The time of entertainment per dollar is probably a bit different too I think. Depending on the replayability of the game in question, one can buy a game and get enjoyment out of it for hundreds or in some cases over a thousand hours. Meanwhile, even if you really enjoy a movie and rewatch it like 10 different times, that’s still only like 20 hours. Movies tend to be cheaper to buy than games individually, but I suspect that buying enough movies to make up the time difference would make the movies significantly more expensive.

And that’d be reasonable for you to do. However, having a network choose to remove something, or cut ties with servers in the network that don’t in an attempt to persuade them to remove that thing, isn’t exactly the same as a government ordering a thing be removed. The former doesn’t give much avenue for a malicious actor to suppress something that isn’t in their interest, because they can hardly control the collective actions of users on the network, but the latter does by creating a single point of decision making on the network’s content from the outside. Not that the motivations in wanting that video gone were bad, but there is an element of risk to making it possible for a government entity to remove something from a social network, even if the thing they want gone this time is something that really shouldn’t be there.

Bold of one to assume we can run an economy capable of supporting billionaires without a habitable biosphere.

There is a brand of flour called King Arthur that seems pretty decent as far as brands as a general concept go. I don’t get them all the time as their stuff does tend to cost more, but I’ve found my bread machine has consistently done better with their stuff than any other flour I’ve tried (I’m not sure exactly why, what is there to get wrong with grinding flour, that would enable a significant difference in quality to exist?), they don’t seem to have gotten any worse over the time I’ve known about them, and operate as some sort of employee cooperative from what I’ve read.

One of the problems of car centric society is that the process for licensing almost has to be too lenient, because it causes major issues with people not being able to get around unless almost everybody can get a license, which means that regardless of safety, the bar has to be set low.

echidna I understand, but why cat?

Basically any interest of mine, doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll easily end up rambling on and on about it if the conversation goes there. I tend to end up rambling to people I know about geckos a lot, with varying degrees of interest on their part.

We tried banning it, it didn’t really end too well, as it was still available but funded a lot of organized crime, but apparently we didn’t learn our lesson when it comes to other drugs. It’s also not really practical to control as making it, in at least some form or another, is too easy. Even weed requires you have seeds from a specific plant to produce it, whereas a huge, huge variety of foods cab be fermented. It’s also got a lot of cultural relevance and history to it that make people think of it as different from other drugs

It’s not really a great sign for the developers if their game doesn’t have a ton of replay value I imagine. Consider Skyrim, it’s the same general type of game, but people play that game over and over and make modifications to it to keep it fresh and enjoyable even now, and as a result Bethesda has been able to resell it for other platforms or with extra content or related merch for years, because people like it enough to keep coming back. If Starfield isn’t managing the same despite being the same sort of game from the same company, then that both serves as a warning to those who haven’t gotten it yet that the game probably isn’t as enjoyable by comparison, and also doesn’t give the devs as much incentive to keep making any improvements to it.

To my understanding, it is actually made of cheese, just cheese that has been melted, pasteurized to extend shelf life and then cooled back into solid cheese again.

I suspect that firefly might survive as well, not because of anything particularly special about their launcher (though having flown it does put them ahead of the many companies that haven’t even done that yet, even if they’ve not had all the flights that rocketlab does), but because they have that contract to supply rocket parts for Northrop Grumman as well to provide extra revenue and experience compared to if all they sold was rides on their own rocket.

Wasn’t that sub also rife with cost-cutting measures to an ultimately unsafe degree? I also seem to recall stories of it’s owner, prior to the incident, saying that it had not yet reached the point of being profitable. That doesn’t mean that running a business off extreme tourism to rich people isn’t viable of course, but I’m skeptical that it’ll be all that big or successful of one.

I’ve just had the realization that, Garfield has no reason to hate Mondays for work or anything, because he’s a cat. The most plausible reason for a pet to hate Mondays is that they mean their human is away a lot of the day again after being home for a couple days, which makes the idea of Jon acting abusive to him over it only sadder.

I mean, kinda Jon’s fault for getting a cat then, they’re not exactly known for contributing anything except emotional benefits and maybe keeping mice away

The thing is, if they're finding the relevant microbes to start this research with already eating plastic, then there are already naturally occurring plastic eating bacteria in the environment. Beyond that though, bacteria aren't going to be able to degrade stuff to the same degree under every condition. Consider that wood is biodegradable, but we can build wooden structures and wooden objects that last for generations.

Can confirm I got this too just now on my G Stylus

Relevant xkcd

It does make me vaguely curious what happens if you try to make one of these on the more powerful end explain step by step how its own program works. I dont really expect it to be accurate, given that if people dont know how the thing works, it probably wont find much about that in it’s training data, but if what it learns ultimately enables it to make connections about how the real world works to some degree, could it figure out enough to give even marginally useful hints?

when I worked as a grocery store cashier for a few months, I dont think I was ever given any kind of rule that customers couldnt bag. Usually both the customer and I would bag things, sometimes they’d stand and let me do it, and once or twice they were just like “It’s okay, let me take care of it” and Id let them do it. Never considered it rude or anything.

While I agree with the idea that there is merit to a proper and well designed national id for official uses, I disagree with the idea of attaching it to R18 content. The way I see it, trying to do so inevitably intrudes on people’s privacy in some way (content providers might collect that ID to check against government records, leading to the risk that they improperly store it, for example, or the government might be tempted to police the activities of adults to an unreasonable level, or at least creates the infrastructure to do so if a more restrictive government came into power). Further, it will not and fundamentally cannot stop kids from accessing things deemed inappropriate for them, because kids are curious, and the things one wants to restrict in this way are generally information, which is trivially easy for them to copy and distribute among themselves. I think we need better education, both to children/teenagers (depending on the subject) about those topics we as a society seem averse to the idea of them knowing about, but which they will inevitably learn of anyway (things like sex-ed, or how to deal with drug addiction or its presence among people they might know (and not just in the counterproductive way that things like DARE used to do)), and to parents about how to deal with children becoming curious about or trying to access restricted topics. Beyond that, I think we should generally leave it to parents to parent their children. While it might not be ideal if some kid gets access to a video game rated for adults, it also isnt physically dangerous to them in the way that something like alcohol is, so treating it the same way is overkill at best.