Anyone watching the massive near-WWII level military buildup in China right now can read between the lines.

When you tally Uber / Lyft drivers plus OTR Over The Road and Local Route truck drivers you end up with a number that is by far the largest source of employment in the United States, dwarfing the second largest category, K-12 public school teachers by a few million more jobs. .. Throwing that many people - many of whom are middle aged and unable to quickly retrain to other industries - will be economically and socially catastrophic. This raises further questions, including: "When AI throws tens of millions of people out of work, who will be able to afford the stupid shit the AI are producing?" If you think hypercapitalist nations like the U.S. are magically going to switch to a high corporate tax / Universal Basic Income model, like some Federation of Planets pipe dream, boy are you in for a rude awakening.

I can close my eyes, hear the National Geographic television theme song in my head and see the famous yellow rectangle flying into the opening credits in my minds' eye. I had the same experience you did. The print magazines came to the house every month in their little brown paper sleeves, and I absorbed every one of them, for decades. This news feels like learning about the death of an old friend. What a gut punch. I'm almost equally troubled thinking about how little people value quality long form journalism today - what in the hell is society turning into? Apparently Mike Judge's dystopian scifi comedy "Idiocracy" was a documentary.

Reddit is on track to file their IPO in the second half of this year. Investor and advertiser pressure will achieve what activists have thus been unable to accomplish - the pablum, flavorless Disneyfication of the site, causing millions of users to stop using it. Hey, hows' Tumblr doing these days?

Apple's insistence of keeping nearly everything on-device has been crippling their assistant and overall device utility for years. They either open up to more cloud-powered assistant and AI-powered apps or their phones will quickly become beautifully designed, very fast, increasingly less and less useful curiosities.

..brilliant.

Tech companies who for years have been selling cloud services & collaborative teams software had been denying employees remote work ability in one of the most ridiculous examples of hypocracy imaginable. Then.. the Pandemic. Then.. the birth of Generative AI. .. Suddenly, NOT building billion-dollar campuses on some of the most expensive land in the most expensive regions of the U.S. is starting to look like a good idea. The sheer absurdity of TECH COMPANIES building monolithic office parks in Southern California and other incredibly expensive cities around the world while selling COLLABORATION SOFTWARE and CLOUD SOLUTIONS is PEAK STUPID. Can you imagine other industries doing this? Could you imagine say, the #1 manufacturer of automotive brake pads in the U.S. building a $700 million dollar office park in San Francisco "for clout?" Absurdity. What we're witnessing is the cold water of market forces hitting the I.T. giants in the face.

This isn't going to age well. .. And if Apple doesn't get their ass in gear, neither will they.

.. per title. Google, the same company that developed a chatbot so sophisticated that one of their software engineers swore it was sentient, even to the point of, and after being fired for publicly stating this? Given the stranglehold Google has on the public Internet's information given 20+ years of Search, their ability to crush ChatGPT will be limited only by how effectively Google can tie this lead into their existing scary-good chatbot.

Army. Air Force operates fixed wing aircraft. The Army operates rotor aircraft. And no, the US Military isn't terribly interested in culture wars; more so the ones fought with explosives and high velocity projectiles.

Yes, and both the FBI and the (numerous) news outlets covering the story handed the public a handbook on how it was done. Shooting transformers with a high powered (hunting) rifle creates 2 holes in the unit, allowing the mineral oil contained within to bleed out, and the internal components - no longer propely cooled - blow. I'm not telling you anything 10 seconds of Googling the California substation sabotage articles won't. Deer season in parts of North Carolina runs from Nov. 21 through Dec. 10th, making rifle fire out in the countryside something area residents have become completely deaf to and unconcerned with, compounding the "earwitness" problem. People most likely don't remember hearing any firing, and they'vre oblivious to it in that part of the country, this time of year.

.. just heard him in an ad for Wild Dick Johnson's Kia Emporium advertising the new 2023 models!


*CELEBRITY VOICE IMPERSONATED

.. They want to be eligible for awards season, primarily the Academy Awards, as AMPAS requires a film to be displayed theatrically for N days on X screens to qualify. Additionally, it's easier to attract A-list talent to films releasted theatrically, as it maintains their personal brand strength and visibility during awards season. "Movie Star" still has a little cache' above "streaming movie personality."

There are many reasons U.S. Presidents don't have unlimited power to classify, declassify or in some cases even KNOW classified material - - They may compromise programs that predate their administration containing information vital to national security now, and long after their term ends -They may unknowingly compromise human assets in the field, costing lives and destroying ongoing intelligence gathering - They may, by publicly sharing or describing imagery or information about persons, places, things foreign or domestic divulge the methods & resources used by US Intelligence to gather that information, revealing crucial technical information, capabilities, assets, and partners - blinding and deafening crucial intelligence channels that may have cost hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and human lives - The President - one fallible human being - cannot possibly see or consider, and lacks the full Technical, Historical, Sociological, Psychological, Economic, Military & Political ramifications of abruptly publicizing extremely sensitive material "in the moment" *However* As the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Military in its entirely, outranking all including 5-star generals in time of world conflict, one could argue The President DOES have the capacity to view and interpret all levels of classified material, and SHOULD be able to share select information with the public - HOWEVER, PRIOR TO DOING SO, should be forced to seek the counsel of their advisors, military advisors and intelligence analysts familiar with the source(s) of the classified material to consider any and all risks that publicizing the information would create.

Please tell me there is an animated GIF of a mailbox opening and closing with blinking text below it "EMAIL THE WEB MASTER", and on the bottom of the page are two sawhorses and a stick figure of a man digging above the UNDER CONSTRUCTION text