While Paramount claims they cancelled Colbert as a cost cutting move, that makes no sense since other late night shows on other networks with smaller audiences continue. They must make some sort of financial sense.

It is widely understood, though not provable, that the move was a bribe to Trump in order to get the merger approved. Trump has had a longstanding dislike of Colbert because of his commentary on Trump as a person and as the President.

When is a hard question. Rationally it should never have blown up this much in the first place (some expansion would be rational, but not like we've seen). Clearly the minds driving this are not rational.

Insanity is notoriously hard to predict. That's why short selling is so risky. The market can clearly remain irrational longer than most people can remain solvent when betting against it.

I don't actually use Apple Store all that often. A fair portion of the software I have installed, like LibreOffice and Firefox is just installed via DMG images. It kicks up a window about unrecognized source, but then just works. iOS devices are definitely more locked down, but the Macs are really no different as far as installing software than Windows or Linux.

I imagine the Mac Neo is the real source of their panic. Right now RAM prices are probably saving them from even more losses, but the hegemony is coming to an end. If a credible useful, at least for average users, non-Windows platform using smart device level hardware can sell as well as the Neo has, I'd say Microsoft's reckoning is finally upon them.

At what point in this long and seemingly endless list of fixes to even the most basic usability features in Windows do its users finally admit it is really a shitty and badly maintained operating system. I use Gnome or MacOS, which are streamlined and uncluttered, and then I head over to Windows and it's like looking into the mind of someone with severe ADHD. It's a colossal mess where nothing particular makes sense, there's no coherent approach, everything is slow and inundated with advertising, context menus that worked for decades don't function right or at all, even the simplest tasks just seems to land you in the wrong place.

I suppose under the hood it's still a fairly decent operating system, although tools like Powershell, which can be achingly slow itself, demonstrate that there's a lot of layers of cruft.

I don't play video games, and frankly Office isn't that much better for my needs than LibreOffice, and Outlook is a bloated pile of crap, so I rarely even access the Windows desktop I have at work via RDP, save for two applications I rarely use. Windows is rapidly becoming irrelevant in my world.

American cults have significant indirect impacts on the world and we produce the most and house the most of them. Some get exported even. Some do a little good like helping Tom Cruze make some entertaining movies.

But right now, the worst cult is driving up global oil prices.

1. Blockbuster films help fund other films and a lot of people like them enough to have them make money or crash and burn a ton of cash... They shouldn't succeed simply because they have a 30% marketing budget which is ridiculous because of the film's pile of money.

Yes, it makes bland stuff to appeal to the lowest common denominator and they don't have to run their business on massive bets; perhaps if people were not such gullible consumers?? FX doesn't draw people in as much...
Also, those expensive films pay a lot of people to make them although a ton of money is not going to the FX people. The bankable movie stars get too much for their brand. That is on the public... The big unspoken cost is the business managers who take massive profits while probably encouraging the hate on the stars they resent having to pay high wages to. They are also trying to replace every writer, artist, and actor with AI so they can keep all the money for themselves. Think it's bad now? Wait until they have zero push back from their interference which is the biggest reason films suck today. The formula committee and exec producer created shit that ruined everything is going to have a suck up AI following orders... not sneaking around the system to add memorable scenes to Forest Gump disobeying the bean counter's "artistic" vision.

2. Cable TV is not great and they make you buy channels you don't watch (or hate or are actively destroying the USA.) but the cable model with ads funded tons of TV shows that were good and had niche markets. Now the whole business model is shot, TV shows of the past are not possible; just some on broadcast TV or the HBO model (also might die.) Youtube shows make no money and have to beg for donations just to fund a tiny staff without stability or capacity to produce much. So now you have tons of choice and is it really cheaper?? I know people who pay as much or more now than before and they don't rave about quality improvement - plus they admit to watching a lot of old content from before "modernization."

The real problem: People are overly entertained. We are amusing ourselves to death. You shouldn't see so many videos that everything is a rehash. That said, if you pick the best of every plot or genre, we don't need any more new content if you consumed it in moderation. One thing I've noticed in decades in education is that we have far fewer people with actual hobbies. Pure consumption is not a hobby. Get a hobby and you won't have time to see all this content slop... and it was slop before AI started learning the patterns that was turning it into slop already.

I would say that any kind of substantial level of investment in a jurisdiction is a reasonable indicator of an expectation of a return on investment, and thus confidence in the economic growth of at least some industries in that jurisdiction. I'm not sure why people are trying to hand wave away that kind of an indicator, unless the fact of it creates some problem for some narrative they have bought into, creating a level of cognitive dissonance necessitating peculiar denials.

...or AI will eliminate all need for labor at all?

You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Do they retain all their training data? can they store all that? - i thought they were using all the internet and massive piracy?

The web is being polluted with slop so.... I would think China could get around all copy-protection and have an advantage in data collection outside of the slop invested parts of the web. If the USA AI corps were not violating the law, they'd be trying to scrape from China's bots who don't have their legal limitations... Is the old web even that valuable to mine in the 1st place? From what I've read these AI are pretty amazing when reduced to a relatively small domain data set; like all journals and books on 1 topic. Have you not tried to research something in depth on the web and found it to be severely lacking compared to books and journals?? Even online lectures are just highlights from textbooks... Well, when you look to the book... I've spent years reading on the web on a topic for entertainment then tried a book only to find it had everything I learned all in 1 concise place that would have taken a fraction of the time and effort... and without all the filtering and correcting of know-it-all blowhard slop and that was before we automated windbags with AI.

Tech makes things worse. It's like a drug. Opioid... It has targeted controlled good use cases but outside of that it's bad stuff. Everybody's answer to the problems it creates is to get more tech...at at least suffer until the next update/version... People were already getting more stupid, especially in the USA now we have AI and already we have studies showing it does just that... If you think things are stupid now...

With a 15% drop in PhDs ,science going down hill , and CS people leaving or souring on the evil of the corps here... I think these tech bros are quite self inflated as to their importance and how close they are to the end game. They are not going to get their huge break-thru monopoly they are racing towards like mad which looks more like a cover for a Ponzi scheme hoping to become a real business before it collapses. 80% of the effort is for the last 20%. They are probably not even at the last 20% and even then, their "AGI" could take centuries to get the last 5% of it (if you can even measure it well enough know when you are at 95%... or even at 80% progress. Assuming, you know what 100% even is!)

No, the title of the post *I replied to* was "half the country voted for this".

"Oh god, we're not making enough money. Quick, fire the people making us the most profit!"

..in the fired.

"Most of the non-voters I've actually interacted with couldn't stand the idea of voting for either candidate."

Well, as long as you've carefully surveyed the situation...

" The assumption that a non-vote was a vote for Trump is just that, an assumption. And a bad one at that."

I'm not making that assumption. I'm just not making the assumption that a non-vote was a vote *against* Trump, which, without evidence (and no, "I talked with some of my non-voting friends" is not evidence) is an equally bad assumption.

Your analysis assumes that people who didn't vote would not have voted for Trump if they had voted. Trump doesn't have the support of half the nation now, with his approval rating in the dumpster, but I'm not convinced that was the case during the election.