Agreed. I didn't spend too much time in the "front lines" as a teenager, but I recognize that that in vast majority of the cases, the lowest level peons in the front lines aren't the decision makers. They aren't given the authority to give the customer everything he wants (even if it is reasonable.) Berating them for bad policy that they have no control over helps no one. Being a jerk makes it even less likely that they'll help you even within their authority. You're more likely to get what you want if you work with them than against them.

That's a good one.
I was thinking of it this way:
Think of a pair of hypothetical ultra-dense planets with a very deep ocean. A small solid core is surrounded by a very thick layer of liquid. Now move these two planets closer together. The water between them will merge and will form a figure-8 in cross section. Get to the point where the two cores touch, and you will see that the water distribution is not a sphere, either. There will be a "dent" where the liquid is pulled away to each core. Generalizing a bit, wherever there is a "dent" in the mass producing the gravitational pull, there will be a "dent" in the liquid, much like your lead ring.

Of your list, GOG is the most unobtrusive. There has never been a "required" GOG app. (They keep pushing that "Galaxy" thing, but I've never even downloaded it.) I have all GOG game installers archived to install and run as I see fit. I understand SOME of their games have an online component that requires login, but I only have the classic games which are standalone. If GOG disappeared tomorrow, I can play every single game I bought from them. Between that, and their quite frequent giveaways (I think I have gotten more free games from them than I bought), makes it my favorite by far.

For whatever reason, real estate transactions have been public records for a long time. It may be hard to change that tradition. If a person only bought one house, it's fairly likely he lives there. Investment purchases will more likely be one of several, or under a non-personal ownership.

Refining your idea a bit, it used to be that one would have to go to the county clerk and shuffle through paper records to dig this up. The difference now is that everything is online. I think a good case can be made that under today's conditions, SOME public records don't necessarily have to be ONLINE. If someone really needs to know about a real estate transaction, he can get his butt down to the county office and hand copy the details needed. There's no reason some scammer in Elbonia needs access to this information.

The big difference between AI based killing machines and all the killing machines humans have come up with up until now is the predictability. Yes, we have nukes that can wipe out every city in the world, but they all have to be launched at those cities in the world. The machine gun could mow down an order of magnitude more enemy soldiers than the bolt action rifle, but it still has to be pointed at the enemy and the trigger pulled. It stops shooting when the trigger is released. If we dropped a nuke on Hiroshima, we don't expect to Moscow to suddenly also blow up. We have a general idea of the "bad" that is going to happen for each weapon we have created so far.

With allegedly self-adapting autonomous machines, we could have our Dr. Evil send out an army expecting to "wipe out ethnic group X" and instead have the machines decide that the best way to achieve that objective is to wipe out all humanity (or at least, also wipe out groups Y and Z). There was a research paper about how generative algorithms came up with "creative" solutions to problems posed by the humans because the humans didn't think to constrain the problem space in that way. It was "obvious" to the humans that that is not the intent. That is the concern with AI based weapons.

Too bad the Ultra branding is for the 9 series only.

Such a missed opportunity for a Japanese TV tie-in.

On the flip side to this, my employer provided a very generous "home office setup" reimbursement to buy all kinds of goodies that are at least tangentially related to work (new monitor, office chair, laptop stand, etc.) So having folks at home also cost a lot of money. They're still trying to get folks back into office now, at least partially.

Another point: In Japan, it's customary for the employer to pay commute expenses. I think they're still trying to get folks back into the office there, too.

As discussed earlier, it's probably more of what management believes with respect to "collaboration" and "teamwork".

Unfortunately for me, half of my work is at a desk, but the other half is actually poking and prodding things in the lab.

Actually, the word you're looking for is 'careless'. Lazy, though it may cover "carelessness" in some respects, is too imprecise for the meaning you're going for.

Though, as others have said, expecting any human to have 100% record in not making mistakes to not be called "lazy" is too high a bar. By that definition, every single person on the planet is "lazy", and the word loses meaning. I think that's what the others are trying to point out.

For example, is every owner supposed to presciently know that a particular leash they bought is defective? Are they supposed to load test each leash in a lab before they use it? Are they "lazy" if they don't?

This reminds me of the summary of an article I read a while ago...
Looks like I found the article..
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.034...

