I still have my very first credit card. It's 20+ years old, sits in a lockbox, and has a thousand dollar limit, by far the lowest of my cards. It costs me $10 a year to maintain. It's there entirely because it anchors the oldest account ranking for me.

Oregon isn't a red state overall. Almost all states, whether red, blue, or purple, allow felons to vote at some point.

Democrats sure don't. They want them to vote and everything.

The following red states allow felons to vote after completing their sentences (carceral sentences in some cases, or complete sentences and fines in others):

Alaska, Arkansas, Florida (1), Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa (2), Kansas, Kentucky (3), Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

That's the overwhelming majority of them. A couple of them have exceptions for certain crimes like rape and murder, but for the rest, if you can finish your sentence, you can probably vote.

(1) Sort of -- the state government has intentionally made a mess of the initiative that passed 65-35.

(2) While the Iowa constitution bars felons from voting unless they have applied to the governor to have voting rights reinstated, Gov. Reynolds (a Republican) has a standing executive order automatically reinstating voting rights of felons upon completing their sentences unless they were convicted of murder.

(3) Similar to (2), except that Gov. Beshear's executive order applies only to those convicted of non-violent offenses.

Automatic salary increases have been part of federal law since 1989, as your linked article mentions. They haven't happened since 2009. The bill that the link mentions didn't pass, and the replacement bill didn't change the prior block, so no pay raises are possible until the new session in 2027.

I get that members of Congress are unpopular. But if we want regular people in Congress, people not coming in wealthy, they're going to face extra expenses that aren't covered from their office budgets, and they should be paid enough to not end up poor for doing their service. Maintaining a separate residence -- even sharing in renting an apartment -- in or around DC is expensive. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) was unable to rent an apartment in DC when he was elected last year because even with a guaranteed Congressional salary, he didn't make enough to overcome a poor credit rating coming in and the apartment complex rejected him. I'm all for the stock trading bans for them and their family. I'm fine with them participating in Social Security and the federal employee pension fund. I'm happy with them getting their health insurance off the DC ACA exchange. But at some point, the pay should increase so that we can send people who aren't already rich or who won't have extra temptation to bend or break the rules because they're about to go broke.

Here comes a data-point of one, which makes this simply an anecdote...

When I work out hard (resistance training to beyond failure) I find that consuming protein at around 1.6-1.8g per kilo of body weight significantly improves my recovery time -- perhaps because of the effect on muscle-protein synthesis which seems to be optimal at this level.

Working out hard with lower levels of protein intake adds at least a day to my recovery so it's easy to see why, given the fixation on strength and fitness that abounds right now, many people are consuming more protein than they might actually need if their goal is simply to remain healthy.

One consideration for many is that when you bias towards a high-protein low fat/carb diet it becomes easier to lose weight or prevent weight gain. Protein is generally more satiating than carbs and leaves you feeling fuller for longer, reducing hunger pangs. A diet higher in protein is also less likely to produce insulin resistance (type 2 diabetes) than one higher in carbs. However, protein is usually also far more expensive (per calorie) than protein which can be a factor in many people's decision-making.

Increasing protein intake (as a percentage of total calories) is also important as you age because it plays a role in reducing the effects of sarcopenia, a condition that affects most over-50s and predisposes people to becoming frail and increasing their likelihood of death from many causes.

Previous comments have been drawing analogies to Black Mirror, but this "idea" goes back much further...

...This is an episode of Max Headroom (US version).

Specifically, S02E02: "Deities." A company claims to be able to bring past loved ones back to "life" as an AI, for a modest recurring fee. But Bryce (the creator of Max Headroom) opines they can't possibly have the compute power to do it, as it requires a large mainframe just to run Max's highly flawed, glitching bust.

Wouldn't surprise me if the "visionaries" behind this saw that episode, and saw an opportunity to fleece gullible rubes.

I wish they'd fix the issue that under Linux Mint, my mory use grows to over 50% and VM use gradually climbs to 95% over several weeks when doing nothing but web-browsing and this is only released when I exit FF and re-enter. Memory leaks anyone?

