The look on her face is clearly one of disappointment. It’s funny because it encapsulates the ~~children fyrefest ~~ Willy Wonka Experience but I never doubted she was just trapped in the machine.

An iPhone and Chipotle. That dude is set.

Oh, I’ve been there. I hope you found a good coach. Mine moved away just a few months after I started, but I learned soooo much and he was very inspiring. Saw your first session went well - congratulations!!

Sinus (head) stuff is just terrible - and and internet outage? You drew the short straw this week! Hope you feel better soon!

Went to see my parents last week. Dad had a sniffle the first day and I suggested we leave but my wife didn’t want to drive 8 hours back home so we agreed to “be careful” and he stayed mostly away from us and wore a mask when we were in the car. Cue to 4 days later and my wife feels tired and has allergy symptoms driving home (tbf, the pine pollen down south is nuts and it’s one of her primary allergens). I slept in the guest bedroom when we got home / spent my time on the other side of the house in case it wasn’t just allergies. Tuesday morning…she tests for Covid “just to see” and is positive. I’m typing this from a hotel room, still feeling well, tested negative. Will test again today regardless.

Oh, and Remdesivir? $1680 for a single prescription. Fuck me; no wonder they have so much money for TV ads.

Michael Bolton

With the small carve out exception of people who are fine with the antisocial behavior and management style of the owner, Inertia is the only reason. Governments, influencers, corporations- they all have a following and an established channel which involves minimum expense to maintain.

I’ve heard of that in Portugal! Barbershop is actually an art form that was appropriated from African slaves who brought an oral tradition with them to America and morphed from the spirituals they sang; it was developed more though the Vaudeville practice and modern barbershop (the organization and preservation of the art form) started as a lark in the 40s. The less I sing it, the more I enjoy it when I do - it’s very distinctive, so a little goes a long way.

Barbershop. I know, weird, right? It gets weirder. This is a weekend event - a “brigade”. The best way to describe it is like a pick-up basketball tournament. 100 guys show up, they get randomly (by position forward/center/guard or bass/bari/lead/tenor) into 25 “teams”. Instead of basketball plays and general sport, we all learn - note perfect - twelve fairly complex songs. Each team gets assigned one of the songs and, after an hour of rehearsal, compete against one another (we have voice judges, like the Olympics have gymnastics judges). It’s all for shits and grins, but mostly for the brotherhood* of shared song. We split up and do programs for local school music departments, and all get together to form a 100 man chorus for a benefit concert the second nite. Unlike most choral events, we all know the same songs, so you find three others and go. All day and all night for two days. Lunches or dinners at local restaurants often turn flash-mob performance.

Again, it’s weird from the outside. From the inside it’s like 99 friends best friends or family members, but without the family discord.

*There has almost always been women in barbershop, but we were officially separated into our own societies/organizations until recently. Falling numbers will do that - it’s an old art form and the men who were around when it is popular are passing on. Anyway, several of these weekends are now gender inclusive and, from what I understand, awesomer as a result. I’ll get to go to my first in two months. We’re also adding semi-modern repertoire. Sugar (maroon 5) and Feel it Still (Portugal The Man) are on the song list, for example. Last weekend they threw in a Garth Brooks and Joe Diffy songs. Not 2023/24, but not 1923/24 either.

So far, so good. Sang with a hundred people over the weekend and haven’t gotten sick (yet). Small victories.

I sat in a conference room with 300+ other professionals in my field and they laughed that AI could take their jobs. I’m on the “top” of that pile of practitioners - I make my living in the niche where I’m the old expert who gets called in when nobody else can figure out a solution, or in the ordinary job to make sure it’s done right the first time. Easily 80% of my job could be replaced by AI, if my industry were a big enough cherry to pick. Luckily for them (and me) it’s not. For my industry the danger is that the AI will “solve” the problem of newly graduated professionals - the people who learn on the normal ways so that they can grow old and become the experts who understand the basics and work on the hard, unique conditions. If AI displaces the graduates so that I can increase my profits through a lower employee count, it’s really just shortchanging society 30 years down the road when we won’t have humans with hands on experience. That’s the societal danger we face if we aren’t careful. You and I can got on top of this, but if nobody behind us can there will be a gap in knowledge. (I’m re-reading Azimov’s Foundation series. It feels a lot less like the idle entertainment it did when I read it as a teenager)

Posting anonymously can allow people to protect themselves

There it is. A knife can be used to prepare dinner as easily as it can kill a man.

Anonymity doesn’t cause hate or aggression, it enables it by removing consequences. The hate and aggression has always been there, it now has an outlet where the aggressor can be offensive without repercussion and still see the reaction from others.

LOL. CEOs aren’t going to be using AI for themselves; they have the money to hire teams of people (who will use, but vet, AI output) and provide specialized, boutique assistance. Instead, they will be forcing you and I to use AI because it costs them less money to serve us.

Robots and AI are orders of magnitude cheaper to run than humans, and have been for decades. ATMs are robots. Earthmoving equipment is robots. Computer software is a type of robot - from word processing to CAD to calculators. Mostly human controlled - as will the foreseeable future robots - but requiring fewer and fewer humans to do a set amount of labor (physical or mental).

