IMO it's much more subtle. There are still really cold days in winter. There are still mild days in summer. You can even have a whole summer that's cool or a whole winter that's incredibly cold. I've heard that one of the effects of climate change is that the weather is more unpredictable.
Having said that, there's a winter festival here that relies on naturally frozen outdoor water. A couple of years ago they had to cancel it because for the first time since it started it never got cold and stayed cold enough. If you look at the data, the length of that festival has been getting shorter and shorter every year. As for summer, having an air conditioner used to be uncommon, now it's a necessity.
It's tricky because some of that is lifestyle creep. An air conditioner used to be a much more expensive luxury, but now they're cheaper. Technology changes, expectations change, so behaviour changes. We're also notoriously bad at remembering what was normal in the past. We remember events and extremes, not averages. But, the number of days a festival can stay open in the winter is a much more concrete thing. It was just a given that it would be about 2 weeks when I was a kid, and they had a lot of freedom when it could be. Now it's a matter of waiting for the weather to cooperate, and often it can't run the full 2 weeks.
My hope has always been that if self driving cars are successful, almost nobody will own a personal car.
Cars are massively wasteful. Put aside the idea you're hauling around multiple tonnes of steel and glass frequently to just move one person. Ignore the pollution aspect too. They're also wasteful because they're used for maybe 2 hours per day, and the other 22 they just sit somewhere taking up space and getting rusty.
Just think about how many stationary cars you pass when you're out in the world. Nobody's getting any use out of them, they're just sitting there in case they're needed, meanwhile they're taking up useful space. There are other potentially expensive things you only use for a short amount of time each day: say, a good kitchen knife. But, most of them are indoors where they're not exposed to the elements and deteriorating without being used.
In a future with self-driving cars, owning a car could be a luxury that enthusiasts could pay for, if it was worth it to them, but everybody else who needed a car could just rent a car for an hour or two.
It's a psychological drama with Aubrey Plaza in it at her weird best, by the same writer behind Fargo, the TV series and Alien: Earth. Jermaine Clement plays a small but important role. It was nominated for a variety of awards, but only won a couple of minor ones. If that seems interesting to you but you haven't heard of it, it's best to go in blind because spoilers could really ruin it.
A Japanese Anime from 1995 or so. One of the most influential "huge humanoid mecha suit" animes. There's a mystery / story that's very slowly and carefully revealed over the course of the series. The art and sound is just superb. The pacing is incredible. There are scenes where it's just the hot summer outside and you can almost feel the heat. The characters have some of the annoying Japanese anime quirks, but in this case the story actually explains why the characters behave they way they do.
The IT Crowd is unique, some of the stuff in it is a bit dated now, but some of the jokes in it are so good that I know people who still quote them decades later.
(The movie first, then the TV series). Vampire faux-reality TV comedy. Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement made the movie it was based on, and were executive producers on the series, so it's that sense of humour.
I think most people know that J.K. Simmons is an amazing actor, but he's rarely the lead character in anything. I'm glad I got to see him as the lead in this, what a performance!
Babylon 5 is excellent. The special effects are still pretty decent decades later, but apparently you need to find the right version, because they tried to upscale some of it for HD at one point and completely messed up the effects scenes.
The actors do an amazing job though, and the fact that it's a cohesive story that was slowly played out over multiple seasons is so rare.
If you know of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it was a Babylon 5 ripoff. The creator of Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski went to Paramount with his idea and they rejected it. He went to PTEN / Warner Brothers and they made it. DS9 launched just a month before Babylon 5 came out. But, "coincidentally" it took place on a space station next to a wormhole, involved a leader who became a religious figure against their will / knowledge, there's a fiesty female second officer, an idealistic doctor, a hard-boiled security chief... basically too many things to be coincidental.
Of all the versions of the Sherlock Homes story I've seen, this series is the best. Jeremy Brett is an amazing Holmes. It feels like the books are being brought to life.
Aired on ITV1 Yorkshire Television in the UK in 1978 to 1980. It's a spy show but it's realistic. Incredibly realistic. The "Sandbaggers" are the elite group of "Special Operations" officers who go behind enemy lines, perform assassinations, etc. but you almost never see that happen. 90% of the show takes place in drab offices, and the show is more about office politics than spycraft. But, that's what makes it really compelling.
If you watch a clip of the show, you can see in general what it's like. Apparently the whole show is on YouTube these days.
I'm really hopeful that Steam Boxes and Steam Decks etc. mean that peripheral manufacturers start making sure their stuff works well on Linux.
Honestly, a lot of the time all they'd need to do is document the protocol and publish it and probably someone else would build and maintain a driver for them. I think it could undo a whole chicken and egg situation. Right now, manufacturers don't build their stuff with Linux support because not enough gamers run Linux. As a result, not many gamers run Linux, which means it's reasonable for manufacturers not to build in Linux support.
As for the unknowns, there are unknowns in Windows too. I've had to go into the registry many times to tweak something so it worked the way I wanted. The only difference is that my Windows install was the result of months or years worth of tweaking and customizing. Well, not the only difference. Linux is much more tweakable, and it's something where you go in expecting to have to spend more time adjusting things. But, Windows didn't have its unknowns too. It's just that most of them were already behind me. With Linux, I knew I'd have to start from nearly square one. I'm glad I did in the end, but it was still frustrating at times.
That's a good start, but too often things happening slowly means that nothing happens in time. During Biden's 4 year term they started to investigate and eventually prosecute things that happened in Trump's first term. The clock just ran out though. Too many things were still being investigated when Trump took office again.
The FBI reports to Trump, and he put a toady in charge. Ditto for the DOJ. The Supreme Court has a tiny force of police who basically guard the buildings, but they don't go out and arrest people.
It's probably good that there aren't competing federal police forces, some of whom report to the executive branch and some who are on the judicial branch. OTOH, the courts need to be able to do something if they're being ignored.
Maybe it would work if the courts could tell the executive branch that until their orders were obeyed, the court wouldn't hear any other business brought by the government. Any federal prosecutor anywhere brought a case, and the courts would refuse to hear it until other matters were resolved. OTOH, with the way the republicans want to break the country, maybe they'd be happy to have the courts effectively shut down completely. But, if the courts started issuing default judgements because the government wasn't able to present their side, maybe that would work?
IMO it's much more subtle. There are still really cold days in winter. There are still mild days in summer. You can even have a whole summer that's cool or a whole winter that's incredibly cold. I've heard that one of the effects of climate change is that the weather is more unpredictable.
Having said that, there's a winter festival here that relies on naturally frozen outdoor water. A couple of years ago they had to cancel it because for the first time since it started it never got cold and stayed cold enough. If you look at the data, the length of that festival has been getting shorter and shorter every year. As for summer, having an air conditioner used to be uncommon, now it's a necessity.
It's tricky because some of that is lifestyle creep. An air conditioner used to be a much more expensive luxury, but now they're cheaper. Technology changes, expectations change, so behaviour changes. We're also notoriously bad at remembering what was normal in the past. We remember events and extremes, not averages. But, the number of days a festival can stay open in the winter is a much more concrete thing. It was just a given that it would be about 2 weeks when I was a kid, and they had a lot of freedom when it could be. Now it's a matter of waiting for the weather to cooperate, and often it can't run the full 2 weeks.