Please fix the bugs before you start adding more "fluff".

Wait a few months and you'll hear:

"Has anyone seen my shirt? I'm an investor in this eVTOL air-taxi thing and I seem to have lost mine. What is 'due diligence' anyway?"

Don't be so generous.

I would not be surprised if this move was designed to deliberately blur the line and visual difference between creator-generated and AI-generated content.

"Why?" you might ask?

Well right now Youtube has to hand over more than 50% of its ad revenues to the pesky creators that make the videos people watch on the platform. If they can replace those creators with AI then they get to keep *all* the money -- and that is a very, very large chunk of change -- more than enough to incentivize such a move.

YouTube (and its parent Google) long ago lost any interest in not being evil and now *everything* they do is all about hiking revenues and boosting that bottom line. If you think otherwise then you're sadly deluded.

That brings up something interesting. According to US Census data, the median age of first marriage in 1950 was 24 for men and about 20.5 for women. But that was an outlier, with a dramatic drop from 1940, when the median ages were about 25.3 and 22.8. Between 1890 and 2010, the median ages were usually much higher -- 25 or more for men and 22 or more for women. In 1890, the median ages were 26 and 23. That really drives home your mom's claim that pregnancies were drivers of a lot of marriages, as the 1950s were an unusually difficult time to get birth control. In 2010, the average ages were about 28.4 and 26.9. That's a lot of time taken out of primary childbearing years, and birth control is more available and reliable than it was.

A company provides a contract that says that the functionality ends when the customer stops paying for the license. If Davis Lu provided software under contract and had terms allowing the software to stop working, yes, it would be legal.

But he was an employee. An employee is expected to leave things running after leaving the company. Leaving behind a kill switch and not telling anyone about it is a criminal act. He's not the first person to do this (look up Tim Lloyd in 1996 and Nimesh Patel in 2016), and he won't be the last. And they all have or will have committed a criminal act. Lloyd got 41 months in prison and $2 million in restitution. Patel was lucky enough to not get charged, but he was sued by his former employer, Allegro Microsystems, for damage he caused. They appeared to ultimately settle out of court.

The birth rate in the US has not significantly recovered from the last peak in 2007. The number of births in the US was mostly gently climbing from 1997 to 2007, rising from 3.9 million to about 4.3 million (10% in ten years). But since then, it generally declined through 2020 to 3.6 million (16% decline in 13 years, and 8% lower than in 1997). The numbers for 2020-2024 are fairly flat at just above 3.6 million. The maternity rate in 2007 was 2.12, while in 2024, it was down to 1.60.

I am more convinced with each passing year that the global population is much closer to peak than we think. In the 1990s, the peak was expected to be around 2080-2100. By 2010, the forecast moved to 2070-2080. More recent forecasts have suggested 2050-2060. I'm thinking that some of the more aggressive forecasts that see the global population peak before 2050 are right. After that -- and maybe before it, in some cases -- we're going to have to figure out how the new economy works, because expanding markets will become a thing of the past.

Calling all hackers, calling all hackers....

Since you already own the car, hacking it to unleash its full potential can't be a crime.

Mind you... I've been using electronic test equipment for decades with similar stupidity. You buy an oscilloscope and it has a specified bandwidth and/or feature set. Pay more money, enter a code and voila -- it suddenly has a higher bandwidth and/or more features. Everything was in their when you bought it, you're just paying to activate it. Once again though, many bits of kit have been hacked to sidestep these artificial limitations.

Well I don't pirate -- although I'm pretty sure that what I do will likely be declared illegal soon because the movie and music studios will claim I'm depriving them of revenues.

When DVD rental businesses started shutting down a few years back I bought as many disks as I could find. That's given me probably over 1,000 movies on physical media. I'm slowly ripping all these to a NAS and when that's done I'll be set for life. At my age I can't remember much about a movie within a year or two of watching it so I'll just cycle through these titles.

Nobody's going to put up my prices, reshuffle my library of titles or delete what I *OWN*.

Take that Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and the rest of you!