Counterpoint: People could miss out on good opportunities without targeted ads. I'm interested in local theater and I've found out about several productions through Facebook ads. Also I go running, and there are a couple of local events that I only found out about because of Facebook. If advertising is partly about matching up possible consumers and possible suppliers then (and it pains me to say this) Facebook's targeting could be a good thing.

"Race to the bottom" should get more love in Slashdot. It gives people more stuff for less money, and it's silly to engineer a sandwich toaster to last for 20 years, when it might only get used 20 times. But I'm quite keen on my over-engineered vacuum cleaner.

Honeybees and CGP Grey know it: Hexagons are the Bestagons.

Hundreds of billions of dollars to teach a 78 year old man some economics. Coursera would be a lot cheaper.

Agreed. Also it's wise to spend the shortest possible time at the "insane crowd around the Mona Lisa" exhibit.

I can't remember what I ordered at about 9am in the Louvre cafeteria, but they served me a beer. I'm pretty sure my French isn't that bad. Anyway, quite an unexpected treat.

It's funny that we're discussing matters of enormous constitutional importance, but what I most care about is that you didn't put a space before either of the opening brackets :)

Isn't this just reflecting the reality that the Congress has taken a back seat and the Executive is completely in control? Perhaps the GDR and the DPRK should have edited themselves in the same way.

That's a fair point.

If I was going to be snarky, I'd say that "would of" instead of "would have" is evidence for declining standards, but that would just be me being old :)

You could have written the same in the 1850s (German, Italian and Irish immigration), the 1920s (eugenics), or many other times in the past. People always think we've peaked and the new generation is terrible, partly because it's the old generation that is setting the (soon-to-be-outdated) parameters on what the important skills are.

Actually it's "Barbra", which is a fairly unusual spelling, with only three Barbras and over 200 Barbaras on the relevant Wikipedia page. She was also the answer to the NPR Sunday puzzle recently: "Barbra Streisand, sand bar".

As advertisements go, it's not particularly a hard sell: "lack of new features", "model never materialised", "sharp decline".

I wonder if part of the downturn is just people holding on to their watches for longer before replacing them. I've bought Garmin running watches in 2016, 2020, and 2024. I'd imagine that if people hold on to their Apple watches for four years or more, then that would tend to reduce their sales.

If you trip over a Roomba while it's cleaning the shopping mall floor, sue the mall. If you trip over a young woman with a mop, sue your optometrist.

San Francisco is about 800 miles south of the Canadian border and switching to daylight saving time in the summer works there. Without DST days would start before 5am for a couple of months in the summer. How about permanent DST? That would mean a winter sunrise after 8.15am for a couple of months. Changing the clocks twice a year avoids this.

Oops - DC would also need more voters to qualify for four electoral college votes.

The number comes from the US electoral college, based on having 435 representatives, 100 senators (two per state) and three votes from the District of Columbia (23rd Amendment). Fun fact: if many voters migrated from other states to Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming, then that might increase DC's vote count and bring the total electoral college to 539 :)