I think a lot of it has to do with monetization - YouTube pays much better than text. (also has less embarrassing ads than all the gut doctor / weight loss / toenail fungus / 15 Celebrity Wardrobe Fails crap that text sites seem to all be using these days)
Virginia has a Republican governor and a Republican House, it's a purple state with a looming threat of abortion restrictions.
If you're talking about the broader movement of people into red states, sure - they have lower housing prices and a lot of factory jobs - but in professions like medicine and teaching where we have massive staffing shortages and jobs available everywhere, people are moving to blue states.
(and in fact, as the qualify of life in red states continues to degrade - due to climate change and the consequences of all of those professionals fleeing - you'll probably continue to see their costs of living go down, and more factories open there to take advantage of that low cost of living and the commensurately low wages they have to pay; we may ultimately find ourselves in a situation where young healthy people move to a red state for a decade or so to accumulate some savings before moving to a blue state to raise their family)
I'm thinking Steam Deck. Or wait for the Switch 2 and expect a port to that (Microsoft seems to have no problem putting exclusives on Nintendo platforms, c.f. Ori)
This is a particularly dumb move given that the states likeliest to produce the greatest number of climate change refugees over the next few decades are Texas and Florida; the Northeastern states would be perfectly delighted to have a legal excuse to shut the door on them.
Well yes - we've still got at least a year of controlling the senate / WH, maybe we'll get lucky and Thomas or Alito will be visited by 3 ghosts + decide to retire.
Barrett is like the 4th most conservative justice; Alito's the other crazy one. (I know it's tempting to Handmaid's Tale her, and her views on abortion are indeed abominable, but in most other cases she's the sensible former Notre Dame law professor and tends to occupy the middle third with Kavanaugh and Roberts)
It was a default judgement, in large part because he refused to comply with a discovery order; wasn't a matter of them winning so much as him not showing up.
The judge speculated - and other commentators seem to agree - that he may have done this because the discovery could have hurt him more badly in some of the other, scarier legal cases against him (like the criminal case in Georgia); she made it clear she wasn't going any easier on him because of it, though. But if he figures he's going to be broke for the rest of his life anyway, then having them get in line with all of the other people he owes money to might be worth it if it even slightly reduces his likely jail time.
Interestingly, written Chinese does have a gendered 'she' pronoun, 她, but it's pronounced the same as the male one, and it's a recent invention meant specifically to improve compatibility with Western languages.
Also, if you want a sample of how this works in English, the narrator / main character of Ann Leckie's "Ancillary" trilogy doesn't understand gendered pronouns and constantly gets them mixed up.
The thing the studios don't seem to appreciate about this is that once they can have an AI generate Iron Man 7, so can any other schlub; you can say you want to watch a movie where Iron Man enters a mini-golf tournament with Genghis Khan and the 1927 New York Yankees and it'll make one for you.
There are 3 possible outcomes, basically:
AI is never more than a curiosity as far as movie making and this whole argument was pointless;
AI gets good enough to replace a lot of the capital-incentive grunt work of movie making, like VFX, but not high-level creative work like writing / directing / production design, so making AAA movies gets cheaper and the big studios lose power while indie studios gain more;
AI gets as good at making movies as humans are, in which case we don't need studios at all.
None of these are good for them; the status quo is actually the least bad outcome. The real game, I suspect, is that they hope that they can convince writers that AI is a big enough threat to a) make concessions in other areas to stop it and b) be grateful they're still employed at all; a world where AI actually replaces creative talent on films is a world where we don't need studios at all anymore.
Yeah, another big disaster or two and it'll be impossible to get homeowner's insurance policies - and therefore, mortgages - on a large portion of Florida real estate.
Gee, I wonder if the cost might go down if we built more of them, as is the case with, y'know, basically every other complicated thing that humans build.
But building new plants uses a shit ton of concrete. So we’re paying the carbon cost up front, and it can take years or even decades to break even.
That's not remotely on the same scale, carbon-wise. Global output is like 4 billion tons of concrete per year, a nuclear plant uses like 12 tons per megawatt; an all-in nuclear buildout would use a tiny, tiny fraction of global concrete production and the carbon costs aren't even remotely equivalent.
I think a lot of it has to do with monetization - YouTube pays much better than text. (also has less embarrassing ads than all the gut doctor / weight loss / toenail fungus / 15 Celebrity Wardrobe Fails crap that text sites seem to all be using these days)