Comment Missing the point (Score 1) 37
Sure, age-verification might impede underage use of their product, but there are a lot of adults that understand the age-verification movement to be an invasion of their privacy. Whether or not this is true, "perception is reality".
Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 348
Comment Re:"Baited" breath? (Score 3, Funny) 57
Comment And the Death Spiral (Score -1, Troll) 348
Comment Re:Polymarket, Kalshi whitewashing (Score 1) 71
Comment Re:Guilty of not being rich already (Score 0) 71
Congress (as a whole) acts as if their shit doesn't stink. It's high time they get reminded that it most certainly does.
Comment Best of Luck (Score 1) 2
I hope you find something good soon.
Journal Journal: Well, That's been a thing. 2
Worked at a company for 15 years. Company was bought and sold a couple times. Most recent owner decided my position (and that of several others) was to be eliminated. Such is life in the world of Mergers and Acquisitions.
Now I'm looking for another job. The tools at my disposal are better, the resources are better, and the personal networks I have built over the years is better. Hopefully I'll be back to work soon.
Comment The real reasons viewership has dropped (Score 1) 152
- Much of what Hollywood has been putting out is crap.
- Politicians increase taxes constantly, resulting in less disposable income for potential movie-goers.
- Ticket costs increasing - Not much can be done there, theaters do it to compensate for the loss in sales.
- Streaming is a thing. Why go to a theater to sit in a sticky, uncomfortable seat when one can wait a little while for the movie to hit $STREAMING_SERVICE and watch it from the comfort of one's own home?
Comment Re:Surprising! (Score 1) 59
Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.
Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:
The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.
— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia
Comment Re: Make them occasionally? (Score 1) 186
In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?
If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.
Comment Re:I can only dream (Score 1) 23
The Las Vegas Fry's is still vacant, too. Best Buy has this market to itself.
Comment Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score 1) 48
I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.
I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.
Comment Re:Say goodbye to your 401k (Score 1) 43
Embrace the power of "and."