https://xkcd.com/810/

I hate creating Powerpoint slides, so I find it genuinely useful that I can type a few sentences or paragraphs into Copilot and it will do 100% of the slide creation and revision. It'll even pull content from documents.

I recently told it something along the lines of: pull a list of the APIs from this specification and create a slide summarizing the purpose of each API. APIs X and Y aren't mature yet, indicate that on the slide. API Z is the current area of focus.

It created a very professional looking slide with all the APIs summarized and color coded, with a legend for the color codes. A few more paragraphs of text resulted in more slides providing a solid overview of what's been done, what's in progress and what our targets are.

Only a few people need to actually read the API documents from start to finish. A much larger group of people need to be kept informed as quickly and briefly as possible of what the status and progress is.

I can verbally describe something to people, but they'll forget it immediately. I can type up a lengthy text description, but they won't read it. If AI can turn my text into a picture, they'll likely remember it.

What are you under the impression happens two times per year? The time of sunrise and sunset changes 365 times per year (366 in leap years).

Why not change the clocks four times per year? Or monthly? Or weekly? Answer: because that would be stupid, just like changing the clocks twice per year is stupid. Just like the US and Europe changing the clocks weeks apart every spring and every fall is stupid.

There is no natural event that happens twice per year that corresponds to changing clocks twice per year. Sunrise and sunset times change every day and every latitude. It's absurd to think that there's a particular day in the spring and another particular day in the fall when the clocks need to be changed by exactly one hour.

Many countries do not change the clocks at all, so every year we go through this sequence of Europe changing their clocks, offsetting meeting times with the US and Asia, then the US changing their clocks, resynchronizing with Europe while simultaneously offsetting with respect to Asia. It's just stupid. And twice every year, the people in Asia observe the stupidity of Europeans and Americans (though I suppose they probably observe that more often than twice a year, just in different contexts)

My thermostat doesn't have any notion of DST, so it's wrong for about two months per year because it takes about a month for me to notice that the furnace is running extra early or extra late and that I need to change the time on the thermostat by and hour by choosing the "Set Clock" option.

But thermostats are cheap and simple to replace, so if I actually cared I could replace it and so could anybody who has one of the weird ones you've seen.

Mine doesn't know what DST is because it has no idea what date it is, it just repeats a seven day cycle endlessly. I'm not sure what excuse there is for designing a thermostat that actually knows the date but doesn't have an option for changing or disabling DST. A thermostat like that would be incompatible with parts of the US and all of Europe and Asia. Why would someone design a thermostat that's hard coded to only work in a specific geographic area and only as long as DST practices never change. It's not like the anti-DST discussion is new. It's been going on for decades.

It's not e-ink, but the screen is tiny and a low resolution. In addition, it only comes on when you plug something in or push a button and turns off automatically after about 5 seconds.

I haven't noticed any meaningful impact on the battery, although I don't continually mash the button to keep the display on.

I have an Anker charger with a tiny screen that tells me how much charge I have, how much charging time I have left, the time it'll take to recharge to full and whether low power 5W charging is enabled.

Whilst I don't disagree that some companies appear to be going completely overboard with features, I don't think a small screen showing useful charging related information should be automatically seen as a bad thing.

The link you provided doesn't describe a subsidy at all, it describes costs being tax deductible. The specific costs are oil company specific, but the idea of costs being deductible is generally applicable to companies of all kinds. Companies in general are taxed on profits, not revenue.

If the government taxes businesses on revenue and doesn't allow deducting costs it would put all sorts of businesses out of business, not just oil companies. Agriculture for example, probably wouldn't exist if farmers weren't allowed to deduct the cost of farming from their revenue.

There are very few companies of any kind that could exist if they weren't able to the specific costs associated with their sort of business from their income. The interesting thing about the article you linked to is that oil companies can't deduct 100% of the cost of "IDC" whereas presumably other types of capital expenditure can be fully depreciated according to IRS depreciation schedule rules.

It sounds to me like your link describes the exact opposite of a subsidy, it's calling out a specific type of cost that oil companies can only partially deduct. Whereas in an industry agnostic tax scheme, oil companies and all other companies would deduct 100% of all costs regardless of type and pay an identical tax rate on net profit regardless of industry.

Those really, really expensive yachts are a huge wealth transfer to the working class. Do you have any idea how many working class people it takes to build, maintain and operate those things?

And most of the rich don't hoard their wealth because if they did, inflation would make them a lot less rich. Most of the rich have most of their money invested in ventures that make them more money.

