To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.
I'm not going to hold my breath.
To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.
I'm not going to hold my breath.
Storage is cheap, especially at the corporate scale.
Make two simplifying assumptions: pretend that Google is paying consumer prices for storage, and pretend that Google doesn't need to worry about data redundancy. In truth Google will pay a lot less than consumer prices, but they'll also need more than 1 byte of storage for each byte of data they have, so for the sake of envelope math we can just pretend they cancel out.
Western Digital sells a 22TB HDD for $400. Seagate has a 20TB HDD for $310. I don't like Seagate but I do like round numbers, so for simplicity we'll call it $300 for 20TB. This works out to $15/TB. According to wikipedia, Youtube had just under $29b of revenue in 2021. If youtube spend just $100m of that — 0.34% — they'd be able to buy 6,666,666 of those hard drives. In a single year. That's 6,666,666x20TB = 133,333,333 TB of storage, also known as 133^note^ ^1^ exabytes.
That's a lot of storage. A quick search tells me that youtube's compression for 4k/25fps is 45Mbps, which is about 5.5 megabytes/s. That's 768,722 years of 4k video content. All paid for with 0.34% of youtube's annual revenue.
Note 1: Note that I am using SI units here. If you want to use 1024^n^ for data names, then the SI prefixes aren't correct. It'd be 115 exbibytes instead.
EDIT: I initially did the price wrong, fixed now.
Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple's platform. That's incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It's the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.
But did you ever stop to think about how Italy's system impacts the most important among us: the wealthy shareholders? A truly humane system would prioritize them at all costs.
/s (should be obvious, but I'll put it there to be safe.)
In this case it's not truly a result of limited fab availability.
TSMC has two main variants of their 3nm node. The original one, that Apple is using, is N3B. It has worse yields, so TSMC started work on another variant, N3E. N3E has much better yields but will not be ready until late 2023 or early 2024. Everyone else besides Apple opted to skip N3B and go for N3E. Apple, with their very consistent release cadence, didn't want to wait for N3E. So Apple — and only Apple — is using N3B.
Thus, we have:
(1) TSMC only has one 3nm node in 2023: N3B.
(2) TSMC only has one customer for N3B: Apple.
(3) TSMC will never have any other customer use N3B, and have no incentives to build capacity beyond what is needed now.
It's effectively tautological that their entire 3nm allocation will be sold exclusively to Apple in 2023.
This year's new phones are for people that last bought a phone in 2020 or earlier. If the average user is on a three year upgrade cycle (what the data shows as I recall) then you'd expect roughly 1/3 of people to upgrade every year.
This is better for Apple, as it keeps their revenue more spread out instead of heavily concentrated in year one of a three year cycle.
This is better for consumers, as it means new features and upgrades are constantly being made. If they want to upgrade early they can, and they'll get new features even if it's only been two years.
This is also better for both Apple and consumers because there's more opportunities to course-correct or respond to feedback over issues. If Apple only released a phone every other or every three years, it'd take that much longer for the switch to USB-C.
Just because a new product is launched does not mean you need to buy it. Nvidia released a new GPU last year, but I didn't buy it even though it's newer than what I currently have. Arguing that new phones shouldn't come out each year is like arguing that new cars shouldn't come out each year. It makes no sense.
Hopefully we'll see the return of net neutrality. It was implemented the last time that the FCC was 3-2 dem, then it was revoked when that switched to 2-3. This is the first time that dems are in charge since that revocation.
The pressure campaign for RBG to retire was when democrats still held a senate majority with 53 seats. Republicans blocked Obama's SCOTUS appointment when they held the senate majority. In 2016, republicans simply just didn't allow a vote to happen because the senate leader sets the vote schedule. The nuclear option had already been invoked by that very same dem caucus on all other presidential nominations too.
