If by 'burned a little' you mean 'her labia literally melted and fused shut,' you're correct.

Cheap is exactly what you don't want, even if it's inexpensive.

-m

Tesla FSD car + Optimus robot actually sounds like the setup to an odd couple movie script...

That or a robotic vision quest buddy film.

The funny thing is, if Bezos really did put 100% of the money in himself, people would accuse him of trying to hog all the benefits of manufacturing automation, and shutting out investment by other parties.

I'm waiting for Larry Ellison to do just that, but with a fuckton of borrowed money, because... well, Larry Ellison.

https://www.wired.com/story/la...
https://www.thomasnet.com/insi...
https://slate.com/technology/2...

Part of the game is taking assets people think is worth money, and converting it into assets that are actually worth money...

https://www.forbes.com/profile...

J.B. Pritzker
$3.9B
Real Time Net Worth

        Jay Robert "J.B." Pritzker is the governor of Illinois; he unseated Republican incumbent Bruce Rauner as a Democratic candidate in 2018.
        An heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, Pritzker ran private equity firm Pritzker Group with his brother Anthony until March 2017.
        His charitable foundation supports nonprofits primarily in Chicago, including the Ounce of Prevention Fund, which provides early-childhood education.
        His uncle Jay Pritzker (d. 1999) founded Hyatt Hotels and his father Donald (d. 1972) managed and developed the chain.
        His sister Penny Pritzker, also a billionaire, served as U.S. commerce secretary under Barack Obama from 2013 to early 2017.

"Corporations are people, and money is speech" comes rather forcefully to mind.

Yes, that's the point.

Sure, you still had to buy the license, dev kits, and so on. But at the time, Nintendo was taking something like a third of the cost per unit, right off the top, if I remember correctly.

I'm going to go reread Game Over.

Ironically factory towns would actually be better.

In a factory town, the housing is a recruitment incentive and benefit (that ironically keeps you trapped because the non-factory town alternative is so much more expensive). But at least then the objective is to keep the housing affordable and accessible to employees of the company, and the ecosystem that keeps them happy. Whereas it seems like everywhere else in the US (and in highly desirable places internationally) people have decided that a place to live is an asset, and that the price must always go up.

Compare the limitations on use between say, a 20-40 acre parcel of land in a rural area, and the limitations on use for a 5000 ft parcel. Then go further and take a look at municipalities that are barely a step removed from having an HOA looking over your shoulder about everything you do with regards to your house.

Leaving aside the history of zoning as a method of excluding "undesirable" residents, zoning is an artificial, and inefficient (because code is a function of rulemaking, not of economics, and rooted in assumptions that may no longer be true) way of regulating land use.

For example, there's a lot of zoning and code regulation around needing adequate parking for residential developments which assumes some average number of cars which is pretty much always just incredibly wrong. In high cost of living areas without transit, the regulations understate the amount of parking needed because each unit has multiple residents (you need one or more roommates to get by, and everybody needs a car.) In high density areas designed to be walkable with a high density form of transit nearby, the regulations overstate the amount of parking needed per unit of housing.

The funny thing is... if you mix commercial and residential, often times you can balance the use of parking spots. During the day - the spots are used by commercial users. In the evening, those users leave, and the commuters who live in the mixed use development can then use those spots. Think about all the commercial/industrial parks - full during the day, and then empty (with the exception of box trucks in the evening) at night. Most of these companies are not going to be running second and third shifts, so those spaces are just unused 2/3rds of the day (so why all the Waymos decide to chill in my neighborhood instead of finding an empty stretch of street next to the storage yard a few streets over is just strange.)

I'm not going to go around telling people that capitalism is an unbridled good, but I will say that efforts to regulate how much money people make often backfire in unexpected ways. Consider if a single company owned the land, built housing, retail, commercial, industrial space, and also built high density transit and shopping plazas. They could afford to partially subsidize the transit during the early years while filling out the various developments, until they reach a level of density that makes it self-funding.

