Never mind all those DVDs from the mid 2000s that rotted on the shelf. Good luck getting anyone to replace those..

Physical media does not provide any sort of certainty you'll be able to enjoy it a decade from now and don't say "but make backups" the value proposition of making a backup as in a real redundant copy to sit on self somewhere (or hardisk ... whatever) vs for piracy just isn't there. The time plus the cost of the media does not let that make sense for something you paid less than $20 for in the first place.

There are already provisions for 'hair cuts' and similar theft.

Dodd-Frank gave the FDIC the ability to treat similar seniority creditors differently in resolutions, for 'systemic stability' which is not well defined. So if you have a bond in a failing bank and the current administration does not like you... to bad....

Temporary though it might be the pandemic legislation (cares act? I think it was) also created force majeure where if you'd owner financed a residence and the buy decided to just not pay, dear old Uncle Sam say to bad, you can't foreclose and get your property back.

I for one don't think if the shit really hits the fan and gold buried in the yard or bitcoin wallets on USB keys will do anyone holding it much good but rest assured, 'they' will absolutely steal your money. They already demoed this now twice in as many decades, and things did not even have to get that all that real.

The thing about doing this nationally though, is nobody is a bigger customer than the federal government. If by statue federal agencies move'd to 7-4, big business with federal contracts and small business with federal contracts absolutely would follow; and everyone else would follow them.

It makes zero f'ing sense to not have noon be when the sun is directly overhead. I realize that timezones are geographically to large and if you live at the edges noon is never really noon. Still FFS the middle of the day should be the middle of the day at least near the center of our given timezones.

The other thing DST means is the earths rotational day does not align to the calendar day, that just means more goofiness around local observations, and recording.

Given this is entirely a political thing if people WANT DST from a life style perspective, why don't we collectively agree start the morning news at 5a instead of 6a and open the office at 7 rather than 8 on the same day we set the clocks for the last time?

We can't understand why you can't understand basic fundamental realities that these twelve year-olds you speak of are able to plainly see.

Dude Biden has been out of office for almost two full years. He is to feeble to sexually harass most women now and probably needs help getting in and out of the shower, so even his daughter is mostly safe.

Allow me Fix the headline!

Over 200 Economists Embrace Sensationalism To Drive Ad Impressions on Blogs and Substack Subscriptions.

The problem here is the loss of trust. I have migrated almost everything I used to still use Windows for (at work left Windows at home behind a long time ago), to either MacOS natively or a Linux VM.

Microsoft made the experience of using Windows 11 so bad it was worth it abandon workflows with a decade or more of use to avoid it!

The very idea the find/search feature on the desktop should have ever searched for, let alone returned results from the internet prior to those found on the local machine and maybe possibly maybe some user identified data sources like attached network volumes and associated sharepoint / intranet resources in business environments was both stupid and malevolent.

Windows from at least 22h2 on through now is basically malware, by any reasonable definition and identification of characteristics. It literally does everything out of the box people once objected to BonziBuddy doing!

Sometimes I wonder if this is all a grand conspiracy to destroy federalism and make us 50 nifty little states..

I hope so

Anytime you convert from one time of power to another you usually incur a ton of loss. Charging the battery with the engine or running the motors with the generator output, mechanical -> electric only to go back to mechanical pretty much destroys any advantage you get from running the engine more optimally.

Yes rail roads do this, but it is not about (fuel) efficiency, it is about torque / tractive effort (not a rail way engineer so I don't understand all the details differences )

With automotive hybrids it is more sensible to capture waste energy regen breaking, and help the engine when it is outside its power band, use the motor to provide the extra power needed for acceleration etc.
Use the motor more as the prime mover in situations like stop/go where engine power is hard to manage effectively at all, and there is otherwise lots of idling.

Trucking though (long haul) is pretty efficent accross most of the US. You have large loads on engines with tall gearing, and everything runs at pretty stable speeds.

Most of our interstate highways, with some exceptions in mount regions have a fairly narrow range of again consistent grades.

A battery-electric boost where efficiencies of the main power train fall down, long grades in the mountains, any kind of stop/go situation due to accidents, road maintenance etc, and the last miles in/near destinations in a lot of cases, stands to pack a huge punch in energy savings. Without adding a lot of weight to vehicles that already place stress on roadways and structures, at least as compared to trucking around enough battery for the long runs.

Hybrids especially if you can put the hybrid tech into the trailer rather than the tractor, therefore making it possible to use cheaper lighter traditional trailers on routes where the hybrid tech offers less advantage, is pretty smart. It also sides steps the problem of not being able to operate if you can't charge for whatever reason. Substations do catch fire sometimes, storms / fires do take out major grid supports having a trucking industry entirely grid dependent is problematic because they may need to be delivering the very supplies and equipment needed to effectively repair the grid when needed.

I think the correct approach is the best of both here, use electric propulsion when it is more efficent, than the ICE drive line can be or can be alone, use electricity when it be generated with lower carbon foot print and deliver better cost per mine, use fuel where energy density remains key, be able to use fuel for any job if operating in stand alone mode become a sudden requirement.

At the scale of a commercial transport truck this should all be very do-able

My banks site won't work in Firefox. Oddly it says it does, I have not tried on Windows. Maybe it would on Windows but I don't know why that should make a difference.

Yeah,

I kinda like Disney+, my family and I do watch quite a bit of content on it. It has gone down hill some though. I don't really pay for the ad tier it is bundled with my wife's mobile plan (so yes I do pay for it) but that bundle includes other features/services/tethering rules we want and is still the most economic to get them, at least without completely switching carriers.

I don't think I'd be a subscriber if we had to pay 'full rate'

$20 for ad free
$15 for w/ads

Would free be
$0 w/MOAR Ads!

Or would it be a limited selection of content, stuff comes out first on the paid subs levels?

Something even more aggravating and dickish like the first 8 episodes of whatever free, but oh look you have to subscribe to get episodes 9 and 10?

Regardless of what youtube and Tubi etc might be doing there is psychology in play here that I expect is going to leave either subscribers or would-be subscribers feeling resentful about the model.

They are counting some combination of legitimate risk, FUD, and protectionism to ultimately protect them from the Chinese models.

The reality is at some point in the not to distant future it will be cheaper to put enough AI accelerator hardware in workstations to give most folks using Claude/Claude code and similar a perfectly acceptable degree of performance. It always goes this way - it is never cheaper put hardware behind the glass when it can go under the desk long term. The only reasons to do it usual boil down to management and wanting to do something more bleeding edge that hasnt filtered to commodity hardware yet.

Of course for online applications that need to scale, and for complex engineering or very large data volume tasks, sure "Cloud AI" and certainly for anyone who needs to train a model. However the idea these guys are going to get individuals and business to keep paying $200 for tokens to use some desktop AI assistant is unrealistic, and down goes the datacenter volume requirements along with that.

Again I am not saying there isnt a new industry / space here or that it is all a bubble but the current Anthropic/OpenAI/Grok business model persisting for a whole lot longer does not appear to me anyway to that it fits the patter of the last 25 years of White-Collar-targeted IT systems.

Let me caveat that I also think the sorts of people making big investments in Data Centers are not stupid and at least see this as a likely outcome as well, presumably they believe they can sell the space/capacity to other users for other applications. If so why not charge the Anthropics of the world with the VC money huge premiums to rush build outs while you can get them? As long the assets are still marketable after that business drops off, it is a win!