Because there are eight billion people on this rock. The words "smart" and "bed" both exist, so of *course* somebody made a "smart bed", and of *course* there were people who bought the silly thing. Presumably there are also internet-connected toothbrushes, can openers, pencils, cutlery, and socks. Why wouldn't there be?

Are these *popular* products that *lots* of people own or want? Well, no, but that's an entirely different question.

> No one who is just getting by is going to do it out of the the kindness
> of their heart for the environment.

Almost no one, in that demographic, yeah. And I think that demographic
(just getting by) is going to include the overwhelming majority of ride-share
drivers, because it doesn't pay well enough to raise someone out of that
demographic, and it's not really a highly regarded "dream" profession that
a person with other means of support would do because they think it's
important (like teaching school or medical work) or just plain love doing
it and don't want to do anything else (like art or music), at least not for
most people.

The price gap between traditionally powered vehicles and electric ones
is narrowing, but it's narrowing fairly gradually, and I don't know that it'll
necessarily be down to zero by 2030 (for the new vehicle market), and
if you want drivers of older used vehicles to all be using electric by 2030,
the deadline for that price gap to narrow to zero is more like 2010, and
that ship has sailed.

With that said, superficially, a $4k subsidy is substantial enough that it
might *sound* like a real windfall to some people, and fear of missing
out on that deal (especially if it's advertised with a prominent and
imminent expiration date) might potentially motivate some people to
try to stretch for it. Dunno.

(Presumably there will be car dealers who will go out of their way to
provide financing that allows people to overextend and buy a more
expensive car than they can really afford, with a loan term so long
they won't be able to afford the maintenance on the car by the time
it's paid off. It's a sleazy practice, but it would neither be new, nor
unique to EVs.)

And the price! They must think we're flush with cash.

I keep telling people this, and they keep saying I'm wrong, something about it not being an actual accepted or useful definition of insanity, just a meme that caught on at some point. Their refusal to see the truth is driving me f'ing crazy!

Yes, but that's a _later_ problem.

The CCP is incredibly good at kicking the can down the road. I mean, most governments do a fair amount of that (not necessarily with regard to stuff in space specifically, only a handful of countries even have stuff in space; but there are other kinds of cans to kick down roads), but China is on another level. Short-term thinking is pretty much their whole modus operandi.

Although, hmm. I might potentially be persuaded to watch Encanto at some point, if the right other people are watching it and invite me to watch it with them. If so, it'll be the first Disney movie I've seen since Shrek.

Eh, you're preaching to the choir. I haven't watched a Hollywood movie made in the last fifteen years. The last one I saw in a theatre was LOTR:ROTK. I've seen a couple of movies more recently than that, but they were old ones.

When the thirty-second trailer looks boring and heavily derivative, it's pretty difficult to imagine that the actual movie could hold my interest for over an hour. Sorry, not interested. Do you know how long it's been since I saw a movie trailer or advertisement, that made me want to watch the movie?

Eh.

Some cultural features are neutral, e.g., what you do about shoes when entering a home. Do you take them off and leave them at the door because shoes are dirty? Do you keep your shoes on because you have guests and you don't want them to have to look at your feet because feet are disgusting? If you do take off the shoes, does it matter how you line them up, and which direction the toes point? This all depends how you were raised; it's neither good nor bad, it's just culture.

But some cultural features are actively good for society. Japanese culture has features that lead to a low crime rate, for instance, and that's a good thing. Many cultures value things like integrity (particularly, keeping your word) and hospitality, and these are good positive values, that are good for society. I think it follows that there can also be cultural features that are bad for society. To avoid offending foreigners, I'll pick on my own society for an example here: in American culture, it's normal for people to deliberately lie to their children about important ontological issues, for entertainment purposes. That's *evil* but almost everyone here does it. (One of the best examples of this phenomenon, is Santa Claus.)

Bringing it back around to the Persian example from the article, my question would be, why is it that humans native to the culture only get this right 80% of the time. AI getting it wrong most of the time doesn't bother me, that's the AI companies' problem, and phooey on them anyway, so what. But if humans native to the culture are missing it 20% of the time, to me, that makes it sound like it must be some kind of esoteric, highly-situational interaction that regular people wouldn't have to deal with on anything resembling a regular basis; but no, we're talking about a basic social interaction that people have to do every day. Something seems off about that. That's a lot of pressure to put on people, to undertake something that difficult, and be expected to get it right all the time, and then catastrophically fail one time out of five. I don't think I'd want to live under that kind of social pressure.

