IIRC, it's mostly that mega-churches are taking over.

It's the smaller (ostensibly) community focused ones that are dying.

Germany's population is ~80 million. $10 million isn't nothing, but that's $0.125 per person. We also didn't just, hand them a bag of cash and walk away whistling.

10 million dollars on the scale of Healthcare is... well about $0.30 per person in the US. Do I need a source to say we spend far more than that? The problem isn't just how much we spend, it's what we get for it, which is mostly rich Insurance companies.

I agree the passkey user experience needs work, but man do I enjoy it over the haphazard 'passwordless' website login that just sends you an email.

I get it, they're just skipping an attack vector and basically relying only on '2FA'. But now I have to go to a different app/tab, copy a code, and return to the site instead of letting the password manager fill stuff in for me. Some, like kickstarter, let you still have a 2FA code enabled so you have to grab your code from whichever authenticator and go to your email. Really nice login experience out of nowhere one day. \s

It's absolutely a gimmick markup, but as gimmick markups on gravestones go that's not that expensive. Not because that's reasonable but because there's so much guilting people into spending at least 4 figures while they're grieving.

The conversion for eMPG (which yes, is possibly the most cursed of units) is ~33 kwh equals a gallon. My PNW home electricity prices are pretty low, but that puts an eGallon at ~$2.97.

If anything I think that number is misleadingly high, but that's part of why it's possibly the most cursed unit.

Thankfully in the US we won't get the choice because they're not allowed to sell here to protect our domestic producers from competition so we can just give them more money the next time they need to be bailed out.

Most of the things I've seen basically say 'no'.

There are commercial displays that don't have spyware / connectivity, but they tend to have significantly lower refresh rates / HDR / etc. even if they are 4k. And they're several times the price of consumer TVs, at least in part because they aren't being subsidized by selling them at a loss to make money on ads.

Agreed.

I strongly remember a CompSci professor ~2005 being disgusted with auto-generated Java GUI. And yes it was clunky and more memory intensive than it could have been, but also, I really don't care about how GridView is defined most of the time.

Bad code is bad code, touched by AI or not. For working code, a volunteer group spending resources to determine if it might have been touched by AI is at the very least an incredibly frustrating standard to try to meet. And very likely impossible to verify in any meaningful way.

Ebay or second hand shops are a pretty good entry point. You can get a decent camera and lens for ~$100-200.

Too expensive, too big, and too military were all arguments for computers, radio (/radar), and GPS to never have widespread adoption.

It's a cool experiment/technology. Why so down?

Absolutely, it's not their problem or their business.

But the 2025 tax cuts saved just Facebook ~$11bn in 2025 alone. Meaning across all US mega-corporations there are trillions of dollars not being allocated in whichever way voters want, but going to pet projects and yachts because they have more money than they can reinvest in their business or know what to do with.