the US the 50 states basically act like they are different countries instead of different states. There's a lot of back and forth on that - through the last 50+ years the US federal government has done a lot to unify and centralize control. Visible things like the highway and air traffic systems, civil rights, federal funding of education and other programs which means the states either comply with federal "guidance" or they lose that (significant) money while still paying the same taxes... making more informed decisions and realise that often the mom and pop store option is cheaper in the long run. Informed, long run decisions don't seem to be a common practice in the US, especially in rural areas. we had a store (the Jumbo) which used to not have discounts, but saw less people buying from them that they changed it so now they are offering discounts again. In order for that to happen the Jumbo needs competition. In rural US areas that doesn't usually exist. There are examples of rural Florida WalMarts charging over double for products in their rural stores as compared to their stores in the cities 50 miles away - where they have competition. So, rural people have a choice: drive 100 miles for 50% off their purchases, or save the travel expense and get it at the local store. Transparently showing their strategy: the bigger ticket items that would be worth the trip into the city to save the margin are much closer in pricing. retro gaming community GameStop died here not long ago. I never saw the appeal in the first place: high prices to buy, insultingly low prices to sell, and they didn't really support older consoles/platforms - focusing always on the newer ones.

One of the greatest videos ever.

Segue into sexy time

AI is robbery.

Tokyo banned diesel motors in the late 90s. As far as I know that didn't kill Toyota. At the same time European car makers started to lobby for particle filters that were supposed to solve everything. The politics who where naive enough to believe them do share responsibility, but not as much as the european auto industry that created this whole situation. Also, you implies that laws are made by politicians without any intervention of the industries whatsoever. I think you know that it is not how it works.

Oh sorry, my mind must have been a bit foggy when I read that. We agree 100%

Online group started by a 15 year old in Texas playing Minecraft and watching extreme gore they said in this article. Were they also involved in said sexual exploiting of other kids, or was that just the spin offs that came from other people/countries? It all sounds terrible but I wonder if this was just a kid who did something for attention and then other perpetrators got involved and kept taking it further and down other rabbit holes. Definitely seems like a know what your kid is doing online scenario, but also yikes on all the 18+ members who joined and participated in such.

This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/