Houston has the most stable housing prices of any city in the US. Houston does not have any zoning restrictions. If housing prices go up, developers tear down strip malls and build apartments. If commercial prices go up, they tear down low density housing or commercial property and build high-density commercial property. That is a functioning market.

People like to rag on Houston as not a nice place to live, but you can, at least, afford to live there.

Copilot doesn't produce good code all the time. But it does often enough that it's worth trying it out first.

There's those weird 3" floppies that dedicated word processors used, as well as other gadgets like early digital cameras, in the late 1980's through to the mid 1990s. It's probably the most widespread oddball floppy format.

I need to buy some commodity item. A cable. A weird light bulb. Replacement air filters for the furnace. The workflow is simple:

1. Look the item up on Google, check prices at the local places (Home Depot, Target, Micro Center, Wal-Mart, Lowes, etc...)
2. Look the item up on Amazon.

If I must have it immediately, I buy it locally.
If it's a lot cheaper on Amazon and I don't need it right away, I buy it on Amazon.
If Amazon isn't that much cheaper than buying local, I'll buy local.

It's not hard. It takes about two minutes to research this stuff. Shopping around used to involve calling or driving to multiple stores. Now I can do it from my couch.

I'm not sure what's getting worse here.

Reading books has been largely de-emphasized in schools. My son is a senior and has only had two full books assigned as reading. No summer reading. Most reading assignments involve "texts," like news articles, blog posts, social media posts, and short stories. Fortunately, he likes reading and reads quite a bit independently. His classmates, if not doing the same, are going to run into problems when going to college.

I saw that movie. The PR lady falls in love with the robot that looks like John Malkovich. I'm not sure what's wrong with that.

Know what makes people age fast and causes cancer? Smoking. Know what 14% of millennials do? Vape.

Copyright on Youtube is hopelessly broken. A couple of legal channels I watch have had their content copied wholesale into new channels, with new AI generated intros and outros. The lawyers, some of whom specialize in IP law, and some of whom have some fairly large channels, had tremendous difficulties getting the cloned channels taken down. Subscribed viewers said that the clone channels were being recommended over their own channels by Youtube. It's a mess.

I'd agree with you 100% if these people were criticizing Klein. For the videos he is suing for, they were not. They were sniping his stream. Meaning, they were rebroadcasting his stream with no commentary or communication of any kind, so they would get the views instead of him. I've seen the videos of the people he is suing. They said, basically, "Here's his stream! This guy is an idiot." And that was the extent of the criticism. Some walked away from the camera and ate dinner while rebroadcasting his stream.

The mods he is suing were organizing and promoting the snipe streams. They also didn't offer criticism beyond "Let's snipe Ethan he's a jerk."

I don't like anybody involved here. I'm not a fan of Ethan Klein either. But the people who make nothing new and snipe content are bottom feeders and need to be kicked off the internet. I'm fine with criticism and commentary channels. The sniping, though, needs to stop.

The point isn't that Saudia runs 380-800s. The point is the royal family has the money to buy anything they want. Planes, apartment buildings, yachts, skyscrapers, cities, airlines, football clubs, hotels, restaurants, software companies, etc... If they wanted an Airbus 380-800, they'd buy it. To that point Riyadh air, also owned by PIF, is planning on buying a few dozen Boeing Dreamliners.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. The royal family are the nation. We only vaguely know how much money they have because they don't need to report it, as they are not taxed. They get *all* revenue from state-owned enterprises then distribute money to the government as they see fit. They keep their money in banks that they own governed by laws that they make.

Brunei has the same situation. The sultan was traditionally the richest man in the world.

it's an all-cash deal. No leveraged buyout. The PIF is sitting on trillions of dollars of liquid capital. The Saudis don't need to take out loans to buy stuff.

Elon Musk is often cited as the wealthiest man in the world. Most of his capital, however, is tied up in stocks and investments. On paper, it's worth a lot of money, but it's not liquid.

Mohammed bin Salman controls the Saudi Public Investment Fund entirely, and is now also the de-facto ruler of the country itself. He has access to his family's wealth, which is tens of billions of dollars in liquid capital, but also controls the PIF, which has access to trillions.

What this means, is that if a royal family member wants an apartment in NYC, they don't buy an apartment, the PIF buys an entire apartment building and they take over four or five floors. If they want a plane, the PIF buys Saudia an Airbus 380-800 and builds them a private gate. Jealous that Emirates has more cachet than Saudia? They start up a new ultra-luxury airline, with customized planes and all new gates in a dozen airports. If a royal family member likes golf, they start their own league. A family member likes soccer, they buy a chunk of the Premier League.

Elon Musk, by any metric, has a lot of money. Sovereign wealth is in another category altogether.

Patterson is known for hiring other authors to write his books and he slaps his name on them. The books he writes aren't bad. The books other authors write are of extremely variable quality.

The point is, you don't need AI to make garbage. It lets you make garbage much faster, but a million monkeys and a million typewriters and all...

I'm not sure about skeletons, but I know that ghosts are verboten. The Hong Kong Disneyland version of the haunted mansion doesn't have ghosts at all, it's scenes are mostly fantasy and magic based. Ghostbusters was banned, too.