Possible counterpoint: Frozen food transport.

Back to Old Timey Matchmakers, only using AI to pick matches for us. All because we're too lazy to have human interactions ourselves.

While true, that's not the complete picture. You can survive in pretty spartan conditions for a short time, but for a longer trip, you need:

• More radiation shielding/exterior hull mass
• Exercise equipment
• Food preparation equipment
• Food storage equipment (refrigeration)
• Bathing and changing and sleeping facilities
• Large tanks of fresh water (assuming reprocessing with only limited replenishment)

And so on. That's all mass that you're not having to accelerate into orbit over and over.

Additionally, it may be possible to provide some of the consumables from the Mars side, where gravity is lower, and thus less energy will be required to escape the planet's gravity well. These things might include:

• Food
• Water
• Uranium
• Calcium oxide and/or sodium/potassium/lithium hydroxide for CO2 scrubbing

And so on. All of these mean that it could actually save a decent amount of energy compared with launching full ships from Earth to Mars, despite accelerating the people and the launch craft with the same amount of delta-V.

But it matters to the research and operation teams whether their downtime is two months or nine months. Such a reduction could alter the economics of a robotic exploration program, which would surely be a prelude to a manned mission. So the robotic program could both provide input into planning of the manned mission while proving the propulsion technology is reliable enough to be man-rated.

Current concepts for a manned Mars missions would last 22 months, 21 of which would be spent in transit and one on Mars. If the round trip transit time were reduced to 4 months, you could spend 18 months on the surface in a mission of the same length. In such as scenario with robotic missions you could avoid staging supplies that only *might* be needed knowing you could send them if the need arose *during* the mission. You could respond to unexpected circumstances, or return samples to Earth for analysis that could alter the priorities of the mission.

So it could make sense to build unmanned vehicles with such a technology -- as part of a manned *program*.

Nothing wrong with it that a reverse ad wouldn't fix.

Fade in, interior, recycling center.

[center]WORKER[/center]
So what are we doing with these iPads, again?

[center]FOREMAN[/center]
We're crushing them and turning them into musical instruments for schoolchildren.

[center]WORKER[/center]
But don't they contain heavy metals that are poisonous?

[center]FOREMAN (shrugging)[/center]
I-uh-nuh.

[align=right]CUT TO:[/align]

Close-up on the machine as it crushes a few hundred iPad and iPhone devices.

[align=right]SLOW DISSOLVE TO:[/align]

Interior, school band room.

A sickly child pulls a trumpet (or trombone) away from his lips, revealing a green ring where the mouthpiece was, then coughs.

[center]BAND KID[/center]
Thanks, Apple!

The usual approach is to buy business interruption insurance or similar.

Health insurance costs are obscene, but mandated or not, that money is still essentially going to the workers, i.e. it isn't a tax, per se.

False. Businesses are taxed on their net income, not their gross, and money spent on employees is an expense, so that money comes out of the gross revenue, not the net. Therefore, taxes don't reduce the amount of money that you have available to pay employees — only the profit that you make after doing so.

I mean, if you want to be pedantic, the money spent on employees is taxed slightly, in that the businesses must pay the employer half of the Medicare and Social Security payroll tax, but even that is still at least arguably paying the employees, albeit not until after they retire.

It's unclear, but they are using their extreme market power in one market to gain power in another market, which is definitely pushing against the bounds of being an antitrust concern.

I'm not sure it is a clear step in the right direction. Yes, the fact that they're shifting at least some portion of the price increase onto people who actually use the Prime Video service could be considered an improvement, but as long as you can't get shipping without getting the "free but not free" tier (if it were really free, you wouldn't need a Prime membership at all), it's still a huge problem.

And I'm not certain that they actually pushed all of the Prime Video cost increase onto actual Prime Video users, either. From 2022 to 2023, their sales revenue increased by 11.8%, and I *think* the number of packages shipped increased by 13%, while money spent on shipping increased by only 7.2%. So if those numbers are correct and include all Amazon shipments rather than just the ones they did themselves, then it likely means that their average cost of shipping decreased, both in terms of cost per package and in terms of cost per dollar of revenue. However, I'm not confident in those numbers, so take them with a grain of salt.

Higher prices for Prime in the face of reduced shipping costs would imply that part of the basic Prime cost is going into either higher profit margins or into bailing out the Prime Video division's overspending (or both).

Peer reviewers are volunteers who don't get paid, at least that's not the norm in science. Arguably they should be given the importance of the task. If you've ever seen peer review comments, some of them are obviously phoned in. Occaisionally institutions will offer honoraria for reviewing proposals -- typically $200 or so. This is not a lot of money considering how much work it is.

Here's how I look at it: generative AI is dsigned to create plausible-looking output in response to a prompt. That's how the lawyer who submitted a ChagGPT-generated brief got caught. The references the AI generated for the brief looked plausible enough to pass a cursory inspection, even by an expert, but if you looked them up they didn't exist.

This wasn't a failure of the AI; the AI did exactly what it was designed to do. It was the fault of people who relied on it to do something it wasn't designed to do. Surely someday soon a *lot* of the work of peer review will be automated by AI before a paper actually gets reviewed by a human, to avoid wasting reviewer time with obvious shortcomings.

