TwinIon

A pretty good Bond song, but much more in the vein of previous Bond songs than I expected.

It depends on the M4A plan, but some of them involve essentially eliminating private health insurance.

Apparently the Bernie Bros are unhappy with this outcome: While I very much understand that unions don't want to lose their hard fought healthcare plans, I'm still surprised that this seems to be their primary point of contention with progressive dems.

I really need to do a better job of backing up my stuff. If everything went away today, I'd have all of my most important stuff in the cloud, but most of my raw images would be gone. I always just get discouraged when I look at cloud backup pricing for 7-10TB. Especially when it's all in a RAID array, which I know is not a backup, but it makes a real backup feel less necessary. I could spend a few hundred dollars a year backing up everything to a cheap cloud service, or I could setup a secondary backup NAS in another location for >$1000. The latter feels like a better option, I just never get around to it.

So it's out, and apparently it really sucks. The performance is bad, the cameras are bad, the screen is bad, the battery life is bad, and the hinge isn't great. MKBHD seems to dislike it even more. Fear not for those that are interested in the concept though, because Samsung is making their own folding phone: the Galaxy Z Flip. It has a folding glass(!) display, flagship internals, a decent camera, and does away with the Razr chin. It's still $1300, so you're still paying more for a worse phone just to get one that folds, but given that Samsung's own phones can get even more expensive than that, it's not a crazy premium and signals that the tech is evolving faster than I expected. The external screen seems much more useful on the RAZR, but otherwise the Z Flip seems to be far and away the better clamshell foldable. A glass screen is by far the biggest deal here though. I didn't expect folding glass to come so soon, and even if it turns out not to be "real" glass or hold up perfectly, from the early hands on it seems to be a huge step in the right direction. If I could dream my perfect foldable device into reality, I honestly don't know what shape it would take, and I'm not really willing to pay a premium for it anytime soon, but it's still so cool.

A 71% on RT is about 50% higher than I expected. I doubt I'll go see it, but good on them for making something decent after it looked like such a disaster.

I was thinking more about this and the early "chase" sequence should have exemplified this movie. It was farcical to an almost Monty Python level, with everyone she'd ever wronged all approaching her at the same time for any number of reasons. It was insane and zany and totally fit with Harley Quinn's energy. However, with the context of the full film, it also felt weirdly out of place with this version of Gotham and the movie as a whole, but I really wish it didn't. I suppose you can't have an entire film at that same Looney Toons energy level, but I wish they'd tried a bit harder make it that way.

Maybe I'm overestimating what I'm expecting them to do with Anthem, but from the sounds of it they're trying to reinvent the game. Destiny certainly evolved a lot, but I never got the impression that it was rebooted to the level that they're implying with Anthem.

After hearing a lot of praise, I watched the first two episodes of Mythic Quest, and I was not a fan. I've heard enough praise for it that I won't discourage everyone else from watching, but the comedy just didn't land for me.

It's new Wes Anderson alright.

I'm among the people that would like to see this succeed. I was very interested in the game before launch, put off by the reactions to the game, and would be very willing to give it a go if a redesign was well received. That said, I'll be surprised if they can make it work. What are the good examples of this having worked in the past? I know it's happened, but I'm struggling to come up with any. I know Destiny evolved slowly, but that wasn't a complete overhaul like they're talking about here.

A quick google search doesn't reveal any district specific polling, but I'd bet that AOC easily wins the primary.

It wasn't that long ago that AT&T wasn't allowed to buy T-Mobile. It's really not all that unfeasible that the Feds just wouldn't allow either of those two to ever buy T-Mobile. Being a wireless carrier in the US is a pretty good business. T-Mobile finished Q4 with a Net Income up 17% to $751M, $3.5B for the year. That is in no way a company that is destined to fail or be sold. Even if the parent companies of T-Mobile and Sprint did decide to offload them, it was never guaranteed that they get bought by one of their competitors.

I think I mostly agree with you, but the military does things at such a scale that even gradual cuts feel enormous. Reduce the number of warships you build, and that might mean a few billion comes off the budget. Kill off a next gen bomber program or something and you might be talking about a few hundred billion over the next decade. That doesn't even account for the war budget, where really large cuts could be made very quickly. So yeah, I think I'm with you that you don't want to blow things up by making such severe cuts that you put whole industries out of business, but even very reasonable cuts to something as enormous as our defense spending could look significant.

I don't see why any of that is relevant. The question here isn't how feasible it is for T-Mobile to become as big as their competitors." The question is if they provide meaningful competition at their current market share, and if that competition would lessen should the merger occur. Ever since AT&T was not allowed to buy them, T-Mobile has shown they have very much have the ability to compete in and change the dynamic of the entire market. Not being as big as their competitors doesn't mean they can't grow, and it hasn't hurt their ability to be profitable. Besides, this new company is going to be run by the T-Mobile people, so who cares what the parent companies think or want? Still, the biggest failure of this whole thing is the complete joke of a plan to turn Dish into a fourth competitor. There's just no reason to expect that they'll succeed.

She was probably the biggest lock of the night. I don't know why, but somehow she was just established as the obvious winner months ago, and she won pretty much every preliminary award. It always seems odd to me when that happens in a movie that people otherwise don't care about, but it seems like a pretty common occurrence for acting awards.

I imagine the total number of jobs propped up by the defense budget is huge, but I would also imagine that it's an incredibly wasteful way to employ those people.

Harley Quinn is certainly colorful and peppy, but her movie is almost bizarrely bland. While not offensively bad in the way some of the other DC films have been, Birds of Prey does little worthy of note. Each of the characters, Harley Quinn included, are one note, disposable, and generally unexplored. Ewan McGregor's villain is similarly nothing and no one. There are momentary flashes of something worthwhile, a couple nifty fight sequences, and an early chase that leans well into the cartoon lunacy that Quinn is best suited for. Unfortunately after that it seems the movie settles down into a boring and predictable path, and never really finds a new take on a well worn story.

1917 was considered a significant front runner for both Picture and Director. Parasite was second in both categories, but I'd still consider those wins to be upsets. Upsets that I'm quite happy about.

I think that’s a very plausible scenario. Bong is just so lovable, and 1917 feels like it’s as much Deakin’s movie as it is Mendes’. I’ll probably still mark down Mendes in my Oscar pool, but I’m holding out some hope that voters don’t decide that foreign picture and original screenplay are enough for Bong.

I imagine this is well trod legal territory, and I didn't read the decision, but when I read that you can't do a thing "without the consent of congress," I think that you'd need permission to do that thing. Not that you can do that thing until congress tells you not to. I generally find that cases involving standing are the most frustrating. It's obviously more complicated than I feel like it should be, but I honestly don't know enough about it to make any kind of legal argument. I just know that when an important case goes up before a high court and instead of looking at the merits of the case they just throw it out on a standing issue, it's frustrating, even when it's correct.

Yikes. This is very much the type of character that works well as seasoning, not the main course. I'd like to see it succeed, but the trailer doesn't give much hope.

Yup. Had to spread the wealth around if you want to keep up that level of funding. If this capsule really does get lost in all this mess, that leaves Orion and SpaceX's Dragon left, but as far as I can tell, those two don't really serve the same purpose. I sure hope Space X can keep their record clean.

While I have some reservations about the idea of space based internet, I do hope they can provide some meaningful competition to existing carriers. If this IPO helps that, I'm happy to see it happen.

I really respect Romney for his vote. There is plenty to chastise him for, but, as he noted, he will suffer for this vote. As far as I can tell, the only reason he voted to convict was out of an actual sense of duty to uphold his oath, a rare thing well worth applauding.