Do you think that HBO Max + Netflix will cost the same as Netflix does now?

I swear people who insist there's something terrible about multiple streaming services can't see the wood for the trees. HBO Max and Disney+ and Hulu and Netflix and Paramount+ and Peacock and Prime all merging into one service doesn't mean a single service for $10 a month, it means a single service for $150 a month.

I would rather just continue the status quo. Have them compete with one another, and let me switch subscriptions every few months to get the content I didn't get with the others.

32 bit OS's coming back because no one will be able to afford 4GB :-)

> They're supposed to watch every video before airing it?

Uhm, yes. Why are you implying otherwise? I'm not aware of the TV industry ever having a time where it was considered normal to just take footage and broadcast it without some sort of review. At best, live performances are often actually live, though sometimes on a 10 second delay. But prerecorded content is ALWAYS reviewed first.

This is 100% HBO Max's fault. It's not even 1% Liongate's fault - they may have passed on the video, but they had no reason to believe HBO Max would be this incompetent, and it may well have been what Liongate assumed HBO was asking for. This is what you get when you let a sociopathic money man who knows more about how to commit accounting fraud legally than how to run a content empire like Zazlav run your business.

Crucial was always my go-to for RAM upgrades. I'm getting my son some upgrades for Christmas, and when I saw desktop memory prices, I was stunned. It's the same thing everywhere. "AI vendors are grabbing all the RAM they can get their hands on, dramatically driving up the price".

Why should anyone have to go and create a security policy, especially on a "professional" OS to prevent ads? Especially when a future update will almost certainly re-enable them.

Users shouldn't have to baby sit their OS like this. And if you tell the OS not to do something, you shouldn't have to worry about future updates overriding what you've already told it.

MS treats their power users like idiots, and is driving them away with it.

Codeberg is very nice, all the more so because it's a non-profit that's made efforts to protect itself from risks of enshitiffication. You can self host its entire system, Forgejo, which, while not at the same level as Gitlab, also requires exponentially less resources for something that implements everything most people want or need, and only misses a small number of things the power users want. You can easily self host on a Pi, if you don't have a server set up for that kind of thing.

Codeberg largely exists because of issues with Gitea's management and signs it was about to follow Gitlab in the enshittification path. While those fears haven't been realized, Codeberg forked Gitea into Forgejo, and that seems, now, to be where the mindshare is.

(I honestly think we're not going to see any progress in computing back to positive things if those with the skills to self host stuff don't start doing so and don't start working on making it easier for everyone to self host everything. But that's a different rant. Point is, Codeberg is great if you're not ready to do that yet, and Forgejo is even better if you are.)

Syria says "Hi".

We're the United States. The world's most powerful country. Outside of Russia and China, all countries are "small".

And Russia and China... they have nukes. Attacking them means WWIII. If you think this is a good idea, by all means, run for President on your End Humanity platform.

I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

Why do you think the Germans have the 5% rule?

The 5 percent rule is basically a guardrail built after the Weimar failure, where dozens of tiny parties splintered parliament and helped the Nazis rise through chaotic, fractured coalitions. Modern Germany uses the threshold to prevent that kind of fragmentation again and keep extremist fringe groups from getting seats off tiny vote shares.

And we keep automating stuff that really shouldn't be. Classic example is customer support phone lines. I cannot remember the last time I used one of those and didn't have to ask for an operator. Believe it or not, most people call those lines because we need something to be done, rather than information that we almost certainly already have or can easily obtain via the website (which you keep advertising over and over again while we're on hold, and even before we ask the question, but has no options to contact a human other than calling this number.)

I kinda feel we need the entire commercial world to take a time out, and revisit everything we do that involves interactions between the different parties involved in commerce. Is it really the right approach for companies to value shareholder value over long term sustainability? Should customers and employees be valued just as much as the investors? And if you (not you Morromist, the generic you) are about to respond with "But Friedman said" or some other "economic" argument, why do we, as a society, allow shareholders to exist? Is our aim to ensure those shareholders can make money, or is our aim to provide funding to ensure the institutions needed to do everything from develop technologies to providing food on our tables can exist and get the funding they need?

Because I can tell you, I sure as hell wouldn't sign on to the entire that we create an entire legal structure aimed at ensuring people with money can make more of it, and damn the consequences.

I'm not entirely sure how a rant about automated customer service lines turned into this, but now I've written it I'm going to submit it anyway.

Good lord, we agree on something.

Anyway I think the issue is that there are idiots everywhere, and a lot of people who jump on bandwagons and are too proud to jump off once the evidence comes out it's a scam. And while I hate the idea personally, it sounds worse than flying, I would assume a lot of people look at the transportation speeds involved, and just assume it would be successful for that reason, especially in an era where a significant number of people believe America's railroads collapsed due to "flying", when the story is way, way, more complicated (essentially a systemic shock from all sides, over regulation, poorly thought out taxes that weren't applied to rival transportation systems, poor management, and out of control dumbass unions. A perfect storm of crappiness.)