The scenarios look similar on a surface level but in the details that matter they are leagues apart. If RBG had retired in 2013 or (most of) 2014, her replacement would been confirmed, barring a Kavanaugh-sized scandal. Either republicans would have provided the seven votes needed to secure cloture, or Reid would have invoked the nuclear option to lower the cloture requirement on SCOTUS nominees to a bare majority, like all other positions. Either way the nominee would have been confirmed.
Unity cares. This whole fuckup is Unity trying to further monetize mobile games and get a stranglehold on mobile game advertising. Console/PC games are just collateral damage.
If this costs Unity enough money it might work. I'm not holding my breath but stuff like this has a better chance of working than PC indie devs abandoning Unity does.
It’s also because their current shows suck, and because any shows that are actually good get shitcanned after season 2, because Netflix sees less consumer growth after two seasons.
I'm always surprised at how often other people (not you) will defend this practice from Netflix. It's classic case of following the data in a stupid way. If their data shows that interest drops off after two seasons, I don't doubt it.
But... that comes with a cost. They have built a reputation as a company that doesn't properly finish shows that they start, that will leave viewers hanging. That makes it harder to get people invested in a new series, even one that's well reviewed. Why get interested in something you know will end on a cliffhanger?
That kind of secondary order impact from their decision isn't going to show up in data. Doesn't change that it happens all the same.
I wasn't calculating server costs, just raw storage. Google is not buying hard drives at retail prices. I wouldn't be surprised if they're paying as little as 50% of the retail price to buy at volume.
All of what you say is true but the purpose was to get a back of the envelope estimation to show that the cost of storage is not a truly limiting factor for a company like youtube. My point was to answer the question.
With the level of compression youtube uses, the storage costs of everything below 4k is substantially lower than 4k by itself: for back of envelope purposes we can just ignore those resolutions.
Yep. We can look at the source to see what their metrics are. They have economic freedoms and personal freedoms.
The metrics for economic freedoms they used are fiscal and regulatory freedom. Focusing on fiscal, that branches down into: state taxes, local taxes, government spending, government employment, government debt, and "cash & security assets." It's obviously a libertarian based definition of "economic freedom", wherein they feel someone with $5 to their name and no obligations is more economically free than someone with $100 to their name and $10 of taxes. Completely illogical bullshit.
But you can look at it and see that a lot of them are incoherent or intentionally overlapping even if you buy into their base ideology.
Why are government spending and government taxation separate entries? Is someone with low taxes less "economically free" because their government budget is able to afford to be larger anyway? Why does government employment factor in at all? Surely — especially after you've accounted for any budgetary, taxation, and debt based impacts — there's nothing inherent to government employees existing that can be argued to impact someone's "economic freedom." Even within their base libertarian fantasies, the overlap and design of the categories will specifically make a richer, but otherwise completely identical, state less free than a poorer copy-cat.
The rest of their categories are even more bullshit. They have an entire section under personal freedom categorized as "Travel Freedom." A sane person might define that as both the right and the capacity to travel places. They define it as "This category includes seat belt laws, helmet laws, mandatory insurance coverage, and cell phone usage laws." So a state is less "free" according to Cato if it makes it illegal to text while driving.
tl;dr it's all libertarian bullshit.
I'd agree, though I wonder how much of this is how appealing consumers find the competition? None of them seem to be making major inroads at the moment. The biggest competition is also raising prices, nullifying the competitive penalty Netflix would face from that move.
Which is... never. At least for presidential elections. I can't speak for the marriage proposals.
The Republican party didn't appear out of nowhere in 1860 to win a presidential race. They were formed in 1854 and supplanted the Whig party entirely before the 1860 election. It was a majority party throughout the north before it won a presidential race — it wasn't a "third party."
Likewise, Democrats replaced the Democratic-Republican party in much the same way that republicans replaced the Whig party, and had been a major party from its very beginnings. Literally in their first election there were only two parties running!
There are only three other parties that have won the presidency: Federalists (there from the inception of the party system), Democratic-Republicans (ditto), and Whigs (major party years before first electoral win). There's been no "third party" that has ever won the US presidency. All three have the same story as democrats as starting off in an election with just two parties.