Eh, I kind of hope Hollywood goes all-in on AI generated content, tbh. They haven't produced much that's worth watching any time recently anyway, and if they go under, maybe it'll clear the way for better content creators to rise to prominence, maybe even someone who can figure out how to write a script from scratch, that is NOT the eighty-third sequel to a mediocre nineties action movie, or the twenty-seventh reboot of a superhero franchise.

On the one hand, yes, the job market *is* a bit down right now, and yes, getting a job, especially a decent one, has always been more difficult when you don't have any meaningful work experience yet.

But I don't think it's really significantly worse, at least here in the Midwest, than in past generations. The young people I know, generally have been able to find work that is commensurate with their qualifications, to an extent that is pretty comparable to what I've seen in the past, most of the time. Occasionally, somebody in a previous generation has gotten lucky and had an easier time and gotten snapped up for basically the first real job application they filled out, because the economy was up or whatever (my own experience getting an IT job in 2000 is an excellent example of this), but that has always been the exception rather than the rule. For most of history, getting your first really _good_ job has been difficult, and often required you to work a not-so-fantastic job for a few years first. (Heck, I worked fast food for several years, including a couple of years after getting my degree, before I lucked into that IT job. I've never regretted having that in my background, though I'm certainly pleased it didn't end up being my entire career.)

On the gripping hand, my experience with Gen Z is that in terms of employment opportunities, they aren't really any more entitled, on average, than Millennials were at the same age. Somewhat less so, if anything. If there's an aspect of their attitude that's worse, it's more social than professional and is related to how much they expect other people (especially casual acquaintances, like coworkers) to care about learning and accommodating all their personal idiosyncracies that aren't work-related. But this could be my Gen-X bias coming through: we were taught to only reveal personal stuff to people we're actually close to. We expected our phone numbers to be public knowledge, but we kept our personal feelings private. Gen Z is pretty much the reverse.

Ok, so the specific formats are new, but Windows 98 supported animated wallpaper. No one actually wanted it or used it, but it was supported.

The term "thread" in this context is older than Slashdot. It originated on usenet, before the web existed.

> "Proves" might be too strong

Different fields have different standards of proof. The most rigorous that I'm aware of, is in mathematics, wherein a proposal that almost all the experts think must surely end up being true, can be heavily studied and yet remain "unproven" for an arbitrarily large number of centuries, until eventually someone finds an actual real-world use case for the math that you get if it's NOT true. (The poster child for this is non-Euclidean geometry, but there are lots of other examples.)

There's an old joke about three university professors from England who took a trip up north together, and on their way out of the train station, the journalism professor looked over at some livestock grazing on a hill, and said, "Oh, look, the sheep in Scotland are black!" The biology professor corrected him, "Some of the sheep in Scotland are black." But the math professor said, "There exist at least three ship in Scotland, and at least three of them appear black on at least one side, at least some of the time."

Sorry, no, that isn't the issue either. The problem the OP is running into is much, much more basic than that.

Forget, for a moment, that the ports are USB ports, and that the peripherals are USB peripherals, because as long as they match up (which they do, in the OP's scenario), none of that is the problem. The number of ports doesn't even matter, we can abstract away the 4 (or 2 + 2, same difference) and just call it N. The problem is that he's got N ports, and N peripherals that he wants to keep plugged into ports all the time, and that leaves N - N ports available to plug anything else into, if he needs to plug something in temporarily. But N - N is 0, so something has to be unplugged to free one up. That's a number-of-ports problem, entirely irrespective of the port type.

If you were proposing replacing the 2 USB-A ports with a *larger* number of USB-C ports, then your argument might have some relevance. But just changing the type of port won't bend the arithmetic in any useful direction. They could be upgraded to the new USB type K ports introduced in 2042, and it still wouldn't solve the problem: if there are still four ports and four all-the-type peripherals, there still won't be any unoccupied ports available for temporarily plugging in transitory things.

At least USB is (mostly) hot-pluggable. But, again, that's as true of A as it is of C.

This has probably changed over time. My impression when I was taking college entrance tests, was that the ACT tested what you knew (i.e., memorized facts), but the SAT tested _how you think_ (i.e., how good you were at figuring things out). But that was in the early nineties, and they changed some things not very much later that, among other things, resulted in more students getting higher scores, which I think was the goal then too. They had a lengthy explanation about keeping the test relevant to the changing expectations of modern institutions of higher learning, but reading between the lines, it seemed like the main outcome was giving out higher scores.