What is the biggest push right now? Automated driving. What is the largest job sector in a majority of the US states? Delivery driver. There are fears of automated drivers missing edge cases and hitting pedestrians and (clutch your pearls) children. Over 40,000 people and over 1000 children were killed in the US by human drivers just last year. 3 Adults and 3 children were killed in Ohio just this week when a tractor trailer plowed into two passenger vehicles and a school bus because the driver wasn’t paying attention. The simplest impact detection “robot” could have prevented that. AI is already better, on average, than humans - it’s only our sense / belief in self determination that we erroneously think that we are (on average) better than a machine. And AI/ML/Automated drivers will improve with time, whereas humans are explicitly getting worse as we are offered more and more distractions in our daily lives.

AI/ML/Robots are already being implemented in the US Government (I know people who are doing it). They are coming for your job. They’re coming for my job. It’s only hubris that makes us think we are outrunning our digital competitors. The question is if we (through governments and regulation) will benefit from it or become destitute by it.

R’amen

I think I read your title differently - as in, gravity would ebb and flow like wind or rain or barometric pressure or temperature. In normal days the gravity might be mostly constant, or may fluctuate a few percent as the day goes on, rising and falling over the diurnal cycle. But at times a gravity storm could blow through, causing wild fluctuations from just a few percent (or even reversing!) to a couple hundred percent, causing travelers to lose their un-secured cargo or to be pinned in place until the storm subsides. Locals would know the dangers and have things easily tied down, or beds for riding a gravity storm in relative comfort, but any huge storms people would evacuate, praying that the fluctuations wouldn’t destroy their homes or farms. (And now I’m imagining the end of O Brother Where Art Thou with the cow on the roof)

That’s an urban legend. Prices are aggregated and cataloged by ITA matrix (purchased by google/alphabet a decade ago). The only time a price change is when the airline itself changes the current retail price.

Now, if you’re using a third party service - like Priceline or Travelocity - to check and book tickets (which is a terrible idea, btw) they may track your history and alter their price, but the master index (served by google flights from ITA matrix) will not change for you, personally, or your specific ip or other identifier.

Note: Airlines will adjust their prices based on interest/purchases, so if you’re hitting a flight with requests to bill so hard that the airline thinks the flight is popular, or you go through the reservation process far enough to “fill” a particular fare class, then the price will change - but it will change for everyone, not just you. Similarly, Amazon will raise pricing during a buying surge - but it’s for everyone, not just you.

On the (mostly) plus side for untracked browsing - as long as it’s so tight that you’re hopping ips and avoiding any back end fingerprinting of your system - Many merchants do source-based pricing. Ex: if you go to book certain services direct vs following a referral link (like via a cash back site or association) you my find different pricing. Using and AARP link to some travel services will result in a 25-30% price increase, to offset the 20% rate coupon they offer, plus a little coin for themselves. Other sites will also trigger cost basis alterations - especially for services which are hard to identify or compare a fixed cost.

All my main numbers VoIP are Google. I’ve got two others at a large (Canadian, iirc) provider.

A second sim is the only options for some. Either ChatGPT or one of those requires a real-world mobile number. Anything on a VoIP is blacklisted. I literally can’t sign up for it or a couple other oddball services (like the Dunkin’ app*) because I refuse to divulge my carrier number to anyone but my family and 2-3 close friends. I have a (former) mobile number and two former landline numbers on VoIP that are my real, active numbers but some services simply refuse to use them.

* I’d use my freebie backup sim for registration, but many use that # as their required+sole 2FA “security“ so signing up with it is useless as I’d have to use that phone every time I interacted. Maybe it’s time to look into eSIMs.

Your passport contains biometric data (your photo - not as complete as a depth scan or multi-spectral image, but still biometric).

There are two (well, threeish, legitimate) reasons for biometric. First, it is currently harder to fake. Digital passports are difficult but not impossible and non-digital are relatively easy, especially for state actors. Second people are stupid (or unlucky) and lose their passports, which leads to a shit-ton of paperwork to fix. Third, and this is really the rule for which lost docs are a sub-problem, efficiency. Even the cheapest front-line human costs about $100 an hour, including management, training, benefits, etc and I’ve yet to meet an international (or domestic) traveler who enjoys waiting in hour+ lines to get through passport control. Less contact time / zero friction interfaces are both better for passenger attitude and cost efficiency.

Until we stop the practice of drawing imaginary lines on the planet and regulating which side each person is allowed to be on, nearly every travelers and pretty much all the boarder control apparatus is going to want to spend as little time and money on one another as possible.

From a practical perspective? They could eventually cross reference the exits to arrivals, automatically flagging those who have overstated their visa (or, more specifically, automatically clearing those who have left). The data (exit data) is generally useful for all sorts of mundane statistical work. From an automation standpoint it’s both cost effective and time saving. Anyone who’s queued up in an hour+ line to get through border patrol will attest that the prices can be infuriatingly slow.

Of course, that the data can be used for non-official or privacy-adverse uses doesn’t make the collection ok, but that fact also doesn’t mean that the data isn’t useful for its overly intended purpose (automated tracking of everyone who leaves)