rfwhyte

I love OLED panels and their amazing color reproduction, but I'll never buy another device that uses them ever again if I can help it. My current laptop developed pretty horrific burn-in after just a couple years of regular use, and there wasn't really anything that could be done about it, as the burn-in is comprised entirely of my taskbar and the UI elements of my web browser which is far and away my most used program / application and likely is for the majority of other laptop users as well. I'm sure they're fine for TVs where content is played "Full screen" 99% of the time, but for phones or PCs where there are common OS or web browser UI elements displayed on the screen the majority of the time the user is using their device, they just don't make sense.

No, it's more that the so called "Journalists" have directives from their editors and corporate overlords to never link to any external content that might see people who could be reading the article and thus served ads leave the site. It's purely profit motivated, and results in long winded articles describing a video where just simply watching the video itself would be infinitely more useful / informative.

"The Brooklyn-based startup is making the 32-inch model’s price available on request."

What incredibly lazy and feckless journalism. You're writing a bloody article about the thing, request the damn price and publish it.

You can get wrist worn step counters on Amazon for literally one single dollar. You can get Bluetooth connected "Smart watches" that count steps and monitor your heart rate for less than $20, so in what world is this thing at $56 considered a "Good deal?"

Wouldn't really expect much else from The Verge though, as their whole site these days is basically just a bunch of ads in a trench-coat masquerading as "Journalism." This is almost certainly a "Sponsored post" and is more their typical regurgitation of a manufacturers press release / marketing materials than any sort of actual critical review, as if it were they would have mentioned the fact you can get other devices that do the same thing or more for far less money.

One interesting thing to note, is that in 1949 Levit sold houses in Levittown for $7990, which adjusted for "Inflation" to 2024 dollars is equivalent to $105K. Those exact same houses that sold for $105K in 2024 dollars in 1949 are now selling for north of $500K.

It's always seemed patently obvious to me that humans were the primary cause of megafauna extinctions. First and foremost because the timing of extinctions aligns so closely with the arrival of humans in a given region, but also because the climate has changed dramatically over the past few million years or so, with cooler or warmer periods happening frequently over geological timespans, yet we don't see similar extinction events happening around climatic cycles / events other than those that happen to align with the arrival of humans in a given region. The Mammoths of North America for example survived numerous cycles of warming and cooling, some far more drastic than the most recent ice age and subsequent warming period, so why was it only the most recent one that caused their extinction? We already have control data for the effect climate had on megafauna populations, the only variable left is us humans.

I sincerely hope you're joking. The Richat Structure is a natural geological formation and Atlantis isn't real. Anyone who says otherwise is either a conman trying to sell something, or is an utter moron.

Another fact that supports this perspective is that the North American megafauna survived through numerous cycles of ice ages prior to the arrival of humans. There was nothing particularly unique or special about the last ice age, the only real difference was the presence of humans.

One thing I find particular interesting though, is that there are likely two unique extinction events. One around 50KYA, that coincides with what I personally believe was the first peopling of the Americas, and another around 16KYA, which coincides with the arrival of North Americas current indigenous population.

I'm 100% convinced the Rabbit R1 and the Humane Pin are in fact not AI "Assistants" but rather "AI" spying / user data harvesting devices. This is the reason their batteries deplete so fast. They're constantly sending your data back to some shady company to be sold to the highest bidder and / or given to foreign governments.

Second chances are yet another of the many, many privileges afforded exclusively to the rich in our society. For the rest of us, one mistake can literally be terminal.

Mistakes cost time and money, neither of which the majority of people have in abundance, and one mistake can set you on a path that is impossible to deviate from.

Choose the wrong career, chose the wrong spouse, have a couple of kids, and suddenly you find yourself stuck in a job, a relationship and a home you literally cannot afford to escape from. 50%+ OF ALL PEOPLE IN THE WESTERN WORLD are one paycheck away from financial insolvency and living on the streets. They literally cannot afford to quit their job to "Retrain" for a new career, as that training costs real money most folks don't have, and unless you're in a special / protected group no one is giving you a dime to pay for school let alone cover your food / housing / medical bills while you "Retrain" for a "Better future." It's a nice pipe dream / political talking-point to say truckers can all become coders, but when those truckers have mortgage payments, groceries, medical bills, kid's clothes / school fees, etc., to pay for, and when there's not even a dime of assistance money available to them, and they have nothing in the way of savings, how the hell are they supposed to be able to afford live for months or years at a time while they learn to code?

Folks can't even leave relationships these day, as moving also COSTS MONEY and the majority of people can't afford to pay for movers, put up first and last months rent, etc., making moving to a new home or a new city, too expensive a proposition to be realistic for the vast majority of low to mid income earners. The real kicker though is in basically any city in the US or Canada, if you're moving out of a rental home, the next place you live will be 50%-100% more expensive! Rents have gone up so fast in so many places that a great many people can literally never leave the place they are living as the market has gone up so fast around them they literally cannot afford to move.

