Did you read what you quoted? Those are the worst customers.

The hotel needs to book X rooms at $Y to break even on a given day. They know their average room-fill rate, and they build their asking price based on that, with the target profit on top, getting $Z. A customer books a room in advance, and agrees to pay $Z.

All is well so far.

Now, as the day approaches, the hotel sees that they are not booking to capacity. So they offer the remaining rooms at below $Z and possibly even below $Y because empty rooms bring zero revenue.

You can view that the long-booked customer is getting a poorer deal than the last-minute booker. Okay. Too bad. You agreed to the terms you agreed to. And you got the guarantee that your room is held, where someone who waits until closer to the date may not get a room. It's completley fair.

The problem comes in when a customer uses a third-party booking company that cancels and rebooks, artificially replacing foundational income that was used to determine when discounts could be issued, replacing a $Z consumer with something less. That act undermines the hotel's profitability and stability.

I don't know why booking anywhere but a hotel is even a thing. Makes no sense to me whatsoever for a third party site to generate a discount. And playing scummy games that erode the predictability necessary to operate something like a hotel or restaurant... also not cool. I don't see how the hotel's actions are in the wrong.

I find it illuminating that your demands are simply the best quality and the lowest price. Easy-peasy, right? You're part of the problem.

Yes, if. That said, it's entirely possible to do this right. Head office bags the money in front of the driver, who scans a barcode indicating he's agreeing to the amount in the now-sealed bag. Recipient scans the barcode confirming the package is sealed when handed to them. Plus the company only assigns drivers who have established they are capable. It's a stupid service and the company involved is stupid so you're probably right, but it doesn't have to be that way.

First of all, lying is a strong word. You can't know there was any intention behind the error.
But if the judge had thrown out your case, then a person who committed an act that was against the law would have gone free. Which isn't a good thing, regardless of what was or wasn't legalized after the fact and regardless of how you and I feel about that act. (For the record I couldn't possibly care less about pot possession or use.)

Why didn't he? Presumably because clerical mistakes aren't sufficient cause for mistrial.

It doesn't matter if AI fabrications represent or misrepresent the spirit of the law. Case law citations need to reflect the actuality of prior case findings so the judge can rule based on those previous rulings. Giving a judge fake material that encourages them to rule the way legislators intend is fraudulent regardless of a convenient outcome.

Look, if you don't see a difference between "your honor, here is the video evidence of the accused stealing cars that night... five in total... wait, what... three... sorry, here's the video evidence of the accused stealing three in total" and "your honor, in the 1984 case of Santa Clause v The President of Mars, the judge found that wearing green is grounds for conviction... wait... you don't believe that's a real case? I told ChatGPT to not make shit up. Huh." then we don't have anywhere to go. While I am sympathetic to the specific cause for your court visit, I just don't see it remotely the same as knowingly using a bullshit bot.

In one case, lawyers knowingly used a product famous for fabricating fundental case law. Said product should not be used. In yours, a human transcribed a number incorrectly. They are not the same. The error in your case us one of degree... a question of how severe your punishment should be. The cases where fake precedents are presented as factual guide a judge to determine legal basis for guilt or innocence. You could - and did - correct the error in your case because it was possible for you to recognize the error. No accused is going to recognize fabricated case law. It's the difference between a name mixup getting you sent to the wrong seat on an airplane versus being wrongfully detained in Gitmo because they think you're on a no-fly list because someone knowingly looked it up on a fake web site instead of the official source.

First, Lego sets were never "generic". They were exactly what they were, be it a truck, a house, a castle, a space ship, or a dog.

Second, today you build anything and everything. There appears to be one new/unique part in this set and it's a very useful one. Take a look at Rebrickable.com and you'll see that there's a truly massive trove of other things people are making out of today's Lego sets. There was a brief period around the 1990s where there were a high number of elements that could only be used for what they were. Bows of boats, noses of airplanes... whatever. But for a very long time that mistake was remedied and things tend to be brick-built now, out of smaller, more useful elements.

Yes, there is a newish adult collectable trend where people can buy things like this for display purposes but I absolutely guarantee tonnes of these sets are going to be ripped apart and incorporated into other things, and in many cases the parts sold on the secondary market to become something completely different. I have personally bought tens of thousands of elements that are now on display at home and in my company office as completely different creations. I'm in my 50s and I've got multiple projects on the go, and I'm frequently dabbling in Stud.IO, designing stuff digitally.

The nostalgia you're kind of yearning for is absolutely, positively alive and well, rest assured.

As for price, well, yeah. But this is a 3,600 element set that is licensed. Parts on the secondary market go for between $.10 and $.15 Canadian and this comes out on the upper end of that, but again, it's a licensed product so it's not just LEGO who gets a slice of the pie here. It's still not abnormal. It's just a high quantity of parts. The per-part value is high but not abnormal.

I was curious about your point. You've provided an interview where the alarming headline is basically "crime isn't being reported". But I read it and discovered that's not what happened. The interview actually contained "in 2021, a bunch of cities didn't report crime statistics to the FBI".

Those three words change so much.

Just for fun I looked up crime statistics for NYC because they're the biggest one the interview picks on. Now... maybe NYC didn't release the 2021 stats until today. Maybe what your referenced article implies happened really happened. Maybe it wasn't just the FBI that didn't get stats. Maybe it was all secret. Maybe.

