Some TVs may project fake static.

Just because OTA broadcasts are digital doesn’t mean you are stuck with all or nothing. You can definitely have poor signal and see or hear something other than what was intended. Doesn’t manifest as analog static, but depending on your decoding and error correction schemes, you can have cut audio, frozen frames, iframe inconsistencies, and stuttering.

Enjoy it! You could be driving another fun car with a completely boring sounding engine (cough FL5 cough) with almost no good sounding exhausts that aren’t just noise.

Glorious 160x150 resolution

There was a British superhero TV show called Misfits. One of the delinquents had the power to control milk, I.e. you drink milk and this guy could curdle it in your body and kill you.

Are we both thinking about 15% BAC murderin’ Jesus here?

Russia claimed and held territory. Their military leadership doesn’t particularly value human lives in this conflict and hasn’t historically either. I have no doubt that they will continue the course suffering heavy human losses and eventually find some form of victory.

Ukraine needs more people if they want any hope of staving that eventuality off. The Russians have very different ideas of fighting a war of attrition.

Quantity is a quality of its own. I’d say Ukraine is hanging on with advanced weaponry. It needs the mass to push Russian troop advances and repel their forces out of their country.

Anything else is keeping the status quo of roughly even wins and losses, which will never lead to victory in the next decade.

Looks like fun, but expected full release out of early access in 2026?

That’s a year and a half wait to finish out the story.

A fits on paper much better than B, especially when you try to write as small as possible to fit all of your work on one line

Pedantry is always important! I would argue that ants would be selected over humans by both mass and population

Look at this human still using SSH. I bet they still process on old PCs instead of PC2’s

This shit can destroy companies and tank its value

Leaving hundreds of contacts in limbo with no resolution has the potential to cost more than $17 million in legal fees and termination clauses.

Where the fuck is the board of directors and why are none of the shareholders revolting?

We have plenty of things to be old grumpy grouches about.

“Those banks ruined the American dream and we bailed them out!”

“Fossil fuel companies successfully lobbied the government to allow them to poison our planet in the name of profit!”

“Those Disney crooks consolidated all media and destroyed independent creative ventures!”

“Back in my day we could afford a house if we saved 10 years of earnings for a down payment and then took out a loan eventually totaling twice the value of the purchase price. You kids have it easy with your rental sleeping pods and low-monthly rate outdoors park subscriptions. You don’t even contribute to furniture or clothing industries because you don’t own a place to put any!”

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The bottom 20% of earners aren’t likely to make the same amount in CA vs TX.

California’s minimum wage is $16. Working 40 hours (hard on a minimum wage job for reasons) brings $640 a week. 10.5% of that is $67

Texas’s is $7.25. 40 hours of that job is $290. 13% of that is $38.

In this bad example, a minimum wage earner in California pays almost double the tax than a minimum wage worker in Texas. It’s a bad example for many reasons, including us not taking into account the extra spending power the California worker has after taxes.

I’ve lived in both. The average people don’t seem to care.

Older Texans might namedrop California at times when they’re airing political grievances, but older people everywhere seem to have some casual “product of the times” prejudices against something.

I hope games will be able to hit 60fps stable or offer some type of 40hz minimums for the higher refresh rate TVs.

Resolution is important, but if the games still perform like they do now, I’d be disappointed.

I’m not an economist but that makes sense to me.

What about a modified scenario:

A small island has three cupcake makers operating out of their homes: Meta, Alphabet, and Bytedance. Each has captured a section of the island’s market with cupcakes and at this point, there’s no real opportunity for growth. Meta can’t convince Bytedance’s customers to switch because they prefer other flavors. Meta would need to purchase one of the other cupcake companies in order to expand.

None of the cupcake makers are interested in selling their companies. They consider themselves elite and their successes feed into the CEO and shareholder perceptions of value and success.

Now, we consider that one of the cupcake companies is funded by a rich uncle from a different country. The island’s elders decide that the uncle’s influence is too great and orders Bytedance to sell its cupcake company or leave the island.

We’ve established earlier that people who like Bytedance cupcakes don’t necessarily want to eat Meta or Alphabet cupcakes, so if they leave the market, those customers may be gone for good. They may have a change of heart and decide that cupcakes of any flavor are fine, but they may also be angry that the government forced their favorite place out of business. In any case, Meta and Alphabet cannot rely capturing this segment of the market to grow.

Faced with the dilemma of possibly gaining customers organically or definitely gaining customers by purchasing their preferred product brand, I’d argue that the remaining companies may jump on the opportunity to purchase Bytedance before they are forced out. None of the cupcake companies were up for sale in a traditional sense before, so this was never a realistic path to achieve growth.

“Vote to participate in democracy! Here’s some local voting resources”

vs

“Vote to protect our interests! Tell your representative that they are killing free speech if they don’t listen to me”

The US government has been caught doing the same thing… poorly. You probably aren’t going to find a lot of sources showing that the US is fighting these fights on Facebook and twitter, but you can read between the lines with interviews. In general, these kinds of things aren’t performed out in the open.

Agree with you though. National security has trumped privacy. 9/11 changed a lot of things in a bad way.

I’m not arguing against them explaining their rationale. I originally argued that they shouldn’t be taken as experts.

Zuckerberg and Musk “get” to do these things because they are in the US, with majority US-based workers, running off US-based infrastructure. If any of these platforms are being used to facilitate attacks against the US, the government can choose any number of methods to step in and enforce compliance to mitigate the threat. That’s it. This is about free speech in that not all speech is protected. If somebody uses TikTok to perform the digital equivalent of yelling fire in a crowded theater, the government sees a need to control it.

If Facebook was run and operated out of Tunisia, I’d expect these same conversations to be happening with them as well.