The natural cascades of man-made global warming have only kicked into overdrive in recent years. Basic common sense tells us that the rate is only going to increase in the foreseeable future. Meaning that regular heat itself will be the main problem. And way earlier than 2050.

Point in case: It's nearing the end of September and temperature and humidity was flat-out tropical this weekend in western Germany. The water table here has been nothing but dropping for the last decade or so with zero replenishment happening and it ain't looking like that's gonna change. Rains have mostly reduced to short warm drizzles or the occasional 3-hour long flash-flood with a years worth of water coming down in an hour in selected counties. And flowing away within 24 hours. The first farmers in Germany are starting to move towards dryland agriculture (in effing Germany!), the complete vanishing of alpine glaciers is due in 5 years or so, perhaps even earlier and the famous German forrest with their Beeches, Oaks, Sykamores and such are officially a thing of the past because the water-cycle can't support them anymore.

Tourists have been steering clear of the mediterranean in recent years because the water was too warm. Not the air (although that too), the effing _water_ was too warm.

So I'd say in 2050 smoke from forrest-fires is likely to be one of our lesser problems.

... about the Fyre Festival fraud and failure, (at least) one of them on Netflix. Check it out, absolutely hilarious. LimeWire buying the Fyre brand sounds 110% like something the LimeWire crew came up with while laying stoned in a Whirlpool. I love this. LOL!

What's wrong with "Yeah, there are some kinks that we overlooked. It's because the studio had to get the release out before bladiblah. We're working on a patch that addresses the issue. Anyone who bought the game until yesterday will get skin/pet/neat-fun-little-soapbubblegun as a bonus DLC for the inconvenience."

It costs like nothing to do this and you'll be portrayed the cool gaming company dude.

Borderlands is a beloved franchise, it's not that the fans will get all worked up about this. Why insult your customer base with bullshit for no reason what-so-ever? And claiming they build UE5 or that UE5 is a sub-par engine is just being silly. A move that anyone who knows a bit about gaming will see right through. .... With minimal social skill you could turn a buggy release like this into a PR win with a slice of self-deprecating humor, a little DLC fluff as a token apology and some community chat to calm the waters and grow connection. If I were in his place I'd even ride the wave and call it the special "Buggy as Fuck!" release, "Only for a limited time!". I'm pretty sure that would've gotten the game even extra attention. Especially the Borderlands fanbase is into this kind of humor.

I fundamentally don't get it.

These pretentious douchebags need some basic PR training above anything else.

Many PFAS/Forever Chemicals have a structure and effect similar to estrogen, which makes men less manly. It also appears that there are environmental effects lowering testosterone, some researchers Link this to PFAS as well. Low sperm count has also been linked to PFAS.

So, yeah, they literally make your more trans. If you're a man that is.

Socialism with American Characteristics

Iowa's rolling farm fields of coffee

They are slowly gaining in Germany too and have been for the last two decades or so, also due to some EU funding while back. Some German towns even exploited this a little by stringing roundabouts together. They make you dizzy driving through them. That aside, roundabouts are a surefire way to slow down traffic to reasonable speeds, remove breaking and waiting at traffic lights and are low-maintenance intersections.

They'd be the default intersection if I were in charge.

Sadly, quite a few of my fellow German citizens whine like crybabies about them and would rather wait at traffic-lights. I don't quite get it, but this is Germany where people are similarly crazy about cars as some are about guns and gun regulations in the US. Go figure.

Narrative podcast is a media format, not an industry. Conflating those two like some silly dimwit is very likely to lose you big amounts of money. QED.

"Serial" was a podcast that helped kicked off the craze. It was new, had the true-crime pull that fascinates women and men alike, produced with a fairly low budget, available for free download asynchronously (unlike radio shows), covered a current controversy (which it helped hype up, partly out of self interest in the attention economy) and had enough cliff-hangers to string people along and have people around the world awaiting the next episode.

There is one "problem" with this sort of format though: It takes time to consume, very much like a streaming series. And there is only so much time that shows like this can eat up. I jumped on the "Serial" bandwagon right after a close friend of mine got all hyped up about it. I listened to a few episodes but quickly noticed the cliff-hanger shtick on keeping people on edge wether the convict was guilty or not. IMHO the trick was somewhat transparent and it became less compelling after I noticed it.

I'm pretty sure the format is still out there and used by podcasts, but it never was an industry, since every regular person with a cheap-ass laptop and a free installation of reaper or ardour has everything they need to get going and producing their own narrative podcast.

Thinking that this is an "industry" in itself was quite silly from the beginning. Sort of like calling "cooking spagetti" an industry.

Indeed, I fully agree. The funny thing is, monthly numbers would help us move away from the distortions of the quarterly cycle. If key data reporting becomes frequent enough, you can't get into a cycle of "do adverse-numbers stuff early in the quarter and then cram positive-numbers stuff into the end of the quarter". You have to - *gasp* - just run your business normally.

Some businesses could still manage to switch to a monthly cycle, but anyone who deals significantly in transoceanic feedstocks/parts/goods shipments won't be able to.

BLS numbers aren't some sort of dark art. They're literally just the compiled numbers reported by companies. Numbers are what they are. To fight against jobs numbers is to fight against reality.

People get confused by the existence of revisions. The problem is that not all data gets reported in a timely manner. When late data comes in, it causes revisions to the earlier reported numbers, either up or down.

Firing the head of the BLS because you don't like what numbers US companies reported is just insane Banana Republic-level nonsense.

Yes, he fired the same person who was ultimately responsible for putting out crap numbers.

US reporting has always been the gold standard. Nobody has accused the BLS of "crap numbers" until Trump decided he didn't like them. It's is so way outside the norms it doesn't even resemble something that could conceivably happen in the US; this is banana republic-level stuff.

Yeah, as an investor, my reaction to this proposal was, oh HELL no.

TL / DR:

BLS chief: "Jobs are turning bad now."

Trump: "Fake news, you're fired. I'm appointing a January 6th rioter conspiracy theorist to head the BLS!"

BLS today: "Jobs were ALREADY bad!"

The fact that you take at face value a revision of Biden-era job numbers, immediately after Trump fired and replaced the BLS chief explicitly because he published jobs numbers Trump didn't like, is....

Well, it's certainly a choice.