You can get old business laptops for a few bucks on lots of places, like online retailers, refurbished sites or eBay. They are quite solid, can be upgraded for cheap, and will last for a long time. That's where I got the T14 from - for less than $250, and that's what I use for my 3D printing, for my web browsing and for the occasional game. And you don't find that many business laptops with AMD processors. I don't buy a computer for its CPU. If it works, it's fine for me.

Adding in that there was a large cross-marketing and promotion of women authors in 1970s science fiction and fantasy to try to open women readers towards that genre.

Been tried before: There were country music stars that did Beatles covers in the 1960s including Beetles haircut wigs, and also the Rolling Stones included 1 country song (more or less country) on most of their albums.

It begs the question, are those in poverty in other countries more likely to have both parents, more likely to have a strong community and extended family and less likely to overdo social media consumption?

Agree with your opinion on the statistics. It would greatly help if the many sub-optimal papers get retracted also. Those include

- Self reported surveys
- A too small (50?) sample size
- Papers with a biased starting sample (surveying only middle aged white women) and generalizing to the entire population including men
- Ones with survey questions which seek to confirm an already held conclusion (e.g., using "Is it OK to speed if you are driving a critically sick person to the hospital?" and reporting it as "Is it OK to speed?")
- Papers which are an opinion piece with no backing data

Then
- Then evaluating papers with cite them as primary sources to see if they need to be retracted also.
- Then evaluating papers from journals having a high level of retractions
- Then evaluating papers which have many self-citations, citations from the journal's staff or colleagues, or citations from a circle of academics who cite each others work for cross-promotion
- Then evaluating papers by authors and/or academic departments who have repeated retractions

It's not a liberal or conservative take here, the UN, World Bank and the usual NGOs have pushed for Europe (who doesn't approve of the president and follows socialist policies) and the USA to pay money for past events, past allegations, or unproven grievances claimed by a third-world country.

What's common with this first-world to third-world wealth transfer, the UN and NGOs get their cut of the money, keep their influence and media promotions, and get to employ lots of people.

Countering the group of people who assign collective blame and collective responsibility at birth to one group of people for some real or unproven issue in the world; and then push for those in that group to somehow pay retribution for things they could not have possibly done because it was before they were born and before they were voting age adults.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/1...

The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone
New York Times - Dec 7, 2024
-
The gist of the article is that there are less male authors and the majority of the publishing industry is women which is driving male authors and readers away.

- The comments on https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
- Podcast examining this https://www.youtube.com/watch?...\

Even when the industry is dominated by women, it's still reported as somehow unfair or discriminatory:

https://www.thebookseller.com/...
Are men being 'pushed out of publishing'? Industry insiders discuss - Jul 22, 2025 - by Heloise Wood
"Proctor also explained that many bestselling male novelists are well-known household names, such as Richard Osman and Bob Mortimer, and that, while women comprise two-thirds of the publishing workforce, only two of the five big publishers have female CEOs. "

So, the takeaway from the quote is that if women outnumber men 2 to 1 in the industry workforce it is a failure because 40% of CEOs are women.

This will upset lots of people who's job depends of the narrative that the third world was abused by Europe and the USA and perpetual restitution is needed to correct things.

Noting that it is good to hear that individual happiness and well being are not correlated to how much money you have.

The inflection point where music started going downhill was when digital recording was introduced into the studio.

It went from a recording and production process with a limited number of overdubbing due to the compounding of noise to one where you could do an infinite number of overdubs and sampling with only adding a tiny amount of noise.

The earlier analogue microphone to tape to record process meant that each person in the recording process had to be excellent at their job and produced better quality recordings, lyrics, songwriting, and musicianship.

With digital recording, mixing, mastering and playback, less of the people involved have to have the same level of job proficiency resulting in enough low quality music to be popular so as to drown out the better work. There are lots of exceptions to this.

Add in fake harmony via autotune, singers harmonizing with themselves (Taylor Swift) and lyrics right out of 3rd grade (the decade of country songs with "burning up my phone" lines) and the public is forced to embrace the decline.

Predictions:
- The largest copyright holders will have to write-down the value of their back-catalog assets due to royalty amounts declining much faster than projected and much much faster than in the past.

- AI generated music, royalty free will be 'good enough' to fill the background ambience of more and more places - restaurants first, grocery stores, malls, TV commercials, TV scene background music, movie background music and eventually second and third tier tracks on soundtracks and major albums.

/. headline - "Microsoft CEO: Time To Move 'Beyond the Arguments of Slop vs Sophistication'"

Suggesting a better headline - "Microsoft CEO tired of justifying AI and glossing over the negatives of AI"

It would be informative if someone from the UK, knowledgeable in nonprofits (not for profit) organizations, add information on how they are coping with the national focus shifting from older steady well-known issues to a focus on new national issues (migration, drug use and gangs).

