Generally speaking, it's best to do your homework before giving. As with any kind of organization, commercial or noncommercial, there are good guys and bad guys. There are three sites that help you do your homework and give to good causes:
https://www.charitywatch.org/
https://www.charitynavigator.o...
https://give.org/

Each of these sites provides information about how much of your donation goes to the cause it supports, as well as how effective they are at what they do.

Giving to individuals yourself can feel "safe" but it ignores the incredible power of people you know to SEEM worthy of financial support. Supporting only your neighbors leaves out the many people who aren't lucky enough to be your neighbors. And most people barely know their neighbors' names, let alone their need for help. By giving to *good* charities, your money can be put to good use far more effectively than you can on your own.

This company is going down. If you work for this company, you want to have a big head start finding other work. Take that deal, use the months of pay to keep going while you look for that next *real* job. A company that believes its own AI hype to this degree, is going to blow itself up until it pops. You want to be far, far away when that happens.

What if the world blows up? What if a new strain of COVID kills everyone on earth? What if the atmosphere disappears?

All these "what-ifs" are awful, and also impossible. Krafton is buying their own hype. It's going to kill the company all right, but endemic? Hardly. I use AI too much to believe it can really replace people to the degree promised by the crusaders.

I'd say they DID innovate. They saw Cable TV disappearing, so they reinvented themselves as ISPs. So now everybody who's streaming, is still paying the same old cable TV company for the internet connection they use to stream even content from *other* companies. The cable companies are doing just fine, thank you.

Well, your TCL+ doesn't carry NFL or college football.

As for the 350+ channels, quantity is not quality.

People haven't understood how to use em-dashes for decades. I say get rid of them entirely.

Much bigger, useful at the beach, and at $150, less expensive!

Let's see, what else can I come up with to sell?

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

What about...wheels???

If you and I didn't ever work together, and we don't already know each other, then you have no reason to want to "connect." I'd like an AI tool that auto-rejects anyone who doesn't have a reason to connect.

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

Very true. Been playing the Riven remake on an Oculus Rift and it's astoundingly beautiful. Playing on the Meta Quest was just sad in comparison. The headset Steamlink will make all the difference.

I did *not* mention Manhattan.

Well that makes sense. Manhattan and the Bay Area are the two least affordable places to live in the US. To those who are struggling to get by, who live in those places, my advice is to get out of there. The US is full of other much more affordable places to live. Sorry, Manhattan is a straw man here, it is not representative of people's experiences in the US, nor is it a sign that it's impossible or even difficult to live on a normal salary in the US.

All you did was say you disagree with the way inflation is calculated, but you didn't propose any alternatives. That's not an argument, that's just an opinion. As the linked BLS page explained, the CPI takes into account the things people actually buy. If I'm not supposed to "cling to inflation," what am I supposed to use instead? Your opinion?