Nah, there will be plenty of them working at every cafe in Hollywood just like they are now.

But in all seriousness, the real problem with acting as a career is that only maybe one or two percent of the people who graduate with degrees in drama actually end up acting as a career. Maybe a quarter of them manage to get some odd jobs on the side doing a little bit of voice acting or hand modeling or whatever, but it doesn't pay the bills. The rest of them end up doing other things. There are far more people who want to act than there are jobs that can pay them.

And the reason for this is because Hollywood rakes in huge amounts of money for a small number of elite actors and actresses, and leaves no market for much of anything else. That's changing somewhat with the rise of streaming, but even there, the number of companies doing production is relatively small, and the amount of content they produce is quite limited. In other words, acting wasn't ever really a realistic career in the first place.

And because most of the money went to the wealthy people at the top instead of being turned into more production, and because copyright has made it so that studios can reissue old films and sit on their laurels and make money off of their back catalogs instead of being forced to compete with the public domain by creating new content as the creators of copyright law originally intended, we're seeing more consolidation and less production. Every year, seasons get shorter, fewer shows get greenlit, etc.

So the way I see it, this is destroying a job that was already in decline and hard to get, while in the process creating a giant pile of new jobs for content creators at a different level. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. And there will still be people who choose to act. They'll just be doing it on stage, in schools, in short films that people create for fun, and so on.

Hahahahah. Receptive. Sure. When I'm wasting half an hour or more of my time trying to find a very specific product that meets very specific requirements and can be delivered in a tight timeframe, I'm going to be happily distracted by an ad and say, "Oh, maybe I should buy toilet paper, too." If Amazon's search didn't suck harder than a black hole, maybe, but as long as it's an uphill battle just to buy things on Amazon, and as long as 75% of my purchases end up with me doing a carefully tailored Google search to get to the products that I'm trying to buy instead of the higher-margin, but useless products that they're trying to push, their ads are just going to piss me off even more.

I leave when I make a purchase or conclude that I could not find what I needed. And every extra distraction that gets in the way of finding what I needed makes the latter more likely than the former. It's self-defeating. See also my comment above about seeing products locked in a cage and giving up before someone came to unlock it and ordering it on Amazon. If Amazon becomes too inconvenient, I'll buy it on AliExpress.com or Walmart.com instead.

Do you know, out of all the times I've shopped at Amazon, what percentage of the time an alternative was worth considering? I always have a list of requirements, and products that don't meet all of those requirements are of no value to me. When I'm looking for 6mmx30mm hex pan head machine screws, knowing that Amazon also has 5mmx30mm machine screws and 6mmx30mm countersink Phillips screws is of no value, because I need the exact product that I'm searching for. Again, all that does is make it more likely for me to leave and buy it somewhere else.

Maybe 1% of the time, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. And even then, I know enough to reject large swaths of products in a particular space. What's missing is the "Don't ever show me products like this one again" button. That's what makes Amazon so miserable is that there are so many hundreds of vendors selling the exact same products with different name badges, and you can't find the legitimate products by established vendors for all the dross.

And I've literally never, in all the years I've spend many thousands of dollars per year on Amazon, bought anything because of any of that. So clearly it doesn't work, it isn't smart, and it isn't data-driven, because if it were, they would have realized that they're just wasting my time and pissing me off, and they would have stopped showing me that crap.

He's also wrong about Fulfilled by Amazon. It might be more expensive, but there are no comparable fulfillment services. None. Amazon has 1200 fulfillment warehouses and logistics facilities. And assuming the Google summary isn't wrong, FedEx Logistics has 130, and UPS has 250.

That's why I can order a lot of products and get them on the same day or the next day, depending on when I order them. Literally nobody else can do that unless you want to spend a hundred bucks on next-day air shipment. And when you look at it that way, you just might find that it's not so expensive after all.

Whether that speed translates into increased sales or not is, of course, a different question, and that would probably depend on the vendor and what they're selling.

If true, that's pretty open-and-shut false advertising, and gas companies have been hit with very large fines for playing very similar tricks. This is arguably tantamount to drip pricing, which is explicitly illegal in California (SB 478). And on the federal level, it also appears to violate my casual reading of Title 16 Chapter 1 Subchapter D Part 464 section 2a. Why? Because if you are non-member, that's not the total price. The total price is the other, higher price, or alternatively, the lower price plus the price of Prime membership. And that higher price must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed under 2a.

So to the FTC, if you're reading this, please nail Amazon to the wall.

That's kind of like mine, but backwards. I need something ASAP, so I look online and figure out if they have it at Lowe's or Home Depot. Then I drive there, find that it is locked in a cage, and either hit a call button or wander around looking for someone to unlock the cage that it is locked in. After about five minutes without getting any help, I check the price on Amazon, find that it is $20 cheaper and I can have it the next day, and I order it from Amazon as I walk out of the store without having made a purchase.

Between those two stores, I'm pretty sure they've lost at least a thousand bucks in purchases just from me in the last year alone because of those cages. The whole reason for buying locally is because it is faster and more convenient. If you throw obstacles in my way so that it stops being faster and more convenient, I'll just order everything from Amazon and you'll get no business from me whatsoever, because realistically speaking, they are almost always cheaper. And as more and more stuff from Amazon gets same-day delivery, my willingness to put up with local merchants and the related hassle diminishes.

