These kind of coordinated efforts come from think tanks, lobbyist groups, etc. If you look around you'll see a lot of nearly-identical bills introduced in several states more or less simultaneously, not just about this topic but about all sorts of things.
I don't think there's any requirement anywhere that legislators write their own bills. But they do have a lot of incentive to introduce bills on behalf of their larger campaign donors.
America's Test Kitchen actually does suggest adding water to reduce the amount of time needed for caramelization--and not an equivalent amount of water, but much more than the amount of oil you'd use.
The idea is that adding water, raising it to a boil, and covering the pan reduces the amount of time needed to raise the temperature of the onions to the caramelization point, more than offsetting the amount of time needed to remove the water itself. That plus adding some baking soda near the end reduces the overall time considerably.
The game High On Life used Midjourney to create additional environmental art like posters and advertisements.[1]
The twitter account for the remake of System Shock used Midjourney to create an advertisement, and said they'd be continuing to use AI for art and possibly in other areas.[2]
I've seen other random postings from people saying that it's being used especially for generating concept art for games.
It's a doable and fun project. I did it a few years ago, designing a small set of instruments in Fusion 360, 3d printing them, using stepper motors and an arduino to handle movement, and using Mobiflight[1] and FSUIPC[2] to handle the firmware and communication with MS Flight Simulator.
DCS-BIOS[3] is a similar project for interacting with DCS.
There's something really, really neat about seeing real physical instruments spinning around in response to a computer game. And they're actually often a lot easier to use than the instruments in-game, too.
I have one and use it probably a few times a week. It's become a necessity for flight sims for me, I no longer play them outside VR.
Flight sims aren't terribly mainstream, sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's enough of a crowd between flight and racing sims who are willing to spend small fortunes on peripherals to keep VR going at some scale.
For gaming generally, there's a lot of friction that'll have to be removed before mainstream success is a possibility, I think--reducing the weight of headsets, reducing the cost, solving motion sickness, improving the game selection, improving situational awareness with the real world, reducing the setup effort, etc.
A lot of current games aren't worth the effort of dealing with all that, at least not once the novelty of VR wears off.
He leaves behind a complicated legacy. It's important to note that credible allegations of domestic abuse lead him to sell SA in the past year, and this can't be set aside.
At the same time, SA's influence on the modern internet can't be understated. The 'image macro' of early SA (maybe created by Lowtax himself, from what Fragmaster says in his video in the link) is the direct ancestor of today's common meme image--impact font text over a silly image, easily accessible to anyone who wants to post it.
Many of today's well-known internet comedians and writers grew up with the site. And it's hard to estimate how big the impact (positive or negative) of things like ADTRW leading to 4chan have been, not to mention things like the rise of Let's Play videos, or the creation and eventual shutdown of BitTorrent Barnyard (and its ensuing spinoffs).
The site itself still remains one of the last vestiges of the old internet--one of the few sites that both survived and managed not sell out and go headlong into monetization--and as a result, is one of the last sites on the modern internet that (maybe ironically) is not entirely awful.
My job is split between maintaining a giant legacy perl codebase and doing new dev work in python. I vastly prefer python overall, but perl's still the best when you need quick one-off scripts to tear through log files or do some quick regex subs on a bunch of files.
I don't think python has an equivalent of 'perl -p -i.bak -e 's/foo/bar/g' *', for example (which will do in-place regex substitutions on whichever files are passed in, additionally copying the original files to 'original.ext.bak').
The regex syntax is also bit more streamlined in perl, so I find it quicker and easier to throw together a script that's just doing regex stuff in it. A simple example:
Of course, the same magic that makes perl great for those one-off kinds of scripts makes it less than ideal for complex or long-living scripts that need to be maintained by multiple people, in my opinion.
Rents are only a part of inflation measurements and can easily outpace the general rate.
California's recent rent control laws caps rent increases at 10% or 5% + the yearly CPI increase (whichever is less) every year, for example, explicitly allowing rent increases to outpace the general inflation rate. Personally, the rent I pay has gone up 9% this year.
Rents can change based on whether an area becomes more or less desirable, as insurance or other costs for landlords change, as ownership of rental units consolidates, etc.--that is, for many reasons that might be only tangentially connected or even completely divorced from the reasons that the costs of other goods and services are changing.
My office has at least a few hundred thousand lines of perl 5 (v 5.8.0) running on legacy systems, though we've switched to python for new development.
We won't be using perl 6, and suggesting it in the office would get some good laughs out of everyone who's had to work on that codebase.
