Fires are also more of a problem because we're spreading out more through traditionally-forested areas. That fire that 50 years ago might have burned down 50 homes through a rural area could today burn down 1000 homes.

That's because the streaming services don't make a huge amount of money. The only way to recoup the costs of a $200m movie is to release it in theaters, because that's where the money comes from. Releasing it on a streaming service means eating most of that $200m in a loss. One thing is for sure: if streaming takes over completely and the theater industry dies, almost no one will approve those $100m+ budgets for a 2-hour movie anymore. Financially impossible.

Yup! DRM doesn't deter true pirates, but it sure gets in the way of anyone wanting to reasonably space-shift his own content!

Yeah, Disney pretty much bought everyone. In this case, they bought 20th Century Fox and now have access to anything that Fox owns. Also the reason why you can watch all 30+ seasons of the Simpsons now on Disney+..

I'm telling you, the "Golden Age" was the mid-2000s, at the peak of pre-streaming Netflix. Reasonable monthly rate, and access to... _EVERYTHING_. The only catch... sometimes you had to wait a few days between ordering and when you can watch it. Boo effing hoo. These days we can pay five times as much on streaming services and not get so much as half of the content.

No evidence so far. It's just a page from the "cancel culture is evil, they are going to look around to kick off anyone who isn't a liberal activist" panic.
At this point, it feels like the tech bro version of the War on Christmas (which didn't exist) or White Genocide (also doesn't exist) nonsense -- not exactly based in reality, but pure stereotype.

For example, his famous "list of 57 communists working in the state department" that brandished didn't actually exist. He said he had "penetrated the iron curtain of State Department secrecy" while hiding that most of the names came from the Robert Lee list that had contained mostly named that had been cleared. McCarthy constantly exaggerated the loyalties of the people on the list, converting "has some sympathies for communist causes" to "a communist." He was good at using rhetoric, but rarely produced any evidence towards a person.

I can say of the nine people charged by McCarthy at the Tydings committee, the evidence against four of them was very flimsy (and they were later cleared by loyalty boards), and the evidence against these five was even weaker:
Dorothy Kenyon, a feminist who did some work for the UN (good enough for McCarthy to charge her as a communist), who lost her civil service job as a result of McCarthy's allegations.

Esther Brunauer, who left Germany when the Nazis came to power, and converted previously-pacifist to more specifically anti-isolation and anti-Nazi stances at the start of WW2. After the war, she came under attack from isolationists, but Senator Joe Ball stated she was "perhaps the most violently anti-Communist person I know."

Gustavo Duran, who joined an anti-Communist faction during the Spanish Civil War. McCarthy claimed that in a picture from that time, he was wearing a uniform of the SIM - The Russian military intelligence. The uniform was actually the Spanish military uniform. No communist ties were ever proven.

Owen Lattimore, who made some pro-Soviet Union statements. Specifically, during World War II, he was in favor of the USSR's foreign policy of international cooperation against against the Axis Powers of Japan and Germany (before the US's entering the war), and due to that he published an article by a pro-Soviet writer who wrote favorably on Stalin's purge trials to strengthen the Soviet Union against the upcoming war on the Axis Powers. It was absolutely the biggest blunder of his career, and his own editorials arguing against allowing a communist takeover of China didn't erase that stain. Later reporting on how good things looked at a sanitized Russian labor camp did not help his position either. His writings were "superficial and uncritical", but McCarthy trumped up the charges and turned it into "Owen Lattimore is a top Russian spy." No proof was able to be produced, later declassification of intercepted Russian cables mentioned Lattimore, and a retired FBI agent 30 years later said they never had anything substantial against him.

Harlow Shapley was one of the nine people charged in the Tydings hearings, but I can't find much information here. Despite the report's statements, Shapley was not in the State Department, working as an astronomer with the Harvard College Observatory. He was known for his public contempt for HUAC, but these days contempt for that group is pretty reasonable.

Uh huh. Maybe George shouldn't have run after him with a gun. If someone were doing that to me, I might have tried to get the jump on him too.

Someone coming after me with a gun is a direct threat on my life, and yes, I do have the right to defend myself.

Your link does not support your statement. There is a difference between "A is true" and "A cannot be proven false."

You still have a "right," even if it is abridged or violated. That still is a right, and then that situation gets called a rights violation. I don't know that I believe in the concept of "natural rights," but plenty of people do and find that their can't be a moral justification for those violations.

Well, there's probably some overlap..

Which is why user reviews should always be treated with extreme suspicion. You can't be sure that an app with 70% positive reviews actually has 70% of their user base thinking positively about it, or whether it's manipulated, and no one really has the ability to tell the difference.

Or it's IN the hedge fund that needs to be protected...

That's particularly limiting definition that makes a review almost useless, and it certainly doesn't follow the definition of "review" that we've been using for over a hundred years. Review has typically encompassed "quality level" as well, like how entertaining a movie is, how much better product X does a task than product Y, and so forth. If John C. Moneybags can use his influence to prevent ordinary users from affecting the market like he can and ordinary users make up Robinhood's base, then that affects functionality of the application, and it's absolutely fair to factor that into a review.

The goal of a review system should reflect how users of the service/product felt about the service they used. Therefore, if someone has never used Robinhood but got angry about a news story about them and left a review, that should NOT be considered a legitimate review. But if you used Robinhood and found yourself frozen out of trades on the stocks you wanted, that's a very legitimate customer grievance. Supposedly the earlier low rating was due to the review bombing, but the current low rating follows the review rules, made of dissatisfied customers.

And don't try fooling the Necronomicon into thinking that you said it correctly when you'd forgotten the words, because that totally won't work.

It seems designed to appeal to the QAnon idiots who seriously think Trump is fighting a secret war with all this evidence we don't know about.

I'm not.