Selected because it's the information page available? Which

I don't spend much time on slashdot, rather in economics reading. Paul Krugman is probably the most-famous detractor of average, proponent of median, income reporting. I believe his best-known point was that when Bill Gates walks into a 20,000 seat football stadium, the "average attendee" just became a multi-millionaire.
He repeated his 1992 point in a longish 2014 article:
https://prospect.org/2014/06/0...

But my whole post was off-topic for this slashdot article, and we're now moving further afield, and should take this up when income inequality, or relative income of different states, is the actual topic.

But I gotta say - that St Louis Fed page says it rose from 27K to 45K in 45 years. That's 1.1% gain per year. Krugman's own essay above is about how that number is smaller than the percentage gains of the top 10%, much less the top 1%, much much less the top 0.1%...which is what the inequality debate is all about.

But my stronger point was the use of "wealth" rather than "income". Wealth is the integral of (income - living.costs) over time, modified by preference for saving over spending. (Japanese are great savers, so are Canadians). If your income keeps going up, but your inescapable living costs like housing and higher education also skyrocket, your wealth will do poorly, as with Gen Z not having housing.

Canada has THIRTY PERCENT higher median wealth than America. That's the sum of savings, despite lower income, because we have far lower medical insurance costs and precarity.

...and it doesn't really have bugs...

Actually, it's an Office sort-of-clone, so OF COURSE it has bugs. It's Office (inspired).

Because, and read carefully, we all know only Microsoft and its lackey sycophants deliver buggy software.

Not an excuse, just a reality check. Once you get past Hello World, software gets, well, difficult. Film at 11.

Every time any action of mine has led to Google doing any AI "computation" has been unintentional. I never asked for it. Google just chose to bundle it with my search.

I usually use an address bar keyword that uses an URL with &udm=14 to avoid this, but sometimes I slip up.
And I've also noticed that Google have added an AI summary to image search has well... I never asked for a textual description of an image, that contains factual errors or pure guesses half of the time: I have my own eyes, and I'm not blind. And I can make uneducated guesses myself.

.... And today I learned that daily passes to "cable tv" are a thing. Bye bye, YouTubeTV. Don't mistake my cancellation as evidence I ever wanted your service in the first place.

Don't discourage! Conservatives HATE looking at median numbers instead of averages, normally. This is my discovery-of-the-week, the "Median Wealth" by country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... (click on the "MEDIAN" column and sort so that Iceland is at top)

If you think of 'wealth' as "the integral over time of (income - living expenses)", then it's a much better measure of whether your society maximizes the number of people with minimal stress...and on THAT metric of national success, the USA is way below Canada and nine European nations. But economists like Noah Smith still refer to Europe "catching up" with the USA, or "falling behind" based on *average* income changes...when most increases go to just a few percent.

Let's hear it for median economic stats.

I used to work for Sling TV, and you basically have that backwards. ESPN is the part of Disney's package that people are willing to pay money for. The shutdown and negotiations every year is just Disney forcing the various providers to pay for and carry their other channels. That's why Disney always holds these negotiations during football season, so if they have to shut someone down their customers actually care. Every year viewership on Disney's other channels (and non-sports channels in general) is lower, and the prices that the content producers require goes up. Scripted television is in serious decline, and Hollywood is using sports fans to prop it up.

As an example, If you don't care about sports you can get Disney+ without ads for about $12 a month. Disney will happily throw in Hulu for that same price if you will watch some ads. You can binge watch the shows that you care about and then switch to another channel. Heck, you can buy entire seasons of their shows ala carte. You can't get ESPN however, without paying at least $45/month, and that's with a package with no non-Disney channels and chuck full of ads. For the record, that's basically what the streaming services are paying Disney as well. When I worked at Sling the entirety of the subscription fees went to the content companies (primarily Disney). There is essentially no profit in cable packages. All of the profit has to be made up somewhere else.

