Been a while since I've flown a budget airline. On the normal flights I've taken, there's always a few people (usually older people) with paper boarding passes.

That's a trick question.

Answer: None. In 2025, Everything's Computer.

Omitting the camera saves the consumer the minor cost of having to use up a square inch of electrical tape.

Show me the how you can create a system where the price totals of all possible combinations of inventory selections result in only (3 or 4) mod 5.

People need to consider: Rounding to a nickle isn't going to be greater than 2 cents more inaccurate than rounding to pennies. Let's say you live in a backwater state, and still only make $7.25 per hour. Each transaction could potentially cost you at most 10 seconds of extra wages. However, transactions randomly round up and down, so the average error gets reduced by the square root of the number of transactions you make. Statistically speaking, you'll gain or lose only a couple of seconds of your time per purchase. Probably less time than it took to fumble for all those pennies.

But it sucks to be poor. Without pennies, someone who makes $50k per year will gain or lose only milliseconds worth of salary per transaction on average.

"But the stores will set prices so that it always rounds up!!!!1!" -- That only works for one item at most. Savvy shoppers would strategically buy combinations of items that always round down.

In a few years, all of these GPUs will be available on eBay for a few bucks each.

Then I'll finally be able to snag a whole bunch of them and build a Beowulf cluster to run SETI@home faster than anybody else.

For an additional fee.

THAT, I believe, is the main part of this change. Ryan Air already doesn't even break even on the pure ticket cost. It's the horrendous extra fees that make it profitable.

Which cost, exactly?

We are speaking about paper boarding passes the customers themselves print. The gates read the barcode and don't care if it's on paper or a phone screen.

So which cost, exactly?

That's putting it mildly.

Smartphones can crash, run out of battery or any number of problems. On important trips I usually have a paper boarding pass with me as a backup. Only needed it once, but I'm just one person with fairly normal travel amounts. Multiplied over the number of people flying Ryan Air, statistically speaking this happens constantly.

Frankly speaking, I think it's a gimmick to milk the customers for more money. Someone at Ryan Air has certainly done the calculation, estimated how many people can't access their boarding pass at the gate for whatever reason, and how much additional money they can make by forcing all these people to pay the additional fee for having it printed.

That work sounds like a great candidate to offload onto AI!

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

The merchants need to consider that if their competitor down the street still accepts rewards cards, the customers might just switch, and then they've just lost the whole sale. All this over a 1% extra cost to the merchant.

In the meantime, they think nothing of offering things like buy-one-get-one-free deals to lure in a few more customers.

That summary at the top of this story is just way too long. I'll have a chatbot break it down and give me the gist.