Regarding the NJ election, it became obvious that the former Lieutenant Governor bent the knee to AIPAC, both to get money to support her campaign and also to fund a smear campaign against former representative Tom Malinowski since Tom wanted some conditions on aid to Israel.

Looks like AIPAC got Tom out, but Analilia Mejia is likely going to be far worse for them

The problem is that Galaxy’s Edge got descoped later in the design process while Eisner made decisions early on in the design process to ensure a cheaper park.

Galaxy’s Edge feels emblematic about the issues of design under Iger versus Eisner.

Eisner vastly expanded park capacity, but he didn’t just focus on E-ticket attractions. He intentionally built some parts of the parks to entertain but cheaper to add capacity and give people a place to be entertained if they didn’t want to wait in long lines.

In contrast, most of Iger’s expansions were generally a lot more costly and didn’t have the throughout of previous E-ticket attractions. This ended up pushing Disney into being a more premium experience.

I feel like this is a symbol of the difference between the Eisner and the Iger CEO tenures. Eisner built out a massive expansion of the parks under his leadership, doubling the gates in Anaheim and Orlando while planning international expansion. Iger didn’t, choosing smaller expansions with premium experiences over capacity expansions.

It is part of the reason that Universal has been able to grow so much, Disney doesn’t have the capacity that it needs to meet high end theme park demand.

Given the number of porn video websites now, I don’t think the cost of video hosting is the major issue.

The bigger issue is likely having to moderate the site. Twitch focused on live streaming as a way to reduce exposure to copyrighted content and TikTok kept videos short enough that it could skate around fair use by not being able to air longer form copyrighted content.

This wasn’t built to be a great service, it was built to be a French controlled one.

That’s typical for most construction projects.

If I’m going to build a building or a bridge, the number of people required to build is far more than the number of people required to maintain.

It looks like we’re starting to hit the same issue with websites. You need a maintenance staff for websites, but no where near the level of staff required to build the thing.

No country wants to build a tech infrastructure that they don’t control.

I don’t know if it is purposeful. It just seems to be a side effect of the market going all in on AI.

The kind of person that Trump is isn’t an abberation, but the oligarchs were expecting more of a Reagan instead of Trump.

Even during the halcyon days of CD sales in the late 90’s, there was a decent amount of filler on a lot of albums. It didn’t help that albums were the product while singles were what were advertised.

Yeah. My previously covered medication now has a $10 copay.

If you ask Greenlanders if they want to be independent, they generally prefer independence.

If you ask Greenlanders if they want to be independent if it means a lower quality of life, they generally prefer to stay part of Denmark.

Denmark subsidizes Greenland to the cost of over €500 million a year. To replace that subsidy, Greenland would need to self generate over €8,700 per person per year. It would also need to do so in a manner that doesn’t invite American intervention.

Trump has admitted that there are a lot of CIA agents in Venezuela. It was also suspiciously easy for the USA to get Maduro out of the country.

My guess is that the USA likely expects a coup to happen which will install a friendly regime.

There have been wargames going back over a decade which highlight how vulnerable current aircraft carriers are to various forms of attack from nations like Iran. I would expect that China would be more than capable of destroying an aircraft carrier, especially if the carrier group wasn’t in the high seas but next to the Chinese coast.

That hasn’t been a thing since 2001.

Yeah. Kick them both out.

I don’t see how that affects his analysis, though. An American attempt to oust the Venezuelan government would likely lead to a wide scale guerilla war and South America would likely become more anti-American in the process.

That someone so high up in the administration is saying it likely means there are reasonable fears of this becoming a major issue.

It was a great way of showing off YouTube talent. There were meaningful trends on YouTube for a while and these videos were a way to celebrate what went viral for the year.

That these videos are harder to make speaks a lot to how YouTube has changed as a platform.

This is going to sound strange, but a major problem in the world economy is the lack of Chinese consumer spending. It is at least ten percentage points below non-US developed countries and is a major reason for the trade imbalance between China and the rest of the world.

It has been suggested that the Chinese government increase its retired health care benefits to include more money for emergency events as, currently, a large chunk of that cost gets paid by the retirees.