In context of this conversation Deadpool vs Wolverine would be storytelling of storytelling. Great examples are all the breaking of the forth wall and exploration of tangential stories or actors that had short lives or never made it off a writers page. It was less a single cohesive story and more a moving about storytelling.
FYI, Passive Matrix doesn’t mean monochrome. Passive Matrix were color too. If you’re actually looking for a reflective monochrome LCD, you probably want STN aka Supertwist LCD.
I’m not aware of any STN smartphones. Others have already rightly posted eink is likely a better fit for what you want.
What’s the opposite of forced abortions? Because given the history of the CCP that could be where this is heading.
“Decree 770 was a decree of the communist government of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, signed in 1967. It restricted abortion and contraception, and was intended to create a new and large Romanian population.”
"To enforce the decree, society was strictly controlled. Contraceptives were removed from sale and all women were required to be monitored monthly by a gynecologist.[3]: 6 Any detected pregnancies were followed until birth. The secret police kept a close eye on hospital procedures. "
Not in an academic sense but they never actually learned to form ideals
First, yes there are people that never intellectually explore the world nor the underpinnings of their beliefs after high school. This is, many times, why people are a stark difference from their prior selves when they go to college and do actually get exposed to other beliefs and are taught to question the “why” of their known “what”.
However, don’t get too cocky and arrogant in your superiority. I only have fractional knowledge of this myself, but when I was much younger I thought the way you did and I was equally ignorant as you may be now. There’s more you’re not seeing that has value.
Those same people you’re referring to do learn other things which aren’t always apparent. “Street Smarts” is one way some of these skills are described. They can generally read a room and know the social condition in it and if it is risky or becoming unsafe. They are keenly aware of navigating the fringes of society’s bureaucracies just out of necessity. This includes navigating the legal system. Many times they have social bonds, which to outsiders, defy reason. Others would look at some of these relationships as “toxic” but they don’t understand that those bonds will sometimes produce effort, money, or insight in emergency or dire situations to those on the in-group not available to the rest of us. Society has a pale phrase that tries to encapsulate this in “ride or die”, but to those that live it, its much deeper and more committed.
The problem I have with theaters is that the time and money sink is a terrible value these days. For my wife and I it’s always somehow shy of $70 and takes up most the night.
The money is bad, yes, but the deal breaker for me is…other movie-goers.
For 90 minutes, modern movie-goers simply:
Paying for a movie is expensive, but when its regularly ruined by others in the theater it simply stops being worth trying to go anymore. I’ll watch it at home when it comes there.
edit: After checking on responses overnight I see I have 3 downvotes. I can only assume that these are the movie-goers I’m talking about in my list above. To those folks, why are you upset with my post? You won. You have the whole theater to yourself because I’m certainly not going to be in the same room watching a movie with you. Enjoy your theaters. I hope there are enough of you and you don’t annoy each other enough to drive each other off that movie theaters don’t go out of business.
You’d think they’d have learned from the cold war, but I guess not.
Well, many parts of them have. Eastern Europe, formerly under Soviet conrol, is now firmly in market economies. Armenia has left the CSTO (Russia’s wish.com NATO), and Ukraine famously kicked out its Russia puppet leader. All of these were part of the Soviet Union or under their control before.
But Russian soldiers on the intercepted calls appeared doubtful that they would have enough commanders to lead the new units, or enough weapons and ammunition to arm them 979 days into Moscow’s invasion.
From what I can guess, I don’t think they need to hold a gun or fire any bullets to accomplish what Moscow wants out of them. Russia will march those North Koreans out in “meat waves” to absorb Ukrainian bullets and drones while forcing Ukrainian defenders to reveal themselves to shoot the North Koreans forcing themselves be targeted by artillery.
