It won't come from the politicians, certainly. But it could happen by the people via constitutional amendments and propositions. No state is there yet, but if the nuttiness of the extremes of both parties doesn't settle down and some good central focused legislation that actually helps the voters instead of the wealthy and politicians doesn't get passed, there will be something done. I'd rather put out some ideas that might make a difference now than let the revolutionists have their hand at running things.

While that may be the answer, a good solution would be making all of Congress be statewide elected officials like Senators instead of by district. Add in ranked choice voting in primaries and the general election, and make all primaries be open primaries.

Politicians would be forced to move to the center in most cases to keep their seats. Except in a few extremely red or extremely blue states, you couldn't be far left or far right and hope to survive the next election. It would also be easier to get rid of entrenched politicians who only survive due to extremely gerrymandered districts.

I was probably posting my second comment above when you were posting yours. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But to be clear, I didn't say that x number was equal to the print run. And even then, if you were looking at ads, you were generally looking for a specific thing. In my case, going back years and years, my eyes would hunt for a coupon or sale price on particular soda - not naming brands. But my eyes were looking for that picture, and skipping everything else. Passing through the optic nerve is different than paying attention. I looked at sports pages too, but couldn't have told you anything that was on them because I was simply passing over them to get to something useful. And yes, I'll admit that there was perhaps some tiny percentage was retained about a brand. But I was never - oh that looks good - let's try that.

And I do agree that ad viewing has changed in print and in digital, and agree with all of your complaints about the intrusiveness of digital ads. Regardless of the causes, people's relationship to ad reading has changed. Being mad at ad blockers is simply not a rational position anymore. And the advertisers can totally blame themselves for that fact. And really, even though we hate ads in general, it is more that we hate the slowdown on the page due to serving the ads and risk in clicking on something that might be malware that we detest. Time is more valuable than the best "deal" an ad might suggest. Serve the ads in-line from your own server and take responsibility for making sure they are legit. This again goes to reputation.

I suppose it depended on the paper, but most cultural events I saw promoted were in their own arts section. That whole section is an ad and is outside the scope of what I was referring to.

The death of the classified ad section in the paper due to Strider-'s comments about Craigslist and eBay are also spot on. I was never in a position where they were particularly relevant to me, but I am probably an outlier there.

I don't have a problem with digital distribution of news. I subscribed to the print WSJ for a very long time. But with our wonderful US mail service, the print edition would arrive in batches, days late. It became worthless. So I switched to digital once monitors got a high enough resolution that I could read the print edition in digital format. I still skip the ads. It's even faster to right arrow over full page ads now than to turn a page manually, and it's available first thing in the morning instead of when I get off work and already stale by a day or more depending on the US mail. So I'm a fan of digital news.

But the WSJ exists because of their content and price points. A bloomberg terminal is out of my price range. The WSJ is okay for budget conscious people. If it had a comics page I'd be even happier. And I suspect that providing some of their content to the world - say a few articles a month - doesn't hurt them much. A bundle with IBD and Barron's is pretty reasonable.

But I gave up on the local paper quite a while ago. Too little local news coverage, and anything important was going to be in the WSJ anyway. And their subscription price for a year was higher than WSJ.

I suppose there are a few columnists in the NYT or daily that people don't think they can live without, but it is really about content for every newspaper. If you provide timely content that is unique and worthwhile, people will pay for a subscription. If you don't, or are just one of many AP or other news feed suppliers, you shouldn't be surprised when nobody wants to subscribe. But it is also largely about reputation. People aren't going to sign up for a subscription or expose an e-mail address just to view an article. If you are worthwhile, people will subscribe on their own. But they aren't likely to subscribe to some unknown paper (or even a well known paper like the NYT) if they don't need it for local news. I live a long way from NYC. I might read an article if it was free, but I have no interest in paying a subscription price for all the NYC local content that doesn't matter to me.

Most of them are probably doomed. There are a few where content makes it worthwhile - the Wall Street Journal, perhaps Barrons and a few other financial papers where people are willing to pay for a subscription that is cheaper than a dedicated terminal but still allow you easily spot new information about financial instruments of interest to you. There are a few magazines whose content is also sufficiently unique that a subscription might be of interest to enough to keep things afloat.

But most general newspapers are going to have to find a different funding model all together. Many local papers bit the bullet a long time ago. If they haven't been bought out or folded, hey have little local content, and what local content they have is just repeated column inches of upcoming events that doesn't vary by day. And if you are just going to repeat the AP news feed, people can go there directly. Just because you are in a large metropolitan area, you aren't going to survive because people just aren't reading anything much anymore.

Brave has a news feed.

I didn't look at ads when print was a thing either. Digital is no different. They sold advertising space on the make believe notion that x number of eyeballs saw every ad. It was always bogus. It's just that it's easier to prove the lies now.