It's all well and good to say people should just move for better opportunities, or just "Retrain" for a new career, but when the cost involved in either of those actions means unless they immediately pay off the person in question would find themselves destitute and homeless after bearing the involved expenses, it just goes to show how callous, self-serving and entitled our societies attitudes towards the poor and less fortunate have become.

Yet more fuel on the bonfire that is the fact that basically all tech journalism these days in thinly veiled "Sponsored content" that places the interests of advertisers above the interests of the reader. The trust consumers once had in the institutions that were supposed to be working for their benefit has been utterly and completely eroded in service of clicks and short-term profit. Every website we visit, every online review we read, every social media post we see and every YouTube video we watch has been bought and paid for, and the concept of "Journalistic integrity" has been willingly sacrificed at the alter of corporate profits. We can't trust anything anymore and it's all just another stage in the great late stage capitalism enshitification of everything cycle.

I am 100% convinced that Trump Media is Trump's endgame graft. He stands to make literally billions upon billions of dollars from this unabashed scam, and I think selling MAGA suckers shares in his MAGA "Social media platform" might be the entire point of his political career thus far. He's long talked about wanting to start a media company, and I think the whole point of his run at the presidency was to validate whether people would pay attention to him at scale, which unfortunately has been thoroughly proven by this point, so now it's all about converting that attention into cash the most effective way possible for that's only accessible to the world's wealthiest folks, which is selling suckers shares in some pump and dump scheme.

Poor people run scams on the street, the wealthy run them on stock exchanges.

A decade and a half ago a film-producer buddy and I, along with a motley crew of some other rad folks did a web-series based on putting out a series of "Bait-bikes" and trying to film people stealing them and then us eventually recovering them, with the intention of showcasing how serious a problem bike theft had become in our city. Despite everyone of the half dozen people involved in the project having had the bad luck of having at least one bike stolen each in the past year, for some reason despite a week's worth of sitting out in the cold watching and filming our "Bait-bike" sitting barely locked up in a series of sketch alleys, it didn't get stolen a single damn time! Ironically my producer buddy who started the whole project had his personal bike stolen the week after we wrapped...

Based on the fact it looks like a Teenage Engineering product, I can already tell it'll be wildly overpriced. I'm betting >$500, which is flat out insane given you can get a pretty decent mechanical keyboard for $50 these days.

I for one am sick and tired of these conspicuous consumption status symbol products that offer no real improvements in utility, but are just expensive so people can say the spent more money.

Greener cities are absolutely a necessity for humanity, but sadly will be reserved for the wealthiest who can afford the "Luxury" of such things as clean air, clean water and greenspace.

Until the extreme inequality at the core of capitalist society is addressed in a meaningful way (so never really), any so called "Green cities" will just be gated enclaves of the wealthy, and the poor will be forced to live surrounded by the pollution the rich are ultimately responsible for, yet are able to afford to isolate themselves from.

$500 USD is an absurd price for a "Phone" with such limited usability. Unless you're some edge-case who absolutely "Needs" the longer battery life, I really fail to see how this can justify a $200-$300 price premium over a low end Android phone.

The problem I have with extreme, gratuitous wealth, and the inequality that creates it, is that it is fundamentally anti-democratic. It is well known by anyone with a pulse that money = political power, which means those with the most money, have the most political power, and given how just how much wealth so few people in the world have now, an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the population of most democratic countries have essentially entirely captured the political apparatuses of the countries in which they reside. Meaning the interests of the majority of the people in most countries are no longer being represented by their elected officials, instead the people being elected solely represent the interest of wealthy elites who can afford to make huge political "Donations" and pay lobbyist's salaries.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, but one of the most effective changes we could make in the world is to get money out of politics, as its the only real way democracy can be put back in the hands of the people.

I find it somewhat feckless how basically every review I've read so far of the Vision Pro seems focused more on the "Potential" of the device than on the current reality of the device itself. Every fault is seemingly boot-licked away with promises of how it'll all be "Better" in the future. A fancy VR headset that costs more money than the majority of humans on earth earn in an entire year of their lives should honestly be arriving a lot more fully baked than it seems the Vision Pro is. But hey, just keep giving Apple your money, cause if you give them enough of it they'll have to eventually make a version of this thing that actually delivers on their BS promises right?

They are marketed as investments, not housing. The majority of people buying these "Homes" never intended for themselves or anyone else for that matter, to live in them in the first place.

I imagine largely because it can happen much quicker than grid scale projects, as it's a lot easier for thousands of individuals to make modest personal investments, than it is for governments to make huge capital investments. Plus the reduced dependency on the grid would reduce peak loads and improve grid stability for all users.