To see how it gets worse, look at history. Specifically Decree 770 in Romania in 1967 source
"Enforcement: To enforce the decree, society was strictly controlled. Contraceptives were removed from sale and all women were required to be monitored monthly by a gynecologist.[3]: 6 Any detected pregnancies were followed until birth. The secret police kept a close eye on hospital procedures. "
People also just drive a lot more today than 40 years ago, in part, because jobs and shopping are further away (it’s gone down since COVID due to more WFH). A car with 100K miles on it was an old car. Now it’s not unheard of for people to put that kind of mileage on their car in under five years. I have no argument that vehicles are much more well built today.
Well built for specific uses, but not necessarily well built to ensure lots of them are on the roads decades after their release.
As I said in another comment, I’m not arguing that cars are more capable of being on the road, just that I don’t believe people are going to choose to drive a ten to twenty year old car in 2035 - 2045 as much as they had fifty years prior.
I partially agree with but for different reasons that you’re stating.
You could put less than $1,000 into a 100k mile car in the 90s and expect to get another 50k+ out of it. At least, I can confirm that that’s what I did with my 1976 Ford Elite and later my 1980 Camaro.
That 1980 Camaro was a far simpler car that modern cars. Simple generally means more repairable, but that comes at other costs. Economics have shifted this behavior in western society. In 1980 labor was cheap and simple machines meant lower skilled workers could accomplish the work too. Meaning when your 1980s Camaro was slipping out of gear it made sense to take your Camero to a transmission shop (do those even still exist now?) and have them do a full teardown of your transmission and get the synchros replaced. Today it is almost unheard of to get transmission work done and instead your Auto Technician will simply replace the entire transmission if any problem is occurring inside with a synchro.
Further, that Auto Tech will also be part Electronic Technician with knowledge of hydraulics, air emissions, HVAC, and more. That makes for a much more expensive labor per hour charge.
Moreover, there’s nothing aside from the maintenance of the vehicle and maybe improved gas mileage that would deter anyone from choosing to drive an older vehicle. There are far more reasons today to not choose a ten year old car than there were 30-40 years ago.
Passenger safety and crash survivability has improved dramatically from cars 30-40 years old.
Automotive emissions were in their infancy 40 years ago, which is a partial cause for the climate change we live with today.
My point is about consumer choice and the advancements of technology. Will people choose to drive vehicles that aren’t compatible with future technology.
I’ve driven old cars. Things start to break that don’t break on even moderately old cars. Rubber seals on all kinds of things deteriorate. Rust claims the structural integrity. Long mechanical wear has you doing repair after repair always bracing for the next expensive thing. Its no panacea .
This is my problem with any new car. Practically every new car (even ICEVs) is just a smart phone on wheels now. It’s not like in the ‘90s - ‘00s when you could still legit buy a car from the ‘70s and daily drive it and repair it in your own drive way for cheap (most people in the 50s - 80s were capable of basic tune ups, etc).
Remember cars from the 70s and 80s were considered “clunkers” at 100k miles. Today that number is 200k miles generally.
My concern is that at some point the parts won’t be made anymore. Or if the LCD command console gets cracked or something your car’s totaled.
Thats true of all modern cars, not just EVs. That ICE car is full of computers named things like “Engine Control Module” etc. Its already happening where they are dying and a car is essentially totaled.
I mean, people used to own cars for at least ten years, twenty years wasn’t uncommon.
Twenty years wasn’t uncommon? For collectors cars or sunday drivers maybe. There were extraordinarily few 20 year old Plymonth Reliants on the roads in 2001.
Do you think a 2025 XYZ is going to be on the road in ten years- twenty years? What’s the resale value on that / who’s going to buy a twenty year old phone on wheels?
Even though there were other EVs before it, the Tesla Model S was the first mainstream EV that most would consider. You don’t have to wonder if they’re on the road. You can do used car searches for 2013 (11 years old!) and find them for sale.
As much as people believe EVs are better for the environment, aren’t they increasing the rate at which a vehicle ends up in landfill?
No. Interestingly one of the challenges of setting up recycling facilities for EV batteries that there simply aren’t enough EVs being taken off the road with their batteries junked to create enough feedstock to justify the facilities.