They aren't the only one. Trying to figure out what is a bicycle on a high resolution monitor with a small resolution CAPTCHA is a pain for old eyes.

Rename Erie as to Lake America as well - they're close enough. Then you can have HAMAS.

Talking about the President reading briefs shouldn't be a question. Yet, it reportedly is for this President. What I have seen reported is that he doesn't have the patience or reading ability to do the reading in order to make an informed decision. He relies on bullet pointed summaries that better not go over one or at most two pages. If correct, that is wrong for any sitting President.

I don't think that any person would debate that the issues the President is addressing are potentially very real. Foreign chips, dependence on foreign suppliers for critical items, and probably even a very small number of products in trade should indeed be handled. But the ways he goes about solving them are shortsighted and wrong. There are very few companies which are going to do much more than lip service to claim they are investing in America, and hope that saner heads in 2028 will prevail and they can get back to business. Nobody in America wants to pay for what "Made in America" as opposed to at most "Assembled in America" would cost them. They're having troubles making ends meet as it is and are perfectly happy buying "Made Elsewhere".

I'm a Republican, by the way, and proud to say I have never voted for Trump. I also haven't voted for candidates who are rabidly pro Trump at the federal level either. For state offices, there frequently isn't a choice as many times there may just be one Republican candidate on the ballot and a slot for a write-in. But Congress needs to find their collective spines that they were issued at birth and rein in the idiocy spewing from the White House.

More likely, they're producing installations according to the specifications they are given to bid from. In most all municipal jobs, the lowest bidder is going to win. If you bid in all the extra layers that should be there, you'll lose the bid. That isn't the way it should be, but good luck changing the process. If you want to point blame, look to the people writing the specifications for bid.

But also realize that most water and wastewater infrastructure is old. It may be internet connected, but the threat surface was perceived to be much different when those specifications were written. 20/20 hindsight is a great thing. In the early days of the internet, your IP address meant something. Today, with virtual server farms located around the world, they don't mean much. Everything should be written or updated to the security problems we have today. No utility has the money to upgrade - they're just trying to build out more infrastructure to serve more people that needs to be compatible with the existing SCADA system - not a new and improved SCADA system that is more resilient.

Most of the long distance stuff was done over radios. They had line of sight issues, failed frequently, had their own security issues, and dealt with congested spectrum. Sometimes it was dial up, but the telephone companies are abandoning analog as fast as they can. You have to go through hoops to handle phones in elevators compared to the old days.

They certainly should be doing better internet security. But the old technology had lots of problems as well. Combine that with the need to do remote security in many spots, requiring live video feeds sent back to logging devices and running a separate radio or dial up connection for data is a very hard sell.

It has been a while since I visited Canada, and then, it was a couple of provinces in western Canada. But at that time, French was very much a Quebec province thing. Yes, there are scattered patches elsewhere, primarily in areas near Quebec. Implying French is universal in Canada just because it is predominant in Quebec is just wrong. And to be fair, the hostility between western provinces and Quebec has been real for a very long time. At least it was the times I was there.

I loved the people I met and have great respect for Canada. I'm not a fan of the current US leader's desire to annex everything to get everyone's attention off of his family business dealings, or many of his other ideas for that matter. There are many in western Canada that would like to be independent, at the very least from the eastern provinces. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't want to join the US, especially as poorly run as the government has been lately. But ignoring the leadership issues, the people of western Canada have a lot more in common with the people of the upper midwest and western US than they do with Quebec.

At work (all at one company) - work built 6502 based systems, Kaypros, UNOS with serial terminals, Xenix, SCO Openserver, Linux, and eventually Linux with Windows running as a virtual on rare occasions for me. Don't get me wrong, we're mostly Windows based, but as the licensing changes, there's a lot of regret there as well and we see many more attempts to move what can be moved off of Windows. I don't make use of any Windows software, so I'm fine with my Linux box. I can administer all of the Linux servers just fine from it.

At home - UNOS with serial terminal, SCO OpenServer with a Windows box, then Linux for the last couple of decades (not counting gaming consoles).

I'm a LaTeX fan, and find Kile works well for editing, or really any text editor in a pinch. If the packages that allow picture insertions at random spots in the text were better, there would be no competition. Floating figures can also be a trial. They've improved a lot over the years, and there may well be more modern packages that I'm not aware of, but that aspect is the most annoying to me. Still not enough of a problem to go back to the roff suites or to mess around with Microsoft.

I love the tables of contents, list of equations, figures, graphs, glossary options, and the like. Equation creation and display is pretty nice. And when all is done, you get something that looks like it came out of a book publisher, in most cases. If HTML would ever get hyphenation of capitalized words enabled by default, so multi column looked better, it would be a close second to LaTex for content delivery looking good, at least if you didn't need to ever print the document.