As much as you may lament it, the culture war stories are often the ones with the most comments.

The problem is that there's ideologies in the schoolboards and in the classrooms at all (both far-left and far-right). If everyone wants to turn society into a tribalistic ideological hellhole, that's bad enough. But let the kids be kids without everyone trying to shove their ideological shit into kids' heads.

If the code is good, merge it! Otherwise, call it out and refuse it. Why is this so hard?

In the near future, Trump's FTC will warn Warner Bros. Discovery that it will not accept a merger with them and Netflix, so it will be Paramount or nothing. The old-money, right-wing oligarchs are in power and won't be outdone by new-money, left-wing oligarch-wannabes (especially with the opportunity for the Ellisons to run CNN).

Trump said the quiet part out loud on purpose because he thinks it makes him cool

He didn't say it to make him look cool, he said it to make him look powerful. That action demonstrated numerous things:

• - The U.S. military is willing to follow unlawful orders from Trump
• - The U.S. population will largely do nothing
• - Congress and the Supreme Court will do nothing
• - The rest of the world will do nothing

So he was right. At this point, it's only a matter of time before he does the same thing to another country because it's clear that there are no negative consequences for doing it. We've seen this behavior enough times in the past to know how this ends, but nobody has the balls to use their powers of checks and balances to stop him. I blame them every bit as much as I blame Trump.

Ah, the old Microsoft Mandatory Spring Cleaning!

A service would ask to be activated. A service would ask what you wanted to synchronize. A service would ask what you wanted to delete. A service would assume the local copy that is currently the default location would remain the default main location unless specifically changed.

Microsoft's attitude is that users don't know what they want, so they'll want what Microsoft tells them they want. That's always been their attitude and this somewhat recent notion that Microsoft isn't going as far to abuse its monopoly powers as much as it used to is largely a mirage. They were temporarily somewhat humbled by the iPhone in the mobile market and AWS in the server market, but moving enterprise to a subscription model via M365 has really shown them that they can still be very successful while abusing their customers. And that lack of humility has been permeating through their consumer services as well.

The graph at the top shows that there was a steady decline between 2010 and 2020. At first I thought a decent amount of that decline may be related to COVID, but the numbers further down show that enrollment in 2015 was about halfway between the values for 2010 and 2020. After 2020, the data shows that the numbers are relatively stagnant and have not "increased consistently".

Four-year institutions awarded 2 million bachelor's degrees in 2023, up from 1.6 million in 2010

This data is more than 2 years old. While it tells us about the past, the sentiment that is measured is a better indicator of the future. After all, home sales were pretty strong right before the crash of 2008. Showing the recent popularity of a good or service doesn't disprove the existence of a bubble.

and the fraction of 25-year-olds holding a bachelor's degree has steadily increased for the past 15 years

They claim it's "steady", but there's definitely some subjectivity to that term and they don't provide yearly numbers to allow the reader to make his or her own determination.

Even after accounting for student-debt payments, college graduates net about $8,000 more annually than those without degrees.

The yearly difference doesn't tell the entire story. If the current cost of loans takes more years to be paid back than historically, then the ratio of additional salary over the course of your career versus the total cost of the degree can be significantly reduced. This reminds me of car dealers framing everything in terms of monthly payments instead of total cost of ownership.

Part of the disconnect may stem from misunderstanding how college pricing works. Nearly half of U.S. adults believe everyone pays the same tuition, though fewer than 20% of families actually pay the published sticker price.

The effects of compound interest on the loans contribute far more to the total cost of college than the difference in perception of the base rate. Of course, the two are not independent of each other.

The simple fact is that colleges have become perceived as greedy diploma mills and they haven't done a single thing to change that perception because they took it for granted that society would keep pushing for college education for everyone, regardless of how much they raised tuition. Getting an extra $8,000 per year for having a degree is not chump change, but that number could decline before you graduate in four years. Besides, the number to really look at is the break-even age for salaries of the average person with and without a college degree while factoring in student loan payments. I saw an article over ten years ago that compared that number using a truck driver as an example and the break-even age was in the low forties back then. I can only imagine with the large increases in tuition and the compound interest on top of that, it could be approaching the age of 50 at this point.

They aren't even trying...

They don't have to try because:

• - MAGA is a cult and its member are incapable of finding any faults with their leader
• - Trump doesn't need votes anymore, so he no longer has to pretend like he's some sort of populist

The band I'm in is from the east coast. We recently played some shows in the middle of the country and while waiting in line for the bathroom at a gas station, one of my bandmates noticed that the shopkeeper asked every single customer "What kinda Zyn do you like?" in what he described as a repetitive, NPC-style behavior. Despite the fact that none of the customers had previously shown interest in a tobacco product, almost every customer purchased a pack of Zyn. This shocked us and became a running gag throughout our trip as we were amazed to see how many people in that part of the country chose to chew.

The highest birthrates in the world are in countries like Chad

It would figure that Chad has the most children!

tells you all you need to know

Yes, Apple's questionable decisions inevitably spread to other manufacturers like a virus.

True, and yet a human would likely still be liable for making the false statement and a defense of "I heard it somewhere" will likely not get the person very far in court.

In the past, search delivered a list of links and excerpts from web sites that are related to the user-generated query and contained no unique materials generated by the search provider. However, an AI-generated summary contains information gathered by the search provider's algorithms and is published as a statement of fact by the search provider. It may be possible that they have a claim in the ToS that they have no liability for the veracity of that information, but simply making a claim doesn't mean it's true in the eyes of the law. I believe a statement like this may not qualify for the protections offered by Section 230 of the CDA because I believe that applies to user-generated content, not content generated by an employee or algorithm of the publisher. I'm not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will shake out, but I think Google, and all other providers of AI content, should be at least a bit worried that they could be liable for content generated by their AI algorithms.