The Economist's Babbage podcast has done several episodes on lab-grown meat. One of the ones that makes most sense to me is there was a company targeting fish, not beef or pork. Their reasoning was that fish is a more homogeneous meat than the other two, and also it would have a larger environmental impact since popular fish species can be heavily overfished and become endangered.

This always made complete sense to me, yet I've only ever seen plant-based steak and burger alternatives. Lab-grown fish meat seems absolutely perfect since it doesn't have to reproduce the marbled texture of land-based meat, something that the process struggles with today.

As an aside I'd love to switch to lab-grown if it were widely available and similarly priced. I'm never going to become a vegetarian, and if there's a way of supporting that without affecting actual animals...yep, sign me up please.

I didn't see anyone give the true reasons, talking about population this and that. I spoke with a pub owner - they said it literally cost more to keep the lights on than they were making in profit.

It's not demographics or 'young people drinking less' - I've heard that every generation. It's purely cost driven - high energy, high rates (property tax), increases in national insurance (employers tax) and wages, to a lesser extent increases in duty vs buying at a supermarket...all leads to high drink cost at a time of low disposable income. That's the driver.
br. Many of the pubs closing are rural pubs too. These had already declined due to drink driving laws and accessibility (and to be clear - I'm in favour of such laws). The attendance is the same as when they were profitable, it's the cost base that has increased not the customer interest dropping away.

Further resources here. The original argument suggests that British authors were paid but without copyright, This is mostly incorrect, as some authors with sufficient clout were paid a little but the vast majority got nothing.

That's absolutely incorrect, and US 'piracy' of publishing rights in the 19th century is well documented.

I've put out a couple of albums and a few tracks in the past. They haven't shaken the earth and neither should they - they're ok, some tracks less ok and some tracks more.

Then suddenly one week I started getting played a lot. I had no idea why - hadn't released anything, I don't really promote...it's all just a hobby for fun. Turned out another track with the same name as mine had gone super-popular, and I was picking up the results of bad searches. (Annoyingly, it was also one of my tracks that..err...'could potential improve from a remaster'. ). Covers get you heard. Soundalikes get you on playlists. If you actually do want to promote yourself and you're an unknown bedroom writer, you need to do some covers and ideally create playlists of popular tracks that also have your own tracks intermingled. This is how you get started in a purely online world, leaving aside the obvious let's all pay for fake views and votes route.

According to this inflation calculator, 2015's $158k would now have be 2025's $214.61. So the actual change is 6%, not 44%.

Also, every year someone pops up to say correlation is not causation. It isn't, but it's a damned good place to start. Like if I'm thirsty, standing at a t-junction and all the people walking from the left are carrying fresh new bottles of water and all the people walking from the right look like the last thing they tried to 'drink' is sawdust...it's not 100% proven that there's a place to get water from in one particular direction, but on the other hand...it's pretty damned well correlated and guess which direction I'm going to head in.

From the study: " The most pronounced associated differences were observed with intake of approximately 2 to 3 cups per day of caffeinated coffee or 1 to 2 cups per day of tea.".

You heard it - ditch the coffee, drink some tea.

(although, in a small voice, I should probably note that while I am British, I don't drink tea. I drink coffee. Damn.)

The license payers. The idea would be instead of paying for Teams, pay for a joint venture open source Teams alternative.

It's an attractive idea but in practice fraught with issues. First, I don't want to wait until its ready so I'll end up with a Team license anyway. Second, this means I'm going to have to agree a feature set with my fellow contributors - many of these companies will be rivals, and some will have some dumb workflow that means it's absolutely vitalthat a message turns purple 33 1/3rd seconds after being read otherwise how on earth can their compliance dept....blah blah, you get the idea.

Then you've got classic Tragedy of the Commons. You mean if I don't pay/stop paying, I can just get it anyway? Well then, guess what I'm going to do. And them. And them. And...yeah. And god help them when it's 'finished' and suddenly they realise they have to pay for ongoing maintenance not in license fees but in ensuring there are always coders who are interested and knowledgeable about it.

It's all do'able, but it's quite the model shift. I wish it well.

Mostly harmless.

Apologies - commenting to undo a misclick mod, please ignore.

Because it would be unusable. Lockdown mode is pretty severe, it's not something you want to deal with day to day.

Everything you just mentioned is physical. They're made of computers and wire, and all of those computers have a physical location and wthe wire goes through holes in the ground. Remember the internet was created to link multiple geographical sites to allow things to continue if one were hit by a nuclear strike.

Just because we're used to dealing with the abstractions doesn't mean the underlying isn't real. It's a long time since this terminology was in use, but even 'the internet' used to be 'an internet', and it was possible to have multiple and that the global one was spelled with a capital I.

Less efficient, more expensive? Yes, I'd think so. Whether that's worth it or not depends on the goal you're looking for.

Oh I had the Gamecube. Pikmin, Super Monkey Ball, Luigi's Mansion...plus let's talk about that Wii Fit 'craze' for a moment. It seriously changed my life.

At the time I got the Gamecube, I was unfit and pretty overweight. There was a poster here on Slashdot who in one thread or another said "How many overweight 30 year olds do you know? A lot, right? How about 40 - still a lot? Now try 50, 60, 70...". This really stuck with me, and I decided to use Wii Fit properly. Started out jogging round the living room, was then invited to real runs outside and I started do 3km, 5km with the nirvana of reaching 10km at some point.

Still taking it seriously, I carried on running. 5km? Done. The unobtainable 10km? Done. Further? Why not. I ended up running 10km a night, half marathon every weekend, and running up and down 7,000 steps a day (ground to top floor of the tower I worked in, multiple times a day). I ran a marathon, though annoyingly didn't do that well as the last 7km my knee gave out and I had to limp it. I lost about 80lbs, and at my best I was pretty fast. This is decades ago now of course and while my fitness since has ebbed and flowed, I have never returned to the state I was in when I got that Wii. The Slashdot line and the data tracking plus encouragement of Wii Fit literally changed my life.a

I don't think it was for prestige. The huge success and Wii Fit craze took everyone by surprise, likely including Nintendo themselves. Add that Sony were losing it with pricing/drm/whatever and a whole "Wii Sixty" meme was born - cheaper to buy a Wii and an Xbox 360 than a single Playstation (I forget the gen - 3? 4?).

Remember Nintendo were coming off relatively poor market share - for all the nostalgia today, the Gamecube in its day was considered a failure and very much an afterthought (although I seem to remember that was a consumer view, and that it made the most profit of that gen. Again, just casting mind back to what was said at the time, not quoting any hard data here). The PS and XBox owned the Gamecube era, so Nintendo likely didn't have manufacturing capacity at the time to handle the huge demand for the Wii.