Based on their comment, I don't think they're the person deciding what engine is used. They work for someone else that has already selected an engine. They need to keep their skills employable first and foremost here.
Hopefully Godot takes off a bit here, I think there's good room for it to advance with indie devs and maybe use that growth to be able to be more of an alternative to UE sometime afterwards.
Technology filters down. Once upon a time only the rich could afford corrective lenses, but that wasn't a waste of resources. How many of non-wealthy people will read this comment and wear glasses or contacts? I do. BEVs were limited to the wealthy at first too, and now are solidly affordable to much of the middle class: dependent more on their access to charging and their driving requirements than on their budget. The first residential fridges cost more than a brand new Model T when they came out: the inflation adjusted 1922 price was ~$13,000 today. Was inventing fridges worthless?
It's NASA developing new technologies. New stuff starts off more expensive, which means it will start off limited to the wealthy. If you don't want any new tech to come out that starts with rich people being the primary users, then you should go find your local luddite club to join.
That really depends on what their goal is.
From a business perspective it's not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can "win" for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.
People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren't also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.
Aviation is one of the smallest contributions to greenhouse gas emissions as-is: in 2016 it was 1.9% of global emissions.
The danger the rich pose to the planet isn't being first in line for the second generation of supersonic transoceanic flights.
The danger the rich pose to the planet is them keeping coal and natural gas plants open longer because they personally profit from it. It's them keeping their taxes low, reducing our ability to fund renewable energy. It's them fighting tooth and nail against any new energy efficiency regulation (remember the incandescent lightbulb ban fight?) because it "hurts profits." It's them fighting against public transportation.
This? This isn't even in the top 50 of their ills against the climate. The hate for the rich is well placed. Applying that hate to basic science is dangerously misplaced. The rich love when people push-back on funding science efforts.
I think it's simpler.
As things are in Texas right now, anyone he is replaced with will be a conservative republican. There is zero political risk to republicans in removing him. His only constituency within the party is the furthest right loons... but they tend to abandon "losers" quickly and will happily latch onto the newest far right loon. All while keeping him around does represent a political cost to republicans. That cost has gotten high enough that they're willing to consider removing him.
They can remove him with no risk to their power and get rid of a headache at the same time.
I'm more willing to forgive members of the house running despite their old age than I am senators.
Representatives only serve two years, so they're making a shorter commitment. It's substantially easier for someone to think they can keep doing something for another two years than it is for them to think they can do it for another six years. Especially on health matters. But also, individual representatives are simply just less important. In our current political environment, an individual senator leaving office is going to be a huge disruption for any balance of power that's less than 54-46, with another critical point reached at the 60-40 balance. In the house it won't matter for any caucus that's ahead by ~5+ seats. Even in today's razor close house, it was elected as 222-213 seats — a nine seat gap.
There's a decent number of older representatives out there. I wouldn't have minded Lee sticking around there for a bit longer. The only real issue with older representatives is that by staying in office they block the pipeline for new blood and building a bench for future offices. Running for senate in her late 70s is ridiculous though, especially for a first term.
For Pelosi specifically, I'd put it at 50-50 odds that she retires shortly after the 2024 election. If it wasn't for her personal feud with Hoyer I'd put it at near-certain. When she decides to retire, I expect she'll stick around for one last campaign solely because it will improve her ability to fundraise for the DCCC. She's a team player through and through.
Most great games never get anywhere near this much buzz.
I think it's a product of the genre. BG3 is in the CRPG category, which had a bit of a resurgence lately between Pillars 1+2, Pathfinder 1+2, and (perhaps most relevantly) DOS 1+2. Good games in an existing category of game helps build up buzz in that category and more players. More players creates more demand... but there hasn't been that much being made in the CRPG bucket lately.
