Can you point to any history which has been destroyed, specifically? The last copy of a historic work?

I can't believe anyone who values information to any degree would do this.

"keep the stuff AI is killing"

Like what, exactly?

- Reddit, which is a minefield of misinformation and crazy ideologues
- Wikipedia, which has an official stance of ideological filtering, having banned the founder
- StackExchange - hasn't been relevant in years, likely the source of much of the AI coding hallucination and bad agent tooling
- Google - hasn't been a useful search engine since at least 2018, mostly just an ad delivery system now
- not sure what else

Meanwhile, I can still read books published before 2020. But I can also build things quickly to read them to me out loud (even reading a paper book, if I so desired), and there are millions of APIs I can directly and quickly harness to generate a ridiculous amount of information which was locked behind hours of work trying to decipher horrible API documentation + coding.

I don't see it as a loss.

Child safety and actual auto deaths are nothing when compared to the inconvenience of, y'know, changing the time you get up TWO WHOLE TIMES a year. THAT'S the REAL ISSUE. /sarcasm

People can't even complain they have to change their clocks, since easily 95%+ get their time from their phones or computers that auto-set anyway.

There is no next move. Netfilx was buying them for their back catalog. The part of WB that people care about is the part that makes new movies and television, and that part is dead no matter who purchases WB.

If you haven't seen the tour of the Warner Brother's lot, you should do that now. They are still even filming some shows there. My guess is that, no matter who owns it they will probably keep something open there as a museum, but the days of it functioning as a working studio are quickly coming to an end. Heck, they are already living in the past. Most of what they talk about when you visit the studio is shows that they stopped filming over 20 years ago.

Still, it is very interesting to see how shows like "Friends" and "Gilmore Girls" was filmed before computers could be used to create whatever shot you needed.

> radical increase in legal wage floors
The Federal minimum wage remains unchanged.

Notice how I didn't say anything about the Federal minimum wage?
30 states + DC (basically, the blue ones) have implemented minimums of $15 and higher, some of those nearly doubling their previous $8 rates.

Pls, show me where QE or QE-like policies were implemented in 2001? The Fed rate was cut, but they didn't print money like drunken sailors in 2008, 2010 (less so), and 2012. What incompetent wastrel was president each of these times, again? I'm not even arguing 2008 due to the crisis (I still disagree with it, but my job isn't to get re-elected either). But democrats perhaps need to stop trying to print themselves out of every crisis, maybe?

I don't get your point about qe vs money to 'ordinary people'? I prefer NO increase in M1 no matter in whose pockets it lands. Whether it's largesse to billionaires or 'hardship checks' to 200m 'ordinary' people, THAT INCREASES INFLATION.

And no, it WAS $1trn, or as close as matters:
I see:
1) (CARES Act, 2020): Up to $1,200/adult + $500/child. Total: ~$300b.
2) (Dec. 2020 / Consolidated Appropriations Act): Up to $600/adult + $600/child. Total: ~165b.
3) (American Rescue Plan, 2021): Up to $1,400/person incl dependents Total: ~$410b.
I callt it about $900b, the GAO tallies $931 billion across roughly 165 million recipients

(https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-22-106044)

This is DIRECT PAYMENTS to people.

Stupid Keynesians actively validating the damned gold-bugs.

You can't just stop and ask for directions, can you? Just this once?

Yeah but which of these can I do from my chair while reading slashdot, mr smarty-pants?

"if they can accuse important people without evidence and make them spend time and money"

So, for example, dredging up (in a suitable venue ofc) some ancient bimbo who diddled some rich guy in a dressing room (though she can't remember exactly when, or what she was wearing, and....well... She does admit to finding rape kinda sexy before she's dragged off the air), carefully not bringing the case to criminal court? Like that?

I'm sticking with stone knives and bear skins.

"... the way that the Federal reserve deals with that is every few years they crank interest rates. "

What?
That's absolutely the opposite of the data.

The US has generally had - aside from ww1/WW2, and the explosive 1970s - an inflation rate of 3-3.5% since 1900.

The last 25 years have had extraordinarily LOW inflation until the literal shoveling of money toward the public during COVID. ($5t in "assistance" including $1.8t in DIRECT payments).
Couple that with an insistence on the radical increase in legal wage floors across the country - how would those policies (which, I recall, you militantly supported) NOT be inflationary?

It's hypocrisy to blame "the Federal Reserve" for the logical, predicted outcome of the policies you have rather militantly endorsed.

"CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units."

That's gotta be money laundering. CD sales have decreased an average of 12% per year, for the past quarter century.

"only 60% of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission (according to a survey from auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle)"

1) that seems like 60% of the readers of American Muscle
2) 'know how to' is covering a lot of ground here. "Knows how to start a stick, and how to probably get it moving from level ground with 25% of killing it" maybe. Can confidently and reliably drive with a stick, knowing basic techniques? 25% or less, certainly.

Having a stick shift is 100% the simplest security system you can have on a car in the US in 2026. Your car might still get broken into, but they'll abandon it quickly.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Unfortunately, afaik red dwarf stars are so cool that any planet in their liquid water zone are also almost certainly tidally locked.
Not saying that doesn't make it habitable (as ample science fiction authors have imagined alternatives) just that that might make the challenge harder.

Then again, life finds a way.

First, let's note the referenced article IS A SALES PITCH.
Second, electrical outages are a normal thing in a storm prone country. The "outages" aren't news, it's only meaningful if they're growing more frequent.
The article asks plaintively "is this the new normal" without ever establishing what the old normal was.

When taking into account the higher population and higher electrical demand per person, are large blackouts becoming more common in the US?
Per ai: no.

"The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) tracks Bulk Power System (BPS) performance annually in its State of Reliability (SOR) reports. Key takeaways from the 2025 SOR (covering 2024 data):

The BPS "remains highly reliable and resilient." Core metrics like frequency response, misoperations, and many transmission outage categories are stable or improving.
Severe weather (hurricanes, winter storms) caused the most impactful outages, as in prior years. In 2024, events like Hurricanes Helene and Milton led to millions of (mostly distribution-level) customer outages, but BES restoration was often faster than historical averages for similar storms due to hardening efforts. No major operator-initiated load shed during key winter events.
There were notable events, but the Severity Risk Index (SRI) and other indicators do not show a clear upward trend in frequency or severity of large-scale BPS disruptions when viewed over multiple years. Distribution outages (local, below 100 kV) are more visible to customers and can be widespread, but they are outside NERC's primary jurisdiction."

I fully agree our policies toward the increasingly critical electrical grid infrastructure are incoherent. That's said: quit buying into advertisers insisting the world is ending and here's some snake oil that will fix it.