tal

They seem to be adapting to modern society pretty well.

Based on the article, it lets her ask them things that she doesn't want to ask her parents, though I'm not sure that if I were 9 years old that I'd suddenly want to discover that my parents have a list of everything I've asked it and are reading through it, much less that Amazon has a database.

In 2023, 60% of UK households had a smart speaker, up from 22% before the pandemic.

Jesus Christ. I had no idea so many people were buying these things. That's astounding.

If you'd asked me to guess what percentage of households had one, I'd have guessed single digits.

how is me renting a car and fueling it less expensive than a train seat for the literal same route?

Car rental companies operate in a competitive market, as do gas stations. Competitive markets are pretty good at driving prices down.

Trains tend not to.

https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/business_economics/natural_monopolies.html/

Railways as a natural monopoly

Railways are often considered a typical example of a natural monopoly. The very high costs of laying track and building a network, as well as the costs of buying or leasing the trains, would prohibit, or deter, the entry of a competitor.

To society, the costs associated with building and running a rival network would be wasteful.

I can see and feel the headcrab like it's actually there.

Stories have a lower cost of production, which also permits for a wider variety of topics to be covered.

Thr lower the cost of production, the better you can do a better job of covering the long tail, providing smaller quantities of stuff that's more niche or specialized, and have a smaller pool of people who are interested in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

In business, the term long tail is applied to rank-size distributions or rank-frequency distributions (primarily of popularity), which often form power laws and are thus long-tailed distributions in the statistical sense. This is used to describe the retailing strategy of selling many unique items with relatively small quantities sold of each (the "long tail")—usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities (the "head"). 

Anderson cites research published in 2003 by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, and Michael D. Smith, who first used a log-linear curve on an XY graph to describe the relationship between Amazon.com sales and sales ranking. They showed that the primary value of the internet to consumers comes from releasing new sources of value by providing access to products in the long tail.[10]

At some point in humanity's future, I assume that it will be a thing and be widespread. Just too many potential benefits to having high-bandwidth links to the brain not to eventually do it.

But it's a path with a lot of hurdles along the way, and risks.

The Valve Deckard was a little more ambitious than had been originally anticipated.

I think that this is okay, because this lemmy instance isn't a commercial operation.

I guess that places like PinkNews and similar commercial media outlets might be open to lawsuits, though.

Note that under the Kansas bill, it appears that depictions of homosexuality qualify as also needing to be locked behind an age gate. Like, not "homosexual sex", but homosexuality.

https://kansasreflector.com/2024/04/03/dont-look-kids-according-to-kansas-lawmakers-this-is-pornography/

Don’t look, kids! According to Kansas lawmakers, this is pornography.

Images and text depicting gay affection could be swept up by age-verification bill

A same-sex couple exchanges rings at a marriage ceremony. You might think it's a sweet moment. But should we be protecting children from seeing it? (Getty Images)

Take a good look at the photo just above these words. You should see two men exchanging rings at a same-sex marriage ceremony.

You’re also seeing, according to the Kansas Legislature, the kind of pornographic content that should be walled off from those under age 18 with age-verification software. That was the consequence — intended or not — of passing Senate Bill 394. All 40 state senators voted for the legislation, including 11 Democrats. In the House, nine Democrats joined Republicans to pass the bill, 92-31.

Max Kautsch, a Lawrence media lawyer, outlined some of the problems.

“The online age-verification bill expressly incorporates the definition of ‘harmful to minors’ that already exists in Kansas statutes, a phrase defined to mean ‘any description, exhibition, presentation or representation, in whatever form, of … acts of … homosexuality,’ ” he told me. “The term ‘homosexuality’ is undefined in the law, but it could include a wide swath of conduct between two persons of the same sex, including kissing, hand-holding, and other activities that would be considered ‘public displays of affection.’ ”

A couple of gentlemen exchanging rings, as shown above, would certainly qualify.

I encourage everyone to study the actual bill. From my perspective, it not only invokes a double standard against the brave Kansas LGBGTQ+ community but actively seeks to chill free expression. The proposed law applies to “any commercial entity” that shares content online, which means it could sweep up individuals trying to make money from a travel blog or small businesses that take wedding photos of same-sex couples. (As a nonprofit, Kansas Reflector appears exempt, which comes as a relief given my columns.)

I don't think that they're obscure. If you asked me to name a major, non-state-run English-language mainland European news source, it'd be in the top three to come to my mind: Euronews, Euractiv, and EU Observer (with the last focusing on stuff in Brussels; maybe a better source for the !EuropeanFederalists@lemmy.world community).

They featured prominently on /r/Europe back when I followed it.

Some cultural context, for those who may not be familiar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boot_Hill

Boot Hill, or Boothill, is the generic name of many cemeteries, chiefly in the Western United States. During the 19th and early 20th century it was a common name for the burial grounds for paupers.