And their honeycomb really attracts the Martian bears!

because you don't have any idea where it got its "facts" from.

With a link you can (roughly) judge the credibility of the source. I.e., did the "facts" come from published research or some nobody on social media. Or some known propaganda outlet.

Sounds like a good strategy for a studio that expects their big movie to be a box office flop.

They also invented salmonella and body odor.

Fortunately God decided it was necessary to intervene and created his own political party to protect us from drag queens and people who take that "liberty and justice for all" kind of crap seriously.

You mean, like, a good one and a bad one?

Anyone want to buy a $100,000,000,000 data center at fire-sale prices?

I'm anticipating the first time I see the word roboticide in the news.

And B.Clinton, Carter, Johnson, J.F.Kennedy, Truman, Roosevelt...

I got Google Play Music for my family back when that was a thing. It was the same price as Spotify, had the same catalog, and included any music on Youtube as well. The fact that it included ad free Youtube was just a bonus. These days that has morphed into Youtube Premium, and I still pay for it. I am mostly there for the music, but the ad free Youtube is not terrible.

The interesting thing is that it is pretty clear that most people just watch the ads. Youtube had $60 billion in yearly revenue last year. More than Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Brothers combined. Roughly $20 billion of that is credited to Youtube Premium which is bigger than any of its Hollywood competitors.

There's a reason that Peacock is being included with Youtube Premium and not the other way around. Youtube is worth something. Peacock, not so much.

Things have changed dramatically since the heyday when everyone had a cable subscription. I used to work for SlingTV (and then Dish), and I had a front row seat as the whole industry imploded. Every year the television networks and movie studios would sit down and renegotiate their contracts. Despite the fact that viewership was always down at least 10% year over year they always wanted price increases. If the cable providers pushed back (as Dish often did) they would lose access to channels, invariably during football season when it mattered most.

You see, as technology started allowing people to purchase their entertainment piecemeal it soon became clear what parts they were willing to pay for, and which parts they weren't willing to pay for. Hollywood thought that people paid for cable subscriptions to watch their scripted television. It turns out that, for most people anyway, the part of television that they were willing to pay for was live sports.

That's why Disney won't sell you ESPN unless you bundle it with everything else that they sell, and that's also why Disney is suing SlingTV for reselling access on a daily basis. SlingTV's "sports pass" allows you to pay for just the games that you want at a ridiculous price. Disney should be stoked, but instead it has sued because it wants to force sports fans to continue to pay for their other channels.

Almost no one is watching traditional scripted television these days. The few hits that the networks do have tends to be reality TV stuff like "Dancing with the Stars," where the audience can watch people compete in real time. Youtube (not YoutubeTV) has at least half again as many viewers as their next highest competitor (Netflix), at any time during the day, on traditional 10 foot devices (your living room TV). That's not counting people watching Youtube on their phones or their computers. Youtube is killing scripted content on living room televisions, during prime time. During the day its an order of magnitude worse.

Take a look at nielsen.com and take a look for yourself. It's absolutely grim. Look at the shows that are doing relatively well, they are all either sports or sports commentary. That's literally the only reason that anyone watches anything besides YouTube and Netflix.

Apple spent over $20 billion building up a content catalog. At their height they were spending nearly $5 billion a year making shows. They made some great shows and got rave reviews. Amazon spends $1 billion a year for the rights to Thursday night football. That is arguably the worst football game of the week. However, Prime generally gets as many viewers for a single game as Apple has total subscribers, including all of the free subscriptions that Apple gives away. It's not just Apple that is shifting away from scripted television either. Take a look at any of the streaming sites (including Netflix) and you will see that all of their recent moves have been to try and compete for the sports market. That's definitely what YouTube is doing by bundling Peacock.

Hollywood is currently circling the drain. Everyone is up for sale right now. No one is watching scripted television. They certainly aren't paying for it.

Which conveniently brings this thread back to the story.

Cool. I like to watch snow on the relaxation channels.

Is slopocalypse a word?

s/red/shitter/

No amount of forest management can help a forest that's tinder dry the whole year.

I live in the Okanagan valley in BC, and this winter we got so little snow, and the snow pack had melted off extra early. A deeper snow pack lets the water feed the water system over a longer period of time, keeping the ground wet for longer. Our early summer was a little cooler and wetter than usual, but our lake levels are the lowest in recorded history. (My city is in between two lakes: Okanagan and Skaha.) I talk to the farmers at the market every week, and every farm exists in a different microclimate, so sometimes 10 minutes between farms is the difference between ground so wet you can't walk in the fields and dusty-dry conditions.

But overall, it's hot and dry here, and getting hotter and drier. We've been on level 2 water restrictions since early May, if I remember right, and we've had a campfire ban for about the same time. There was no ice on the lake over the winter--the long-distance outdoor swimmers swam the whole winter this year. 40-50 years ago (long before I moved here, this is just what the older folks around town say) the lake froze over so solid that you could drive a car across it.

The tinder isn't the issue anymore, even though it's true that we ignored the indigenous people here for too long and should have adopted their land use practices. I wish it were as easy as you say.