I'm 55. I have a decade of alcoholism with uncontrolled sky high blood pressure accompanying it. My doctor once pointed to my liver enzyme chart and said, "Your liver is very unhappy with you." Then he pointed at my ECG and said, "See that little bump there? That might be what kills you." I had 18 months with a cocaine problem. For two years I partied hard including every psychedelic I could get my hands on. I spent 40 years out of shape, sometimes ridiculously so.

I'm in good shape now, and across the board my numbers are great. ECG is clean. I'm comfortably retired, and at the gym every day. I'm healthy. If you looked at the snapshot at this moment in time you'd think things could hardly be any better... but I know the damage has been done. I'm on borrowed time.

So if I'm going to spent a few uninterrupted hours on MS Flight Simulator, or slashing my way through a few zones on D2: Resurrected, I'm not going to sweat it. In the pantheon of self destructive behaviour this doesn't rise to the level of consideration.

Because we've got all the low hanging fruit like preventable diseases in childhood, dangerous products, toxic pesticides, et al. But don't worry, Trump and the Anti-Vaxxers are working tirelessly to bring back such wonderful easily preventable diseases as Polio, Measles, Rubella and if they can manage it, Smallpox.

It should be noted this is a record for the US... which is still lower than almost all other developed nations.

For those who aren't idiots, I'm sure I don't need to explain that the biggest factor is the reduction in infant, child and young adult mortality as people under 25 dying in larger numbers skew the statistics downwards.

600km is 0.0020014 seconds at the speed of light.

Or 2 milliseconds.

Birth rates are at record low since WW2:

www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate

So there are fewer people, but they are living longer.

Which is probably the balance required, and probably explains WHY they're living longer too.

What makes this an American website? Seems pretty well traveled by folks from most English speaking nations. I, myself, have only visited the states.

Thing is, PC gaming has been diskless for ages. The last game I bought on disk was in 2015 and that was because I lived in Australia and internet speeds were shit back then.

PC gaming has never really been cheaper, even with the ridiculous price of RAM and SSDs at the moment. A gaming PC I built 5 years ago is still more powerful than a PS pro (to start with, it's a Zen 3 CPU, the PS pro is still Zen 2).

PC gaming is cheaper than console gaming if you actually play games. Consoles are a false economy, the initial hardware is sold at a loss to get you in the door then they pile on charge after charge after charge, pay for access to online services, pay more for games, so on and so forth. PC gaming is the opposite, higher cost of entry as no-one is subsidising the hardware but no-one is expecting to make that back in additional fees and charges afterwards so once you've paid the inital cost for the hardware, savings start immediately. Games are cheaper and go on sale more often and Steam, GoG, et al. could triple their access fee tomorrow and no one would care because 3 x $0 is still $0.

People are realising the console price is a false economy and it's not helping (or is helping, depending on if you're a console fanboy or not) that a PS pro is only £80 more than a PS pro. Because people are looking to reduce their ongoing spend with consoles, Sony and MS are having to raise hardware prices. This, to digital only is one way Sony is trying to shore that up, by making sure that they get a cut of every single sale. Also the breaking of backwards compatibility is a feature, not a bug, as that means all your older games need to be re-purchased through the rip off store.

Which brings me to another point... I've 30+ year old games that still work on my current gaming PC. Of course I've got the installers on a hard drive now as no-one's seen a floppy drive in years and the original disks have probably melted in my sisters garage back in Oz. Games older than the original playstation.

Yet console fanboys keep lining up for more. Doesn't matter how much abuse they get, the only response is "yes master, may I have some more".

The Concorde's engines were adapted from military engines, the Rolls Royce Olympus which powered the Avro Vulcan bomber, so yeah, they were F-ing loud.

Question is, can we develop quieter engines these days? Modern high bypass turbofans (like the RR Trent) are way quieter than their older counterparts. Especially the older low bypass turbofans (I.E. on the 727s)

Gosh, that must be worth at least a trillion dollars.