Then, on comes BG3. It fits in that bucket. It has much higher production values than the other recent games in that bucket. It's got one of the most valuable CRPG IPs attached to it with Baldur's Gate. And it's reportedly amazing as a game on top. The last part wouldn't get it anywhere near this much attention on its own, but in conjunction with the others it's gotten lots of buzz.
I also feel like Larian handled the early access part really well for keeping the game in discussion without making the game oversaturated in gaming circles. They got a lot of "free" (not actually free, but you know what I mean) marketing out of that.
Curious why everyone in the comments (as of my own comment) is happy about this?
Sure, he exudes C-suite personality and doesn't act like he's a gamer. But that doesn't matter. He oversaw Sony's rise to dominance in the console market. That dominance is built on the foundation of their first party AAA games — which is a less than ten year old change for them. Sony porting their big games to PC was a project that was fully embraced under his leadership.
Point being, as a gamer it seems like he's done a fairly decent job. I don't care how boring his interviews or speeches are or that he looks and acts like he belongs in a board room — they're all like that anyway even if their public persona says otherwise. I care about games and treatment of consumers.
The practical performance differences between N3B and N3E should be more or less immaterial to the end user. N3E just has a lower defect rate, meaning a greater portion of chips will be valid when made under that process versus made under N3B. There was a fairly credible rumor a few weeks ago that Apple was paying TSMC per valid chip instead of the industry standard per wafer. So for us, the end users, the cost won't even be passed down — that's just a cost that TSMC has to bear.
That said, if you don't need a new phone now, waiting is good in general. Whatever is out today, they'll have something better next year. Wait as long as you're willing and able between upgrades. Unless you're absolutely loaded with money, I guess.
Faster transportation is quality of life too. Just like cars were, or railroads before them. Yeah, this one is currently worthless for anyone that isn't rich. But if it proves successful it will become useful for more of us. Like you say, there's also just the material and other sciences being done to make it possible that will filter out elsewhere. So much of early space exploration was Cold War dick waving, and now think about how much we rely on satellites. I couldn't navigate anywhere without GPS, personally...
People here take their hate of the rich (which is well placed) and aim it at all the wrong things. Don't like the rich? Tax 'em more. That's what I want. Higher income taxes and even a wealth tax on the top. And way more meaningful inheritance taxes. Instead they're bitching about investments in science.
They're fixing the last line of that. Republicans parred it back some it's still seeing substantial budget increases. You can see the 10 year timelines.
The tax enforcement budget would see a 69.2% increase relative to the pre-IRA projection. I forget what the size of the debt limit deal cutback was, but my recollection is that it was not enough to change the core fact that the IRS is going to see substantial improvements to its budget and especially to its enforcement arm.
EDIT: Worth highlighting that stories like this one are exactly why republicans hate the idea of the IRS being properly funded.
This is true, but fuel taxes are very low. Most states that are charging an EV "road maintenance fee" (with whatever phrasing they select) are charging way more than an ICE vehicle would contribute in fuel taxes. And while it is true that BEVs are heavier than ICE vehicles, all else held equal, and that road wear and tear is strongly dependent on weight... as I recall reading, the overwhelming majority of road wear and tear is the result of freight trucks and similar vehicles.
I’m all for going electric, but an 8500lb truck is not helping the environment.
The issue here isn't that it's an EV in this case. It's that it's a truck. I'd wager than >95% of people buying trucks in the US would be perfectly served by a four door sedan or comparable sized vehicle. Trucks have largely become expensive vanity items to act as an external signal of a person's cultural identity. Contractors and similar that actually use a truck for truck purposes still exist, but they're comically outnumbered by people buying trucks for no good reason.
Topic title is "PS5 console exclusive" emphasis on "console". On consoles, it will be a PS5 exclusive for an indeterminate length of time.
ME2 is a good game in isolation, but I think it played a big part in getting Bioware where they are now.
