People believe what they want to believe. He believe iPhones are super-sexy.

Unfortunately right now I believe we're about to get AI judges and AI cops. Good intentions under the old motto of "Justice delayed is justice denied." Instant "justice" for each of our crimes, and homo sapiens should be extinct within a week or two.

Me? I'll go down for aggravated littering with cold-blooded malice. Someone will hand me an ad for an iPhone and I'll throw it in the street.

NAK

Er, I guess I couldn't decide whether to say "closer" or "more closely" and munged them together. :-)

If only there were a way to preview posts before submitting them...

Your comment and your sig line fit perfectly!

There are many different situations. Your cut and dried example is just an example, not a universal.

And no you don't get to content cop me. The conversations have been widespread, so I address them. There are some here who want paid per mile of driving. Some who want paid for their commute to work. So yeah, I'm going to go along and ask the hypotheticals.

Including the salaried guy who does get paid for his travel, 70 cents per mile.

Finally, my contract that I was working on before my present position stated that if I regularly work more than 50 hours a week, I get paid overtime based on a simple calculation. Still salaried though. If I don't go over regularly, the paychecks stay the same.

And if I might correct you. I signed in and out. And our timecards are audited, and compared to the signing and sign out sheets. If they don't match - if I claim X hours, but not signed in. I got docked. And if the opposite is true, if my sign in and sign out times show I worked over 50 hours regularly. I got paid extra.

My present situation has renumeration that is task based. That's a lot simpler. Even then, it is a hybrid. I'm paid as an independent contractor, but have their HR and accountants do all my W2 and deductions. There was a case at an earlier, different workplace I was at, many years ago in the 80's, where the auditors decided that the exempt people were being abused, and made that company pay them overtime for every hour over 40 based on the sign in sheets. Perhaps things are not as cut and dried as you believe.

If I might be blunt - we have some experts on the law in here, who might not know the exactitude of every situation, even though they express great authority. I wouldn't even have said that, but you declared me irrelevant.

I'm not seeing why "launch and loiter" is beneficial. If Mars transfer windows were only hours, or even days, long, I could see that it's useful to launch early so that you don't end up missing your window because of weather or ground equipment problems, but the transfer windows are weeks to months in duration.

It seems to me that this strategy is mainly driven by lack of confidence in New Glenn, which makes sense given that it's a completely unproven platform. Over the 8+ weeks of the 2026 launch window they could certainly get to space with a reliable platform. Something like Falcon 9 might have some delays due to weather or minor technical issues, but it's extremely unlikely it would miss the window entirely. But New Glenn might have weeks of delays, so launching early might make sense.

What would make even more sense is if NASA is concerned that New Glenn might fail catastrophically. Making the attempt a full year early might provide enough time to build and launch a replacement.

Does anyone who follows this more closer have a better explanation?

Time to switch to iPhone then and keep that AI cruft off the phone.

In all seriousness "AI is enshittifying the web" at a rate that we're going to start seeing a lot more snake-eating-it's-tail AI's and eventually model collapses left and right.

Let's be real, Nobody needed "AI" and nobody wants "AI" except people who seek to monetize it, and even then the largest use case I've seen someone legitimately try and use it for is shit-posting on twitter things that no artist would want their name on.

When people describe DEI as hiring unqualified minorities what they mean is that people should be considered unqualified if they are a minority.

I wasn't suggesting that. I was making the comparison that those practices would be in the in the same school as wanting paid for the commute to work. But let's analyze this a bit.

One of my biggest tools I use is "dreaming the solution". It's a strange thing. I've used it to grok solutions to very complex problems. The wife has become used to me bolting upright in bed... "Fixed another problem, hon?" It's not something I control, but it is doing WFH. (half my work is WFH)

So, if I was paid for time worked, Is that time I needed to be paid for? It isn't an instant process either. It's like running a computer overnight to do computation intensive work. Wonder if I would have to be woken up to take a break?

Anyhow, I love posting hypotheticals. What if no one posted hypotheticals? (ducking)

True, dat.

Once upon a time, those burger flipping jobs were considered as starter jobs. Outside of manager positions, they weren't career choices. We really need to go back to that, since some today are trying to make the drive through window at BK a career.

Reminds me of a co-worker back around 1980. Engineer who was making 6 figures a year. In 1980! At that point, I was making ~15K per year.

A good engineer, nice guy, but he was constantly bellyaching about not making enough money, not having enough money, How sad life was that people aren't paid enough. Meanwhile, I was doing okay. Wife was working, but because she enjoyed it. I was even saving money. How could this be?

It's all relative. Since we worked together and were friends, we compared notes. He bought as much house as he could afford +, had a wife who demanded it be in the best neighborhood, and who liked her expensive clothing and other social accouterments. He was happy to play the keeping up game. He was prone to impulse buying, and wasn't in the habit of budgeting. Checking account dangerously close to 0. No savings.

Meanwhile, my newly minted wife and I were managing to live modestly yet nicely, and were even saving. She's really good with money, and I'm an inveterate planner. Some say to a fault.

All relative, he had so much trouble grokking that I could do that.

Meanwhile I could still live comfortably off 80 K per year today. 45 years after this guy couldn't live off 30K more than that. Some people will be broke no matter how big their paycheck is.

I've never worked at McDonald's, but I worked at pizza places while in Jr High.

And how did you know I have way too many computers!? 8^) Wife just put me on a computer moratorium for a couple years. Can't blame her. I do have a fault of liking my tech-toys.

I do recognize his name and would like to find a book he's written, but pretty sure I've searched a number of times.

I think I was about as explicit as I could be about going for funny. How about this attempted joke:

You couldn't pay me to fly when the ATCs aren't being paid to keep my plane in the air. (But I haven't flown since around 2005...)

I would say the timeline matches, but I don't care nearly that much about the presentation to spend time on such aspects as forcing things to look differently. I prefer tools that are easy to use. Again from the funding perspective, why would I want to buy an annoying tool?

The heritage foundation has been packing the courts with lunatics for the last 45 years. It's part of project 2025.