Users should never be able to do things that cause crashes in the same way that drivers should not ever be able to press any button or press any pedal that causes the engine to spontaneously burst into flames.

I'm also a Mac user, but let's not boast here, shall we?

My personal guess would have been at least 10x. Did Microsoft bribe the study authors?

Dude, are you living under a rock?

These bands are creating new music. But the money that allows them to do so comes from their old music. I have bands in my collection that have been making music for 30 years.

No they don't. They don't even make ok money. Tours are expensive and a lot of people, from road crew to venue security, take their cut before the musicians. The big guys, they make a killing on tours. But the small ones sometimes don't even break even.

In fact, a common wisdom in the industry is that touring is worth it not because the tour itself makes profits, but because it builds a fanbase and drives what is called "catalog discovery" - both old and new fans looking buying the albums with the songs they liked (and for the old fans, didn't know).

This study: https://www.giarts.org/article... says that 28% of income across all the musicians surveyed comes from tours. The share is larger for the rock/pop sector where it nears 40% but even that isn't easy money. And if you consider that only 20% of the rock/pop musicians make more than $50,000 a year, then it becomes a hollow statement.

Plus, it goes directly against your first statement - while on tour the band is not creating new music. So if you want to drive musicians more towards constantly creating (which most of them already do), then you can't make live performances the main income source.

You misread or misunderstood the statement. Nothing was said or had anything to do with those who didn't vote.

A truly non-lazy person, then, would have to conduct a detailed spectrographic assay of all of the pipes (or at least sufficient samples from each lot) to accurately determine the precise composition of each, because all of them contain impurities and aren't merely copper and phosphorous.

In general, getting a truly pure sample of almost any element is incredibly-hard, and outside of laboratories (and even in laboratories, most of the time) it just doesn't matter. In the case of transporting anti-protons, standard "pure" copper is apparently inadequate, because it's not pure enough.

Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to feed cattle elsewhere. China is one of the biggest buyers. Essentially, our farmers are selling the contents of our aquifers to the world.

If we had plenty of water, letting our farmers buy it at a deep discount and sell it to willing buyers elsewhere would be fine, just another commercial use of a local resource, which is what trade is all about. But we definitely don't have plenty of water.

The solution is simple and straightforward (though legally complicated): Don't discounts. Set the same price for water across the board, residential, commercial and agricultural. There can and should be minor differences in delivery cost, and surcharges for purification, but the base cost of the water should be set through a single government-managed market, probably at the state level, probably divided up by drainages (drainages with more abundant water will have cheaper water; if this creates an arbitrage opportunity for someone to pipe water between drainages, great!).

Yes, this would probably put the alfalfa farmers out of business, but that's good because growing alfalfa in the desert is a bad idea. It might also raise the price of local produce, but that's as it should be, putting agricultural water use directly in competition with other water use. If prices go up, people will find ways to be more efficient. Farmers may switch to drip irrigation. If you build too many houses for the available water supply, well, those houses are going to have very expensive water and residents are going to want to find ways to conserve -- and maybe the high cost of water will disincentivize new move-ins.

The bottom line is that efficiently allocating scarce resources is what markets are good at. The problem with water isn't that there are too many people or not enough water, the problem is that we don't properly allocate the water or encourage conservation in the right places. Trying to fix this through regulation rather than market pricing will always be subject to regulatory capture and will never be as efficient or as effective as just enabling a competitive market and letting it work.

Once AI takes all the jobs the prospect of a sexy suicide coach will be appealing not only to investors, but also to governments as a subsidized way to euthanize poor people. They should really just keep this concept in their back pocket until the mass layoffs pick up steam, then roll it back out.

Yes it does. And as much as the AI prophets want us to believe that AI will solve that problem, the only solution they've proposed thus far to the "sucks up too much power" problem is build ever bigger datacenters sucking up still more power. That's not a solution so much as a goalpost transplant on a nearly astronomical scale. There's a reason people are concerned about it, because we just keep hearing that if we pour enough resources into AI, AI will solve every problem we've ever had. Yet, at the moment, it can't even solve the problems it itself is creating. I don't think building ever larger datacenters using ever more resources is going to pay off nearly as well as the pushers are trying to convince us it will, and we need to start looking at the situation with a little tiny modicum of that ever encroaching thing called reality.

You can't collect data on datacenters being built to collect data on people! HOW DARE THEY SUGGEST COLLECTING DATA ON BIG DATA IS OK!

There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

Yes, I think an effectively dead leader that isn't being replaced is better than a living one presuming the goal is regime change.

I keep having flashbacks to Sharpiegate. My personal guess Trump is mostly just making shit up. His public statements had the same vibe as the babbling about Iran having Tomahawks.

The "point at hand" of my post was exclusively a response to the absurd characterization "because of the poor downtrodden Iranians".

I don't think #1 makes all that much sense given ample opportunity to bomb North Korea when it didn't possess nukes.

I don't pretend to have any idea why we are or are not bombing any given country. I never supported bombing Iran but I do support continuing it for the sake of regime change now that the bombing has started. I would say compared to North Korea Iran is different in a couple of relevant respects.

1. Iran is the worlds leading state sponsor of terrorism. North Korea except for a criminal enterprise to make money for the regime mostly keeps to itself.

2. Iranian regime is largely seen as illegitimate by the vast majority of its population. North Koreans are so brainwashed it isn't clear to me that is even the case.

I have no way of knowing what was part of any equation. I do know there was global outrage over many tens of thousands of protestors being murdered by the regime over the course of two days. I also know Trump made threats against the regime over murdering citizens and stated "HELP IS ON ITS WAY". It was shortly after this that US military assets in fact started heading in the direction of Iran. The Israelis seem to at least rhetorically be concerned with protecting Iranians taking out check points, regime members responsible for mass murders and conducting overwatch missions around recent Persian new years holiday celebrations.

I have always assumed regime change at least the kind that would lead to RP's prosperity project is less likely than not to be successful. The best measure that tries to be objective I've been able to find is this.

https://iran.aminsabeti.com/en

RP, BB, DJT, CENTCOM...etc have all repeatedly asked Iranians not go out and protest due to danger from regime and bombs actively dropping. There will be a time for it. That time is NOT now. People are still protesting from their homes at night and IRGC goons are still shooting up apartment buildings trying to suppress people shouting anti-regime slogans from their windows and balconies.

I have never in my life argued for attacking Iran or North Korea or any other country. Now that we are attacking Iran any goal short of regime change is in my view counterproductive.

Tell me you know ZERO about biology. Oof. You just did.

The business world is pretty notorious for "whatever we say we won't do is already part of the plan." This one is so absurdly obvious I'm surprised they bothered to even say it.