People that aren't sports fans, especially if they are entertainment fans, tend to believe that scripted programming is carrying sports, but it is the other way around. That's why AppleTV, which has spent over $20 billion creating content for their channel has about as many subscribers the amount of people that typically watch a single episode of Thursday Night Football, the worst professional football game of the week. Amazon Prime pays $1 billion a year for that franchise, and it is a bargain compared to creating scripted content. Apple makes great television that almost no one pays for. The other content providers are in the same boat. You'll notice, for example, that Netflix's most expensive package is $25/month, and the revenue per user in the U.S. is around $16. That's ad free. The lowest promotional price you can pay for ESPN is basically twice that, and it always comes with ads. What's more, sports fans tend to actually watch the ads.

Sling is selling day and weekend passes to people because it knows that most of its customers only have their service to watch the game. No one is watching linear television anymore, but the content creators have built their entire business around the idea of having a channel that they fill up with content. Even with Sling's ridiculous prices they can typically watch the games they want to watch for less than maintaining a subscription.

I have spent most of my adult life in the sports world, but I don't watch sports. I personally believe that in the long run sports television is probably going to end up uncoupled from scripted television. I think that is going to be very bad news for people that like scripted television.

"And, they continued layoffs they started"

FTFY. Layoffs have been for how long, and where? For centuries, and everywhere.

Which is the bot-driven sales. Followed by commission sales agents enabling the process.

I may never see another major act in person. Just don't want to participate in the fraud.

I know a few who would take the extra money and see a quack doctor. I did, for instance. Good enough results to recommend them.

Except the overwhelming majority of massive corporate consolidation happened under Obama with Obama era appointments.

The last great recession was due to precisely this sort of spending pattern plus a collapse in payment. Banks may be healthy, for now, but they can't keep lending forever with no recover. This is not a good sign.

Anthropic's entire pitch has always been safety. Innovation like this tends to favor a very few companies, and it leaves behind a whole pile of losers that also had to spend ridiculous amounts of capital in the hopes of catching the next wave. If you bet on the winning company you make a pile of money, if you pick one of the losers then the capital you invested evaporates. Anthropic has positioned itself as OpenAI, except with safeguards, and that could very well be the formula that wins the jackpot. Historically, litigation and government sponsorship have been instrumental in picking winners.

However, as things currently stand, Anthropic is unlikely to win on technical merits over its competition. So Dario's entire job as a CEO is basically to get the government involved. If he can create enough doubt about the people that are currently making decisions in AI circles that the government gets involved, either directly through government investment, or indirectly through legislation, then his firm has a chance at grabbing the brass ring. That's not to say that he is wrong, he might even be sincere. It is just that it isn't surprising that his pitch is that AI has the potential to be wildly dangerous and we need to think about safety. That's essentially the only path that makes his firm a viable long term player.

If you read around a few more articles on this, the new "scenario" assuming no changed regulations or programs anywhere, was added under "pressure". The IEA has some independence, and came up with the peak-before-2030 scenarios a few years ago.

OPEC+ reacted in horror and condemnation, of course, - how dare they effectively call it a sunset industry that will shrink through the 2030s - and set up their own predictions group that came up with a scenario like this one. IEA, (which isn't entirely independent, it's funded by governments, some of them petrostates, and takes funding straight from oil companies themselves) has been under pressure to add the OPEC+ "happy days" scenario to their own suite of scenarios.

The scenarios all have assumptions, and differ because of the assumptions. You can believe these are reasonable assumptions, and the earlier ones wildly optimistic. But a fifth of the cars sold last year were electric, and a quarter of the cars sold this year. The cars are getting better, the underlying battery technologies are improving visibly every year.

Bottom line, this new scenario is heavily influenced by those who would profit from it, and not likely.

http://brander.ca/cordcutcuug

My presentation to the Calgary Unix Users Group on getting the local TV stations Over-the-Air, onto a shared Unix directory as .MPG files that I can save, edit, compress. Just sayin'. It's not even hard. $35/year for the subscription to the index/schedule/search service that gives me the same schedule grid as cable always did.

OTA...well...and of course, the fact that I hate Amazon, Apple, and Disney as monopolist swine and care little for their "IP rights"...

The catastrophe begins already at 2.0 degrees C.

That's when our food supply is going to start break down.