All of the western democracies are telling their people the reason their quality of life is declining is due to immigrants and the disabled and poor. A lot of people seem to believe them. I agree its about inequality and bringing the far right in will only accelerate the process.
When I look at how much Nigel Farage has been platformed in the UK the press helped manufacture the consent for Brexit and the big far right swing that is coming with it. What were quite isolated social media views have become very mainstream and on the TV all the time. Society is now quite open about a lot of far right talking points. Social media is a part of the media landscape but it didn't make the far right figures popular that was all the traditional presses doing.
Even now they cover and platform Nigel Farage about 100x as much as they do any Green candidate, and yet the Greens hold more MP and council seats. Same with the Lib Dems who are bigger than Reform and yet the press is constantly platforming Reform. Its hard to look at traditional media and see anything but a big swing to the right in the last decade and they have led every step of the way.
This is why wages are failing to keep up with inflation now for decades. Breaking up the labour unions has been an enormous accelerator for the capitol owning classes.
A bunch of research into Covid and how it propagates in the air has found that higher CO2 concentrations allow viruses to survive longer. This is a part of why we are seeing increased risk of infections.
"While the the Covid-19 pandemic officially ended last year"
It actually didn't, the WHO still has it as a pandemic https://www.who.int/europe/emergencies/situations/covid-19. They declared the emergency over because people had accepted the consequences of the disease, but its still a pandemic.
Everything is up especially strokes and heart attacks but especially infections of diseases. The vaccination percentage hasn't dropped much. TB is on the rise for example and its due to immune system damage that Covid causes in a lot of people. It can take a year or more to recover from the immune disturbances that Covid causes, its driving a lot of increased infection. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01113-x
The EU law explicitly says no consent by default and users have to opt in. All of these cookie banners are breaking the law, the law doesn't need to change it just needs enforcing and these banners will disappear. We already have a do not track header and that could be complied with but it's enforcement that is the problem.
Its not very price competitive now. Its moved into the low end N100 territory with ITX boards and while its smaller and a bit less power its no where near as performant. They will still have some use in smaller applications but 5V x 5A is a chunky cable. I am not convinced this is the way now.
This has been coming for a long time. I have had issues with Linus and his channel for a long time including making a complaint about breach of advertising standards in Canada (which resulted in a change forced by the ASA). They have become the model of how to make money on Youtube but they do so in such an unethical way where they make or invest in competing products that they also review. They have never had any appearance of journalistic standards or integrity, they don't publish errata or corrections and they make a lot of mistakes and the abusive reviews have been going on for a long time.
I am not surprised to find sexual harassment as well as undue pressure being applied in the workplace. It all centres and comes from the Narcissist at the centre of it who has built a media group off the back of civil law breaches repeatedly and continues to push the limits.
Labs was a terrible idea mostly because Linus and his media group will corrupt the results for his personal profit and he and Yvonne are the only ones making big bucks in all this. This has been building for a very long time, the lack of basic morality has been on display since the beginning.
Linus just straight up lied about Billet labs resolution. That alone is horrendous behaviour.
Battery tech exists in a variety of stages. We have been using Li-ion for ages but there are two technologies coming out this year and next which are very much real (from CATL the worlds leader in battery sales) one of which you can buy today.
You can buy Sodium Ion batteries already, search for it on aliexpress and you'll see the cells are for sale and BYD is already selling cars with it in. Its similar power in weight and density as Li-ion but it doesn't catch on fire and its a lot more environmentally friendly. Its good a chance of being the main battery used for home/grid storage and cars and other big battery uses, it also lasts a lot of cycles something like 6000-8000 so it will work for decades and its cheap at $50/KWH (li-ion is more like $130).
The other type is a Li-ion advancement into solid state that is due next year and it doubles the power density. That is probably going to end up in laptops and phones and some high end cars with massive range or smaller/lighter batteries where the increased cost for power density is worth it. Not yet at commercial volumes it is well past the theoretical stage however and very much something that can be manufactured already.
All this battery tech in the lab might very well be in the mix in the future but we don't need them to pan out with Sodium Ion filling that space and quite cheaply due to the abundance of salt. I think for grid storage reflux batteries might see a resurgence for their versatility but it remains to be seen if they become price competitive. Li-ion as we use today is very soon to be replaced thankfully.
It's precisely what everyone said would happen. Spez and the Reddit team seem not to realise how important mods and users were to their business! The number of people who will do the thankless task of dealing with the internet's undercurrent of horrendous behaviour are few.
Season 3 was fantastic as were the previous 2 seasons. Half the season was just "filler" episodes of backstory and tying it into the season arc and it was really good.