This. So much this.

I'm a night owl. I hate mornings. Screw forcing me to get up an hour earlier every year because people can't just turn on their damn headlights or bring a flashlight with them. Hell, they could rename noon to "Central America o'clock" for all I care, just pick one time standard and stick with it all year. The difference between DST and standard time will all sort itself out in adjusted scheduling anyway. It's not as if there's a law that says work, school or store openings have to start at specific times.

I'm quite a bit older than Gen Z and even I think AM radio is a waste of spectrum. We've got cell phones now and supposedly Starlink is even capable of providing cell coverage from space. The cell networks are also quite a bit more resilient than people give them credit for, too. Last major hurricane we had here (Irma), I watched the weather radar on my phone throughout the entire storm. Power went out, Spectrum was down, but the cell service stayed up the whole time.

Also, AM radio just sounds like absolute ass. I don't understand how anyone would willingly subject themselves to that when you can get a crystal clear audio feed via modern online streaming. I get it, it was an amazing achievement in its day and a necessary stepping stone to better technologies, but please just let it finally die.

Brainrot social media probably is bad for kids. Lots of stuff out in the real world is bad for kids, too. That's why parents are supposed to do this thing called "parenting" and not let their spawn have access to things that aren't age appropriate.

It absolutely baffles the fuck out of me that so many parents just said to their kids "here's a smartphone, don't do anything stupid with it" and then went all surprised Pikachu faced when their kids went and did the stupid anyway - exactly as anyone with a half functioning brain could've predicted.

If Trump thinks AI is so "super intelligent", why doesn't he ask his favorite LLM for a plan to lower gas prices?

The problem with a flat tax scheme is that it's based on consumption rather than how well the whole capitalism thing is working out for you. I usually like to mention how many iPhones Elon Musk would have to buy in order for him to have paid the same the same percentage of his income towards sales tax as someone making the average median income (it's somewhere around 10.4 million iPhones), but a more down-to-Earth example would be if you happen to know anyone who is of limited means and spends a ton of money in gas because their vehicle is a bit of a gas guzzler. That person is paying more of their income towards road taxes to travel the same distance as someone who conceivably is paying nothing in road taxes, because the person paying nothing was able to afford an EV (assuming they're in one of the states that hasn't implemented a separate EV tax).

Of course, I wouldn't fault you for assuming that the reason the road taxes in my example aren't implemented fairly is because we don't just make everyone pay by the mile. That seems all well and good until you realize that some people are using the roads to commute to their minimum wage job flipping burgers, and others are using the roads to pull down a nice high 6 figure income. Shouldn't the folks who are getting more benefit from the upkeep of the roads have a greater obligation to pay some of that forward (since they're deriving more benefit from the infrastructure and also have more to lose if it isn't properly maintained)?

Lately, that means dumping money into more films for a franchise where the horse hasn't entirely been beaten into an unrecognizable bloody pulp yet.

At least it's just entertainment *shrug*. I'm fine with just re-watching from the back catalog if they don't produce anything good, and if they raise prices on content that actually is otherwise decently entertaining - I'll raise the Jolly Roger. Really, when it comes to companies getting all late stagey with the capitalism, movie studios aren't what you need to worry about.

The worst part is, we knew this and still somehow collectively thought it was a good idea to send this man back to The White House for a second fucking time.

Where I live, we've got these Muscovy ducks near the entrance to my neighborhood that have a tendency to sleep in the road at night. It's not for want of a grassy area to roost in - there's plenty of that. Nope, these ducks just decide that the best place to plop their fat feathery asses down for a snooze, during the time when they're the hardest for passing motorists to see, is right in the middle of the street. As you might imagine, they regularly do get accidentally run over. You'd assume that might send a message to the remaining ducks that their chosen place to sleep is less than ideal, but they're entirely unfazed as to why their comrades sometimes wake up dead in a mess of duck guts and feathers the next morning.

America's voters are like those ducks.

This sort of drama was fairly prevalent in the iOS jailbreaking scene even before AI. The issue was mostly that whatever exploit you found, it would get patched right away anyway, so it ultimately ended up being less about producing something neat that the average user could play with and more about bragging rights between the folks finding and implementing the exploits.

Or just buy the "smart" TV and don't connect it to the internet? I fail to see the issue here.

It's sold as a gaming console. At no point does Sony give the impression that you're buying anything buy a gaming console. Additionally, keeping the system secure is typically considered a desirable aspect of a gaming platform, since it's not really all that much fun to play online against people who are using cheats and/or hacked player profiles.

Granted, I do think gaming consoles should be unlocked by the manufacturer once they reach the end of their supported lifespan, as the hardware could then be repurposed for other uses (and wouldn't just end up a useless brick once the servers shut down).

Can't forget the parody, which was incorrectly attributed to Weird Al back in the Napster days (along with just about every parody song).

You did not just diss Dole Whip? That stuff is the frozen nectar of the Gods when you've been walking around for hours in the hot Florida sun.

That market seems to be pretty saturated. Around here it feels like they passed an ordinance that every strip mall must have at least one smoke shop (with the obligatory obnoxiously bright LED signs saying things like "VAPE", "KRATOM", "THC", etc.)

Most of us here should be old enough to remember when people tried to do serious work under Microsoft Windows in the MS-DOS era, and it crashed if you looked at it funny. Another amusing "it's never going to work" technology story was the development of lithium ion batteries. Early attempts to design a working cell kept going up in flames - literally.

It was even one of the old running gags in Disney's Carousel of Progress that new technologies were inherently buggy.
"But we do have television - when it works."