I'll still write perl when I need a quick one-off script to solve the kind of problem it's good for, like throwing a bunch of regexes at a bunch of text files.
I absolutely agree with you--there is no threat of anything resembling revolution in the US today. The issue is not the self-obsession or lack of engagement the ancestor comment describes, but that e.g. Occupy Wall Street was never going to result in the actual occupation of Wall Street.
I'd argue that taking to the street and protesting is also just giving people the illusion that they're doing something useful.
The Iraq War protests were some of the largest in history, and they accomplished exactly nothing (and to your example, look up Malachi Ritscher). Occupy Wall Street was a massive movement and accomplished nothing. The protests against Obamacare repeal were massive and widespread, and seem to have only succeeded in delaying the destruction of Obamacare to the current tax bill. Black Lives Matter is a massive movement that has accomplished meaningful change in a few jurisdictions and nationwide has managed to at least generate conversation, but that conversation has already been largely derailed to the question of whether or not football players need to stand for the national anthem.
Office holders are not beholden to people yelling in the streets but to the people who get them elected. This means the people who show up to vote and, increasingly, the people who finance their campaigns.
Many people have no choice in their broadband provider[1]--of those that do, their choices are often between corporations that also have significant interest in TV and cable TV (even moreso if the AT&T/Time Warner deal goes through).
Without net neutrality and with effective monopolies or duopolies in many high speed markets, these companies would have both the ability and the direct incentive to limit or restrict access to any form of competition--it would be bad business for them NOT to do everything they can to shut down Netflix, Hulu, et al and redirect people to their own distribution platforms.
It's a nebulous definition as far as I can tell. For what it's worth, I don't deal with these in any sort of legal capacity, but my day job does involve a lot of work with federal legislation and regulations--I'm just not entirely sure where legal terms might differ from my office's colloquial terms.
You can view the text of proposed and implemented regulations in the Federal Register:
https://www.federalregister.gov/
particularly under the Proposed Rules and Rules listings.
A rule will add to/amend/repeal some part of the Code of Federal Regulations. This can be anything from clarifying a few words or fixing drafting issues to implementing major regulatory changes.
It doesn't seem clear to me what this proposal would impact--does a minor amendment to an existing paragraph require a repeal of existing regulations? Would it need to meet some threshold of increasing regulatory burden--how would that be determined? What if it decreased burden?
You can look through daily issues and see that they tend to just be handling the daily business of the government. Today's includes changes to fishing zones (restoring access to an area that had been overfished a few years ago), adding more airworthiness checks to certain aircraft parts, reducing restrictions on certain tires for trailers, and adding restrictions against financial institutions processing transactions involving North Korea.
Would each of those need to repeal two prior regulations to take effect? What would quantify a previous regulation? And would they all be able to?
His work remains incredibly influential today in the current renaissance of modular synthesizers--a number of important eurorack designers (e.g., Make Noise) take a lot of inspiration from the West Coast style of synthesis.
It's not at all clear that only individuals would go for the cheaper alternative.
We also already have cheaper alternatives in e.g. studio apartments, and we currently have families living in those.
I don't see how building downwards will solve these problems in a decent way going forward--it seems that it could only continually reduce peoples' living conditions.
The article has something of an issue in that its ever-escalating apartment prices are never bound to any material costs--i.e., it doesn't directly acknowledge that some significant amount of that $900 initial and $1400 ultimate cost exist only because they're what the market will bear. More, it seems assume the premise that the only solution to increasing costs is to decrease size.
But do micro-apartments not just exacerbate the actual problem--that decent, reasonably sized homes for people in good locations are too rare or too expensive?
I can understand how these micro-homes might appeal to people in certain circumstances (I spent a while myself splitting a tiny studio in Seattle with a few other people--and that same apartment costs ~3x now what it did when I lived there 5 years ago), but I can't see how the problems these are trying to solve wouldn't be much better solved by building new desirable areas, increasing the supply of good housing, and driving the costs of all housing down.
I'm not sure it's right to conflate arguments about the possibility of new technology having other-than-positive effects with arguments about the moral decay of society.
I'd argue it's plainly obvious that the end results of technological innovation are unpredictable (how many of us here make novel use of tech to earn our livings every day? who conceived of all this when computers were first imagined?) and that it's plainly obvious that some technological innovation has not been to the greater benefit of man (e.g., the industrialization of war and genocide over the last century)--none of that has much to do with children misbehaving or society losing manners.
I don't think there's any requirement anywhere that legislators write their own bills. But they do have a lot of incentive to introduce bills on behalf of their larger campaign donors.