As someone who grew up loving video games in the 80s (elementary and middle school aged then), it was a totally different situation than now. The games were more arcade-y, instead of designed to get you attention-addicted, and in order to use a game console, you had to share the one (in our case) TV in the house with everyone else, which severely limited available time.

When computer gaming started to become common in the late 80s/early 90s, you practically had to have a computer science degree to get some of those games to run on resource-starved PCs, and the problem analysis/solving skills that honed stood a lot of us in good stead for high-paying careers later on.

Wait, they require you to provide a phone number to get a phone number? So people who don't already have one can't ever get one? :P

Well, that kind of depends on whether or not you're the one that owns the capital...

This is why the fastest way to end the conflict after Putin's ICC arrest warrant was issued would have been for the US and/or EU to fund a $billion+ bounty to any group that delivered him to the ICC to face the charges. His own security would sell him out in days, and if not, he'd be so paranoid he probably couldn't function.

The math is pretty easy... even if you had 100,000 riders/day for 50 years, it would still cost over $120/day/rider to pay off the initial investment - that doesn't even count ongoing costs. If you're paying interest on $231B, those 100k riders at $120 won't even pay the interest. $300-400+ per ticket would probably be necessary, but no one's going to pay that.

I think the biggest technical problem is that I don't think people with that kind of "net worth" really personally own what gives them that worth. There's already a lot of incentives to not have assets in your name (protecting against lawsuits, divorce, etc.), so how many of these billionaires are actually penniless in a legal sense?

Basically, you could have billions in a checking account owned by a trust, and just be an "authorized user" on a credit card that some lawyer trustee pays off from the trust. Congrats! You have no wealth to tax.

They're certainly not going to break it out in the future, regardless of any threats. Any company that did has now created a specific liability, and could end up receiving tons of small claims cases if they don't refund. Companies that didn't can just claim they absorbed the cost, and don't owe anyone anything.

Even 4k is questionable when all most people do is stream. If I look at our 4k TV up close, "4k" streams really aren't.

PJM commits to keeping existing residential and business grids stable, and not increase their prices.

"Excess" users like AI data centers, crypto miners, etc. must bid once per day with a max price/kWh they're willing to pay. As long as there's no shortage, everyone pays normal rates, and it's fine. If they run out of capacity, then the excess users are shut off from lowest to highest.
For example, five AI data centers bid 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50c/kWh today. If capacity is low, the 10c DC gets shut off, and the rest pay 20c/kWh. If it's still not enough, the 20c/kWh is shut off, and the rest pay 30c/kWh, etc. Ties are not broken - everyone bidding the same gets shut down at the same time, even if it's not strictly necessary (this is to prevent collusion).
Then the ones causing the problem are the only ones that suffer, and the ones that can't make it economically will go somewhere else.

Haven't the various martial arts taught basically this for centuries? The Japanese "kiai"/Korean "kihap" basically do the same without the vulgar vocabulary...

No, it's a great business plan. Add a feature that means the car is undrivable if the customer disables or blocks your location-tracking-for-sale device. Bonus! Make it an additional option they PAID for!

Not really - they're sitting in people's coin jars.

We've been trying to get rid of our giant jar of coins for years, but banks won't take them unless we spend hours rolling them up, and things like coinstar charge outrageous fees - so tons of coins just sit around because we literally can't reasonably put them back in circulation.

Most people are only streaming everything now, and with compression, the image quality is way worse than what most TVs are capable of displaying.

What might be starting to happen is that there are increasing numbers of these "snowflake" employees that are offended by everything, can't take a joke, etc. For them, "normal" people are toxic because OMG! they occasionally make a slightly off-color joke, or something, then go straight to HR. So they think the workplace is toxic because they're forced to be exposed to that. Normal people then have to carefully watch every word that comes out of their mouths, can't have any fun or relax, so they consider the snowflakes toxic. So basically, everyone thinks it's toxic, and it really only takes one snowflake per office to make it like that.

If they won't respect robots.txt, maybe they'll stay off your site if you stick random gibberish poison pages all over the site.