Are they? As the article OP shares suggests, these films quietly make us compare our lives to what is portrayed on screen. This is advertisement 101: display people in enviable positions to portray a sense of longing for a lifestyle that one would not normally seek. A food commercial isn’t selling you a product, it’s trying to make you hungry.

If all you wanted out of these rom coms is the portrayal of a carefree life, you could just watch pharmaceutical, banking, or insurance ads.

The problem is the hysteria behind it, leading people to confuse good sounding information with good information. At least when people generally produce information they tend to make an effort to get it right. Machine learning is just an uncaring bullshitting machine, that is rewarded on the basis of the ability to fool people (turns out the Turing test was a crappy benchmark for practice-ready AI besides writing poems), and VC money hasn’t reached the “find out” phase of that looming lesson, when we all just get collectively exhausted by how underwhelming the AI fad is.

Don’t forget the cost of lower and higher education in your “need for living” calculation!

Also, you’ll still need a system to determine what products and services are valuable for society.

The average human considers the Pythagorean theorem “sophistication”. Let’s not take our education for granted.

Real answer: power density. Pound for pound, gas still contains more energy than our best batteries. The weight of energy storage is still a massive deal for anything that cannot be tethered to a grid or be in close practical proximity for frequent recharging, from rockets, planes and cars (sometimes) to chainsaws and lawnmowers (sometimes).

Other than making sure to be wearing your glasses if you are near sighted enough that your local licence requires it, glasses are an irrelevant factor. It’s not like you are going into active combat duty…

“Conservative”, “right”, “left”, are meaningless, political relevative terms we should stop using. Instead, we should just describe our values on a select major view points, including power, economy, and social structure.

The only thing holding me back now is inertia with compatibility to extensive software/game collection. But yeah, about to jump ship.

They are neither ham nor steamed, unless that’s exactly what they are having over there? Wouldn’t compare it to a hamburger though… (A hamburger being a Hamburg steak, as in the German city)

Epic sax guy and ska is a very strange juxtaposition.

Reject the temptations of short term convenience and adopt sustainable consumption.

Demand ownership of goods. Demand offline-first.