I never got the hate behind self service checkouts, they've done wonders for the old long lines at manned checkouts. People forget that bit when they complain about them, back in the olden days it was like winning the lotto if you could find one without a line. I'm old enough to still remember the bad old days of having to decide if the longer 5 items or fewer lane would be faster than a normal checkout with a shorter line.

Same with smartgates/autogates at airports. Long gone are the days of spending 2 hours in customs and immigration waiting for a surly Border Farce agent to check your passport. Landed on a full QR 777 in Adelaide a few weeks back and got through immigration in 10 minutes, same with landing in London, 30 mins gate to kerb. If you're an American you can come to London and experience this for yourself as US Biometric passports are accepted at the UK border autogates. Sadly, you have to return to the US at some point.

People said that self service checkouts would decimate jobs but the opposite happened, all the people who were previously manning checkouts were suddenly available for other tasks, supermarkets could now offer more options, products and services because they had additional staff and no drop in sales. Supermarkets ended up hiring more staff because they were doing more, deliveries, instore bakeries, et al. So the death of jobs didn't happen and supermarkets became less painful because there was little to no line at the self service checkout.

And that's the thing with this supermarket. Automation (lets face it, that's what AI is, just automation) doesn't result in job losses if a business is profitable, it just means you move staff from BAU work to things that are more productive. AI is not replacing jobs, it's being used as an excuse for downsizing and not to us, employees and little people, they couldn't give two shits about us... It's being used to disguise mass sackings because a mass sacking is a huge sign a business is in trouble which sends share prices plummeting, which is what they care about.

That is until they jack up the monthly prices. Which will happen, then they cheapest way to get a service will be bundling... then bundling will be the only way to get it, no Disney without having to buy a package that includes a bunch of crap you don't want, 2 dozen reality TV services to get the one service you do want. It'll be like cable again

Right now we're in the consolidation phase where established players take over smaller ones, after that comes the monetisation phase and that's when enshitification solidifies. In the old MS style Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, we're at the Extend part.

I've already run up the Jolly Roger again, sigh, streaming was good whilst it lasted but sadly it was never going to last that long.

More likely a response to PS5 pre-orders not being anywhere near what they expected let alone wanted. Console exclusives are now just excluding potential customers.

I'm beginning to wonder if this GTA is going to be a massive flop. It's happened before with GTA 4. It could easily be a lacklustre game they're asking upwards of £70 for.

It's not just the US, all of Europe's far right parties are suffering, AFD in Germany, National Front in France, Reform/Restore in the UK. All of them seeing huge drops in social media engagement without the Russian bots. Hell, even the Daily Mail comments section is clearer without it and calling that a wretched hive of scum and villainy is to do a huge disservice to scum and villainy.

For the most part, they're trying to convince themselves.

Depends who's shoulders. I vote we use Tom Cruise or Sabrina Carpenter as a yardstick.

There are far simpler ways, if your vehicle either:
Was sold as a commercial vehicle (especially for tax or regulatory avoidance).
Has a kerb weight of 2000 KG or greater (kerb weight is "ready to drive" so filled with all fluids and options, basically everything except the driver).
Seats more than 5 passengers or has more than 2 rows of seats.
Is mainly cargo space (in excess of 65% if cabin length including any tray)
Has a towing capacity in excess of 1000 KG.
Is longer than 4.5 metres.
Then it's a commercial vehicle and requires a commercial license. In most countries commercial licenses carry higher penalties for infractions.

I'm aware that the weight and length requirements will get a lot of expensive limos like Bentleys and Maybachs, but if you want to remove a cancer you need to take some healthy tissue and lets face it, a Bentley is not a drivers car, it's a "being driven in" car so for the most part the drivers are already professionals.

There never really was.

With the possible exception of the first one (and "possible" is doing a lot of heavy lifting) Xbox and Playstation consoles were just trying to be gaming PCs but less useful, less powerful and ultimately more expensive. Even the original Xbox was easily modded into a media centre PC (XBMC was originally XBox Media Centre and ran on the original XBox) and the PS3 was originally able to run Linux... well until the corporate overlords decided they didn't want you to.

Expensive, yes, sure the cost of entry was lower for the hardware which was sold as a loss leader but then everything started to cost you, free services were scaled back or eliminated, hell, now Microsoft wants you to pay by the hour, no longer simply content with just a monthly fee. All those costs add up and soon overwhelm the higher cost of getting a PC in the first place (which after you've paid the cost of entry, savings start in earnest). Consoles had (past tense, the PS5 is almost as expensive as an entry level gaming laptop these days) a lower cost of entry which tried to hide the much higher total cost of ownership.

