Bu isn't this the same as when Apple had a 4%, 5% of the desktop market, and so many people here called them a dead company? Here, I'll start your comment to this for you ..."But it's not the same!" Just follow that up with whatever double speak you need to do. Yes, I love hashing up 20 years old frustration.

I thought so.

Well that's just "good business." You pump up stock for the quarter so half of the board can cash out on inflated revenue figures. Who cares about "long term viability?" Get in, fire everyone, raise prices, kill R&D. PROFIT.

Remember when the film War Games came out? Half the audience were enamored, "COMPUTERS!" The other half grumbled "turn off the modem." I think we at the same threshold. The solution to your AI servant? Turn off the computer. You might have a more productive meeting.

Does this kind of anti-Apple click bait still work? There was an argument about the Mac, and some for the iPhone, but EAR PODS? Who the fuck repairs ear pods?

I've seen languages come and go. At college it was Pascal, which led to a job using Fortran, which led to another job using C, and then my career took a left turn to system/network admin. The point is, Python has been preferred teaching language at universities for, what, a decade now. A vote for Python is NOT a vote AGAINST perl. The vast majority of coders, developers, architects HAVE NEVER USED PERL. Projects will be based around Python because it's best sell in the corporate environment. So of course perl's low on the list. That being said, yeah, my last coding project was in Perl, where I replaced a $100k Infosystem Java project with a week of part time perl coding. Anything with strings, oh, databases, web sites, application integration, are ALL DONE BETTER ON PERL. Sorry, I know the flames heading my way, because people don't want to be proven wrong. Anything to keep the reality distortion Python base happy. Hell, I'd bring back Fortran if I could. Still better than Python. I'll give a nod to C. It's excellent for code where speed is needed. Ever worked in a development environment where one coder optimized apps by dumping the executable to assembly and look for the unused loops? No. You just worked with Python and all the warm fuzzies. I say if you are in a Python asylum, see where you can replace a page of type matching and string to integer spaghetti with a couple of lines for perl hashes. Drive them crazy.

We need to implement a full stop on any data that is less than about a year old. EVERYTHING after that is suspect. Flag it in red, so even the "casuals" can see that it's not verified. I know, how do you do that? No idea. But I'm sure people will want to throw AI at finding the AI fakes. And that will work really well

The Golden Age of television was the 40s and 50s. It's been over for about 70 years.

Americans HAVE SAID THAT THEY have been placing less importance on the value of a college education over the past 15 years, to the point that about a third (35%) now rate it as "very important." Forty percent think it is "fairly important," while 24% say it is "not too important."

No survey ever tells you what anyone believes. It only tells you what they SAY about the subject. It's an important distinction, and makes the survey even more damning.

The original post seems to imply that this is something new. It's been going on since I've been able to understand language, and it's called signal to noise. Back in the 70s (and I guarantee through all history) we were inundated with a false narrative. By the time I got to college, I realized how much "history" is, as they say, written by the victors, at a profound level. Our history books are filled with names and dates around "great events," like wars, technology, governments. Well, what about the other 99% of the time? Aren't these the aberrations in history, and the times with peace and productivity and growth the real story?

So nothing new here. People respond to the history they WANT to hear, not the truth. Not what really went down. It's every time some histories tells you what someone BELIEVED, when it really is just what the are recording saying. In the US we are at a nadir of misinformation. But the messages and the techniques and the lies are the same as always. History is hard. Propaganda is oh so fucking easy. That's why it is so important that critical thinkers are in the driving seat, and not thrown off the bus. If it means moving to a new home 6000 miles away, then DO THAT. Do whatever we need to do to keep history as true as we can make it.

Please quit pretending that this is a "stake" in the company. It's simply handing the billionaires yet more to stick in their pockets. Well, you might say, that the money trail goes right into R&D, or building a new factory, so how is this a typical Republican hand out? Look at any state lottery. Here in Illinois they justified the lottery by saying that all the money will go to education, and then cancelled all other existent funding. Same here. The execs will give themselves more billion bonus tied "directly to performance" or some other BS. This is a blatant, criminal shuffling of tax payer dollars into Swiss band accounts.

Yet again Apple is caught red handed forcing people to buy new phones by throttling performance. Oh, wait. Apple doesn't do that. Google does. Well it's OK then.

What about those NFTs? How are those working out for you?

I'm stuck at the first sentence. What?

"But as the distance separating them gradually narrowed, the black hole's immense gravitational pull appears to have distorted the star -- stretching it out from its spherical shape -- and siphoned off material before causing it to explode."

But it also said "The star, which was at least 10 times as massive as our sun, and the black hole, which had a similar mass"

So how exactly does the black hole have "immense pull" when they are the same mass? Is there a nebula of dust from the star that went black hole? "Siphoned off material.." That's a nova then, not a supernova.

Does the summary say ANYTHING that makes sense?