Auditing in general is profitable, but it’s mostly due to it being automated for people that aren’t making 7 figures. Auditing the not absurdly wealthy is also generally a positive revenue. Auditing the extremely wealthy tends to not be a great net benefit as the costs of lawyers and court time outweighs the settlement check at the end. There’s an argument to be made it’s worth the cost to ensure the ultra wealthy do actually pay though.

If the sequels were successful, it likely would mean there weren’t a bunch of mediocre to terrible star wars shows dumped on Disney plus. That would mean there’s less blatant culture war bullshit out in the universe, which would reduce the backlash which Trump leveraged to win.

If the sequels were successful there would be less corporate shills calling people to stupid, sexist, racist, or bigoted to understand it. That leads to less people spiraling into the extreme right.

If the sequels were successful, it may have helped movie and theaters remain more relevant through Covid. This could lead to more of the social contract remaining intact post 2020. Trump wouldn’t be as able to effectively weaponize the loss of the social contract preventing a 2024 reelection.

If the sequels were successful, Disney would have more money and goodwill. That could lead to more effective lobbying for non trump candidates.

If the sequels were successful, we could have gotten a grnf story of the old heroes transferring the reigns to the young new heroes to lead the next generation. This could have had a substantial effect on the psyche of elderly leaders who bow out of races to support younger candidates that are far more appealing than Trump vs Hillary.

Maybe there is a point to this.

That’s great for the 80%. It doesn’t help the 10-15% where a road trip becomes significantly longer, or when you don’t have access to home charging on vacation or a weekend trip. I find a way to work around a once or twice a year event that’s not great for an EV, but I can’t justify a car that doesn’t work for me once or twice per month.

The price is definitely the bigger issue for EVs, but even then they definitely need to either roughly double range or halve charging time from 20% to 80%. Right now, they don’t quite cover enough of users needs, especially at the price. I need a vehicle that covers 90-95% of my use cases, and EVs are sitting closer to 80%.

Gamers complain all the time. I also don’t really have sympathy for billionaire publishers complaining about the one company not actively fucking consumers.

There’s still choices, you can buy from the Microsoft store, or publisher stores like origin or Uplay. Epic is a direct competitor, GOG is in a subset of the market like itch.io. Amazon sells PC games. There’s several streaming options as well.

PC gaming is a far more competitive market than your grocery store.

This has nothing to do with keys. This would be like Sony listing a basic PlayStation on their website that was $100 cheaper than other stores and Walmart threatening to remove PlayStation from their stores. This is about Steam (like many retailers) ensuring that they aren’t being undercut by other retailers.

This isn’t about steam keys, it’s about a most favored nation clause. It’s a fairly common clause when selling across multiple platforms. It can be considered anticompetitive in some cases. It’s also pretty standard in retail agreements. It’s why name brand products are generally the same price everywhere.

The same thing would happen if Walmart found Sony was selling PlayStations cheaper on their website than in store.

Dave Ramsey is an asshole person, but he is one of the few people out there giving pretty good advice to people who really need it. Not so much the finical part (that’s generally mediocre), but the emotional part that drives a lot of these decisions. He’s one of the few voices that’s out their telling people with hundreds of thousands in debt with 2+ kids making $80k that they don’t have to take care of their 60+ year old parents that never saved and feel like they should be able to retire. He tells people that experience massive trauma and loss that it’s ok to take time to process and pause major financial decisions while they process that grief.

Pregnancy is a protected class though, it’s going to be an uphill battle to say it’s premarital sex, when the evidence of that is the pregnancy.

The fact there’s a fairly large amount of people eating raw meat and milk and there isn’t widespread illnesses in those communities is an endorsement of how safe our food industry is.

Long Covid was also a goldmine for the medical quackery institutions.

I like my professor’s view in AI from over a decade ago. AI is the term non commercially viable research. Once something becomes viable it gets rebranded, like automatic text recognition, computer vision, machine learning, llms. It worked great until generative AI was good enough to impress average people, then it became a great way to attract venture capital. It’s still not quite viable so the rule holds, but we are in a very messy and public era where several products are likely to emerge and separate from the AI title.

That’s just the port side. The cables are just as fun, you have multiple levels of power delivery support, that generally don’t include data. There are data cables, that may or may not support video. Thunderbolt cables support most everything. The highest charging speeds generally require dedicated cables. Assuming everything is standards compliant it shouldn’t break anything to plug in the wrong cable to the wrong port.

First rule of rocketry, always assume it will explode.

You realize pointing out how bad Trump was makes Biden even worse right? The fact random non sequitur appeared competent next to Biden was massive problem.

It really depends on what you are comparing against. A temperature taken in direct sunlight at human height in a paved parking lot is going to be well over 10 degrees different than a grassy area shaded by a building. Even if they are adjacent areas. Proximity to a large body of water can easily change the temperature by 5-10 degrees.

A weather app is going to present a temperature that trys to average all of that for a fairly wide area.

The worst debate performance used to be Ford with “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Biden at least matched that with “We beat Medicare.”

If a jury can’t reach a unanimous verdict it’s called a hung jury. Essentially it’s a mistrial and the case can be retried.

I’ve been called several times. Failing to show up gets more extreme as the level of court increases. County and city courts tend to have smaller penalties and pay less than federal courts. The pay is basically a joke in all cases. Jury duty is generally a lot of waiting for things to happen, and it’s pretty boring.

The first time I was called in for a criminal rape case, I believe this was federal. The victim was under 18, but over the age of consent. The issue was around her being mentally handicapped. I was removed during voir dire by the prosecution, but it took until the second day. The first day was mostly sitting and waiting, I don’t remember if either side got to remove anyone the first day.

The second time was a county court. All cases settled that day before trials. So it just wasted a few hours.

The third time was another federal court. It was a civil case of a prisoner against a guard who destroyed his legal documents searching for “contraband.” I was part of the jury for this one, it was a 2 day long trial and we took an extra half day of deliberation. Ultimately we were a hung jury.