But it turns out NYC has crime stats available today for the last 24 years. Including that alarming year four years ago that your article gets so upset about. Know what? Take a look https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/... The city put out the stats. You can look for yourself.

Major felonies in 2000? 184,652. Major felonies in 2024? 123,890

Go ahead. Pick a category. Sure, stats are generally up since COVID but are still way down historically-speaking. Bottom lines:
1} Your article sucks.
2} Crime is trending down country-wide.

I find it amusing that the most iconic purpose behind social media was basically "let grandma on the East coast interact with her grandkid on the West coast".

See, it's that sentence there that gets trotted out from time to time that reveals bullshit-thinking. EV sales weren't stable. They were steadily rising until something happened.

What happened, you ask?

The President of the United States of America removed the incentives that put EVs on roughly the same footing as ICE vehicles, to the benefit of - get this - the subsidized oil industry. That's when growth of the EV market stalled. It would be a staggering coincidence if it just happened that the demand for EVs was satisfied at the exact same time the government declared war on them.

Bonus; as for the countless used EVs on the market, how does one explain the countless used ICEVs on the market?

Even if that were true...

We (Canada) scrapped a tax on digital services that would've meant American companies like Google that take Canadian citizens' money had to give some of it back... because Donald said so or else he'd take his trade negotiating marbles and go home.

We're the country whose trade negotiations were aborted by Donald because he was upset we paid for an ad that played Ronald Reagan saying things about tariffs that Ronald Reagan said, and Ronald Reagan made clear by other words and actions that he believed. Apparently quoting the man's well-established beliefs were "lies.".

Point here is that there's a penis-potato (dick-tater) to our South that we have to be really careful about fellating just right or he'll raise the tariffs another 10%, 50%, 100% of whatever dumb-shit number he feels like at the moment. When that happens, we have a harder time selling our product to you because we have to raise the price to compensate, and for some strange fucking reason America is like "but we don't wanna pay more." Well, your domestic supply isn't cheaper so figure it out, eh?

We're on edge because our nearest neighbor went psycho and has been talking about burning our house down (blah blah 51st state) and we have to pick our battles carefully.

Have you read the summary? This woman was denied access to the footage until after she went through rather a lot of hoops to get their attention. It's my contention that she should never have been a person of interest in the first place. She should not have had to do any of the footwork she did. The police saw data they liked, and they stopped thinking. That's not okay, and the firehose of garbage input is a large contributing factor here.

While that may be true - and I do thank you for it - there's zero chance I'll remember in the future because a} "dead dinosaurs" has a certain ring to it, b} I'm old and unlearning things is harder than learning them especially when c} it changes the nature of the discussion in no appreciable way.

No snark intended. It's just sort of like when some people are having a discussion about vegetables and someone lists what they like in a salad and it includes tomatoes and someone pipes up that those are fruits... and everyone goes back to completely ignoring that fact for the rest of their lives.

Thing is... we know people get wrongfully convicted. That's only one step worse than wrongfully accused.

Assuming for a moment that your lawyer can convince the judge/jury that the footage isn't quite good enough - which isn't a given - what does that cost you? In terms of time, in terms of money, in terms of reputation an accusation has a burden to it. There's always a stigma left over. "Where there's smoke, there's fire." Under many circumstances people will never look at you the same. We should be striving for as low a false-accusation level as possible, and this isn't it.

Let's also throw in that camera footage unfairly penalizes black people. Dim footage and night footage leaves low contrast and it's easy to say "yeah, that looks like the accused" when all you've got is dark on dark pixels. Facial-recognition and surveillance footage both paint pictures that aren't always just.

I hear you, but I have a different angle.

What happens when the only evidence police have implicates SuspectA? They're going to focus on SuspectA, regardless of if SuspectA is innocent or not. Meanwhile the actual guilty party - who has no observed evidence trail - is going to be ignored. I think the flood of low-quality data in the form of poor cameras which aren't supposed to be recording other private property does disservice to investigations.

The same thing is going to happen in a court. "Well, this footage looks like it could be you, and we know your vehicle was in the area, and there's nobody else coming up at all, so the overwhelming evidence says it's you. And you wore a wig."

(Smart) criminals are going to game the system and won't show up. Innocent people will. This is the problem with blanket surveillance.

Odds are good. There's already been phenomenal progress in the last ten years. It's amazing what companies come up with when they're encouraged to not just keep burning dead dinosaurs.

I agree. While it is interesting that this industry consumes a lot of electricity, that isn't meaningful because it has to be tempered by the results.

A similar thing people get all up in arms about is the yearly profits certain companies make. We get alarmist headlines talking about how many trillions of dollars someone like Amazon made in profits and get agitated because we compare that figure to our individual bank balances and our emotions say "I would like one tenth of one percent of that, not fair!" But we're disregarding the scale involved.

Would we react the same if it were two online stores who each shipped half as much stuff but together had the same total profit? Ten stores shipping 10% the stuff but the same total profit? A thousand stores shipping a thousandth the stuff but totally 50% more profit?

Humans are bad at thinking critically about large numbers. Now yes, Amazon has some bad business practices and yes, competition is good and so on, but those are other issues that have nothing to do with the alarmist topic of "big profit number".

These gas producers... maybe there's a story somewhere to be found. But "they use lots of electricity" isn't it.