in the late 80s some playstation titles could be around that mark, a few could even double that, specially cartridges.

then again, that was media or hardware which had to be designed, manufactured, packaged, stockpiled and distributed, which means extra investment and risk, and could be resold so would retain value. gamers today pay the equivalent or more for a mere download at virtually zero cost that can't be transfered and whose continued availability may not even be guaranteed, not to mention some inane pixel vanity at insane prices which are specifically set so the owner can show how little he/she cares for money, but not that much so his/her example still drags a few others in who otherwise wouldn't afford it. i would assume that that business is being adjusted too.

i'd say this is a factor. people still plays but has become more selective. there is a huge offer of good games to have a good time, many viable online with friends and some really cheap, so there is less motivation to pay the sometimes exorbitant launch day prices for the newest titles. also, new aaa titles have had a consistent trend of stagnating innovation and being a hit and miss, with some spectacular flops, so if money is any consideration it makes much sense not to rush to get the newest shiny at any cost to still enjoy good gaming, specially when odds are it will be on sale just a few months down the line.

no, they're running out, ukraine just got the old stuff, most of the stock has been recently expended by giving it to israel to massacre civilians in gaza, also in lebannon and their excursions into syria, then another civilian killing frenzy in yemen where they got their ass kicked by real fighters they weren't able to touch (which in trumpspeak is spelled out as "yemen capitulated"), oh and trying to avoid israel getting rightly and thoroughly pounded by iran, without much success (which in trumpspeak is spelled out as "we obliterated, now iran is a great and beautiful country again and has oil and a beautiful future"). all that is actually a whole lot of fireworks for a candidate to the nobel peace price that they're simply not able to replenish at that rate. maybe if they ask russia or china for it, politely?

it's not clear at all where that cash goes in all cases, but it still stays in the big club, go figure. about desperate ... they just "commited" 800 billion of imaginary euros over the "next few years" to fight imaginary invaders. because evil russia. yet an invasion of western europe is less likely by russia than by alien sharks with lasers strapped on their backs. they are desperate and irrational. or they're just set to rip us off, who knows.

if they did they would outright ban it, and if they had an answer they would be developing their own, not regulations intended to haggle for a tiny slice of the profits. it's hilarious that they even make that explicit. 10%! they will make big headlines settling for 10% of that ... and lucky to actually get a 10% of that. nobody gives a shit about the product, it's sold already.

"daddy"? he's not really new, but his gambling problem is getting worse ... kids are panicking already but just wait until the eviction notice arrives.

so is the eu comission's. they're desperate for cash and being taken seriously which nobody does anymore. the whole competition thing is just a facade, we aren't even in a position to compete.

you know that one possible way out of us' colossal debt (which is otherwise already unpayable) would be just devaluating the dollar? have fun with those pieces of paper and metal of yours if that happens. no money is real, it's just trust.

it was a clusterfuck but ended up being a fun day, not without valuable lessons indeed: people find a way around, pretty quickly, and humanity sometimes surprises you. if you have ever driven around in the dense and hostile jungle of barcelona's traffic you'll know what a depressing and unnerving experience it is. however without traffic lights and with the police completely overwhelmed (and virtually absent) the pure chaos magically worked out. people just did that, there was no need for police. everyone was much, much nicer than usual and let each other pass, actually driving with much more care than usual, and even the massive jams that formed somehow miraculously flowed and everyone got to their destination, maybe a bit late, but without accidents. large queues formed at supermarkets and grocery shops, with customers entering one by one, with flashlights, phones or candles, and paying in cash (both cash and plastic are accepted almost everywhere) or shopkeepers simply writing down the debt on paper to be paid later, while people in the queue kept chatting and cheerfully cracking jokes about the situation, not rioting. neighbors volunteered to help the elderly and impaired to get their stuff or just get around in the evening, with youths having a big time hanging out in a strange, pitch dark city, no looting or vandalism anywhere that i know of. it was kind of magical.

these mega rich have immense power and influence, arguably more than the 99% combined, and a good part of them run high emission industries. they could easily do a whole lot more than using 90 jets to attend a photo op in an inconsequential meeting about climate change, not to mention using those jets nearly daily as many of them probably do.

raising prices in response to demand has always been their openly stated core business model, which makes sense and is legit. cutting driver pay does not make any sense and doesn't seem legit.

you can't uninstall google, although you can go for an ungoogled os ...