Add to that the fact that more and more console "exclusives" are making their way to PC, for the most part we're surprised by them and not in a good way, it's more of a "you harped on about this game for so long and it's distinctly mid". Very few games go the other way, from PC to console because ultimately you can dumb down a PC to run console games but you can't dumb up a console to run PC games.

The irony of RAMAGEDDON is that consoles should be able to take advantage of it, with games and OS requiring less of it and both consoles using last generation RAM... However there's nothing worth playing on there as it's dominated by AAA (fuck it, we're going to 7 A's) publishers that take as few risks as possible when producing Generic Sports 20xx. If you like games dump the console, bite the bullet and get a PC. Not only do you have a lot of indie and mid-tier developers producing great games but also a massive back catalogue. Today I've played games from this year and 20 years ago. Hell, I can load up some ancient DOS games if I so desired, also Linux gaming is ready, more than ready. I've not needed to boot into my Windows partition for any other reason than to check that it installed correctly, I haven't even installed the graphics drivers yet and it's been there for months. I might ditch Bazzite for Catchy though.

Oh, you think this is about doing the right thing... the US government... the current US government? I mean it's cute that you believe that.

Adobe, MS, et al. are being targetted because they've got deep pockets. A few million given to the right orange madman and this problem goes away. They don't even have to do it in secret any more.

Erm... notice a pattern there?

Most of these nations are equatorial or not that far off it. Most of them between the 26th parallels. As you get closer to the equator, there is less difference between the hours of daylight between summer and winter, as you get further you get a greater differential.

In Perth, Western Australia (36 S) there's about a 3 hour difference, in London, UK (51 N) there's an 8 hour difference and this difference does not neatly line up around 12 PM so if you had permanent GMT you'd have the sun getting up at 3 AM in the summer disrupting sleep and if you kept permanent BST you'd have darkness until 9 AM in winter causing chaos on the way to work/school.

Perth doesn't have DST (but the eastern states do so that causes problems) because the differential in daylight hours isn't much of an issue (that and Perth is incredibly backwards and resistant to change but that is another discussion entirely) however London does because there is a huge difference in daylight hours between winter and summer.

Before we had mechanical clocks, we used to adjust to the hours of daylight automatically. Daylight Savings came in because we needed to keep doing that as the hours of daylight changed with the seasons, so the solution was to change the clocks.

With most clocks being automatically updated these days, you barely have the excuse of having to change the clocks to oppose DST. You go to sleep on one time and wake up in the new one.

Well, there's been at least 3 posts about it so clearly, somebody cares.

A good cop in a corrupt society is the same as a "good guy with a gun" in a society obsessed with guns and violence... such a tiny minority that they're pretty much non existent.

Cardinal Richelieu once a said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". Show me a cop in the US that's never taken a bribe, even just a sweetener for doing the right thing and I'll show you a liar. Even if just through the people who contribute to their pensions. Even if you can find someone who has managed to walk through that and some how remained completely clean (in the words of Londo Mollari "I can only assume you have not been paying attention") then back to what Richelieu said, he'll have still done something technically wrong even if it wasn't morally wrong. For example, the nice officer who let me off for speeding on the A4 near Heathrow a few years back with a bit of a tongue lashing, technically he broke the law as I was speeding and he should have wrote me up but he didn't as I wasn't a knob or driving like an idiot (and clearly the officer wasn't a knob either.. this is what happens when nice people meet).

And that's the UK, the US has long tolerated higher levels of corruption but in recent years that seems to be taken to truly herculean levels. With the egregious and obvious levels of corruption you're tolerating in your highest office, and there is no "I didn't know" excuse, you elected him twice... why would you expect the people with a little authority like beat cops to be goodly and honest when your entire country is no longer simply permissive of corruption, nor just expecting of it but openly supporting it.

Often they're not even doing the design themselves but Google has never claimed to be a hardware company, their branded phones were always and openly, someone elses, right back to the Nexus series.

Of course they realise that... Which is why Palantir and AI have been blamed already, they know that they can't keep relying on the Republicans to keep them out of trouble so they're laying the groundwork to make sure when heads start to roll, it's not their head. That way they can retire and get a cushy private sector gig before the investigation even finishes let alone any kind of war crimes tribunal (which the US will still protect them from).

It's not just desperation but also greed. Especially in countries where workers don't have many rights and a lot of costs like the US.

Greed is the most successful attack vector in most scams. The temptation of more money tends to blind even some of the most astute people, especially in a mercenary culture.