Of course, the main alternative is to pay big bucks for cable, and *still* see nonstop ads.
My elderly dad has a "dumb" TV and he wanted to watch some streaming content (BritBox & The Knowledge Network) so I got him the Roku. Installing the streamers' apps on the device is pretty straightforward.
He still has cable TV for things like the local news.
I am GenX so I still have cable TV as well, but I just PVR something like SNL and just press [Skip] [Skip] [Skip] [Skip] when the ads come on. I don't watch Sportsball so that doesn't affect me.
Most referenced is Star Trek from the 1960s. how much of that is real now in some form or another?
Tablet computers, voice interfaces to computers... What else, exactly?
Roku lost me when they became an advertising company.
I bought my elderly dad a Roku stick a couple of Christmases ago. It was under thirty bucks, and to my surprise it included a massive amount of free content and channels.
With them practically giving away the hardware + content like that I don't know how they could be anything but an advertising company and still stay afloat.
yeah if you make things affordable more people buy them.
Part of the challenge until recently has been that all the market research performed by EV manufacturers in North America has returned the same data point: Potential customers are obsessed with range.
People with a 20-mile daily commute insist that they need an EV with 600 miles of range or they won't even consider it. They claim they need to be able to drive 800 miles nonstop to Grandma's house twice a year, and if they can't do that EVs are useless to them.
Hell, the common refrain from EV haters on
When someone asks me about my EV the first question is not about how it drives, or the economy - It is "What is the range?"
The battery is generally the most expensive component in an EV, so in order to deliver what the market is telling them (big range), EV manufacturers generally only offered expensive cars.
As the North American market has gradually re-calibrated to be somewhat less obsessed with range (and the costs of battery technology have declined), manufacturers have started to risk offering more affordable options (with less range) into the market. And people are finally buying them.
Give free money for people to sit around and smoke pot all day.
There are around 50M retired people in the USA at the moment. Of course some of them are impoverished, so let's for the sake of argument say that 75%-ish are not.
So that's 38M retired people.
Do they sit around and smoke pot all day?
If you don't know your wings aren't generating lift anymore, this isn't an unreasonable reaction.
If your wings aren't generating lift anymore then you're in a stall.
So it is in fact an unreasonable reaction, because in a stall you push the nose down to gain airspeed, unless you don't have the altitude to do that.
If employees are being "paid well" to make goods then they inevitably make those goods too expensive to sell realistically.
Yes and no.
Go look up a Sears catalog from 1960.
A basic American-made fridge was the 2026-equivalent of around $5,000. An American-made 23" TV was the equivalent of $2,300. A clock radio was the equivalent of $350.
Middle-class people had these things in their homes. The difference was the guy working at the television factory was earning enough at his union job to buy that fridge, television and clock radio.
Customs has always had discretion for who it will allow into the country at ports of entry.
I'm an older GenX Canadian. This is of course correct.
The difference now compared to 20 years ago is the outright hostility you encounter more often than not from American Customs and Border Protection agents.
While never particularly friendly, in the before-times they were very rarely antagonistic. It was an efficient, almost boring exercise.
Contrast that with now while they angrily scroll through your phone in case you have JD Vance memes while barking orders (yes, they could always look through your phone, but they were looking for CSAM or evidence of immigration violations, not whether you had an AI-generated image of Putin and Trump smooching.)
Canadians like me are saying "screw that" and going to Costa Rica, Mexico, Europe or a hundred other places instead.
We're off to the Netherlands on Thursday. Two years ago we would have gone to the Eastern Seaboard.
Of course the Trump supporters reply "Fuck you, America doesn't need you anyway" but the fact remains that across the USA there are campaigns desperately trying to get Canadians to come back. To which we respond "Fuck you, America."
BoP is collecting and distributing funds
Specifically, American taxpayer dollars.
Trump's goal is to distribute those taxpayer dollars into his pockets and his corporations. Seems to me a stablecoin would be a good way to launder that money.
What do you mean *now* it's the obvious choice?!
Battery technology has improved a lot in the last 30 years. There's been approximately a 90% reduction in cost per kWh since 2010 and a roughly fivefold increase in energy density.
Will Hyundai ever fix the stupidity where you cannot precondition the battery for fast charging without being forced to use the in-dash navigation system?
I live in Canada. I have a 2020 Kia EV (Kia & Hyundai largely share the same tech stack).
My EV has a "Winter Mode" setting. When I turn it on it automatically preconditions the battery at -5c or colder.
I almost never use DC Fast Chargers, so it's turned off, but it is just a "switch" like you're asking for.
https://uni.hi.is/helmut/files...
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