I don’t remove responsibility from the people, but don’t pretend that companies don’t spend piles of cash on marketing when it has absolutely no influence on their customers’ purchasing decisions. Also, don’t pretend that marketing isn’t pandering to appeal and not function.

So what you’re saying is that marketing provides a sober, unbiased presentatiin of the benefits and drawbacks of the products they’re trying to sell, and people make rational, informed decisions? No, like you said, most people behave little better than monkeys, and marketing caters to that, further skewing the norms and pushing people to buy things based on perceived benefits while ignoring the real drawbacks. Next you’ll tell me the prescription opioid epidemic wasn’t exacerbated by the claims that the new opioids were less addictive and pharmaceutical companies incentivizing doctors to prescribe them more than necessary, a lot of words that boil down to ‘marketing’.

You also ignore the role marketing has to play in convincing people that they need those things. Most people don’t need an SUV, let alone a truck, yet I see plenty of people driving these, and even thinking they’re safer than sedans. But they cost more money, which means more profit, and why would it be surprising that people who sell something with a relatively inelastic market want to maximize profit dollars per sale?

They are a better source than anything you’ve provided, yes.

You’re right, Wikipedia is a terrible primary source, because it isn’t a primary source. So, while you should never reference it in a paper or dissertation, the sources it references are perfectly valid. The good news is, I’m not writing an essay or dissertation, and I don’t have to follow the correct rules for those. I did you the favor of clicking two links deeper (it took about a minute) and finding the information where they talk about all those cases that the judges totally threw so they could force you to pay illegal taxes. Now, I can’t make you turn that link purple, but if you do you might get the other side of that argument that you apparently haven’t stumbled across in your decades of examination. Good luck.

Sorry, saw your response just after I had posted the same in response to his comment.

There is no historical agreement that the earth is round, but guess what?

When the second argument that is listed in Wikipedia is that Ohio doesn’t count when it had been a state for over a century before the amendment was proposed, I start to think these arguments are specious at best. It seems every judge the case had gone before agreed with that stance, which also sounds like historical agreement to me. Given the amendment was proposed due to the Supreme Court overturning income tax as unconstitutional, it also appears the courts were more than willing to rule against income tax prior to this supposedly dubious amendment.

Do you have any evidence that is stronger than the Obama birther conspiracies?

What do you mean by questionable circumstances?

Space is almost free, and it’s a good cue to what you’re going to find. It’s how I tell my PerfectDark posts apart.

Looks like we found someone who believed it was financially necessary for the manufacture of the shuttle to be spread across the country.

Performance is really a key factor, and gives rise to now being a time when truly competitive handheld is possible. Like this chart shows, there was a quadrupling of power between 2016 and 2020, but only a doubling of power between 2020 and 2023, with stagnation for the last couple years, largely due to technical limitations. RAM and storage have also seen massive boosts followed by stagnation, as well as a closing of the bandwidth gap between RAM and storage (from about 6 orders of magnitude to 3 orders of magnitude difference with solid state storage). The GPU front is still increasing in performance, with more watts and/or transistors giving more power, with raw performance increasing by a factor of 8 over 10 years.

Now you take those base values for performance, and a few things come together. First, storage has become low-energy, and is more performant, especially in the mobile market. Second, lower power CPUs are reasonably competitive, which means longer battery run time at an acceptable performance level. Third, while there is a bigger gap on GPU performance, smaller screens mean fewer pixels to drive so something a little older and less power hungry can still give satisfactory results. Put those all together, coupled with the steady and constant improvements in battery performance over the last 30 years, and you can make an acceptable mobile computer platform with decent results that’s able to play all but the most demanding of games from the last few years. Certainly, you can’t compete with the power of a desktop gaming PC, but you can get good enough. And then, with a few design tweaks, you can get a little better.

So, until and unless serious changes happen in the CPU or GPU market, mobile PC gaming has a chance to be good enough for a lot of people. I currently do over 90% of my gaming on the Steam Deck, but I’m also aware that I have little interest in playing the newest game as soon as it comes out so the Steam Deck is particularly suited to my tastes.

If Windows was actually good, you could have it take a question and paste the results into Notepad without having to add AI there. If it was really good, the AI segment would be optional.

There are legitimate uses for this. People with neurological conditions, spinal injuries, etc. Would I sign up for this? Now? No. Am I willing to say the same in 30 years? I can’t give a solid answer on that.

It was definitely lacking in core areas. Large files, better search, possibly spell check (and why isn’t spell check core Windows functionality?). It also could have used better handling for non-Windows text files. But overall, yes, this wasn’t a program that needed a dedicated team to manage or improve.

I only got my deck last year, so it think I can hold off until the Deckard. Kind of okay paying 3 times as much for VR to not have it tied to Meta/Zuck.

Musk followers don’t seem to be limited to a certain job or class of jobs, so the point is moot. Society won’t run worse because all the shitty people left.

If you want to put an idea out there, permissive licenses are the most likely to promote it. Any individual or organization can use it without restrictions (or restrictions that aren’t unpalatable to most). So if what you’re trying to promote is an idea, a technique, or a standard, this type of license allows it to have the greatest reach.

I don’t have a Tesla and am just starting to dip my toes into home automation. That said, there’s an article on Teslemetry that discusses the cost of these actions and is trying to reduce them to only when necessary. Here’s a link. I’m not sure if the HA integration is using the queue they talk about or if it’s something that needs to be set by you, but hopefully this gives you a useful starting point. If nothing else, there’s a Discord link that may prove useful.

We could be witnessing the birth of a meme!

I asked my company if I could use a password manager and they said no. So now they get a set of rotating passwords that are the same for all my work accounts. It doesn’t really bother me - it’s their data, not mine.