Is there a decline in media impact score for old-line UK nonprofits and how they market the issue, message and seek donations?

A second aspect is how is the shift in budget from social spending, including government funding for non-profits, to defense affecting nonprofits?

How is the competition for attention and funding affecting them?

The last generation in large numbers to read a daily newspaper was the baby boomer generation, who have mostly aged out of the workforce, aged out of political leadership, government, nonprofits, think tanks, academia and other positions of influence.

Late in their career, and favoring the status quo has been the trend for 25 years. It has led to stagnation, news which has little or no new facts, opinions or reporting.

It is easier to parrot the same old worn out talking points, aged out 'facts' and "new" research which serves only to confirm the status quo generation old research.

Individual reporting, finding new stories, new facts, new research contrary to the status quo has not been rewarded in 25 years. It is the tragedy of the commons where the number of ideas and room to print them has limited anything which challenges the retread status quo news and opinions.

It is easy to see, once you notice that approved opinions, facts, data, and expert quotes are promoted exclusively and there may be a small bone thrown to a dissenting statement which will then be downplayed, dismissed, and or judged via a worn out cliche or deflection.

This slipping to only allowed and approved news coverage has damaged the journalism field and is a net negative for society.

For example, there are rarely any articles on woman and suicide as a lead headline. The only time woman and suicide get mentioned in in news articles on male suicide (75% of the cases) so that they can dismiss male suicide and keep the conversation back on society needing to fix real or imagined issues women face first before any discussion, and government funded programs to address male issues.

The gist was that the Sunday morning political (USA) programs on the major networks would have a balanced set of participants including:

- The left-leaning host
- A pundit from the left
- A moderate (centrist) pundit who most often softly agreed with the pundit on the left
- A weak, soft-spoken person in the central-right

The premise was the host to ask a left favoring question, the pundit on the left and moderate (central left) to agree with the left's position and the central-right person to give a weak answer. The net result was 3 liberals and 1 other person leading to the opinions expressed, by broadcast air time and strength, to be favoring the liberal position.

It moved to the current day where media voices and opinions in traditional media are sold as central when they are liberal and anything not agreeing with the liberal side is called far-right regardless of the political position.

It's a controlling tactic to silence any discussion, allow only approved opinions to be discussed, exclude inconvenient data points and a goal of keeping the status quo of political infighting, divide us into arguing groups; and distract from stagnation, decline and (both) political parties being the party of the institution plus wealth (corporations, Wall Street, government + lobbying industry, NGOs, diplomatic class).

Everyone can read what they want to within reason.

The slouch from reading for fun in the past to today's internet (troll) brigade of people who - "get outraged as a hobby", "need to be judgemental of others without regard to reason, facts or discussion" and "need to pile on anyone and any opinion they disagree with" - is part of the decline in reading.

Why would you share the latest book you read with your co-workers knowing that there, in a crowd of 20 co-workers, is a 5% or greater chance that one of the co-workers will react in a way (reputation damage) which could hurt your job prospects? About 20% of women have had mental health treatment or are on mental health medicine within the last 12 months.

Egalitarianism in discussion has largely been lost, when you could talk to your your neighbor or co-worker, have a difference in opinion or regular politics, and part ways on friendly terms.

Agreeing with others here, have read little of fiction written in the last 10 years and read lots of older fiction and non-fiction books.

Also putting out there that there is a higher percent of modern novels written with stereotypical characters. Flat like a kid's movie - tall kid, smart kid, fat kid, dumb kid, bossy kid, rich kid, poor kid, ....

It may be due to the books at each stage of the process get softened, language softened (yuck) and slanted to approved political and social causes. That is OK. Though, books about external struggle are more appealing than internal struggle books (inter-personal relationships, hand-wringing, worrying, focus on feelings, repeated emotional appeals).

https://www.npr.org/sections/m...
Women now dominate the book business. Why there and not other creative industries? - April 4, 20236:31 AM ET

Modern books suffer from the blanding of literature due to sensitivity readers - 1950s style author self-censoring and sanitation - where only approved social, political, life and pesonality types make it into the final novel. A reader should be trusted to know the difference between what was considered acceptable in the past and what is considered OK today. It's like the old-time town hall committee who's self-appointed job is to morality police everyone else, books, news, speech, entertainment, and employment. People who seek to have judge and judgmental power over others.

https://www.theguardian.com/bo...
Sensitivity readers: what publishing’s most polarising role is really about
Lucy Knight - Wed 15 Mar 2023 04.00 EDT

Because not everyone playing on Steam has a big, powerful gaming rig. I myself am on Steam, but the computer I use to play the occasional game is an old Lenovo T14 laptop - with an Intel CPU. People like me playing on their laptops really tilt the balance towards Intel.

The Meta Quest 3 VR headset is selling quite well: https://www.roadtovr.com/quest...

The AVP is just way overpriced and doesn't have the app ecosystem to make it interesting enough.