But if they did hoard their wealth, that would actually counteract (at least partially) inflation. Taking money out of circulation decreases the money supply which makes the remaining money more valuable.

The issue isn't hoarding wealth, it's investing wealth into non-productive ventures. Which, granted, does include paying hundreds of millions to skilled tradespeople to build yachts that sit underutilized. But it also includes building and operating cruise ships for the less rich, and operating professional sports leagues and the entire entertainment industry.

Can you cite any person, by name, who is not a republican who has said that? A direct quote, written or video, would be helpful. Because I've only ever heard it coming from foaming at the mouth maga types.

Or your daughter comes home sober with her boyfriend. And her ex-boyfriend who just happens to be a cop uses your cameras to keep track of who she's dating and when.

My car is Japanese, I'm skeptical that the Chinese can limit anything on it.

You post this over and over and it's just not true. Lots of people who don't work continue to eat. Anyone can give anybody else food, parents, children, friends, charity donors. Nobody is stopping you or anyone else from giving food to anybody you want to.

But what you want is the ability to force other people to provide you with food (and presumably clothing and shelter and entertainment) without compensation. Essentially you want slaves who will provide you what you want without any obligation on your part to provide anything they want.

What if the people who produce the food decide they don't want to work? I've worked in food service. They were generally unpleasant jobs. I did them because people were paying for the food and that money was in turn used to pay me. If the people who were consuming the food weren't paying for it I certainly wouldn't continued to provide it.

Tell me honestly, if you were guaranteed 2000 calories per day of rice and beans for the rest of your life would you drop this "if you don't work you don't eat" nonsense? Or do you want a variety of fresh and tasty foods prepared and delivered, if not to your door, at least to a place close to your home?

Do you expect a labor force to grow, harvest, clean, package and ship the food to a convenient place for you to get it? If so, why do you think those people should have to do that work but don't think you should have to do any work at all? Are you ok with just raw vegetables or do you also expect factories and machinery to fill aisle after aisle of supermarket shelves? Do you think all those people should be forced to work to feed you without expecting anything in return from you?

You forgot to multiply by the number of widgets.

But yes, the value of your work is the portion of the revenue (not profit) that your work produces. Sometimes this number is easy to calculate other times it's extremely hard or impossible to calculate so it gets estimated with a very, very rough guess.

And if the amount of revenue is less than the cost of all the materials and labor, why even produce the widgets at all? If the company is not making a profit, why would the owners of the company not change the business or shut it down. Running a business that keeps losing money just doesn't make sense. And there do exist non-profit businesses, but they still try to make a bit of money and are at risk of going out of business if they lose money for a while and didn't have enough profit saved up to cover the losses.

Similarly, if you want more money to assemble widgets than what anyone is willing to pay for those widgets, why are you assembling them?

Every single person in the world routinely makes choices to not buy things they think are too expensive. Why should labor be any different? The people running companies choose not to hire people, or to lay people off, if the work those people would do is worth less than the paycheck those people require in order to do the work. This is no different than you walking into a store and choosing not to buy an item off the shelf because you think the price is too high. You could buy it, but then you'd have less money to spend on other things that you'd prefer to spend it on. The buyer decides how much they want to pay and if it's less than the seller will sell for, the buyer walks away. That's all layoffs are, the buyer (company) deciding they would rather spend money else because the price the seller (employee) is asking is higher than the buyer thinks it's worth.

It's not just companies. Everybody wants to get more stuff for less. That's why you want more pay for less work and it's why you buy less expensive stuff when you could pay more for the same thing. You just view it differently when it's you wanting more for less than when your employer wants the same thing.

Are you under the impression that there are no nuclear power plants in America?

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs...

Of the 54 nuclear power plants in America I can't think of a single one that caused a city to be evacuated for 10 years. Did I miss some news? Which cities have been evacuated for 10 years?

These nuclear power plants have been operating for a LOT longer than one quarter. Your claim is just entirely contrary to objective fact. There are 54 nuclear power plants that have been operating in the US for many quarters and exactly zero of them have resulted in a city being evacuated. It's not impossible, but it's also not impossible that an asteroid could hit the earth and wipe out all life. Your assessment of probability is out of sync with observed fact.

Sure, that means this story is false. Obviously coal use did not hit a record high in 2024. How could it have with solar, wind and batteries being so cheap? Why would anybody burn coal when there's a limitless supply of cheap solar, wind and battery power available?

Unless maybe solar, wind and battery are not limitless and need to be supplemented with something else. But I'm going to trust you. Climate change is a solved issue because there's enough solar, wind and battery power available to replace all other power generation and keep up with new demand and not only that, but it's cheaper too.