A traveler doing hidden city/throwaway ticketing (what the cool kids are now calling "skiplagging") is likely in the cheapest fare class. That means you board last, and it's not uncommon for the plane to run out of overhead space for carryons late into boarding. No choice but to tip your hand to the gate agent or cabin crew or get off the plane.

The article neglects to mention that NYT Magazine did a story last fall on this very subject:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/magazine/quiet-chamber-minneapolis.html

The writer visited an anechoic chamber that's soundproofed and acoustically dampened such that you can't hear anything but the sound of your own body. Once you're inside, you quickly realize the difference between silence and the absence of external sound. Apparently hearing nothing but your own body is very disconcerting.

A quick search online says XM Weather is spotty at best in southeast Alaska, especially with a recent satellite retirement: https://www.trawlerforum.com/forums/s3/sirius-xm-southeast-alaska-63933.html. A poster got a coverage map from SiriusXM that excludes the rest of the state.

Apparently the state of Alaska sued SiriusXM in 2014 specifically for selling subscriptions to Alaska residents, knowing that they were too far north to get a reliable signal.

The biggest flaw is that you can't refill propane cylinders at home. A significant percentage of EV owners have home chargers and rarely, if ever, have to go to a charging station. Propane is more like ICE -- when the tank runs out, you go to the gas station.

In the consumer market you'd end up with a bifurcated system: BEVs with fixed batteries, and BEVs with swappable batteries. We're having enough trouble rolling out infrastructure to support the former. Battery swaps would be like gas in New Jersey -- you would need a station attendant on duty to do the battery swap for you, and for peak hours you'd need multiple attendants to handle the volume of cars coming in, adding to labor costs.

The only use case where this makes sense is for vehicles that can't make a trip on a single charge. Even the use case of commercial delivery vehicles (e.g. USPS, UPS, FedEx) doesn't really fit because they typically have a limited travel radius and don't run at night, at which point they can be plugged in to charge. That just leaves a subset of taxis and regional delivery trucks, long-haul tractor-trailers, and leisure/business travelers. And in all of those cases, they'd still have to stop for gas/diesel at a certain point. Developing technologies to drive down the minimum charging time is a better use of R&D $s, instead of developing a parallel infrastructure.

Amazon did nearly $130 billion of revenue and earned $16 billion in profit (EBITDA) in the first three months of 2023.

I doubt they'll get the message from customers returning fraudulent merchandise. If anything they'll close your account and ban you for a high return rate, like some other retailers have.

This.

Needed a Dyson vacuum attachment back in 2018, went through their official storefront page on Amazon and ordered. Even labeled "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com." One day later, a knockoff version showed up. I sent it back and re-ordered from Bed Bath & Beyond instead.

I never buy anything with electronics in it or food from Amazon anymore. Ultimately I canceled Prime because my lack of trust means I never place orders with them. Instead I buy direct from the manufacturer, even if it means paying the shipping cost, or stick with retailers who actually vet their supply chain.

Prime membership cost:
2005: $79
2014: $99 (+$20 after 9 years)
2018: $119 (+$20 after 4 years)
2022: $139 (+$20 after 4 years)

Not unreasonable to think that if you buy the theoretical MVNO service this year, Prime could hit $200 by the end of the decade. Sub growth in the U.S. has probably plateaued (I canceled mine last year with the price increase and devaluation of Prime Music) so the only option going forward is price hikes. Have to pay for that Thursday Night Football and cell service somehow...

OP is correct if referring to the classic (meaning the 2000s) iPod filesystem layout: https://www.engadget.com/2005-10-21-terminal-tips-the-ipods-file-structure.html

You would end up with Fnn folders and inside would be NNNN.(mp3|m4a|m4p) files after import. For instance, "(artist) - (album) - (track name).mp3" would end up as "Music/F18/SKJH.mp3" on the iPod. Good luck if you ever have to restore from the iPod_control folder...

iTunes for Mac/Windows during that timeframe was also known to screw up the folder/file structure, partially due to its data for tagging music, partially due to how it mapped ID3 tags to generate said folders/files: https://www.samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/grouping.asp

One financial institution's automated system also looks at the originating phone number and adjusts the number of authenticators. If I call from my registered phone number, I get fewer prompts plus voice ID; conversely, if I call from someone else's phone, I get many more prompts in addition to voice ID. And the ruse is up anyway if you have to talk to a live person.

Deep Freeze has been around for 20+ years, well before cloud integration (OneDrive, or Dropbox before that) was a thing. Same for roaming profiles and folder redirection, and AppData almost as long. Sounds like the only thing that's changed is putting Deep Freeze on laptops. The school systems I know of that give out student laptops all went the other direction: no admin privs, reimaged between academic years. A laptop with Deep Freeze sounds like a nightmare.

Kazuo Ishiguro imagined something similar in the 2005 novel Never Let Me Go, later adapted as a film in 2010. The U.K. (in an alternate reality) creates the National Donor Programme which raises human clones from cradle to grave for the sole purpose of organ donation. The donors speculate about their origin, i.e. who they were cloned from, in later parts of the novel. Notably, the donor recipients are never described, so it's unclear whether the donors are identical or not.

Honda used a camera-only system in the mid 2010s for forward collision avoidance. It frequently triggered on shadows and cars waiting in turn lanes on windy roads. Luckily my car only had a passive warning system, so it never slammed on the brakes. The same tech was used for the Acura brand and the lane assist (camera-only) locked out the steering column for drivers going through a specific intersection, causing people to drive into the curb.

They're working on the tires too: Firestone plans to switch to the guayule shrub as a more sustainable alternative to traditional sources of tire rubber. It grows in the desert, doesn't need much rain, and is naturally pest-resistant.

Yes, they still have to figure out how to make tire disposal a more eco-friendly process...

Brings new meaning to hiding your cash under the mattress

Terminal users are able to message other terminal users...considering the origins of the terminal (bond trading and pricing), I've always understood that the real value is in the messaging service. One of Bloomberg's ads touts the fact that they have other 600k "decision makers" on the platform, and their TV and radio hosts frequently mention that terminal users can send in messages directly during programming. No open-source option (or even Reuters Eikon) is ever going to replicate that. One can imagine how many block trades and bond trades get done over their messaging service.

A good percentage of the datasets on the terminal is publicly available. The rest is either third-party proprietary (e.g. exchange data like quotes trades) or is internally generated by teams like Bloomberg Intelligence. Again, open-source isn't going to get you very far. But very few people actually need what's offered for $24k/year/terminal; the $500/yr sub to Bloomberg.com (which used to not even be an option) is probably overkill for most.