You usually can't skip commercials via any type of streaming that has them. And some of the so-called "commercial free" streaming services changed their terms of service so that under certain conditions they can still show you some commercials. Paramount+ is one I remember that made that change.

Yeah, it really is. I'd have modded you up, but no points.

Good luck, but as members of the House are elected in local elections, what usually happens is the bigger an idiot they are, as long as they don't commit any crimes, the more likely they are to be re-elected. She'll be defeated only if a better Republican runs against her. And I'm not sure that we'll even have mid-term elections in 2026. If we do, I expect Republican controlled states (cough cough, South Carolina is one) to do off the charts cheating so that Republicans win every election. South Carolina currently only has 1 Democratic representative. It will be super easy to cheat and turn that into 0 in 2026, again if there even are elections.

Asian people do.

Ethnic Chinese people maybe do it more than any other group, although I suspect Japanese people are likely to do this as well. There is societal pressure for Chinese people to save money in banks for various reasons, including getting married. It's not unusual at all for young men to basically be living on instant ramen noodles and living in the cheapest apartments they can find so they can squirrel away every dollar they make for a future wedding where they will not only be expected to pay for the wedding and reception, they may have to pay a "bride price" to the bride's family to be allowed to marry her. This bride price is sometimes erroneously called a "dowry", but a "dowry" is technically paid by the bride's family to the groom and not the reverse. I have a female friend who is ethnically Chinese but from an ASEAN country. She has always worked as a bank teller, so you have an idea of what kind of money she makes doing that. She loaned her ex-husband something like $50-60 thousand dollars for a business. I was kind of stunned that she somehow had saved that kind of money. The impression I get is that it's not unusual at all for Chinese people to have very large cash holdings in banks and little or often nothing in terms of other investments besides any property or a business they might own.

Another problem is that demand pricing has killed consumers and people willing to pay it anyway means it won't go away. A few months ago, Paul McCartney put tickets on sale in my city. I have an old friend from my hometown (a couple of hours away from where I live) who wanted to go. I've seen Paul in concert, he hasn't, so I told him I'd get tickets and he could pay me back for his, but we agreed on a price beforehand. It took almost an hour after sales started before I had any chance to buy and including fees, there were no tickets less than $500 each available, so we currently aren't going. These were prices for upper deck tickets too at an NHL/.NBA arena (approx. 18,000 seats). The tickets weren't originally that expensive, but Ticketmaster sold most tickets quickly at lower prices, so they kept raising the prices of what was left. I imagine those $500 tickets originally were $200 tickets. If tickets sell, under demand pricing the price keeps going up until they stop selling and then it stops, but it's still too high. Every time somebody pays $500 or more for a ticket, you're sending a message to artist and the ticket sellers that they can continue to raise prices and you'll pay it. At some point people need to say I"It's just not worth it at that price" instead of "I can't live if I don't see X live in concert!".

I keep up somewhat with classical music and while Woodard graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music, he isn't anybody I've ever heard of in the classical scene. He seems to be pretty good at promoting himself, or trying to do so. He's written a few works you've never heard of because a lot of them are controversial tributes to people who don't really deserve tributes. He denies being a racist, but he seems to really lean hard on the pro-Nazi side of politics and he made friends with Timothy McVeigh according to the article.

For those who may not know, and I'm not suggesting you are one of those people, China has for a long time engaged in "whataboutism" when criticized. The US used to complain about the Chinese government mistreating the Uyghurs, so China would at the UN give reports about how the USA was the most racist country on the planet, using reports of police misconduct against black people as proof. Arguing "The US spies on everybody and is the worst country to do this. They suck!" is a pretty typical Chinese position. Some people in China do care about personal freedom, but many do not. Those who don't will gladly trade it to live in a society where they've basically traded freedom for safety, as long as they stay in line with the government.

Kids, this is why pension plans are bad and you should instead have IRAs/401Ks. By established court precedent, pension plans have no legal protection, so the company can raid them for anything, including paying down debt. That money isn't going back - ever.

Not kidding in what I'm about to say. Just want to be crystal clear about it.

This is because most Slashdotters don't program in C any more. If it was obfuscated Rust, it might get a lot more interest. Shrug.

There's a legit reason for nobody in Congress understanding tech. It's because the vast majority of members, including in this case Schiff, are lawyers. I'm an IT guy with a lot of lawyer friends from my college days. How this ended up being the case is a long story I'll skip. But none of them are great at tech at all. One lawyer friend for years had a "cell phone that's just a phone" until he grudgingly had to give it up and got, and can barely use, an iPhone. Another is very tech challenged. He basically just asks Siri everything rather than type anything into his phone and I can tell you because I've seen it firsthand that if he has to do something on a PC that requires more than 2 button clicks, his brain just shuts down and it's "too hard" for him to do and understand.

