My grandfather signed us up for the AS&S catalog when I was a kid and I remember him sitting with me as we looked at every page. So many good memories attached to this place. As of writing it looks like they might meet their fund drive. I also want to tell those people who are not able to do a donation is to go buy something from them. Every little bit helps.

Streaming anything has be corrupted in to a much worse version of the terrestrial/cable TV mess. In addition to the mentioned things above, all these media companies and services have sucked up sooo much IP and then only dose it out slowly spoon feeding you things. Also you ever notice that there are some kind of temporary exclusive distribution deals going down? It's like they round robbin content so much you have to try and track it down and hope you already pay for what ever it is on.

Also Media companies are totally ok with treating people with disabilities as lower class or ignore them altogether.

For me captions don't work, are really badly formatted, or have lacking settings. Anyone who has uses AI captions know they are all totally garbage. TV has FCC regulations that made things like captioning/descriptive services mandatory. Rules also were used to regulate audio levels used in commercials. But TV laws never applied to streaming only broadcast TV. People should not have to pay more or be punished for their disability and yes ignoring accommodations is discrimination. But to media and the government it is out of sight out of mind .

On the flip side some people are going back to owning DVDS/Blue-Rays because of how bad things are. But you know what? It's not much better. Tech companies are not working to build new players and devices with things like captions. So some people get shut out when old systems are deprecated or age out. TBH, the caption thing sadly I don't have a solution for yet. No regulations/enforcement.

Like how hard could it be now to make some sort of FPGA device that sits in-between the HDMI output and the TV and uses some sort of onboard AI to detect commercials/audio spikes and adjusts them.

In the end the sad thing is that we just don't care about each other in this country anymore. It's sad and shameful.

The plan doesn't provide more resources or mandates those who might learn via individualized instruction. In fact, it could inadvertently make it harder to identify who needs it. Also teachers have less granular data (no graded homework, no weekly test scores) to identify specific areas where students are struggling and thus less information to differentiate instruction effectively or provide targeted learning opportunities. Also if this is done in a way where students are passed along with significant knowledge gaps, subsequent teachers will face a greater challenge trying to "play catch up" with deficiencies while teaching new material to a diverse group of learners. The focus shifts from a continuous, formative assessment model (where instruction is adjusted based on ongoing student performance) to a summative, end-of-course assessment model. Again this seems like it could be the wrong way to go about this and might actually hurt some students while helping others.

This is clearly going to be an even bigger problem. Even before AI existed companies disgustingly use this practice of ever increasing performance metrics to weed out those who can't perform to their ever changing metrics. This harder/faster is dehumanizing abuse. Tell me it is not? AI should only augment abilities, not replace people or force people to become less human. It is still an absolute necessity for human verification of AI work due to its inherent unreliability. As time goes on that might change too. This also brings people to a point where people get burned out and quit. Some also reach the limit of their abilities and get fired for no good reason other than they changed the goal posts. Some get fired because they try to take shortcuts to stay within the metrics out of fear. It is a viscous and cruel cycle of hire/fire that takes its tole on real people in the workforce. My advice to everyone is always strive to find a work/life balance and a push to redefine what efficiency means in this AI age. One example is passing AI ethics laws. Say that AI takes or cost you your current role, you should be re-skilled into another role, at the same pay scale, rather than being fired. Putting people first is key but I see this as a hard sale since companies/admin is already OK with dehumanizing people and all the breaks are off. Another thing to point out is this making AI/CS mandatory in schools is so they will have an ever increasing stream of young people to abuse. This has been shown during the dot com bomb that it is likely to flood the workforce, further driving down wages and creating another race to the bottom. I would also like to point out the current admins policies directly undermine the need for strong critical thinking skills that are essential for an AI workforce and just a life in an AI world. If not people will end up spending their whole lives being just inputs for the machines. Providing nothing more than Engineering, fact-checking, verification, correction and oversight.

This is just waste of resources because as of 2020 approximately 2,800 of the roughly 4,570 licensed AM stations in the USA are already rebroadcasting on one or more FM translators. The data is not clear but I bet if you looked hard enough you would find most of these AM stations are some sort of religious format stations.

Shall we play a game?