They lost the package in transit, in one of their warehouses, and then billed me £400. I am -not- happy with eBay.

Dude, I know a family where all 3 of their kids identify as LGTBQ+, and so do both of their cousins. Yes, it should be about 1 in 10 because we know historically that's the number, but if that were true then having all 3 of your kids identify would be a 1 in a 1000 chance. There was a survey that went around the schoolboard recently which said about a third of the kids from grade 7 through 12 identified as some kind of gender non-conforming. I support rights for everyone, and tolerance of everyone, but you can't ignore the social contagion effect. It's real. This whole generation is going to become young adults and will sit around laughing about how goofy they all were in high school comparing notes on their gender identity all day every day, and then it'll be considered cringe, and the next generation will be on to something else. It's already happening. That's kind of the reason so many young people are taking a conservative turn, which is weird for their age range. But that'll end too. And after all of that, the real 1 in 10 will still be there living their lives. As far as your complaints about the cost of living, I 100% agree. The only good news I have is that your kid graduated into a small demographic cohort, and that bodes well for their life-long employment prospects (as it did my generation born in the 70's). There will be lots of demand for services as the baby boomers continue retiring and start spending their money. All that capital in their 401k's and older family homes will slowly get converted into cash and spread out. And the stuff they're selling (stocks and homes) will be going on the market.

Isn't most of the S&P500 just speculative fiction anyway?

True, but so is gold.

Alternative facts, eh? You can live in your post-modernist hell-hole where you can insist anything you want is true, but I'm quite happy living in the good old modern era, where people are expected to use logic and reason. If you want to explain what about those statistics are wrong, and what evidence you have that they're wrong, that would be reasonable. The fact that you simply don't like that information isn't a valid argument.

most jobs are getting either automated or offshored

This doesn't make any sense. There are more jobs in the US now than at any time in history and the unemployment rate is near historical all-time lows. But go ahead and live on vibes instead of data, and see how that works out for you.

The conservatives just figure it's people they don't want in America anyway, and the liberals are convinced we're still headed for a Malthusian resource shortage soon, so they want the population to decrease anyway, so nobody actually cares (except the economists and the geo-politics people, but who listens to them?)

One has to put this in perspective. On the rdos "Aspie Quiz" (which, at least of the previous version, followed the official diagnostic procedures for autism extremely closely and accurately measured "autism levels"), I score 178 out of 200, well into the upper range for autism. I've been officially dxed with autism and complex ADHD. Amongst a bunch of other stuff.

I hyperfixate (though generally not on Slashot, interestingly, although again there are exceptions), and my language will, at times, get blunt. And, yes, have been known to do all the other things you list. Although I do make some sort of effort to keep it at levels others can tolerate. Sometimes, I even actually succeed in this.

As a result, I think I can reasonably and fairly say that autistic people generally don't fit rsilvergun's profile. In fact, I suspect that the number of people on the ASD spectrum on Slashdot is well above the background level and quite plausibly much higher than in even the sciences. I could be wrong, there, of course. That does occasionally happen(!). So "autistic" (even "severely autistic") doesn't reflect actual behaviour in quite the way that the "standard image" portrays.

And that's one of the biggest alarm bells you can ever have with this condition. I've been in autistic groups where half the participants can't ever leave specialised care, and even those never ticked all of the boxes. If you see someone who DOES tick all the boxes, it is of course possible that they are autistic, but the underlying neurology of the condition (which is highly complex) strongly suggests that they can't have all those behaviours because of autism. Almost certainly, at least some behaviours are a fiction, even if it's not easy to figure out which ones are real and which ones aren't. And if some of them aren't genuine, you can't trust that any of them are.

Remote diagnosis is a dangerous game, but if someone exhibits two symtoms that appear in a description but cannot actually coexist, that's the time to stop trusting what they say.

If you want to stream and store every single episode of Thunderbirds in 1K, you're welcome to try. Although International Rescue might stop you.

(It's a pity that the 4K upgrades they did on two episodes weren't popular in the cinemas - the quality was impressive and actually showed just how much effort was put into making high quality models even for a cheap show in the 1960s. You couldn't upscale the early Doctor Who stories to 4K without a LOT of cleanup, the props weren't nearly to the same standard.)

Streaming is inherently quality-capped - there's only so much pipe coming out of the streaming service, it's gotta handle an Internet clogged with cats and porn (and, trust me, you don't want the cats in the Interwebs batbatbatting your film to knock it over the edge), and it's got to be a simple enough format that low-end low-power laptop/phone CPUs can handle it.

So it's partly watch-forever for DVDs, but also a case of what to do if you really really want high quality.

Agreed, format wars were stupid, but DVD has limited capacity and there's not much you can do about that. DVD-9 is fine, but heavy on the CPU, and (whilst backwards compatible) is nonetheless another standard.

I dunno. You might watch low-quality stuff - I dunno - but there's plenty of high-quality productions where bluray (even if it's not 4K) offer a definite advantage over streaming. Audio is also much higher quality streamed. Heavy compression may be ok if you're not used to anything decent or not watching anything decent, but high quality sound is always going to win for me.

. and perhaps 30 percent never became pregnant

Correct. See my reply further downthread.

ED: but many have none

On reflection, my wording was too harsh for what was a simple misreading on your part. But just to be clear: some recipients have multiple children. Some have just one. But most have none, and the most common reason is rejection of the transplant. They don't even try IVF until they're certain the transplant isn't being rejected (traditionally at least a 12 month wait, though times have been dropping). 25-30% of transplants fail before IVF can be attempted. Each IVF cycle has ~50% odds for a young woman, dropping significantly with age. Also, this is a relatively new procedure, so a meaningful minority of people who have ever gotten womb transplants are yet to have children.

While the numbers born thusfar are small, at least thusfar in the data, there is no statistical difference in the health of children born to transplanted wombs vs. non-transplanted.