Every single use of the word "capitalism" means the poster spews propaganda rather than logic. The word has become useless.

There are two main definitions:
  * the most used one (by several orders of magnitude!): "any economic system other than communism, including even those that don't use money at all (like early kibbutzim), except for neanderthals ("primitive communism")". This meaning has been used in communist countries to refer to the outside world; we had entire universities devoted to such concepts.
  * free market economy. This one would exclude eg. current USA as they have devolved into corporatism. Stuff like bailouts is an anathema to free market. Free market has its flaws (see eg. late 19th century USA) but makes most of current USA ills impossible: high insulin prices? New makers will pop up in months! As long as the govt deals with monopolies and fraud, it's a sane system.

But here... the pokemon card market is currently saner than stocks.

Come on, just 2nd or 3rd? You can do better, next year we'll be #1 again!

You learn a lot of other new things about life and what you really believe in by meeting new people with different ideas or participating in activities you never had an opportunity to previously. There's more to university than you what you get in the lecture hall or library (or the modern equivalent). Probably more so if you don't do it from your parent's basement!

Seriously, that's how America works? Somehow that doesn't surprise me.

In most of the rest of the world it doesn't work that way.

Firstly things are typically not allowed to be sold unless they can be shown to be reasonably safe - which this study was invaluable for.

But when suing you need actual damages to claim for and you have to show direct harm. There isn't such a thing as punitive damages. The model is to try to prevent bad things from being sold up front rather than assume firms won't do it because of the punitive damages that will be awarded once someone is hurt.

Cancer is particularly difficult to attribute to a particular source.
Technically exemplary damages do exist in the UK but they exist in very narrow circumstances.

Mesothelioma, for example, is extremely rare other than due to asbestos exposure. It is not caused by smoking. This makes it easier to sue successfully (outside of the US I guess) for damages.

In most of the world a study like this is not a defence against damages, but would tend to lead to a presumption that glyphospate was safe to use. But that applies anyway because it's regulated. More likely than not the path to damages would be against someone who used it outside the recommended ways.

Withdrawing this study is unlikely to have any impact on the probability of suing for damages due to glyphosphate exposure or have any claim against Monsanto.

Let me guess, competitors can now produce and market it. So now they need to stop it being sold so they can sell the next great thing at huge markup.

Or even better, 3:4. I use a central 16:10 30" (2560:1600) plus two 3:4 24" (1200:1600) on the sides. An useless ratio 16:9 on the top sits mostly unused.

Yes, I totally agree, you have to pick a reasonable length of time for depreciation. Three years is clearly too short for a lot of devices now, although I wouldn't suggest 18 years is appropriate either!

Indeed. I learnt recently that one of our GitLab VM hosts for Linux build runners is is hardware from 2012. The dev team discovered this when a vendor sent us an updated library that dropped SSE4.2 support and required AVX2, causing our smoke tests to fail and thus fail the builds. Why throw away hardware that is still working and performant?

The baseline profile of MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) (ISO/IEC 23094-1) is supposed to be the modern MPEG codec that only uses tools made public 20 years ago or have been declared royalty free. It hasn't really gathered traction though either because there's not enough incentive for the stakeholders or because nobody wants to invest in adding another codec to their pipeline that doesn't improve enough beyond HEVC.

Not regardless of any size. An old XDCAM will produce MPEG-2 streams that look better than anything streaming from Amazon Video.

The recent stories of laptops having their decoders removed because of patent frees are infuriating.

Maybe you're referring to this story:
https://arstechnica.com/gadget...

It says:
Per a breakdown from patent pool administration VIA Licensing Alliance, royalty rates for HEVC for over 100,001 units are increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States ... "This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine, are part of a 'Pro' line (jabs at branding names are warranted â" HEVC is used professionally) ..."

It's such a small percentage of the price yet some bean counter has decided to make user experience shit. Moral of the story for me is to not buy the cheapest shit on the market.

I'm old enough to remember being told that we were all going to freeze due to global cooling. Panic, oh the horror and terror!

I'm also old enough to remember and no you weren't. You were told that, absent human interference, we were in a warm period (inter-glacial) in an ice age and would be heading back into a colder period where much of the northern hemisphere developed world would see glaciers return.

Over tens of thousands of years.

Natural climate change is slow. The Earth has enormous thermal inertia and the variability in the sun's output is tiny compared to the long cycle orbital effects.

Obviously once we start talking giga-years then the Earth will be toasty warm (before it's most likely swallowed by the expanding sun).

Using the 1970s stuff on the inter-glacial we are in to assert that anthropogenic climate change is not a problem is like using the red giant end of the world to assert that it will be the end of the world.

Why would a grocery chain pull out if they can drop some products and give that shelf space to the rest?

Indeed. The Germans started strategic bombing of civilian areas about 88 years ago, and in fact, the German president was just in Guernica paying his respects to the victims of that attack: https://www.theguardian.com/wo....

We haven't stopped strategic bombing of civilian areas just because they don't work, it's also because it amounts to war crimes. Britain bombed Germany like that as a response to Germany doing it to Britain and that being the only response Britain could muster at the time, but RAF Bomber Command has always been down played because of the perception that it was wrong; they didn't even get a memorial until 2012.

Russia is behaving like it's still the 1940s. 27 Russian soldiers dead for every square kilometre of Ukraine they've taken. They don't value their own lives, and so they certainly don't value those from other countries.

Releasing a database of personal info? Shame on you! But we have laws against that...