In a nutshell, the whole point of machine learning is to let the computer figure out solutions to complex problems. Unfortunately for the humans, the real world is fairly open-ended, and the the challenge becomes defining the problem/objective so that the algorithm goes where they want it go. The computer will often find "solutions" that optimize the defined parameters that surprise the human operators with all of their preconceived notions.

It's not a stretch to imagine (and I think I've read social psych studies that demonstrate this, though it's so long ago I can't recall specifics) that people treat the places they "live" in differently from the places they are "visiting". This is just human nature.

(using "you" as a generic pronoun because it reads more smoothly than "one" or "that person")

If you "live" in an apartment, you don't tend to litter the hallways, because you have to see the trash yourself every day (until someone cleans it up). Your neighbors can see you, and they know where you live. There will be social pressure to conform and live in harmony with your neighbors.

If you are checking out tomorrow and will never see this place again, you are more likely to not care, say, if you dropped your ketchup drenched burger wrapper in the hallway, or accidentally put a hole in the wall on the way out, or made a little extra noise at night. This affects quality of life for your neighbors.

A lot of crime prevention is also based on knowing who your neighbors are and noticing unfamiliar faces. Again, I'm sure I can pull out statistical evidence that crime rates are lower in areas where neighbors know/recognize each other than not. Having visitors day in and day out breaks this model, and it makes crime easier to commit in that neighborhood (and the criminals don't even have to be any of the "visitors".)

The 30-day rule is arbitrarily picked (much like the 18-yr age of majority) to distinguish between the two cases of people "living" vs. "visiting" in a place. Of course there are corner cases, but a line had to be drawn somewhere, and it comes from a real desire to maintain quality of life for those people who live there (and have a stake in that community). As others have said, zoning laws exist for a reason, to keep commercial activity separated from non-commercial activity for these and many other reasons. AirBnB and the like just sidesteps that rule for profit.

Stepping back a bit, humans are social creatures. We have crawled to the top of the foot chain because we learned to live and cooperate with each other (for the most part). This is not asking to give up your kidney for your neighbor, or even giving away money or property. This is just being "neighborly", and not invite a constant stream of total strangers into the neighborhood. It's request for minimal level of cooperation for having a society. This wasn't a particularly foreign concept, even in the US. Yet, over the last few years (COVID comes to mind most prominently), I see a LOT of comments that are basically versions of "me me me! I don't care about others! I should be allowed to do what I want! My Freedom! Why should I even care about secondary/tertiary effects of my actions on others?" They scary thing is that they really seem incapable of seeing it, and perhaps, this is probably undoing of this country, as it devolves into a dystopian hellhole where everyone is only out for #1.

Just on the wording, it says 53% experienced "significant" loss of water. So the other alternatives for the other lakes is "insignificant" loss of water or stayed the same.

Indeed, the overall amount would be quite informative.

I can't tell whether you were going for a funny or it's a serious comment because of all the typos. I can see one or two slipping by, but this is actually impacting your message.

I think I could parse most of it to get the gist of it, and don't disagree, but some of it is escaping my grasp. Perhaps slow down a bit?

copatent, ponzu, compliment, activity, la his Latin, over night,

Their use of the word "prominent" leaves them wiggle room. Prior examples were made by groups that weren't "prominent" enough; unless there are examples from the same group already.

No, but in pure pragmatic terms, an hour of an agent's time spent checking on a high earner vs. a low earner has much higher return in terms of revenue collected.

There are two sides to tax enforcement; one is to make sure everyone follows the rules, and the other is to make sure the garment collects what is due. In terms of the first part, everyone is equal; in terms of the second part, the goverment gets much better bang for buck going after the high earners. This is of course because there is more tax to be collected per individual from the high earners, and (perhaps a larger factor), they cheat a lot more than the little guy.

So, the little guy is not exempt per se, but the government, like any large organization, has to pick their battles and allocate limited resources, and it makes sense to me that that is what happens given the situation at hand. I certainly wouldn't insist that they do it the other way.

Yeah, exactly. I was wondering how all those folks who were all hung ho about some dude going vigilante and claiming that the "thief" "deserved it". Do they still believe that after readings stories of this sort (and this is not the first of this sort.) Due process exists for many good reasons. Even if our elected/hired authorities don't always behave as they should, bypassing it altogether is hardly better. If you really think about it, you really don't want to live in a society where due process is not followed, or at least recognized as a worthy goal.