Amazon's apparent ability to massively degrade the quality of a paid subscription without subscribers revolting and leaving is prima facie proof that the streaming market — and Amazon in particular — has negligible competition, and is in desperate need of FTC intervention of the trust-busting variety. Just saying.

Systematic reviews, including meta-analyses, are very common. Since roughly the 1980s systematic reviews have been considered the highest possible tier of scientific evidence.

This is because of certain facts about science that outsiders often find shocking: (1) complex questions nearly always have contradictory evidence and papers taking opposing views of issues, particularly early on; (2) every paper, no matter how good, has methodological shortcomings if not outright errors; and (3) many novel findings never get replicated. This means individual papers are almost useless for proving anything, at least without putting them in context.

That's what systematic reviews and meta-analyses do: they put individual studies in context of what other researchers are finding. Unlike some internet rando citing papers to prove his pet theory, a reviewer can't cherry pick papers based on what they find. There are rules that ensure papers can only be excluded for objective reasons that apply to all the papers on the topic.

In this particular paper, the authors did not find evidence that deforestation and forestation were drivers of disease. An activist writing a polemic wouldn't come to that conclusion.

Yeah, that's pretty cringey, particularly given how many musicians use iPads for reading music while playing musical instruments.

*shrugs* I concur with the GP's feedback. Face ID is way, way slower than Touch ID for me, too.

But the bigger problem with Face ID is that it does demand at least some of your attention, i.e. you have to have it in front of your face before it even starts trying to unlock. This makes it suck for:

• Unlocking while doing literally anything else that needs your attention.
• Wallet at drive-through locations (because you're double-clicking a side button while your phone is at arm's length, and your face isn't out there).
• Wallet at ChargePoint chargers (because the reader isn't pointing up at you).

And so on.

With Touch ID, your finger can be on the button while it is down and out of your way, so by the time you bring it up to your face, it is unlocked. That no doubt contributes to the perception that Face ID is slow, even if Face ID didn't periodically decide to take ten seconds (and sometimes two or three tries) to unlock.

The real shock is that Apple users didn't dump the brand en masse during COVID in favor of Android phones with fingerprint readers, because even with the mask mode, the rate of recognition while wearing one is still remarkably poor.

Apple removed Touch ID because the hardware costs money, because they didn't think under-screen touch sensors were good enough, and because they thought Face ID was good enough. They were wrong, at least about that third point, just like they were wrong when they thought the Touch Bar was good enough, just like they were wrong when they thought Bluetooth audio was good enough, etc. Their bar for "good enough" isn't what it used to be, and the sooner the die-hard Apple fanboys start calling them on their bulls**t, the sooner Apple will get back to the level of polish that they used to have a decade back.

What I really don't understand is *HOW* something as bad as Bluetooth — particularly Apple's Bluetooth — could dominate a pie eating contest, much less any sort of audio usability contest.

To give you an idea of how bad it is:

• It takes me an average of a minute just to switch my AirPods "Pro" (current generation) from one device to another, because devices keep failing to connect.
• Every time I walk into range of a paired Bluetooth output — my home phone, an open AirPods case, my car, etc. — my phone immediately tries to switch to it, which causes the phone to switch out of speakerphone mode. About two seconds later, the Bluetooth device rejects it (or I walk back out of range), and the phone switches back to internal audio, but without speakerphone enabled. This means on average 5 or 6 times per phone call, I have to say, "Hold on, I've lost you. This piece of s**t iPhone dropped the speakerphone again.

How anyone could think this is even *tolerable*, much less a good experience, is beyond my imagination. And we've been complaining about these problems well over a decade now, but the iPhone's Bluetooth support never gets any better.

"Oh, but if you use Apple's devices, it works SOOOOOO much better than other Bluetooth devices," people have told me. The f**k, it does. The Airpods Pro are just as bad at multiple-device support as the Acrux Bluetooth headset they gave us at work. The only difference is that the Apple hardware costs a whole lot more for the privilege of being a pain in your a**.

I'm really trying to like these Bluetooth things Apple sold, but they don't stay in my ears, they don't handle multiple devices reliably, and the automatic audio switching behavior is a train wreck. No, I don't want you to switch to the Airpods Pro just because I opened the f**king case three feet away from the phone. Why in h*** would you think that I wanted to do that? They're not in my ears. They're still in the d**n charging case.

With wired headphones, if it is plugged in, I want to use it. If it isn't, I don't. If I want to use it with another device, I unplug it and plug it into the other device. "It just works." That slogan is what Apple USED to mean back in the day. And yes, I do have adapters for wired USB-C headphones with pass-through charging, and I'm about to the point of being ready to go back to them if iOS doesn't get a whole lot better real soon.

The one nice thing is that at least it is USB-C and not some proprietary disaster that is incompatible with my Mac like the Lightning-based phones used to require. So at least that's some small consolation. R.I.P., usability.

And at least it isn't as bad as the Vision Pro, which I literally have to reboot every time I want to take over the Mac's screen, because it never shows the "Connect" button a second time. I swear, if I had a dollar for every time I thought S.J. was rolling over in his grave, I'd be richer than Tim Cook.

Sincerely,
Disgruntled Apple Fanboy