When traveling for work it's pretty routine for me to change either my outbound or return flight or both *after I've already checked in*.

Schedules change- "The test is running ahead of schedule - we need you there tomorrow morning instead of three days from now" or "something broke, you're not needed til next week" as I'm about to head to the airport. The same thing happens on returns - I might slip my return day-for-day as some part of a test gets delayed or runs long. It's perfectly reasonable to me that they're overbooking to compensate for such behavior (I'm hardly close to the only one). Such behavior also gets compensated by me and similar people finishing work early and not waiting the extra day or whatever to fly home, but changing to get on the next flight that's easy to make and will leave/arrive at reasonable times.

I did this on a much smaller scale for a short time. I flew at christmas for three consecutive years on a single purchased America West ticket. Each of the first two years I was on an overbooked flight at some point in my itinerary and took the voucher. In one case I was coming down with the flu and simply showed up at check-in and asked if they were overbooked. They were and happily handed me a voucher and rebooked me for a few days out and I went back to my mom's house and took a couple days getting over it before I flew home.

Noodles (ramen or otherwise) with chopped mixed vegetables. Cheap, tastes good, and nutritious. All it takes is some boiling water and a minute or two of chopping. Soylent gets about half its calories from fat, which is way too much.

fresh bread is extremely easy to make and doesn't have to be labor intensive (18 hour, no-knead). Also very tasty.

What takes 10 minutes to say in voicemail can probably be read in 1 or so, and more easily referred back to.

My employer started doing video documentation instead of written documentation for in-house tools and classes and it's extremely irritating - it's a population of very well educated people who are used to reading large volumes of technical information for detail and digesting it, so they started distributing information in the lowest bandwidth, least random-access way they could think of.

My local SAR group are all made auxilliary deputies and get paid $1/year or something like that so that they get full legal benefits of being first responders. Presumably that would include RC aircraft use exemptions, too.

There's actually an eagle's nest very near one of the recent fires around here. They created a 1000' radius no-fly zone around the nest so as not to disturb the eagles (who don't fly near the fire, as others have already pointed out).

Surveying the fires is generally done from high altitude fixed wing aircraft unless it's a small fire and one or two helos with buckets spotting and dumping on their own. Your post indicates that you don't know what the firefighting aircraft are doing-- most of them are not scouting the fire or looking for trapped people, they're carrying 500-1000 gallons (or more for the skycranes and fixed wings) of water and fire retardant and doing precision drops. I've watched a pumper truck park near my house with an inflatable pool and supply two helos with water to knock out a ~5 acre fire on a steep mountainside that would have taken hours to get handcrews to, and been impossible to get a truck to. They completely knocked out the fire with no people on the ground within a mile of it.

As for scouting for people - if you're in a wildland fire and aren't by a road, you're pretty much SOL. The best they'd be able to do is drop water on you (which they'd do) if they see you at all, but you're not getting picked up til it burns past unless you're well away from the fire. They get people out by filling the neighborhood with fire equipment and telling people to leave. The drones in the air don't stop the firefighters on the ground, but they do stop the air support they depend on. There are 28 helos and probably a half-dozen fixed wing aircraft assigned to the Sand fire right now - they do water and fire retardant drops to support the ground crews, especially in areas that are difficult or dangerous for the hand crews to get to, and might have restricted escape routes.

You haven't been around a brush fire at the urban/wildland interface. It's very common for there to be fire right up close to a neighborhood that's still full of people, or just far enough and with favorable winds that they aren't forcing people to evacuate but you could easily pilot a drone from your backyard. I've got co-workers who were in their backyards while firefighters were setting backfires from their yard. So there can easily be hoards of non-emergency personnel within range of a large drone. There was just an article in the paper about a guy who got caught because he posted fire video from his drone. And there aren't always high winds- part of why the Station fire in 2009 was so bad was that it wasn't windy and it slowly burned through and set all the trees on fire, too, instead of just the undergrowth.

Most firefighting aircraft around SoCal are helicopters. They're easier to maneuver around in the narrow canyons and steep mountains. They do bring in fixed wing aircraft for the big fires, but they don't have nearly the precision of the helos. LA City and County also flight firefighting helos at night (Forest Service still doesn't, and I don't think CalFire does), and a drone could be very hard for them to spot.

The drones are most certainly not threatening the jobs of firefighting helo pilots. How many drones can haul 500-1000 gallons of water?

Firefighting aircraft are generally flying in terrible conditions - smokey, low, often in canyons or near mountainsides, and around powerlines, and they're hauling ~4000-8000 lbs that they're going to dump in an instant. The last thing they need is to worry about getting some big quadcopter caught up in the rotor.

Most of the aircraft used to fight fires, at least here in SoCal, are helicopters, occasionally some with open cockpits. They're often flying in terrible visibility due to the smoke and have enough to worry about avoiding (powerlines, mountainsides, and the fire itself) without worrying that they're going to get a drone caught up in their rotor. Any drone capable of getting to where it's a problem without obviously being controlled by someone standing around waiting to get picked up by the Sheriff's Deputies is likely large enough to cause trouble for a helicopter.

The DC-10 tanker could probably take a drone hit and not notice, unless it went into an engine. Those things fly *way* lower than you expect, and don't do things you expect a widebody jet to do.

I was born at the front edge of GenX and graduated high school in the early 80s. Junior high had wood shop, metal shop, plastic shop, bicycle repair, "electronics" (really just basic circuits) shop, and probably more. High school had a full auto shop, metal shop, and probably more if you were on that track. I don't think there was HVAC, but the other vocational classes probably prepared you well enough for that. I think there was even a home construction class.

I'm in the leading edge of GenX and the world population hit 4e9 when I was in grade school and hit 5e9 in my early 20's.

There isn't necessarily easy access to the inside of the seat tube without potentially messing up the rider's position from having to remove the seat-- many modern bikes have complicated seat tubes and integrated posts that may make it non-trivial. And even if you can, it's become so easy to make bikes that are well under the 6.8 kg minimum racing weight that I've known many smaller riders who have had to do things like drop a length of chain down their seat tube to bring the bike weight up to the minimum.

You aren't looking around enough. If you're used to looking for bicycles, they're easy to see. If you're used to looking for motorcycles, they're easy to see. Lane sharing by motorcyclists is legal in California, so if you're driving you have to expect that motorcycles are going to come up the apparently non-existent lane between you and the next car. They're easy to see if you actually look.

Not just car-caused pollution, it's also reduced fitness due to less exercise than if you cycled. I haven't checked for recent studies, but the slight increased risk from traffic on a bicycle is more than compensated by improved health and fitness.