This is all part of the big corporate hatred of things that are free. Nobody has to pay for wind or solar power, beyond the cost to get started.

There's no monthly bill and THAT worries the utilities and their investors. If consumers got used to free, they would gradually flee the money-minting utility bills that keep $20bn reactors funded. Free cannot be allowed. Freedom cannot be allowed.

The utility companies are terrified of anything that gets people out of the habit of paying those bills. This is one reason fleets of power company trucks flock into disaster areas. A downed power line is a customer not using power and not making money for the power company and they are at risk of finding another source for power, like solar. So they scramble to get the power back on to keep that revenue flowing and the old habit in place.

Every address has lists of people associated with it, whether they currently live there or have ever lived there or are related to people who have or do live there.

It is used all the time in business like banking, insurance, background checks. My former auto insurance company got very concerned after I moved from a house into an apartment building. They could see in their data that a lot of people with driving issues also had the same address, past or present. None of them had anything to do with me, of course. But it was all one big block of people at the same address, including former residents of my particular unit, and that's all they needed to see to panic. The whole place was a red flag to them.

I had to send them a copy of my lease with just my name on it and a notarized statement assuring that none of these other people had access to my vehicle. The fact that it was an apartment building you can see on Google street view did not matter at all. Even after my statement, they still didn't want to keep my policy in force.

Whatever data they were looking at was clearly easy to fill in with info and details but sticky and reluctant to ever drop old data in favor of current info.

This is all the fault of selfish young adults. The more women are educated and able to work and pay for their own lifestyles, the less they want to become moms, which is a very specific and limited role. Why do that when they can live how they like, travel, buy luxury goods if they want and generally live comfortably.

Japanese men, on the other hand, don't particularly want to deal with women who don't exactly need men and don't want to get married any more than the women. Like single women, single working men are free to indulge their hobbies and games or whatever else they want to do. The have jobs sufficient to fund it.

For both sides, getting married and having kids represents a loss of income, but even worse, they lose tremendous amounts of freedom as they are forced into extremely narrow roles for mothers and fathers. Moms will be expected to do all the childcare and keep house and home, while the dads are expected to work ridiculous hours and turn over almost all their income to the wife. She becomes a housewife mom robot. He becomes a work robot. And that's IT.

These are smart people. They see how they were raised. They see what will be expected of them and want nothing to do with it. They are the generation that can say NO.

The government talks big about meaningless changes that do nothing at all to address why young adults are not having kids. They don't want to make the real changes it would take to fix the problem. At this point, the only way to save the population would be to outlaw not having kids.

Yet another dumb decision from Xerox. One sinking ship towing another one.

My employer had been a pure Xerox shop for decades. A legendary loyal customer. That changed when Xerox stuck us with a couple junk color inkjet machines that are absolute trash. We are lucky to get one day a month of run out of them.

Meanwhile, we risked buying a competing machine which turned out to be an incredible workhorse. It never breaks. It runs circles around Xerox. Our workers love it. Management actually listened to the workers and bought more of them and now we are laughing at Xerox as their service techs continue to retire and leave anyway.

There's almost nobody left to fix their machines. Dozens of techs in our city alone have left. They have like one guy left and he's ready to leave.

There is absolutely no way in hell anyone in our area would invest in more Xerox printers at this point.

Amazon does contact the doctor office. Not sure if they call or just send an electronic request. But they always ask my doctor, somehow, and always get denied because I have to go see the doc in person to get new refills. My doctor never ever ever issues refills without collecting her office visit copay.

But at least Amazon does try to ask on my behalf. YMMV

All of my Amazon Pharmacy orders have been delivered by UPS, not Amazon's own drivers. That says a LOT to me about who Amazon trusts more.

I don't think UPS has ever messed up any delivery to my home. Amazon has. Fedex and USPS have. But not brown.

Have used Amazon pharmacy for over a year because it ends up being cheaper than any other option, and that matters when I take 8 different medications every day.

My job provides medical insurance but the prescription co-pays are three or four times what it costs just using Amazon pharmacy and paying out of pocket. It is even cheaper than GoodRx.

But the main downside is that they appeared to have just one pharmacy hub in Miami. The deliveries are by UPS, not Amazon drivers. Make of that what you will. They have not messed up or lost any of my orders.

Gosh this sounds too much like a Bezos fanmail. Yuck. I need my pills.

This problem is impossible to solve. Educated women tend to have fewer children. Education enables opportunities doing things besides being a parent, like working full time.

Many Japanese women who work earn enough to sustain themselves and provide for some luxury goods or travel, without needing a partner. They are happy as they are.

Asking them to be a parent means sacrificing all of that in favor of being a mom who stays at home, because daycare and similar childcare is in extremely short supply and there is almost no government support for working moms. Thus an educated and employed woman accustomed to managing her own life is basically asked to surrender everything and take on the wife and mom role and jumper costume that goes with it. It's no wonder few want to do that.

What is in it for her except some sort of duty to country? It's absolutely not enticing. The government offers pathetic incentives to have kids and does nothing to support women who do choose that path.