As best I can tell, although I can't say why, the answer to this is apparently "Nothing".

The earthquake warning is basically Google just trying to be nice to Android customers. Everyone else can, well, die. Google researchers figured out that the phones that use Android have tiny accelerometers in the phone that detect the earth's motion and can do the job better than traditional detection devices. They are also giving Google the opportunity to warn people who may not be near a detection device or set up to get warnings from such detection devices. So they set up a warning system and it worked extremely well. 1276 alerts were accurate and 3 were false. The problem was that the Turkey and Syria earthquake was of a magnitude that Google never expected, so it didn't handle it well. They have since tweaked the algorithm and it's believed that if something similar happened again, it would work.

I wasn't able to find if Turkey even has a warning system at all. They may not.

Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Softbank, thought it was a great idea and invested about $300 million in it 7 years ago. At some point he sold his shares back and left, but I'm sure they were sold at a big loss. Most of Son's VC investments have been terrible and a lot are stunning in that exactly as you post, it makes you wonder why anybody would invest in that kind of company. A very small number of his investments were massively successful, probably just by random luck. A few are OK enough. Most are terrible and wastes of money. He seems kind of smart and Softbank is a well run company overall, but I came to the conclusion that he has no idea what will and won't work so he is just randomly throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks, to use an American expression. I don't think there's any real plan to his investments, but from what I've read he does actually say no at times to investing in some companies. I can't imagine what made him think this idea was going to work with a business that could only possibly be profitable in very large towns.

I have a good friend I'm still in touch with from high school who lives with his family on Long Island, New York. This is in the New York City metro area. So he and his wife bought a house approximately 30 years ago and he was at the time bragging to me about how he didn't have air conditioning in it at all because it was "too expensive to pay for when you only need it for one week a year". He did eventually cave in and they have some type of air conditioning now.

Very short version here. Leo Apotheker was the CEO of HP at the time of the deal. He pushed hard, really hard, for this deal. He either via intimidation or orders or both made it clear that any attempt from within HP to stop this deal or look more closely at it would result in termination. The HP board did approve this deal. Apotheker was a sort of desperation CEO at HP, having almost a year ago replaced a guy who left over some ethics stuff about expenses. HP's stock plummeted during Apotheker's time as CEO and he was replaced about a month after the deal. Yes, there were huge warning signs at the time about Autonomy. Months before the deal went through, some investment analyst wrote a paper that basically said "Autonomy is cooking the books. Their revenues reports have to be made up because...." The same guy also wrote a report on Chinese coffee company Luckin Coffee and a few months after that report said that Luckin had to be making up their numbers, it came out that they were indeed making up their numbers. Luckin is now delisted from major US stock markets and trades as a risky over the counter (OTC) stock. After Apotheker left HP, HP employees were able to examine the purchase and the Autonomy books and discovered that their revenue reports were fraudulent. My guess is that Apotheker was desperate to get Autonomy as he viewed it as his last chance to save his job.

For those who don't know, at one point there were 6 major airlines in the USA that covered the US from coast to coast. There are only 3 now. Here's who gobbled up who:
Delta bought Northwest Airlines
United bought Continental Airlines
American bought US Airways
Southwest Airlines is a really big small airline because it only cover major US cities.

Of the above, by the time of the various mergers, US Airways was easily the most consumer hostile major US airline. Many of their fares didn't earn miles at all, as I found out to my horror when I booked a flight on them intended to earn miles with a partner airline on the flight. Their whole attitude was basically you can over pay for your ticket if you want miles or you can get nothing. They had a branded credit card and it was horrible, offering the lowest miles accrual rates in the industry. So it made perfect sense that American would buy them as American was easily the 2nd most customer hostile airline in the USA. I can tell you that American does not value their customers at all and if they have a way to squeeze more money out of a customer and make that customer's experience worse, they will do it. United has at times been some incompetent in dealing with customers although I think they do care about them. Delta did value their customers until recently. Now their CEO, much to my surprise, seems to be fully committed to screwing all of them over.

Delta's biggest problem in my opinion was that for many years they made it too easy to earn special status. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every Delta flight has at least half the passengers with some kind of special Delta status. Even I have a special status with Delta, although it is rock bottom dead last of all statuses, through a branded credit card. I read the other day that Delta is testing a new type of screw the customers business class ticket where the default business class ticket won't give you anything unless you want to pay for it. No assigned seating. No checked baggage. Are there really customers who want to pay thousands of dollars for a ticket without assigned seating and no checked bags? Delta seems to think so. Or they simply now want all business customers to pay extra for those. And this demand pricing for sure means that you as a Delta customer will always get the worst price they think they can make you pay if you want to fly with them. I fly United sometimes and in this race to the bottom where Delta and America seem determined to see who can piss off the most customers, I guess going forward I'll just start using United more if they end up staying out of this.