What took Lego so long? Probably the contracts/agreements around the rights to use the names (that are all trademarked), likenesses, royalty payments, etc. There's no way that this wouldn't fall into the "merchandise" category and thus part of the profit sharing goes to the intellectual property owners. Makes you wonder how much George Lucas made (& Disney continues to make) out of Lego Star Wars.

If humans survive long enough, they're going to have a pretty bad day when the Yellowstone caldera explodes next. Even in modern history there's The Year Without a Summer

Life does not have that long left on this planet, maybe as little as 600 million years due to other changes in the Sun and its output. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...:

The luminosity of the Sun will steadily increase, causing a rise in the solar radiation reaching Earth and resulting in a higher rate of weathering of silicate minerals. This will affect the carbonate–silicate cycle, which will reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. About 600 million years from now, the level of carbon dioxide will fall below the level needed to sustain C3 carbon fixation photosynthesis used by trees. Some plants use the C4 carbon fixation method to persist at carbon dioxide concentrations as low as ten parts per million. However, in the long term, plants will likely die off altogether. The extinction of plants would cause the demise of almost all animal life since plants are the base of much of the animal food chain.[12][13]

Summary: complex life will have existed on this planet for only ~1.2 billion years from its start to end (for some definition of "complex"), from the Cambrian explosion to when the environment no longer supports life. How precious is complex life? It will only exist on this planet for less than 15% of the time it exists in the universe.

Who do you think pays for it to be broadcast? The gambling companies with their ads.

For sports to reach the number of people that it does requires a lot of money Sports have gone from being funded by nicotine, to alcohol, and now gambling. All vices and all highly profitable with healthy margins. Because society has kicked out nicotine & alcohol ads (and thus sponship), all that is left is gambling.

Rich people already have human agents to do that for them - they're called tax accountants. They don't violate tax law, they just use corner cases and loopholes that you and I can't. What this will do is turn you and I into felons because we screwed up line 40 box C on page 5, something that today would only be a problem if we were randomly selected for human audit.

Since AI will be processing tax returns, it would be interesting if the processing of tax returns could be summarised in data so that we know how many billionaires use each of the various tax return loopholes and corner cases. A difficult job for humans, but since machines are processing the data and evaluating it all against "code" (law), it should be an easy output to produce.

Health insurance in the USA is ridiculous because of the profits that courts feel they have to raid when something goes wrong and a someone sues. The $100,000,000 wrongful death award drives up insurance because insurance companies don't want to be out of pocket when a doctor claims.

The problem then is the vertical stacking of health insurance also being health providers, resulting in a loss of competition because it is very expensive to provide health care. The same problems happens with Internet access - vertical integration creates monopolies. Law that prohibits co-ownership of different layers of the service stack (be it health care of telephony) should be considered mandatory to provide customers with the best value for money

This Internet thing is Elon Musk's price for assistance in the election, as regional people will now be herded towards StarLink.

And since the government communicates with citizens by using the Internet (via web services and any other manner of things), it is not possible to put any restrictions in place on how people access that communication. Passing any law that attempts to restrict access to government communication would fail a 1st ammendment test.

It's more than just what you eat - in some people there are biological mechanisms that aren't functioning correctly, such as the hormones that direct whether or not the body should store glucose as fat or consume it or even convert fat for the body to use. In some people, all calories are stored as fat regardless of how little they eat. and then there are hormones that tell the brain to eat less because the body has lots of fat reserves and new food intake isn't required.

drugs such as this are aimed at helping people with broken biological mechanisms that should be saying "I don't need to eat more food" but aren't.

for some people weight gain is a simple problem of eating too many sugary things.

for a small number of people, it isn't possible to not gain weight.

There's been a lot of very interesting research in this area published in the last couple of years, and simply put, two people eating the same diet may not experience the same changes to their body's mass.

Part of the "small town" thing is that a lot of the towns where he has had rallies in the past won't let him do more because he hasn't paid his bills from 2020. This is normal Trump - don't pay your bills unless sued. That's why he is doing small towns and open air spaces - the big cities and big venues won't let him back in because he won't pay his bills.

Think of it like this: the car throws an exception and it is up to the user to catch and handle it ... or crash.

The countries with advanced economies now nearly all have a different problem: couples can't afford to own a home (or barely), forcing both parents to work, thereby preventing substantial families from appearing. Summary: kids and housing now cost too much "in the west."

In Nigeria and other countries, I wonder how many of those 6.8 children grow up to be adults.

This is simultaneously why immigration (both legal & illegal) is saving the USA and why conservatives want to prevent abortion (and maybe contraception): effectively force the number of births to go up.

If the phones sold in China are the same as elsewhere in the world, it would seem that there's a ripe market opportunity now for someone in China to buy phones at RRP and sell them on eBay to other people new, for less than the RRP, and still make a profit.

Grey market imports (using mechanisms like this) used to feature heavity in (digital) camera equipment on some of the big name websites. Seems like a ripe opportunity for more of the same, unless Apple has bribed US customers to block such imports.

I have both Apple and Samsung tablets that cost about the same. Prior to the A9/A9+, you just couldn't get a Samsung tablet with acceptable performance at the iPad pricepoint and I suspect still can't. Apple have a very good CPU/GPU combination in all of their tablets. That or the developer environments just produce better performing games. At the iPad price point, the competition from others has been lackluster up until 2024. The A9+ is the first to come close.

But one area where Apple is still better IMHO is the glass and the way it feels under your fingers. That might be more subjective but your AI robots and chatgpt scripts can't write about the way glass feels when doing automated comparison reviews based on datasheets. It is a thing. They don't all feel the same.

Yup, digital currencies with public ledgers are an intelligence smorgasbord.

In other parts of the world there are agreements between facebook/Google and media outlets around the news outlets being paid for news content appearing on websites. Those media outlets haven't died due to a lack of advertising revenue. Think about what that tells you with respect to the value of advertising revenue and how much news outlets get vs how much Google gets. Your very argument ("what about traffic and advertising revenue?!") was raised before. The news outlets (with the help of legislation) called facebook/Google's bluff and got an agreement. Obviously those of us on the outside (you & me) don't know what really goes on.

I think the summary here is that advertising returns from Google do not pay very well - or at least not as well as some of us think - and not well enough to sustain a newspaper that pays its journalists