On the men's side, many of them aren't even particularly interested in starting a family.

The only way this is ever going to be "solved" is to take unprecedented drastic measures like forbidding women from working jobs above menial level, to force them to marry to survive and hope that produces enough children. This is not going to happen. Nobody would stand for it.

There just soon won't be enough people to stand for or against it either way. Japan has very little time left to fix it and a terrible really bad track record of poor attempts to do anything -IF they even take it seriously at all.

Just don't have kids. You never need to futz around with parental controls, never need to save money for a college fund or clothes or books or any of that other stuff. The kid you do not have is not wrecking your car, playing loud music, eating your food and thanking you for it by telling you what a horrible parent you are.

How many parents have either thought or said they wish they had never had their monster of a kid? I hear it a lot among my adult friends. Well, the answer is simple: never have a kid and you solve it all.

I may take my entire family DNA into the grave with me but dammit I will do so never having had to configure parental controls on anything.

AI that can beat humans is nothing new for Sony. Way way back on the PlayStation 1, my local crowd of friends used to play a LOT of the game Armored Core. At times, you had to fight AI adversaries in a sort of death match, or you could play against another human if you had the link cable. We did a LOT of that. Fun by the ton.

But it became apparent the AI was cheating to win. Or at least had an advantage no human could match. The human players were limited by the effectiveness of the radar system equipped to their unique machine. This was customizable and had variables like range and sensitivity. If your adversary was too far away, you had no idea where they were and that was part of the challenge.

The AI player had no such limitation. It knew exactly where the human player was at all times, and kept the aiming reticule centered exactly on that point, regardless of distance or lack of radar contact. The human had to hunt around and search, at risk to themselves. The AI merely had to wait for a weapon lock on the gun it had already aimed at the human.

The game was and still is great fun. But that AI cheated constantly. Luckily it was never too hard to defeat. It knew where the humans were but had poor tactics and no subtlety.

It does not take gallons of water to kill a person. All they have to do is drink ONE gallon in a very short period of time. Chug it. And they are in extreme danger, especially if they are already impaired or don't realize the danger. Innocent people competing in water-chugging contests have died from it.

There was an infamous case when the Wii game console launched and was hard to obtain where a mom with kids entered a water-chugging contest with the Wii being the prize for the winner. It was a urine joke, of course. Wii. Wee. She chugged a gallon of water and died. No joke. I cannot imagine being those kids and realizing for the rest of their lives that their mom died because of a stupid game console contest.

We are more likely to get cars powered by our own ZPE generators than quality disc manufacturing.

Seriously. Bad discs have been happening since the first laserdiscs were hit with rot. Nobody has consistently managed to get this under control despite decades of trying. Bad batches still escape beta testing and QA and go into mass production.

I love physical media. But quality is all over the place and nothing is ever going to improve when making it for the lowest cost is the goal. I know of boutique production houses (three people and two of them are fulfillment) doing small runs, which they send out in advance as test discs, still missing glaring problems before the production pressing run and having to do replacement discs.

What do these legacy studios even own besides some standing sets and back catalog? And they don't even own all of that catalog, as some things are co-prods or contract work.

Literally every single part of making a new TV show or movie in 2021 can be done independently of any of the old giant studios, their nifty sets or systems. I'm not sure I know a single person who has ever said they want to see an "MGM Movie" or a "Paramount Movie" versus wanting to see directors or actors or work by certain writers or composers, etc. They gladly express wanting to see a "James Bond movie" or a "Mel Brooks movie" but nobody cares about the studio name that rolls by during the credits.

Amazon has already been making content on their own and paying other people to make content. I don't see THAT much additional value in what owning MGM brings to the table.

A security vendor hired by my workplace loves to pass out scary security training materials that begin with something like "To make a secure computing environment, the first option is get rid of the users." which may be a poor attempt at humor but which also obliquely refers to firing everyone. "The next option is to train them." which they proceed to largely fail to do. No mention whatsoever of candy drops yet I alone have found four thumb drives in our parking lot in a year. Dude. Come on. What good is training if it doesn't train? One of our main competitors got nailed by the ransomware and we had to do disaster recovery for their clients. But we have security vendor who doesn't train for actual attack vectors we are actually finding on the literal ground.

I don't work in IT at this company. Else I would have gotten fired long ago for telling someone off. And I have digressed much too much. Apologies.

If you can't get rid of the users, maybe we can get rid of the applications. If cloud gaming ever takes off, I feel like real cloud computing can't be far behind, and by that I mean the average desktop, notebook, tablet, etc. could become just dumb terminals like the old Wyse boxes of ancient history. Most of what most people do on a PC or phone can be distilled down to a few main tasks that don't need a specific OS to do what they do. In that case, why risk letting email run on the end user device? Just show them a view of it. etc.

Sure, it makes that central host a great big target and sure, you rely on bandwidth to do anything at all, but maybe someday these problems can be solved.

At least in GA, you can have ONE active fault in the ODBII and still pass as long as the ODBII drive cycle hasn't been reset or cleared.