AOL was an early Internet provider in the U.S. (originally known as America Online), known for offering dialup internet access billed by the hour, with an aggressive marketing campaign that involved mailing floppy disks and later CDs with their software, bundled with a certain amount of free hours of access. As part of the .com bubble they were heralded as the next big thing in media and merged with Time Warner in a move valued at billions of dollars but largely destroyed the value of all companies involved and was ended only two years later.

If someone has an AOL email address they probably got it in the 1990s and by 2010 it was strange if someone hadn’t moved on to a better email service. In 2016 it would be easy to assume it was someone stuck in the past, resistant to change.

It’s better to not diss Terry at all if you can help it

I’m basically picturing Kronk as Dudebro

He bet on himself though

The first Cybertrucks started shipping in November 2023 but most were more after the start of 2024, so at best it’s a 1½ year period.

The article showed a screenshot of an owner who had tried Tesla’s online trade-in estimate with a 2024 that had only 6,211 miles on it.

From the article:

Tesla sold a brand-new 2024 Cybertruck AWD Foundation Series for $100,000. Now, with only 6,000 miles on the odometer, Tesla is offering $65,400 for it – 34.6% depreciation in just a year.

Pickup trucks generally lose about 20% of their value after a year and 34% after about 3-4 years.

It’s also wroth nothing that Tesla’s online “trade-in estimates” are often higher than the final offer as noted in the footnote o fhte [sic] screenshot above.

On Car Guru, the Cybertruck’s depreciation is actually closer to 45% after a year and that’s more representative of the offers owners should expect from dealers.

EDIT: corrected mileage from screenshot

Always loved that area, right around where I honeymooned. Enjoy your good luck of living there!

“Elder millennial”/Oregon Trail generation here, and I’d generally rather read it, too. I’ve found it often only takes 5 minutes to read an article where the video would be 20 minutes. Sometimes a video works better for a how-to, but often an article will be a faster choice.

I can believe that. I used to work in broadcast TV operations/engineering and remember a boss at the time lamenting about how the FCC board was composed entirely of telco people, so it was no surprise that they were taking all our spectrum and giving it to the telcos. I can only imagine if you put them directly in charge of the media company.

Should be torrenting “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift

I was notified about 3 or 4 breaches just last year, some from companies I’d never even heard of but had my info.

It’s kind of crazy to me how many of these Blogger sites still exist although they’re inactive

Were the clowns mostly AT&T or Warner? Or pretty even between both?

Discovery has been a clown show for years now, and Warner must have been an even bigger one to get bought by Discovery.

I’ve had my account since Portal was released, so that’s around 20 years ago? Frankly I’d be shocked if I’ve spent even $1k and over 20 years? That doesn’t sound too bad. Almost everything I’ve bought has been on sale, or fairly inexpensive to begin with.

The decision by CFPB to cancel the rule comes days after the Financial Technology Association, an industry lobby group representing non-bank fintech companies, wrote to Vought in his capacity as the White House’s budget director. The lobby group asked the administration to withdraw the CFPB’s rule, claiming it would be “harmful to financial institutions’ efforts to detect and prevent fraud.”

Sure. The only way to detect and prevent fraud is to make it easy for the fraud to happen in the first place.

Sorry for the slow reply; just remembered to ask her. For bookkeeping you don’t need anything. It could be valuable to get a certification in QuickBooks, but not required. It just seems to be the most common software.

If you’re okay with writing a little HTML and just don’t want to deal with writing/designing the CSS, I recently found out about HTML5 UP, which has a bunch of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0-licensed templates. It’s fairly straightforward to modify the content if you understand the HTML, and then you can host it for free as a static page at any number of places like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages.

If you don’t want to have the CC-By attribution on the webpage, the designer also offers a service called Pixelarity with the same templates and more for a $19/quarter non-renewing subscription. You can continue using the templates even after the subscription expires and can keep making new sites with any template you already downloaded, you just don’t get any updates or tech support when the subscription expires. Upload to one of those free static hosts and it’s dramatically cheaper than Ghost or WordPress, and probably less work than a static site generator for something that’s not changing often.

Back in the days when cable/satellite was new and they were bringing you unedited movies from the theater, before they even were released on VHS often. Of course there weren’t thousands of viewers using this as a way to increase their VHS collection for one low monthly fee by recording the channel…

The buy-now-pay-later company had previously shredded its marketing contracts in 2023, followed by its customer service team in 2024, which it proudly began replacing with AI agents.

A few months after freezing new hires, Klarna bragged that it saved $10 million on marketing costs by outsourcing tasks like translation, art production, and data analysis to generative AI. It likewise claimed that its automated customer service agents could do the work of “700 full-time agents.”

As Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg, “cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality.”

Also, just want to recognize this gem:

Though executives in every industry, from news media to fast food, seem to think AI is ready for the hot seat — an attitude that’s more grounded in investor relations than an honest assessment of the tech — there are growing signs that robot chickens are coming home to roost.

This is wild; I’ve used Luden’s my whole life, not for coughs but sore throats. The active ingredient nowadays is fruit pectin; basically it’s a cherry candy but sucking on the candy helps temporarily relieve the sore throat. Very curious they don’t mention the previous opioid formulation on their Wikipedia page!