ME2 saw them move far, far more into the action-RPG direction that was wildly popular at the time, with a narrative that was in retrospect just running in place (ME2 contributes effectively nothing towards the greater plot and zero major issues are introduced if it is excised from the trilogy). I feel the wild success ME2 saw after going in this direction caused Bioware to (a) double down on trend chasing, and (b) abandon one of their core strengths of strong, cohesive narratives. ME3 chased multiplayer shooter trends, DA:I and ME:A both chased open world RPG trends, Anthem chased the live service trend, and the first try at DA3 chased more live service stuff before Anthem launched to shit and they scrapped the whole thing to start over.
All while, of what I saw first hand (of those I played) or read about secondhand (of those I did not play) none of those games put any serious focus on Bioware's bread&butter of well written narratives. ME3 in particular is a narrative mess, with two solid payoffs (Krogans + Geth-Quarians) and the rest being some of the worst writing I've seen in a major video game.
ME2 was great. ME2 also set Bioware on a doomed path.
Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.
For PC: the vast majority of PCs don't have a blu ray drive. So that's a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.
Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It's a huge difference.
This is a common sentiment for people to have, but their preference runs into a major problem. There is no magic "young Biden" candidate out there that can unify the party.
If Biden announced tomorrow that he was going to retire rather than run for reelection, there would be an absolute clusterfuck circus of everyone and their mom's roommate's cousin's dog jumping into the dem primary. Sanders — who is even older than Biden — has even implied that he would run in this scenario. Harris would get a lot of institutional support, but nowhere near enough to clear the field. Newsom would jump in. A solid half dozen house representatives with no real chance would jump in. As would some other has-beens or insufficiently qualified people. A few governors would take the chance too. It would take months for the race to whittle down to the core 5-6 people with any real chance, and by that time >$100m would have been pissed down the drain. Any establishment candidate that won would be met with instant distrust from large parts of the progressive left, and any progressive candidate that won would be met with similar levels of distrust from the rest of the party.
The primary would be acrimonious, expensive, and long. Dems would toss aside one of their biggest advantages going into next year — money — as Trump is more likely than not to tie up the republican primary comparatively early.
"We need a younger, popular person to be our nominee" is a trivial thing to wish for. It's an exceedingly non-trivial thing to make happen. Every person pining for such a person is imagining very different democrats as fitting that description.
The time for new is 2028. We picked Biden in 2020 and picking a candidate one year comes with an implicit outcome of picking them in the next election, if they win the first time.
The very start of that article:
October 6 Update: A newly published report has clarified that the discovered code bits are not related to Windows "12." Also, the next-gen Windows version will not require a subscription.
We still live in the same society as others. People often adopt the cultures and ideologies of where they end up, or at least move closer to it than they were before. If reddit shifts its userbase to the right — even if the net effect is from "very very left" to "very left" — it will impact the lives of all of us that live in societies with large numbers of people using that site, as it'll filter down into our politics. Even if we don't interact with them.
For a long time, the "default" ideology of the internet was on the left. As internet usage has become dominated by a handful of sites owned by megacorporations, there has been a not at all subtle effort to nurture a conservative ideology on those sites. Stuff like reddit holding off on banning the Trump sub for however long or twitter refusing to implement their hate speech detection because it correlated too strongly with conservative politicians (not to mention what Musk has done there). I don't think this is an accident.
Unity is Unreal's biggest marketer now, it seems...
Curious if some of the many internal AAA engines out there might start to get shopped around as a new alternate to UE. Sony, Ubisoft, and Microsoft all have a few in house engines that at least on paper seem viable for branching out — the biggest obstacle would be support, I suspect. Which isn't a trivial obstacle, to be clear.
idTech is due for a resurgence. Maybe Valve could even get a revival in usage of Source.
People underestimate how much production other countries are capable of. Of course, China does dominate the manufacturing game, especially mass production.
There's no shortage of alternatives all the same. Vietnam in particular has been doing quite well taking manufacturing work that companies are moving out of China so as to diversify their production chain. India is rising on that front too. Not to mention that the west truly does far more manufacturing than people give credit for — I've found that nearly every category of general goods that I try to buy will have some US made options. That's not even touching the rest of the west. The big exception being electronics, but those have Vietnam and India as growing alternatives, with Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore all as solid players in that market.