While they never fully realized the original premise, Disney's Reedy Creek improvement district could be considered an example of this type of development:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You're absolutley correct that the PSX's ease for developers to write for was a major factor, especially compared to something like the Saturn.

But Sony's real *business* genius was not doing what Nintendo did, which was to artificially limit developer access to the console.

At the time, Nintendo was still whole-hog on the 'Nintendo Seal of Quality' and treated developers like serfs. You had to get Nintendo's approval to publish, you had to go *through* Nintendo for cartridge production, and Nintendo would limit how many games a year you could publish.

They did this because they didn't want a second Great Video Game Crash of 1982.

Because cartridges take a loooong time to manufacture, developers had two choices: go big and hope your game actually sells and you're not left holding a massive inventory of unsold carts, or go little and risk having the game be a hit, and sold out for months while you wait your turn for the next cartridge run.

PSX, on the other hand, ran on CDs, and Sony couldn't care less about what you published. You could get your CDs made at any factor that could press CDs, and you could stamp out an entire run in a weekend at pennies per, compared to tens of dollars per cart in manufacturing and license fees.

Nintendo was acting like it was an inevitable force of nature, rather than a big fish in a sea of competition.

Except that "micro" means "small," and there's nothing small about the shit they produce... so MacroShit?

Like for the Microsoft Store and Xbox, you tell your user account what your age is and then you can only see items for your age or lower....... yes? no?

-m

Actually... the electoral college (and number of representatives in the house) is based on census, and the census is based on all residents, US citizens and otherwise.

https://govfacts.org/elections...

"A 2020 analysis by the Pew Research Center, based on population projections, estimated that if undocumented immigrants were excluded from the 2020 apportionment count, three states would each lose a congressional seat they were otherwise expected to have.

California would have lost two seats instead of one, while Florida and Texas would have seen their gains reduced by one seat each. Conversely, three other statesâ"Alabama, Minnesota, and Ohioâ"would each have held on to a seat they were otherwise projected to lose.

A similar analysis by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), using 2013 population estimates, projected that a citizen-only count would cause a shift of seven seats among 11 states.

Under this scenario, California would lose four seats, while Texas, Florida, and New York would each lose one. These losses would be offset by single-seat gains for Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia."

So states with large numbers of non-voting residents (as in non-citizens) can give the voting residents (as in the citizens) of those states, outsized power when voting (assuming everyone turns out to vote - which is a different issue.)

Not quite the illegal voter / replacement theory that right wing meme artists want to push, but it can impact the census, and thus, every ten years, the way that seats and electoral college votes are distributed.

From this perspective, if Trump wants to depopulate House seats and electoral college votes in blue states, it is absolutely to his advantage to drive people out of those states and into red ones. Next best thing after that is to keep people from migrating into blue states to begin with.

Consumers won't be able to afford it.

Governments and businesses will likely sign long term contracts with service organizations, if the past is any indication.

We'll all be interacting with these systems in one way or another. Possibly not directly, but at one or two levels removed. The technology keeps changing so I can be confident that what we think of as the primary methods of using these systems is probably not what will be the dominant form in a few years.

This all changed when Congress started creating a lot of the 3+ letter agencies and gave them power to create regulations as if they were law... and those agencies report to the President. Executive Orders should never be law, and were only ever meant to be something that provides guidance on how to enforce certain existing laws. If we really wanted to go back to the way the Founding Fathers wanted it, those agencies would report to Congress and would work to produce things that Congress would have to enact as legislation. By creating all of those agencies, Congress abdicated its power to legislate to the Executive branch. Anything enacted as a regulation by the agency should be converted to legislation if we really wanted to get back to where we should be.

Trouble is, Congress refuses to do its job and likes to play games like Budget Brinksmanship instead. Remember, for members of Congress, job 1 is to get elected, and job 2 is to get re-elected. Anything for their constituents runs a distant third to those two.

This is all party neutral stuff. Both of them do it. Both of them make back room deals to keep themselves in power and screw us all, and woe be unto anyone who attempts to disrupt that ruling class of people who know better than all of us peons.