Better scramble and invest in their hype of... a handheld box that can run AI... like... phones do.

So, I don't understand why it's taken them all this time to add logins to prevent anonymous access.

But that aside... why is "old Reddit" anything more than a skin / display layer over "new Reddit"?

It's the same shite that always happens. Hey, we completely redesigned everything from the ground up, but it's an absolute impossible to just... make it look like it always did.

It's just skinning/theming, effect. This is the whole point of things like GUI libraries and CSS. The content is the same. The metadata is the same. The only thing that differs is how you lob it at the screen. Why that requires keeping running decades of old legacy code, or destroying backwards compatibility is always beyond me.

Same with everything from Office to Windows to websites. "Hey, we're changing how we look, which shouldn't affect anything one bit, but in the process we've trashed the service and half the stuff doesn't work any more and, by the way, there will never be any going back, even though we could offer a "legacy theme" running on the new system as easily as we could build any of these junk new features that we insist on shoving down your throat even if you don't want them."

30 years ago, I imagined and was lead to believe, that in the future things would be commoditised and sensible. I could have Windows laid out how I wanted it. I can have Office use the old menus while still opening all the new files. And I could go to a website and say "No thanks" to the new theme and carry on running the old theme without having to accept that it would an atrocious turd of unmaintainable legacy code that nobody touches (Hello, Slashdot Classic!) even though they could just update it (Hello, SoylentNews with runs on the same backend as Slashdot but has been updated and works GREAT).

Hell I thought that in 2026, I'd be able to type a UK pound sign into a plain text box and it would render vaguely correctly. Let me try again:

£

(That was literally just a Shift-3 on a UK keyboard... not one other site has problems with that, not even SoylentNews based on the same software).

Stealing something because you don't like terms you are being offered is not a noble act. And patting yourself on the back for it says not much about Sony, but a great deal about you.

I have in my past been a pirate, although not recently. I don't pretend it was anything other than simple theft. Own it.

However, much progress has been made. I am alive right now because of a breakthrough cancer therapy that was FDA approved in 2011. (Well after Nixon!)

This fall I am going to get a therapy that mass-replicates your own immune cells in a lab for re-injection. It's so expensive (and has uncertain benefit) that it's not generally available in the UK or Canada yet. Automation will be a key to making it cost-effective.

It's such a complex area, I think information retrieval and computational science / simulation, or AI if you prefer, will help.

The gun nuts are the ones supporting the secret police.

Whilst you're 100% correct that gun nuts are melts living in a fantasy world who would piss themselves if anyone broke into their house rather than carrying out their heroic gun fantasies, I think the GPP was referring to a breakdown in society where people get territorial and violent. Society is, as they say only three meals away from anarchy. In anarchy all bets are off.

Erm... the US is becoming a Soviet state?

Well you are aligned with Russia now.

For the uninitiated, and the reason no-one actually uses "second world" any more is because it originally meant what side of the cold war you were on. The planet was divided into three separate "worlds", the first world being US, NATO and allies, the second world being the Soviet Union and countries aligned with them, the third world was unaligned countries. As time went on and the fact most developed countries were aligned with NATO and most unaligned countries were developing or undeveloped it became shorthand for rich and poor countries and with the collapse of the Soviet Union the second world ceased to exist.

So technically speaking, the Philippines is a first world country whilst Switzerland is a third world country (the former being staunch US allies and the second being staunchly neutral).

I'm no grammar NAZI so you can use first and third world to refer to economic development but "second" world is categorically wrong as it never developed a new meaning, it ceased to exist 30 years ago. If you would like to differentiate between poor and dirt poor countries economically, might I suggest using the terms "developing" and "undeveloped" respectively as that's what you'd put on a report you'd make to someone like the UN security council.

All spelling and grammatical errors contained in this post are intentional, grammar nazis need entertainment.

You misspelled "privacy".