Right! That's exactly it. I was part of "Gen X" myself, and while I had friends who lived the whole "latchkey kid" lifestyle to the max? It really wasn't the norm to just be unsupervised all day or night.

I remember my folks both worked, but my mom went to working only part-time, early in the morning until around the lunch hour, when we were younger. She hired an older lady as a part-time nanny for us while she was gone. When we got older, mom was always home by the time school let out - so we barely knew she was ever gone.

And also true that even for the teens I knew who had a house to themselves after school each day until bedtime? Their parent(s) weren't just buying them electric motorcycles or any of that like you see going on today. Obviously, the Internet wasn't anything like it is today. Even as a hard-core computer geek though? I called and ran my own computer bulletin board system where it was just really a local niche community of like-minded people dialing in with modems. Most heated arguments that came up on a BBS got squashed when the BBS operator decided he had enough and banned all of them. It just wasn't *anything* like what goes on now where people get video-recorded against their will in high resolution just so someone can get famous on TikTok, or ?

Rei: Do you actually work for Amazon in a capacity where you're informed on how they're obtaining these books?

I'm asking for a couple reasons.

1. We all know Amazon has plenty of money to be able to afford to buy rare, out-of-print books that are difficult to obtain. I'd be surprised if they refrained from doing so if that meant their AI risked not having some of that knowledge/information while a competitor's did. I'm not saying the guy tasked with being manager over the disposable labor doing the book scanning is authorized to make direct choices about what books to buy. I'm saying someone in Amazon corporate, in charge of the AI project itself, was probably given the funding to buy what he/she felt was needed.

2. The original article's anonymous interview with the low-level worker sounded very accurate with such statements as the details/orders changing daily and everything feeling disorganized. I can speak with some authority that that's exactly how it feels when you work for them in a non-management capacity. Multiple layers of management are dictating new processes or policies in a constant stream, and then often? The entire thing is up-ended when top level management makes a company-wide decree or mandate. Your team lead/manager is even liable to change on short notice. Their push to constantly "reinvent" causes a whole lot of reinventing of the same wheel another department or team already invented, and it's kind of a zoo. That's why I'd also take their comments as legit when they express concerns some of the books appeared to be obscure titles, etc.

I have to agree. I'm not defending Facebooks' practices, but at the same time? It seems to me social media as a whole can become addictive, or promote bad ideas to kids or teens. You have to control this at the parental level ... not just depend on corporations to self-police it all.

So sure... slap them with large fines and use the money for good, where you can. I'm not opposed. But your kid or teen wouldn't be spending all day on social media if you controlled it as their parent. By the time they're old enough to legally move out of your house? Then it's too late for you to try to "fix" anything they're doing. But before that, they live under your roof and by your rules.

"Just let me live the life I want to live, by fucking up others' lives way more than the other party may have mildly inconvenienced me for sound policy. Wait, why is this affecting me now?"

It's a tale as old as time.

and they ignore our laws in favour of their own

Well, we can at least tell you learned zero Canadian history.

I live in Ontario, Canada. You're an idiot, and don't speak for me. There are idiots everywhere on the planet. You're one. See you at the polls.

~22% (I'll round it to 25%) of Canadians speak French as a first language, and using rough numbers that would be ~10 million Canadians, which equates to 1/8th of 1% of the world population. If forcing kids to learn a language that ~0% of the world uses seems rational, you've lost the point of education.

I'm unlikely to read anything dumber than this today. French is a single class, its easy. You remind me of when I was in grade 7 and two morons in my class took up the cause to protest that we had to learn the subway stations even tho, in their words, 'they would never use it'. So that's fun, you make the same fundamentally stupid mistake that some grade 7 kids were making about the value of learning things - the point isn't to teach things that you need, the point is to teach you thinks so that you learn how to learn. That French *can* help you if you're not some kind of moron allergic/scared of the greater world is part of the point.

3 Inches of Blood

ROFL. Youre whining about CanCon then complaining about a Canadian band that isn't being played on the radio? The stupidity astounds me. I dunno what small town you're from, but it's doing you no favours.

the fucking country speaks English

I hear French all the time on the streets of Toronto, parents at school, in public transit. I am from Toronto. Despite being from an Anglophone family with two parents who don't speak a lick French, all of my school was in French until I was in grade 6, and then half of it was in French until I was in grade 9. I understand French fluently (although I don't really need to speak it) and I know many other Anglophones who are fluent in it here in Toronto.

You're a moron. Don't talk about things you don't know shit about.

Netflix doesn't "broadcast" anything. Users pull it, if they so desire.

Netflix makes content available, and they choose what is available, based on the geographic location of the person watching it. Doesn't sound much like a pull model to me. The ask of Cancon is simply to regulate that there's a particular balance of Canadian produced content. Suggesting Cancon is about regulating the balance of consumption belies the fundamental stupidity at the base of your argument.

And oh, when's the last time you saw the majority of US media (incl Hollywood, to look at the bastion of American cultural power) saying /nice/ things about the US?

Literally any time it would improve their bottom line? What are you, an idiot? Your entire post sure makes it sound that way.

Really, a lot of us in I.T. should have seen this coming.

Earlier in the year, my significant other was still gaming on an Alienware laptop that was about 3 generations behind on its nVidia GPU and had issues like a non-working trackpad (someone messed up the ribbon cable inside it while replacing dying cooling fans in it). We found a high-spec upgrade for it at the local Micro Center, selling for around $3500 with an RTX5090 in it, 64GB RAM, etc. Just about all of our friends advised us not to dump that kind of money on a gaming laptop. "Just wait, they said.... You can surely find something cheaper than that." I told her to ignore all of them and to pull the trigger on it if it's really one she liked.

Only a month later? That same machine was up over $5500. There's basically nothing on the market today with the same GPU in it selling for less than $1000 or so more than we paid for that system. And typically, they only have a 1TB SSD vs the 2TB in hers.

None of us have a crystal ball, but I saw this trend started with price increases on RAM and storage with the rise of AI and new data center construction -- and knew PCs weren't going to go down in price for quite some time...

Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre's partner in Beats by Dre, [ ... ]

...Yeah, thought so.

Sony MDR-V6 forever, dudes...

"It is clear Flock has aspirations far beyond ALPRs to become a digital platform for policing," [emphasis mine]

They misspelled, "Orwellian suveillance and harrassment."

Law enforcement officers are already abusing Flock's existing capabilities for stalking. This will not improve matters one iota.

Living in a Islamo-Fascist semi dictatorship where deep-package-inspection is considered totally usual, I wonder why third World countries weren't included in such offers.

Well wtf does he mean by speedtest then? If he's doing it from his phone or wifi connected laptop, then it's going to reflect the speed of his wifi. If he's doing it from his router, and complaining that the speedtest is wrong because his wifi is slower than his router uplink, I'd say that's a statement only a doofus would make.

"Now I'm currently using fiber at the speed fast than my wifi router, which makes my speedtest always wrong."

oh please expand on this - this is gunna be hilarious