I mean, it's not terrible. Acceleration is comparable to my 2017 Model X or a current-generation Model Y. (The current generation of Model X leaves it in the dust.) The main problem is that it has as little as 68% of the range of a current Model Y, despite being smaller than a Model Y, weighing less, and having slightly less powerful motors. And despite all of those compromises, it is still only $6k cheaper than the Model Y.

When you're spending about $40k on a car, the difference between $38k and $44k is a lot less than the difference between 222 miles of range and 357 miles of range. If this car were $25k, it would sell very well. But it's competing head-to-head with the Model Y on price and is getting stomped into the ground by the Model Y on range, size, and performance.

The remarkable thing is that the battery isn't significantly smaller than the Model Y in terms of capacity, the motors are less powerful (using less power), and the vehicle weighs less, yet they're still getting less range per charge. Unless they're reserving a lot more of the capacity at the top/bottom of the battery, this suggests to me that either they're wasting a *lot* of power on poor accessory efficiency or their drive motor efficiency sucks. Am I missing something?

The problem is, that's basically the way it works now, albeit in a badly degraded state. Car companies mostly bolt in entertainment systems from one of a small number of vendors. At some point, the entertainment system started needing to know stuff about the car itself, and without adequate standards, that meant that the systems became mostly non-swappable, but the car companies are still buying them from the same few vendors.

What this means is that you don't have competition, because it isn't readily customer-swappable, so there's limited incentive for the infotainment system vendors to improve, because they only have a few potential customers (Ford, GM, etc.), not a few hundred million, and to keep those customers, the products only have to be just slightly better or less hassle to integrate.

When the car companies build it themselves, at least the quality is the responsibility of the same company that is gaining or losing sales because of that quality, so there's some incentive to make things better.

Depends on whether he asked to be invited and if so, why. If the answers are "yes" and "to meet a girlfriend", then it screams of something nefarious. If the answers are pretty much anything else, it doesn't. :-)

To add to that, autism tends to run in families, and according to one study I was skimming, women who are autistic apparently are more uncomfortable during pregnancy to a statistically significant degree. So not only does Tylenol not cause autism, but in fact, autism (in the mother) appears likely to cause Tylenol (use).

I always enjoy when an article uses vague weasel words like "toxic environment". It almost always means the paper is crap.

It is likely to usually be a neurologically targeted autoimmune condition. Yeah, it can have various triggers, just like any autoimmune disease, but typically an allergen or an infective agent that tricks the immune system into attacking your own cells. So there's arguably some truthiness here, anyway. :-D

This sounds like it is being promoted by supplement companies that sell probiotics. To be fair, there is definitely evidence that certain bacterial conditions in your digestive tract can cause neurological disorders. Parkinson's is less common after a vagotomy, and symptoms can be lessened with a fecal microbiota transplant (FMT). So I can't rule out the possibility that a major dose of antibiotics adequate to wipe out the gut bacteria followed by large amounts of probiotics to populate it could reduce the severity of symptoms for some subset of autism cases. But it seems pretty dubious to me without something insanely aggressive, like multiple rounds of oral vancomycin followed by an FMT.

Oh, holy crap. Talk about a small world. I was working at a company that did the operating system software for a competitor of theirs (Kerbango) right around the turn of the century. Unfortunately, at the time, most people's home Internet connection just plain wasn't good enough to do streaming audio in any meaningful way, so the product never shipped.

As for streaming video, YouTube didn't even start until 2005, and Netflix didn't start streaming until 2007. So what Philips shipped in 2003 was also several years too early to be practical. But yeah, they definitely shipped something earlier, anyway. ;-)

The only reference I could find to Zoomer being released in 1992 is an uncited mention in the Wikipedia article, which seems likely to be erroneous given the Byte article linked below.

Nope. The timeline doesn't work. Palm wasn't even founded until 1992. Newton was unveiled to the general public in May of 1992 and was first sold in August of 1993. Zoomer was released, as best I can tell, in November of 1993, by which time the Newton UI had been demonstrated publicly for 18 months, and had been available to the public for three months.

This timeline is supported by this article from Byte Magazine, which talked about a beta version of the Zoomer that they tested in October of 1993.

So either Apple and Palm (or possibly GeoWorks) just happened to design remarkably similar UIs at around the same time or Palm copied Apple. There's no way it could possibly be the other way around unless Apple literally pulled a Xerox Parc and conned GeoWorks/Casio into demoing some early internal alpha UI, because Apple released Newton months before Zoomer was shown to anyone outside of the company, and announced Newton a year and a half earlier, at least to the best of the information I could find on the Internet about events that happened right around the dawn of the world-wide web.

You're welcome?

Depends in part on whether the cable is allowed to slide freely in the tether loop. If it is, then any extra length can come from the entire cable, or at least a large enough portion of the cable to prevent it from snapping, I would think.

Seems like with an anchor and a solid styrofoam buoy or similar, they could float the line a few feet above the sea floor on a flexible tether and prevent this problem more permanently.

Apple's were the first ones that anyone took seriously. Before that, you mostly had HTPCs, which were kind of niche.

Wow. Today I learned about two devices I had never heard of. But look at the user interface of the Samsung tablet from that era and the GridPad tablet. Compare with the Palm. They're nothing alike.

Now tell me the Newton UI wasn't a major influence on Palm's UI.