"bubbles popping"

All of the constraints mentioned are supply-side, not demand-side.

That may obscure a market bubble popping, but is not evidence of it.

"Humor works."

Are you sure? Have you tried it yourself?

"You have to admit"

Consider you provide neither evidence not anecdote to back up your claim, I don't have to admit a damn thing.

"I suspect some unknown, microbiome interaction is at play"

See, even you don't believe your own claim.

-1, offtopic

Regardless of the correctness of Shawn Forno's claims, they are not relevant to an unexpected change in melt-off *rate*. His claims might (or might not) be relevant to a change in snow cover, but that is not what is being reported.

He'll buy out USX for the stock ticker, presumably with a sweetheart government deal to undo Nippon Steel's sweetheart government deal, and let the actual steel business fail.

To be fair, it won't be possible to get there *without* burning investor capital and government grants.

"All people I know who got their email hacked were on outlook. None on gmail nor any other provider."

If you are not limiting to people you *personally* know, there was a pretty famous non-outlook case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

If you *are* limiting to people you personally know, I would suggest you may not have a representative sample.

Selling ads against search provides an incentive to degrade search until the ad engine provides the results that the search should have.

Look at the iOS App Store search, where it can be hard to find an app when searching for its trademarked name. If you're lucky it's just competing products that are buying the app's name as an as keyword, but even then an app maker still has to buy ads against their own name to show up.

I wish people would learn their taxonomy of frauds.

OTOH, the streaming services face a problem of discovery that cable does not. With 500 cable channels, the only opportunity cost of trying a new show is time. To try a new streaming show, I have to add the whole price of the subscription to try one show. For example, I enjoy Star Trek shows and saw every episode that came out while I was alive on its first showing until the second episode of Discovery because it was streaming only (the first episode was broadcast on CBS) and exclusive to Paramount+. Since Star Trek is the only thing I know I would watch on Paramount+, it never seems worth subscribing.

First movers have a big advantage(Netflix) as well as bundled services that you already have(Amazon Prime). Few networks have a brand as a whole, the notable exceptions being Disney/ABC and HBO, so network-branded streaming services can't leverage that brand. Stupidly HBO tried not using their brand. OTOH, Apple does have a strong brand, they are bundling with purchases you are already making, and they are also doing some non-exclusive and cross-licensing deals.

The ad-free nature of HBO et al. is a property of those specific channels, not cable TV.

Cable TV originated as community antenna television. Network feeds were received by large central antennas and the last-mile distribution was by wire. The network feeds could be over-the-air broadcast networks, satellite networks, or pay TV like HBO or Showtime. The first two categories are transmitted with ad slots in situ, the last does not have any ad slots*. The term "cable channel" was used for the later two categories as they were not available over-the-air via standard in-set tuners.

*: Some people whine that when a steaming service promoting other programs on the same service constitutes advertising, in which case the premium channels have also had advertising all along.

"In the US you mostly use rails for slow moving cargo,"

This is primarily because US rail companies hate running railroads, and seek to degrade the experience whenever possible so people will stop asking them to carry their freight.

Fast container trains are at least as fast as trucks, but have the advantage that you don't have to pay for one operator per trailer/container.

"less FCC-moderated content "

These days, Brendan Carr is trying to police your speech anyway.

On the upside, the regional sports networks are disappearing up their own asses.

"I'm old enough to remember when the selling point of cable TV was that you could pay for the content on the front end, and then not have ads constantly interrupting your viewing. "

Not only did cable companies not offer this, it is not technically feasible to offer this. The add slots are already in the feed transmitted to the cable companies, where the local ads are inserted in the slots allocated for that. There's no way to get the ads slots back out without eventually getting ahead of the transmitted feed and having to sit on dead air for a while.