That is a true statement. However, as the article points out they produce 90% of the world’s supply of Rare Earth materials.

And just to remind people. “Rare Earth” materials aren’t actually rare. They’re common. However, they are distributed in very very low concentrations, so you have to go throw mountains worth of material to extract measurable amounts of Rare Earth materials. This is typically energy intensive and ecologically destructive, which in most of the work equals “expensive” which is why the nations of the world have been happy to shut down their own Rare Earth extractions facilities any paying China to destroy its ecology instead.

China is free to set up its restrictions on exports. Other nations are free to restart their own extraction operations (with the costs that come with it).

If you’re torrenting, then there’s no risk of watching ads from what you download, which was your primary argument for not subbing. If that’s the case then there’s no risk to subscribing to the service to pay for the content, and simply never log in.

There’s no way in hell hush money is an official act

The hush money wasn’t the illegal part. It was covering up the hush money payments that was illegal and what he was convicted on.

Its a monthly subscription, and if they sell you a no-ad product you’d have strong grounds to ask for a refund for that month. Otherwise simply cancel the month you see ads.

I imagine a gay couple living in the Castro District in San Fransisco experiences a different level acceptance than if that same couple were living in Birmingham Alabama.

There’s a fantasy series that has part of this as a plot point. A normal person becomes god with all the godly powers but only for a very short time do they get ALL the power. Its overwhelming in the first few moments and they almost destroy the planet with a mere thought. They realize their mistake a few seconds later, but only have half the power by then, so they put in an ugly workaround, before most of their power runs out. Now that ugly workaround is just “life as we know it” on the planet for the people that live there.

This is a deep spoiler for a popular book series so I don’t want to post the series name and I don’t think we have a spoiler tag yet.

I’d be interested if they took samples of home ownership across LGBTQ+ and cis populations in geographies with high acceptance of LGBTQ+ populations. Do we see parity in this case? Could it be that geographies that contain accepting societies all have low home ownership?

As in, could places where higher home ownership exist not overlap with LGBTQ+ acceptance?

Sticking to the old model of “pay for cable TV and watch commercials” is never going to work, be it cable or streaming. I don’t think I’m in the minority here, either; I’ve heard this sentiment from plenty of others.

As much as wish I could agree with you, the previous ad-free streaming services now almost all offering an ad-supported tier disagrees with your conclusion. Price conscious consumers are choosing ad-supported subscriptions in large enough numbers for streaming services to offer them profitably. I’m okay with this. Not everyone has the money that I do, but I’ll almost always choose the ad-free version of a streaming channel instead of the ad-supported.

One of the few exceptions to that is Hulu. I don’t watch enough on Hulu to make it worth $18/month, and the ad-supported version can be had for $1/month-$2/month.

Cable companies have seen the writing one the wall with Cable TV for quite awhile. They had the perfect product to pivot to with broadband. Had they offered a great product with great customer service, they’d have had the market forever especially how much consumers felt burned by telecoms abusing their market dominance with with early broadband.

Instead, cable companies doubled down on the lock-in and bundle model with deceptive pricing and horrible customer service ceding ground to wireless providers and even the same telecoms that were hated before.

Our household cut the cord on cableTV/satellite about 14 years ago, but kept cable modem service since then. Now that the local telecom has laid fiber at 500Mb/s for $49/month we dropped any relationship with the cable company. Two months before the fiber came in, cable suddenly dropped the price of our 100Mb/s service and increased the speed to $300Mb/s. At $80/month it was still better for us to ditch the cable company and go with the telecom fiber connection.

I googled a cheap Intel NUC and saw power consumption numbers of 15w to 40w. Thats quite a bit of juice (and heat) for small applications.

Might be helpful to have this hardware if you want to develop malware targeting systems in China.

But somehow I wonder if kids may find it more boring than adults, because I would probably not get this movie as a kid.

I think it was aimed more toward tween and teen on the young side, and the “kid in all of us” on the older side.

I’ll agree that’s a good thing, but that depends on there being assets (likely in this case), but it also means workers may have to wait months or years before the bankruptcy proceedings are complete. That shouldn’t be a burden lower wage workers have to shoulder.

Start with Short Stories or novellas. A whole story from beginning to end in as short as 3 pages or as many as 30 or so. There are entire books of short stories (anthologies) in every genre you can imagine. You say you don’t have the patience. However, in the time its taken you to read this entire thread, you could have finished a short story. You’ve proven you have the patience.

Thats a very good point.

I’m not sure that was much of an issue for DVD. Historically VHS had those huge licensing terms for new releases ($90 for VHS), but the same rules didn’t apply to DVD (new releases $20). This was one of the main reasons VHS rentals died so fast after DVDs came out.

Also at least at one time, I remember Redbox was simply buying DVDs at retail stores instead of buying from retail stores for their disc inventory. I see that Walmart is listed as a creditor. That makes me think perhaps Redbox still was.

Sad to see this for two reasons:

1. Physical discs and the rental model have always been a fallback against oppressive streaming licensing, and with so few video rental stores left it Redbox was the last one standing.

2. It sounds like they missed payroll for their workers. No worker deserves to have their finances thrown into chaos because an employer can’t manage their books.

“Today class, we’ll look at the christian bible’s book of Genesis and its creation myth. We’ll refer back to our science class last week about life on Earth containing Carbon 14, and how it can be used to accurately date living things and how wrong the Genesis is. We’ll be comparing this to other creation myths such as the Greek and Norse versions.”

This was a shockingly good result when compared to the cost of producing this with a set, film crew, actors, costume/makeup, and post production.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, it has to be good enough to get your attention between the latest streaming show you or your kid is watching. It will absolutely do that for a tiny tiny fraction of the cost businesses had to pay before.