Or is a by product of its former format, the live laughs with a crowd while filming?

This is the reason. Television comedy derives from stage shows where the audience sits in one direction from the stage.

A lot of early television comedy programming was often from variety shows, where the live studio audience is an important feedback mechanism for the actual performers. A standup comic needs a laughing audience to respond to (and often, so do other stage performers, including sketch comedy).

So television comedy comes from that tradition, and a live audience was always included for certain types of programs. Even today, we expect variety shows to have audiences. For example, John Oliver's show without an audience felt kinda weird while that was going on in 2020. And even some pre-filmed sketch comedy shows, like Chappelle's Show, would record audiences watching the pre-recorded sketches as part of the audio track for the broadcast itself, while Chappelle himself was filmed essentially MCing for that audience and those sketches.

So sitcoms came up on sets with live performances before studio audiences, just like sketch comedies and variety shows or daytime talk shows. That multi camera sitcom format became its own aesthetic, with three-walled sets that were always filmed from one direction, with a live audience laughing and reacting. Even when they started using closed sets for safety and control (see the Fran Drescher stuff linked elsewhere in this thread), they preserved the look and feel of those types of shows.

Single camera sitcoms are much more popular now, after the 2000's showed that they could be hilarious, but they are significantly more expensive and complicated to shoot, as blocking and choreography and set design require a lot more conscious choices when the cameras can be anywhere in the room, pointed in any direction. So multi camera still exists.

When costs are level per kilowatt over lifetime Nuclear is cheaper thanks to economies of scale

Citation needed.

Vogtle added 2000 megawatts of capacity for $35 billion over the past 15 years. That's an up-front capital cost of $17,500 per watt. Even spread over a 75 year expected lifespan, we're talking about $233 per watt per year, of capital costs alone.

Maintenance and operation (and oh, by the way, nuclear is one of the most labor intensive forms of energy generation, so you'll have to look at 75 years of wage increases too) and interest and decommissioning will add to that.

So factoring everything in, estimates are that it will work out to be about $170/MWh, or $0.17 per kwh for generation (before accounting for transmission and reinvestment and profit for the for-profit operators). That's just not cost competitive with anything else on the market.

Economies of scale is basically the opposite of the problem that 21st century nuclear has encountered, which is why the current push is to smaller reactors, not bigger.

There's a place for extending nuclear power plant lifespans as long as they'll go. There's less of a place for building new nuclear.

Apple's got one, so does Google, and Microsoft.

They've got beacon location data, yes, but Apple is the only one that gives up that information without first conforming that the query is coming from someone who sees that BSSID. As OP notes:

In this respect, Apple's Wi-Fi database also differs fundamentally from other Wi-Fi databases, such as the one operated by Google.

If you click through to the paper, it describes 2 approaches for using BSSIDs to identify location:

1. Client submits a query listing each BSSID and its signal strength, and the server calculates position and returns where it believes the query is coming from.
2. Client submits a query listing each BSSID it's interested in, and the server responds with the location of each BSSID so that the client can calculate its own position.

See the problem there? Approach 2 gives more raw information away, by outsourcing the positioning calculation to untrusted clients.

And the paper outlines how Apple goes even further than that:

Apple’s Wi-Fi geolocation API [4] works in the latter manner, but with an added twist: In addition to the geolocations of the BSSIDs the client submits, Apple’s API opportunistically returns the geolocations of up to several hundred more BSSIDs nearby the one requested. These unrequested BSSID geolocations are presumably then cached by the client, which no longer needs to request the locations of the nearby BSSIDs it may soon encounter, e.g., as the user walks down a city street.

It goes on later:

Apple’s WPS API is free and places few restrictions on its use. It requires neither an API key, authentication, nor an Apple device; our measurement software is written in Go and runs on Linux. Moreover, Apple appears to make no attempt to filter physically impossible queries. The BSSIDs submitted to the WPS need not be physically proximate to each other nor to the device submitting the query; Apple’s WPS will respond with geolocations for BSSIDs on two different continents in the same request to a querier on a third.

That's the discussion here. Apple keeps a large database, like many other big tech/mapping firms, but does nothing to keep that database hard for strangers to scrape in bulk.

In contrast, Google uses the first approach and keeps the information a bit more restricted by performing the location calculation at the server:

Han et al. reverse-engineered Google’s WPS’s method of operation [17]. Google’s WPS functions differently than Skyhook’s and Apple’s insofar as Google’s service attempts to geolocate the device submitting the query, providing it with only the device’s computed position given a list of BSSIDs from the client.

So it's possible to run this type of service with this type of database, without sharing BSSID locations with anyone else who asks.

I disagree with your premise. The 111th Congress got a lot done. Here's a list of major legislation.

• Lily Ledbetter Act made it easier to recover for employment discrimination, and explicitly overruled a Supreme Court case making it harder to recover back pay.
• The ARRA was a huge relief bill for the financial crisis, one of the largest bills of all time.
• The Credit CARD Act changed a bunch of consumer protection for credit card borrowers.
• Dodd Frank was groundbreaking, the biggest financial reform bill since probably the Great Depression, and created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, probably one of the most important pro-consumer agencies in the federal government today.
• School lunch reforms (why the right now hates Michelle Obama)
• Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP or SCHIP): healthcare coverage, independent of Obamacare, for all children under 18.
• Obamacare itself, which also includes comprehensive student loan reform too.

That's a big accomplishment list for 2 years, plus some smaller accomplishments like some tobacco reform, some other reforms relating to different agencies and programs.

Plus that doesn't include the administrative regulations and decisions the administrative agencies passed (things like Net Neutrality), even though those generally only last as long as the next president would want to keep them (see, again, Net Neutrality).

The agency’s manager sent me a background memo about the woman I’d be playing, a purported 21-year-old university student blessed with physical proportions that are in vogue these days.

In vogue these days? That just reminds me of how every generation thinks they invented sex. Or the Simpsons quote where Mr. Burns describes a past encounter: "We expressed our love physically, as was the style at the time."

Put another way, this means that a malicious coffee shop or hotel can eavesdrop on all VPN traffic on their network. That's a really big fucking deal.

There's two parts to being successful at a job: successfully accomplishing the work that fits into your role, and successfully messaging to your bosses that you're doing a good job.

So when executives lay people off, it tends to catch people who are bad at that second task (the messaging/perception side), which may or may not include people who are good at the first task (actually doing good shit for the company).

That's why mass layoffs are damaging, and should be avoided if possible.

My kids have a book called "solitary animals," explicitly framed as introverts in nature, and from what I remember of it, it mentions pumas, octopuses, sloths, and eagles.

I'm glad that The Atlantic is covering this issue. Nothing groundbreaking here for anyone who follows these issues, but the Atlantic's audience overlaps a lot with actual policymakers and their staffs. The tech companies don't want to be regulated by the government, so coverage by these types of publications may be a good starting point for reform (whether voluntary or regulated).

Chavez Rodriguez outlined that abortion will be on the ballot in Florida, where the state Supreme Court issued a ruling that puts a six-week ban into effect May 1. Democrats see abortion as a winning issue for them in 2024 after experiencing better-than-expected results in the midterm elections months after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

That's basically a key point here. Abortion is banned in Florida, but a state constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion is on the ballot the same day as the presidential election.

That does change the electoral dynamic.

Generates a realistic-looking scene that didn’t actually occur

Doesn't this describe, like, every mainstream live action film or television show?

Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.