Anyone know when it hits the do-release-upgrade servers?

AirTags were not available in 2017.

Now, Congress has stepped back and allowed you to get a hearing aid from anyone.

And note how far the prices have dropped. Proof, if any were needed, that the big name hearing aid makers were gouging the public.

If I wrote that Bytedance was losing money, I miswrote. My intended meaning was that TickToc was unprofitable.

Tomorrow it will be insulin prices or something.

I'd like to see them go after the prices of the interferon drugs used to control MS. My sister used to need to take one of them once a month, and before she was taken off of it the price had gone up to $1600/dose. The feds had put anybody using it on MedicAid automatically, but that's a huge, unreasonable price for something like that.

And hearing aids. Notice how you can now get them by mail order at about 1/10 the price the big boys charge? Wonder why they've always been so expensive until now? Well, here's the answer: "Everything the traffic will bear!" Congress should have stepped in with an investigation decades ago, but they were too busy pocketing campaign contributions to bother.

According to TFS, the company is losing money, but they're still fighting to hold onto it and would rather shut it down than sell it. This suggests that profit was never the main goal of its owners, and that propaganda or other intelligence gathering has always been its purpose.

To hell with KLM. They lose bags and actively lie about it.

In 2017 my ex and I were flying to Stockholm (LAX-AMS-ARN), and one of our bags apparently got lost at AMS. To make things worse, we were getting on a cruise ship the next day.

I pretty much spent four days dealing with KLM, and they consistently lied to me about the status of the missing bag. Until I realized that I had purchased the tickets with American Express. I contacted Amex Global Assist and let them deal with KLM. Four days later, the bag showed up in our stateroom (might have been sooner, except for Russian law). However... as a further example of how f***ed up KLM is, as I'm looking at the bag, I get an email from KLM: "Your bag is in Stockholm, please come get it."

1. I'm in Talinn, on a cruise ship. F*** off.
2. I have the bag in front of me you f***ing liars.

Which part of it? If you're talking about the fighting, he's kept himself in shape but she's regularly training in martial arts and learning new styles and techniques. If memory serves, she used three different styles in that fight and was getting a fourth ready when he tried to escape.

(Food sizes also seem weird to me no matter what. Why do tomatoes come in 28 ounce cans? Who decided that was a good quantity? There's probably some interesting history there.)

I'm only guessing, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it had to do with filling boxes of a certain standardized size. They made the cans so that they got a convenient number into the box and then checked to see how much they held.

That is every religionist's favourite fantasy and it does not survive contact with reality. I've had a major near death experience, it did nothing at all to convince me of the existence of god.

I think you've slightly misunderstood that quote. It doesn't say that atheists stop being atheists in foxholes and stay that way afterwords. It only claims that they start believing in someone who might keep them safe while in the foxhole but says nothing about how or if they believe later.

They have to phrase it that way. By naming an individual or company, it becomes a bill of attainder, at which point it becomes unconstitutional on its face (see Article I, Section 9). Of course, Congress, the Presidency (both parties), and SCOTUS seem to think that the Constitution is a piece of toilet paper these days...

Georgia.

It's the only scifi universe I've read from in years.

If you like police procedurals, check out the In Death series by J.D. Robb. It takes place in a near-future world that's not quite ours and the protagonist is Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, NYPSD and head of the Homicide Squad at Cop Central. Not only is she good at solving murders, she's quite capable of beating the hell out of a military trained man who's fighting for his freedom and is quite ready to take her life to get it.

So all they need to do is find some ephemeral justification by invoking the Commerce Clause and every Congress member is fitted for a crown?

It's not quite as bad as that, but if memory serves, the feds once found a way to use the Commerce Clause to interfere with the operations of a restaurant because it was using pepper, which was brought in from another state.

I doubt that the original legendary Atreides would have ever said something so peaceful. They were not nice people.