I've reached the age and mental state where I can fully opt out of anything that asks for a subscription. I have only one exception - seamless cloud backup. That's it. No car features, no smart IoT, no printer ink that I can't third party... if my laser printer fails I'll buy a used one that takes knock off toner. If new cars all demand subscriptions them my subscriptionless 2019 Camry will be my last new car.

The world can swing in that direction, but I don't need to stay in the seat. Nor does anybody else.

This doesn't apply to streaming services, which I think are some of the best deals ever offered to consumers. As a buyer of many hundreds of cds, at an average of $200 a month, all the music for under $20? Gimme that.

On a good site, hidden in those 15 pages of rubbish is often the "why". And therein lies the difference between a list of ingredients and simple steps, and the details needed to cook something well. The demand for just the list without context is fine for those doggedly intent on learning nothing.

Sure, I think that some sites should just fuck off and die. All Recipes and the like are good examples. Anything that just warehouses user submitted works, or that bubble recipes up and down based on likes and dislikes. "I made it, but instead of whole milk I used almond milk, half the salt, used ginger instead of galongal, and didn't process the lemongrass. Didn't like it. One star, would not make again." You shouldn't get a vote, numbnuts.

I also believe in the value and tangibility of the physical cookbook. I have just under 300 of them.

But there are sites that I trust. Serious Eats is one of them, because they spend a lot of time on "why", and often try a bunch of methods, sharing the results along the way. I own about a dozen books that are the companions to sites. RecipeTin Eats ones are great.

Like anything on line, there's an oceanic crap, but there are islands of quality. I don't want to see them go under like this.

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." - Keynes

There's just a stack of pressures against hardware sales. The press has been brutal.

- Higher hardware prices
- Microsoft seeming to lose interest in the XBox
- High profile flops
- Triple-A cancellations
- 5 year into current hardware for PS5/XBox - if you want one you probably have it
- Rising economic and financial uncertainty
- Incoming generations used to small format gaming
- Cost of living already too high for Gen Z, and not getting better.

I've got a Series X, and I suspect it's the last console I'll own. And I've had consoles since I used a Coleco Telstar to burn bars into the phosphor on a TV in the late 70s. I'm aging out - and I'm taking my money with me.

And honestly, I really bailed a couple of years ago. I had the MS Game Pass for a while, but I haven't bought a major title in at least three years, and I haven't spent a dime on XBox-related anything in 2025. The last thing I actually played on Game Pass was a 15 year old platformer called "Limbo".

My 65" C8 is the best television that I have ever owned, hands-down, but I turned that smart TV dumb almost immediately. Once a year I check for firmware updates using a temporary guest network. If I find an update that I think I need I install it then otherwise I leave it alone.

In my electronics graveyard are three generations of Roku, two Nvidia shields, a Chromecast, a couple of Kodi, boxes, on Amazon fire stick, and probably some more devices that I have forgotten about. I also have an Xbox that was my go to device until recently. But now everything runs through two Apple TV boxes.

With so many inexpensive options, why anybody would use an outdated, underpowered piece of shit like WebOS is beyond me.

For me, the ability to turn off the built-in smart center is a must have for any future TV purchase. No exceptions.

Jetbrains would disagree.

The US is Roy Kent.

Growing up if I wanted to see a show I liked, it was planned into my week. We had three channels in English, one in French. I remember the day we got cable. The guy came in and hooked it up, and I switched the TV from 13 to 8 to finish watching Gilligan's Island.

Know what was great about this inflexibility? I was bound to a small amount of time. I couldn't lose a weekend binge watching seasons of stuff. I lost time to entertainment in 30 or 60 minute chunks a few times a week, plus some sports.

The introduction of the DVR was when things started to go south. I could schedule series recordings for stuff I didn't know if I wanted to watch. I could watch a show while recording others simultaneously. I was effectively filling large swaths of my future time. Now there's no end of immediately available material, and if I wanted to I could fill every waking moment with streaming. It isn't healthy.

If we suddenly had to go back to a handful of channels with scheduled broadcasts, I struggle to think how we would be anything but better for it.

Hah. Momentary lapse. Pardon me. :)

They erred in the other direction. The English descriptor of "forty-three trillion, eight hundred billion per year" is correct. The number shaved a trio of zeros by accident.

8,760 hours x 5B = 43,800,000,000,000

And I, too, am skeptical. Sounds like a meaningless calculation based on really silly choices of data points.

Now, I am neither a denier nor a skeptic. I am fully on board with anthropomorphic climate change. But this kind of rhetoric is worse than useless - it's counterproductive.

I once watched a news segment where they did bacteria checks of a home of a woman who kept an immaculate house. They found contamination all over the place. I looked around my home and thought, "Well, fuck me. If she can't keep it at bay, I certainly can't, so I won't worry about it."

Somebody's going to get angry, make some threats, bluster, cave, go silent, then defend H1B while saying "America First".

Nobody in particular. Just the royal "Somebody".

No generalization ever applies universally. That doesn't make them useless. My father knew the difference between useful and problematic complexity. I get your point, and I also completely understand his.

"do you really think the grades are that important?"

If I'm asking somebody's opinion of John Stuart Mills, probably not. But if I need them to design a bridge, the yes, I want to know they were graded. And, to one point expressed in the article, I want to know the institution is concerned about maintaining a reputation for producing capable graduates.

If we think a bachelors degree has low utility now, imagine what value employers place on it if grading stops being a gatekeeper. It might be slightly more favorable than nothing... but barely.

Are smart people more prone to psychological issues?

As my father (a heavy duty mechanic) told me often, "The more complicated you make something, the more likely it is to break down." I think that's true of brains. But I doubt that would account for quarter or more of the student body being "disabled".

Rather, considering how the number of self-diagnosing jackasses I've met has skyrocketed in the 2000s, I can totally see victimhood being part of the problem.

"There are no more stupid people anymore. Everybody has a learning disorder." - George Carlin