If anything, the cut corners and non-reparibilty of the many common ICE vehicles is generating far larger waste. Try to buy a rebuilt Hyundai Sonata ICE engine for a car built in the last 10 years. You will have a hard time because they aren’t very servicable and they break often. Lack of replacement engines means many cars that look amazing are headed to the scrapper because there’s no way to put them back on the road again.
At the same time though, I have to acknowledge that, without an ICE, EVs have far fewer points of failure. There’s a potential for them to be on the road much longer. I just don’t see that happening due to consumer demand.
“Electric cars accounted for around 18% of all cars sold in 2023, up from 14% in 2022 and only 2% 5 years earlier, in 2018.” source
Nearly 1 in every 5 new cars sold last year were EVs.
Gasoline consumption for vehicles is down 4.4% due to those drivers now driving EVs and not buying gasoline anymore source
Demand of EVs seems to be pretty decent.
China would love for RMB to become a default reserve currency. There are strong accusations that China is a currency manipulator though. I’m not educated enough on the topic to have an opinion on it. However, countries choosing it as a reserve currency may be left holding the bag.
there ways to mitigate that, without relying on the dollar and although they are not insignificant,
Sure, you can rely on other stable currencies like Euros or GBP. Alternatively you can rely on gold, but if you have the ability to trade your own currency to someone willing to accept it and give you sufficient gold, and that you can produce that gold on demand to buyers, you don’t really need a fiat currency except to facilitate transactions easier. The problem is these countries aren’t backing their currency with gold (or other precious metals).
The tradeoff to gold backing is that you can’t grow your economy either. The amount of currency in circulation will always be limited by the ratio of gold you’re backing your currency with. This is why the USA abandoned the gold standard, and it was the right decisions. Before doing this, if you wanted to borrow money, you had to FIND someone with money that would be willing to lend it. There were instances of limits in growth simply because all the folks that held the vast majority of the wealth (and thereby gold backed currency) weren’t lending it, so loans couldn’t occur in volume.
Feel free to post the alternate currency that was more stable for the history you’re showing. I’d wait, but I’d die waiting.
How will this be any worse on BRICS Clear than it currently is on Swift ?
Lets say you’re Egypt selling cotton to Russia. BRICS Clear is pushing local currencies. So Russia wants to pay for the Egyptian cotton in Russian Rubles. Lets say the amount of Rubles would buy 10,000 barrels of crude oil at the time of settlement. Russia is currently in economic dire straights and the currency value is dropping. When Egypt wants to spend its Rubles, if it can find a country willing to take them, it could only buy 5,000 barrels of crude oil.
How eager will Egypt be to settle another transaction in BRICS Clear when the value can evaporate. This is way international trade wants to settle in stable currencies.
Here’s where it falls apart, right here:
[Vladimir Putin] also said the increased use of BRICS national currencies for transactions will “minimize geopolitical risks.”
Some of the BRICS countries have wildly volatile currencies either because of governments “printing money” to devalue their currency for economic stimulus for exports or to pay down debts. Alternatively straight up currency manipulation by the sovereign states issuing them. I would think this makes settling transactions in these local currencies a big risk for commerce. You don’t know if the value of the currency you accept tomorrow will be worth what it is today. These are reasons GBP, Euro, and USD are so valuable as currencies, they generally have pretty consistent values.
Likely the article author (or editor) simple searched their stock photography subscription with the keywords “chinese text on smart phone” and went with the first result.
Superintendent Chalmers: “A room full of gold, build in a room under a hospital, at this hour? Can I see it?”
IDF Skinner:“…no.”
Implementation of AI requires strong unified data governance and data hygiene to produce company wide strategic solutions. The current company posture instead is focused on tactical level data collection and analysis which does not lend itself to consumption in relevant possible cross-department opportunities.
That’s an interesting bit of info I never knew. Thank you for sharing that.