i would say fb/ig apps are toxic, i never installed them, but then ... mobile apps are toxic by nature, simply because mainstream mobile oses are designed with limited user agency in mind, you cant get around them without resorting to the nuclear option of opting out completely and running your phone on some linux variety and forfeit a lot of functionality. most people won't like that. then again, a majority of desktop users aren't savy enough to even avoid ads either, let alone blocking dedicated sophisticated spyware. the democracy of the internet has long ago been kind of a lost battle, honestly. the likes of fb apps is just the low hanging fruit. and there is lots, LOTS, unending lots of it. enough for them to take over. any remaining opt-out weirdos are irrelevant.

given that, i feel google is, in all its evil, the lesser evil for the time being in this battle which is lost anyway. welcome to the machine.

the vast majority of the population in the world doesn't live in "houses", but in apartment buildings in dense cities with wildly varying exposure to sunlight. in many regions in the world catching sunlight does demand considerable available surface. the roofs of these buildings may not be big enough to provide for the many families that can be stuffed into them, and it isn't an individual choice and operation anymore. so not so simple, although i agree with your bottom line. btw solar farms are a thing but, again, not without its own problems.

one thing that would undoubtedly help us with this transition is ... peace, plain and simple. you can't rely on solar (or bother much about the environment for that matter) if you have to become a war economy because the declining hegemon in denial judges, quite wrongly, that sowing chaos does serve it better than peaceful development and cooperation and is igniting wars all over the planet. that doesn't leave much room for individual choice either.

indeed. however i wouldn't blow this out of proportion (disclaimer: didn't read tfa, i'm not surprised at all by these results).

back in the day it was fashionable for a while to teach kids to play chess to bolster their mental abilities. jorge luis borges (who was a brilliant story writer but usually an utter moron when it came to worldview, so this came as a surprise to me and maybe that's why i remember it) had a very good quote about this: "playing chess develops intelligence to play chess" which neatly summarizes the point i would like to make.

the point being that our mental abilities have been consistently changing and evolving to adapt to the changes in our environment that we ourselves create. some examples: we no longer teach calligraphy so most people's handwriting sucks, but that's no problem because we count on keyboards. we no longer emphasize ortography because we have autocorrect (ymmv). we no longer practice mental calculations because we invented electronic calculators and then computers. we no longer train the ability for realistic painting because we invented the picture camera (and abstract painting bloomed). taxi driver's posterior hyppocampi are no longer more developed than normal because they rely on gps navigators. and on an on. yet we still function, and it can be argued we are in general even more creative and/or more efficient than we ever were. this doesn't mean we're no longer able to write, paint or navigate, we just do it differently, and in many aspects we do more than ever. all these abilities we worked so hard on still exist but in a very limited and specific way, most people don't need them.

i think in this regard ai is fundamentally no different from keyboards, spell checkers, calculators cameras and navigators. it's just another new tool that will shape our behavior and our capabilities, with some atrophiating and some other blooming. while there are many concerns about the use of ai, some of them very serious, i don't think its impact on our mental abilities is something to worry about (although important to research and monitor). now, i do reckon borges said this in a much more elegant and concise way, and without chatgpt!

i searched for the product, as the first sentence of the abstract framed it as a notable and well known and successful gadget i had never heard of without the rest of the abstract providing any clue about it.

i arrived at the product's landing page, and glanced over entire sections of text an images that, again, provided no information whatsoever about it. it struck me as the worst promotional page of a product ever. i glanced over the word "subscription" and felt a tiny bit of intrigue, but slightly more cringe than that.

i went to the products section. my impression was that there indeed doesn't exist anything as "the field book" as it just showed an assortment of wildly different but apparently regular note books, like you would see on amazon. it's apparently just a marketing name for note books.

i ended my 60 seconds investigation concluding that this company with apparently stardom designer and founder doesn't actually have a good nor even reasonable product to show, but is just fishing for really clueless and gullible customers with too much time and money and too little criteria, and the premonition that i will die without knowing what the damn subscription model is about. the things you learn on slashdot ...

guilty as charged! otoh, apparently reading the whole thing didn't do you much service either ...

btw, how far would you like to "scale" a lottery draw? 2 notes:

1. this system is actually far more complex and expensive to implement, and harder to "scale", likely by orders of magnitude, than your good old mechanical device with its accounting firm, and ...
2. even if it weren't, verifiability doesn't do zilch to scale, it only allows you to discard an entire process if verification happens to fail, effectively reducing its scale to zero.