Most of the devices kids use these days have locked bootloaders. You're not installing Linux on a current gen iPhone or iPad, and Samsung locks their stuff down too.

If some kid really wants to fap to porn on his desktop rig that he installed Linux on, that's something only the clutchiest of pearl clutchers is worrying about.

Texas and Florida aren't blue states.

Because having to verify your age with multiple different companies is clearly superior to just doing it once and being done with it?

Look, I get it when some people say they don't want any age checks. That's how the internet used to work, and it's not entirely unreasonable to place the burden of parenting (ie keeping kids away from age inappropriate content by enabling the appropriate parental controls) on parents. But a few states already have age gate laws that work the way you're describing (at the site level) and:

It's annoying for adults.
It doesn't work to keep kids away from inappropriate content.
There's no way to implement the age checks without massive privacy concerns.

Given the choice, I'd prefer no age checks at all - but my preference for a lesser evil would be to just verify once with Microsoft/Apple/Google (in all likelihood, they already have the information needed to determine I'm an adult anyway) and be done with it forever.

... quite well: It's going to be chaos but in the end it's going to turn out good for everyone. We're just going to work less if the cheap bots do most of the work.

You pretty much have to produce content that follows an established formula or audiences won't like it. One of my favorite examples of this was the Little Shop of Horrors film from the 80s. It was based on a stage musical (which itself was loosely based on a 1960s B-movie). The original ending from the play has the main character killed and the alien plants taking over the world. Test audiences hated it. A new ending was re-shot and what was supposed to be a tragedy became a heroic redemption arc story.

Not too long ago, Disney actually did release an animated film that wasn't tied to some established franchise: Elio. It flopped.

Disney's studios produce content that gets people to visit their theme parks. The theme parks are still packed, at least from what I've seen. So, mission accomplished.

That's pretty much where all the eyeballs are these days, and anyone with the most minimal amount of respect for their sanity opts for ad-free tier of paid streaming services (or just gets their content from the high seas, which also doesn't have ads), so you're not getting movie trailers on TV unless you specifically go searching for them.

Whichever studio is behind the upcoming He-Man film sure has been promoting the fuck out of that on Facebook. It still looks absolutely awful, not that I'm surprised - it's based on an IP that was originally created as a glorified toy commercial. Besides, all it takes for the money you spent promoting a bad film to be wasted, is a handful of influencers on the social media site formerly known as Twitter saying "It's trash, wait until it hits streaming." I guess we'll see how it does at the box office in a few days.

The ability to convert a spectrogram to sound has long been known in the speech research community. In 1950 a device known as the Pattern Playback was built at Haskins Laboratories. You would draw an artificial spectrogram and feed it to the machine and it would play back the corresponding sound. It was used to perform experiments on the acoustic cues for speech perception. The original machine was last used for research in 1976. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I've never seen generators on cell towers, and the batteries last a few hours. They're meant to cover the occasional western world power outage, not a major one.

I did a diploma in performing arts in the the 90ies. The first half of my 20ies was dancing 5+ hours per weekday. I still benefit from that phase. As a teenager I was into climbing. I still have the shoulder muscles from that time, despite totally slacking on strength training. But no smoking, no drugs, no alcohol. And I have been dancing Argentine Tango for the last 18 years, 9 of which where an artsy minimalist lifestyle built around intensely dancing Tango 3+ times a week. My sleep schedule was as off as with my other thing, software development, but otherwise my health was awesome, physically and mentally. Intensely hugging hot ladies 3+ times a week for hours on end does wonders for a hetero-males well-being. I regularly get judged 10 years younger than I am.
Processed foods are organic as much as possible, I avoid junkfood 95% of the time and I've started cooking for myself 10 years ago. Huge impact.

I've since have taken Tango down a notch and picked up motorscooter/motorbike as means of travelling and getting around. Getting slightly overweight for the first time in my life. Not good, don't like it. I'm roughly 10 years too late in picking up a daily excercise/yoga, cardio and strength schedule, a thing I definitely need to get going this year. Started hiking with my sweetheart, we want to pick up the pace and intensity of that to stay healthy in old age.

I keep telling my 28 year old daughter that she dare never not stop her daily yoga practice. I hope she can do that.

It's this simple: Objectively the very best retirement plan is actively working on your health, strength, endurance and flexibility multiple times a week. Way more significant than being wealthy at old age.

I'd rather be top fit at 70 living off 700 Euros per month than overweight with two bipasses living off 2000.

Yepp, one of the reasons being that POTS will work even during power outages, as long as the central switches are powered. Your VoIP will be down if your house has no power. It probably is more efficient, but that "saving" is also simply shifting some of the power usage to consumers.

Zillow is Slow & Behind on Data

A buddy of mine who is a realtor says that he always has a problem with people that call him saying that they saw house listed on Zillow giving him bullshit information and he tells them that looking at the actual local and regional real estate networks that are used by real brokers, those houses are listed for different prices and a lot of times those houses are sold and Zillow still shows them as being available 48 hours later where he has to field calls for the next two days about houses that have been closed.

Compass Buying Other Real estate Brokers

The other thing he told me is that a lot of the real estate companies have now consolidated and bought each other out and Compass has now become one of the biggest companies out there buying everybody else out where now there's going to be Wars for data access too real estate house listings.

Real Estate Transactions Collapse & Recession/Depression

The other thing a friend of mine told me is that there are people that have been brokers and Realtors in the market for over 2 to 3 decades and in the last year or two they have not been able to make any transactions whether it's a purchase or a sale because we are in a massive recession and everyone is just holding their breath because the interest rates have f***** everyone over so nobody wants to sell and people don't want to buy and those brokers are now starting to get really concerned and are switching brokerage companies because of all the massive consolidation that's happening because of the recession and the upcoming depression that we are in. Stock market is doing great. Real estate market is dead.

Where is the shovelware? Where's the killer app?
Shovelware requires some form of userbase. That doesn't exist anymore if every software solution any normal person can think of is just one Google query and one URL away. The Web has won. Nobody will go through the trouble of even installing software these days in most cases.

The market is a wet dream of manufacturers, of course. Already knowing that for all the forseable future however much you can produce will be sold at very good prices - amazing.

Until the house of cards comes down. Most of the stuff ordered is, as someone put well into a meme, money that doesn't yet exist buying chips that don't yet exist for data centers that have not yet been built.

That is highly speculative.