This. I really enjoyed the first books, but then you got hundreds of pages of...absolutely nothing happening. I gave up out of sheer boredom.

If a single book is 30 plus hours to read it'll never be a successful series.

To be fair, at least around 1/5 or even 1/3 of each book is

  - Recaps of stuff that happened as the storytelling pans towards PoV character.

  - Descriptions of scenery.

  - Slow as hell travel scenes

On TV, you can skip the recaps, scenery is implicit, and the travel montages can be made much faster.

I mean, story summaries are pretty much:

    - Book 1, works as an independent story, the three country boys and two gals are yanked onto the adventure, during which they learn a bunch of lore and at the end they have a bossfight

    - Book 2&3, the boss was just a sub-boss of the real Big Bad, need to grab a bunch of gear. Gals go to level up in wizard school, boys start hunting for that extra gear. Add a couple of prophecies into the mix.

    - Book 4-7: The main character does a bunch of level ups with Fremen (oh wait, Aiel) and defeats a few more bosses. A new group (Seachan) show up in force, while they have so far been only hinted at.

  - Book 8-11: Folks bounce around and nothing much happens, but getting a bunch of setup for the final battle.

  - Books 12-14: Payoff to the previous four books set-up. Plotlines finally getting tied up with massive battles everywhere.

(Yeah, personally at around book 9 I stopped for several years, but then when news got around that the series had finally finished, I got around to reading them. It was ok-ish in the end, but I'll probably not even try reading them again).

    Anyway, there's so much filler in the books that condensing those to around Book 1 = Season 1 and then 1 season for every 2-3 books is not *that* difficult if you just cull a bit of the plot kudzu.

As an anime nerd I'm used to shit getting canceled. One of my favorite animes of all time, witchcraft works, only got 12 eps. On the other hand it got a lot more manga which I tracked down and read. Kind of pricey but I couldn't help myself and there weren't any cheap services I could sign up for to read it at.

With wheel of Time if you like the show you've got I think literally decades of books you can read. I haven't read the series but I think it's got a definitive end. So you're better off than the game of thrones fans.

Skip the Netflix trash and read the books instead.

The books are terrible. I had a good go at the first, and made it less than half way through before giving up. The series is way, way better.

This tells me you haven't read the books.

That is one of the main plots of the source material.

You wouldn't want them to mess with what the author wrote would you?

Do they cut someone in half and fire the half?

Math problem:

The bottom 50% is fired each year. How many years before no one works there?

I am really tired of americans bullying europe into compliance. We don't want your products, we don't want your laws. Go to hell.

China has no such regulations, so that's where AI will be developed.

Foreign countries do not do research at scale. Every technology that has changed the world significantly since the Civil War was created in the United States. Electricity, the Airplane, space flight, nuclear energy, telephony, the Internet, the microprocessor, the television, all came from the United States. Runner up countries are other western speaking countries as well (England, etc).

You anecdote is not consistent with the quoted data though. They are claiming a 0.06 sigma (standard deviation) improvement. That's an absolutely miniscule change on whatever scale of human happiness they are using. Indeed, it is so small that it would be hard to measure accurately and assuming someone of average happiness improved by 0.06 sigma it would only make them happier than just 2.4% of the population and, for someone in the tails of the distrubution the fractional change is even smaller.

For people to start feeling a lot happier, as you indicated, that suggests a much large change in where you are in the distribution that just 0.06 sigma.

On Facebook, a total of 10.6 million users were invited to the study, 673,388 clicked the invitation, and 43,249 were willing to deactivate, consented to participate, and completed the enrollment survey. Of these, 19,857 completed the baseline survey, could be linked to platform data, and had at least 15 minutes of baseline use per day. This final group is our “primary analysis sample.” On Instagram, the analogous numbers are 2.6 million invites, 319,271 clicks, 42,658 enrollment survey completes, and 15,585 participants in the primary analysis sample. See Appendix Table S10 for details. The fact that less than one percent of the people who were invited to the study completed the experiment underscores that one should be cautious in generalizing results outside our sample. Most of this sample selection is driven by the fact that only a few percent of people click on research study invitations or social media ads. The degree of sample selection in our study is slightly less severe than previous social media deactivation studies, primarily because Meta’s research study invitations (which were fixed at the top of users’ news feeds) had a higher click-through rate than the standard social media ads used in prior work.8 In comparison to the full populations of Facebook and Instagram users, our study sample has a higher proportion of users with liberal views and high civic engagement...