The overall point being: it's entirely possible to remove China from the manufacturing chain if there's enough money behind the push. The US economy is probably large enough to do so with some meaningful struggle. The US and major allies could do so more easily. The difficulty is more political and temporal. Getting everyone on board and committed plus going through with the multi-year long process.
Election law varies from state to state. But generally from what I gather, a write-in candidate is only valid if the candidate registers with the state in advance.
If there's a winning plurality for Mickey Mouse in your state for a statewide office, it won't matter. The state won't be forced to see if there's anyone there that has the name Mickey Mouse and then pick which (if more than one) was the individual meant by the voters. Someone has to register with the state saying that they're going to run a write-in campaign for office with name XYZ.
Note that these details are a bit of a side track. The above person was talking about Trump being excluded due to the 14th amendment. However that doesn't say "not on the ballot" — it invalidates people from office entirely. If applied to Trump, the not being on the ballot would be a consequence of being determined ineligible for office, not a method to make him unable to win. Also it's all moot: while I think on the face of it the correct action would be to apply the 14th amendment to Trump, the fact of the matter is that this will not happen. States are not going to be willing to risk the political backlash from going down that path, so they will not.
This doesn't need to immediately lower housing costs to have a positive impact.
Hypothetical numbers... If housing was going to go up 5% in the next year and this change causes that to go down to a 1% increase, it will have made things better. Of course, we'd all like to just go straight to lowered housing costs. But individual changes can still do good and bring us towards that goal without strictly accomplishing it.
That's the argument they're trying for in court, which is not the same as what they think. The reality is much more mundane. Probably more frustrating too.
Ranked choice voting makes it easier for incumbents to lose. It makes it harder (but still... not actually difficult) for retiring office holder to coronate their hand-picked successor. That's all this comes down to. Especially in a place like DC that votes for a single party by such wide margins. Places that lopsided, in a FPTP primary system, once elected a politician is all but incapable of losing. Even to horrible, horrible scandal.
Ranked choice threatens that. If DC switched to it overnight, >90% of the incumbents would win reelection trivially. In fact I'd be surprised if any of them that ran again lost. But they don't like that it goes from just short of a guarantee, to still really highly certain.
Polling is volatile and things move quickly in elections, especially when they're over a year apart.
This time in 2011, Obama was polling about the same as Biden is now: low 40s approval, low 50s disapproval. Gallup's Aug 8-14 2011 poll had Obama at 40 approve/52 disapprove. For that matter Trump in 2019 was seeing similar numbers. In early fall 2020 and 2016, Trump was polling in the complete dumps and the polls were predicting landslide dem wins. Early fall 2008 showed McCain slightly more likely to win than not. Fall polling in 2012 showed a bare Obama advantage, but there was enough data there saying that Romney was going to win that without sites like 538, it wasn't at all obvious who was favored.
It could be that Biden will remain weak. But people were predicting that Biden's weak approval numbers were going to hurt in the 2022 midterms, and it was easily the best dem midterm in decades. If not for CA and NY dropping the ball dems would have even held the house! Which is basically insane. There's no reason to be confident that the polling data will stay the same. In fact, it's almost certain that polling numbers will change, and dramatically, in the months ahead. In which direction is far less certain.
The point being... Polling, today, of an election in fifteen months, is borderline worthless. We also have one data point suggesting Biden's weak numbers aren't actually an albatross at the ballot box.
It could be that.
My first thought is that it might be the post-lockdown tech demand crash hitting Apple later than it hit the rest of the industry. If I remember right Apple was holding on fairly well when the market first started to crash as society shifted into a "post-Covid" mentality, relative to their competition.
Could be that for whatever reason the drop in demand for Apple was just delayed by about a year.
In other unbiased polling, the wolf spoke to all the other wolves in the pack and they all prefer that the sheep be eaten.