China also built more coal fired power plants in the past year than the rest of the world combined has built in the last decade, and has more operational coal power plants than the rest of the world combined.

China's so called "Commitments" to green energy are just (coal) smoke and mirrors.

Pretty intellectually disingenuous to present a fringe theory that is far from the scientific consensus as accepted fact.

The people pushing for "Return-to-office" are by and large people who have substantial portions of their personal wealth invested in commercial real estate. Most wealthy individuals hold at least some real estate in their portfolios, and commercial is much easier to invest in at scale than residential, so the wealthiest folks often have a sizeable chunk of their portfolio wrapped up in commercial real estate. This whole "Return-to-office" thing is a bare-faced lie, as it has absolutely nothing to do with "Productivity," "Creativity" or whatever other BS these people are spewing, and EVERYTHING to do with shoring up the value of their commercial real estate holdings.

It's a lot less PR friendly for them to be honest and say to their employees "You need to spend 2 hours a day in a car in traffic, whilst not being compensated for that time, so the office building I own doesn't lose value" though.

Typical corporatist hand-wavey economics bullshit. "Market forces" and a lack of regulation are precisely why we've ended up in this situation in the first place, so yeah, great idea, let's just double down on letting corporations do whatever they want, I'm sure that will go great for... the corporations.

The increase of the M2 money supply is also completely irrelevant. Sure there's more "Money" floating around out there, but as with all other forms of wealth, the vast majority of it is concentrated in the pockets of relatively few wealthy individuals, not in the pockets of the many millions of regular folks who are actually buying diapers. Talking averages in the context of individual wealth and consumer spending is also utterly useless, as it would be far more useful to talk about the wealth and spending habits of the median consumer, but that would obviously show that the typical regular person living out here in the real world does not in fact have "40% more money" in their pockets to spend on diapers or groceries. If anything they have LESS money now than before all that new money flooded into the system, as the rich have gobbled up damn near the entirety of all that "New money" yet are still putting the screws the the masses with their shameless, greedy profiteering.

Hancock is a charlatan of the worst sort. He knows the vast majority of what he says is a distortion of the truth at best, and completely fabricated nonsense at worst, yet continues to say it for the money and attention it has afforded him. There are so many strongly compelling pieces of contra-evidence that pretty thoroughly debunk literally all of his claims, yet absolutely nothing in way of any actual hard evidence that supports any of it.

His entire central thesis is essentially "Things are older than what scientific evidence suggest because I think this thing looks like that thing."

The ancient world is a fascinating place full of many rich cultures and interesting stories, and it doesn't need charlatans like Hancock making shit up to make it any more exciting.

Automakers haven't cared about the people who actually drive their cars for a decade or more unless you're in the ultra-premium segment where they make the fattest margins. They keep shoving shit we don't want down our throats because it makes them more profit and they'll keep doing it as long as we keep buying their increasingly enshitified products. Automakers could sell millions upon millions of barebones, basic, user-repairable, high MPG cars for under $30K USD if they bothered to listen to what regular folks actually want, instead they almost exclusively now make and sell $60K+ cars full of touch screens, pointless features and subscription services because they, like almost every other company on earth has decided they'd rather make $25K in profit per car selling a heck of a lot fewer $100K cars than make $5K in profit per car selling a heck of a lot more $30K cars.

The "Earliest known" "Civilizations" all in fact exclusively originated in modern day Turkey, the Levant and Mesopotamia. If you're going to speak on archeology you should at least get your facts straight. There are certainly myriad ancient cultures and civilizations found around the world, including in the places you listed, but there is currently no archeological evidence to support the notion that there were any older significant "Civilizations" in places other than the Tas Tepeler region in Turkey (14KYA-12KYA), Jericho (11KYA-10KYA) or Eridu in Mesopotamia (7500KYA). There may be older civilizations found elsewhere, but as of yet archeology has yet to find any evidence of them, so it's disingenuous at best to claim any evidence of any civilizations found elsewhere indicates they are the "Earliest known."

Without a complete accounting of this companies ties to the CCP, there's literally ZERO chance I'd ever use their man in the middle attack vector device. Giving all my most sensitive login credentials to a Chinese company that's trying very hard not to be seen as a Chinese company seems like a totally sane and safe thing to do...

Really don't understand what about this thing makes it worth $6KUSD. Induction cookers aren't new technology, and batteries certainly aren't either. Just reeks of yet another "Tech" startup slapping a 1000%+ markup on their BoM because rich folks will pay whatever they're charging for the latest shiny gadget.

Cool, you built your own YouTube with hookers and coke and... bitcoin. Lots and lots of bitcoin. Cause lord knows there's literally (checks notes) dozens of people out there clamoring for an "Anti-censorship" streaming platform where they can watch spammy bitcoin videos.