Thanks for being the token doomer in the comments section, somebody had to do it.

Suck/not-suck aside, would you at least agree that it's as good as The Mandalorian?

Eyeball monster == Baby Yoda. So. Fucking. Cute.

The second movie, Aliens, also didn't have the mood of the first movie, yet was still one of the best movies ever made (IMHO! of course). I don't think the feel of the original is necessary in sequels, and might even be so hard to recreate that it's borderline hubris to try.

I'll probably watch it .. when I feel like doing nothing and thinking the presence of the xenomorph is a coincidence.

I think that is the best attitude one can take. The "domestication" of the xeno is the weakest part of this TV series, but OTOH, the inclusion of all the new monsters is part of what makes A:E so fun. The classic xeno is just one monster among many, now.

There are so many horrible ways to die. Show us more of them, Noah! ;-)

Is there much of a difference between limiting your number and duration of breaks, and clocking you in/out while you run to the bathroom?

Yes; there is a huge difference. Limitations on breaks must be reasonable, and employees must be allowed to bathroom when they need to: for example, the employer can't say you don't get to use the bathroom or can only do once or twice per shift. Limits can be applied, but there are limits to the limits. Generally employers are not interested at all as result in accounting for every little break you take as a result and would only start to notice If you are taking several breaks an hour. On the other hand; employees who are sick or have medical conditions such as Crohn's or IBD may need access to the bathrooms several times per hour, and the law is that employers must accommodate.

The key thing to understand is that an hourly rate of pay is for time the employee spends for the employer - Not amount of time the employee is actually completing useful work. If you are required to be available or be somewhere or do something, then you are on employer time, and that includes time you are there waiting for access, or waiting for the employer's process to allow you work, But it also times While you are there that you are on the job but incidentally require a temporary relief or pause due to your human needs and bodily functions.

This is just in the same way that If you are on an assembly line - the employer Can't pay you on a micro-timeclock which only counts up while you are touching a workpiece. The employer has to pay for All time you are occupied and not free to be at home, or wherever you wanted to be due to the employer.

There are no good android tablets. As an android user I have an iPad for tablet-y tasks, it doesn't get used much, but the iPad is the superior tablet for the average or power user android user. If there was a better option out there, I'd use it.
 
The fact that the iPad finally uses the USB-C standard has been really helpful, when my wife's iphone finally dropped the "lightning" connector we've been able to drop the number of charging cables in the house/car to 1, and drastically simplifies travel logistics.

those practices would be in the in the same school as wanting paid for the commute to work.

Employers probably ought to be required to pay for the commute, but due to historical reasons they don't generally
for ordinary employees traveling from home to the office. The employer only has to pay when the commute is between
two work locaations (from one office to another).

Similarly the Employees also get hit again, because the government treats your expenses spent on commuting
that you have to pay to get from home to work and back, as still a part of your income.
It is a bit strange that your commute expense dollars are treated as income by the government, at the same time as those dollars are necessary to earn money, and the employer does not pay you specifically for taking that commute, either.
It's an illogical situation that has been entrenched by traditions.

One of my biggest tools I use is "dreaming the solution". It's a strange thing. I
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.

You technically are not working when at home off hours outside employee supervision just coming up with ideas on your own, unless the employer has written a very distinct arrangement with you into a contract.

The hourly wage system is not really designed for such kind of workers if dreaming the solution is serious work.

A comparable profession would be research professors. Coming up with Ideas and Inspiration in your mind is a necessary precondition to do the work, but you are not paid to come up with ideas in your head --- you are paid for completing and publishing works. Completing the task of turning ideas into a viable Tangible product or solution of some kind is what the system compensates for - not ideas in the head, but the time and ever spent either applying them, communicating, or writing them down.

As for that which you don't write down or document in a tangible form.. How can you even prove work was done if asked to make a showing?

Nobody wants your shitty iOS. People tolerate it on phones, because you taught them that it's ok for PCs to suck if they fit in one hand. But once the one hand constraint is lifted, people come back to their senses for some weird reason. You did too good a job of persuading people to treat phones as weird exceptions to common sense, when you should have undermined common sense itself (but that would have harmed Mac sales).

The number of times I've needed a waterproof phone is zero and I spend a fair amount of time on boats

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

Is it illegal if you are salaried? Or how about if you have to take a dump? Or if I think about a problem while eating dinner?

Salaried exempt is a fixed amount of pay per pay period regardless of the number of hours, so they aren't part of this discussion.
You dont' get extra pay for working more than 40 hours doing the same job as you do during regular hours, And they can't pay you less for working fewer hours one day either.

As a salaried worker.. there is no such thing as "clock in" / "clock out time", so it's an unrelated matter. If your employer reduces your pay for a difference in hours less than not working a whole day, then they lose the Overtime exemption.

Clocking out to use the toilet, sip coffee, answer the phone for non-work items, patting the dog's head.

They cannot. Many retail employers would do this with their minimum wage staff if the law allowed it.
This is also Illegal. Federal law prohibits deducting pay for breaks under 20 minutes; even if the employee was persuaded to agree.
Federal law states that breaks less than 20 minutes must be paid. The break has to exceed 20 minutes before the employer may clock you out.

Employers are required to pay for all time spent on breaks less than 20 minutes. The only thing they can do is track or limit your number and duration of breaks.

Employers: Cannot require clocking out for short breaks: It is illegal to dock pay for breaks under 20 minutes

Employers: Cannot impose unreasonable restrictions. That includes things such as not letting employees use the bathroom, or forcing them to take 20 minutes... locking bathroom doors and actions that cause delays, etc. Must allow restroom use as needed per OSHA rules / ADA rules in some situations. An employer cannot require bathroom breaks to be at scheduled times, either.

Melodramatically complaining about a 0.1ms

You have to know it takes much longer than 0.1ms to receive the SMS text messages containing a token.

Anyway it doesn't matter if it's 0.1ms or 8 hours. Wages are required to include all time spent on work-related activities required by the employer,
and rounding of times can only be performed when the system is both reasonable and does not consistently disfavor the employee.

Consistently shaving off a second of an employee's compensated time per day from when they are working is still an unlawful thing worthy of liquidated damages, and it will add up to numbers given enough days.

if you knew the terms for which you're being paid why did you stick to the job longer than say 4 to 8
Because you need money for you or your family to survive, possibly. And it may take you MUCH longer than 8 weeks to successfully obtain a replacement role that is any better.

It doesn't matter.. It is illegal for the employer. Not the part about waiting for Windows to boot, but failure to start the work clock including the time when the employee's duties start -- which includes all time taken for all necessary preparations required by the employer (including time for security checks, boot, etc), even though it is before they can start taking calls or working on their assigned tasks.

the security guard at the door wears a stab proof vest and is 6'5" tall. this is not like your neighborhood grocery store, this is downtown literally across the street from a major train station

This safeway is directly across the street from the main "downtown" caltrain station and also two muni rail lines (n judah and ... 4th st? 3rd st?) it's extremely high traffic and they regularly taze resisting shoplifters ,like, a couple times a day. It's both high revenue (mission bay is 14,000 pop/sq mile) and high "loss"/shoplifting. It doesn't surprise me at all that they've had to resort to this. Also "unhoused" encampments pop up along the southern side of the caltrain station on the regular as well as nearby overpasses which.... there's a lot of correlation between that and shoplifting. This is not a bright sunny suburban grocery store, it is part of the ground floor of a huge urban complex building with 600 condos on the 4th-16th floors a couple blocks from Uber and OpenAI headquarters, major genetech offices etc. Context matters.