In a family home with mother, father, 2 daughters, and 3 sons -- 7 people -- but only 3 bathrooms, how will individuals be distinguished. Oh, 2 of the sons are twins. It is a large family, but there are more.

There are frequent visits by aunts and uncles, cousins, grand-parents, and of course friends. Not all of them have smart toilets at home. Thus, they are not registered in the system.

Somehow, all this makes me think of facial recognition where someone is a germaphobe and always wears a surgical face mask.

My brother once said: "If we are not supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?"

The human digestive system -- from teeth through the stomach an into the gut -- is that of an omnivore, eating both meats and vegetables. We are advised to minimize our consumption of processed foods. The new "meats" synthesized entirely from vegetables, however, are the ultimate processed foods.

When Adobe announced the end of Flash -- not in 2001 but much more recently -- I thought that was good. While I had Flash installed, I long ago set my browser to disable it. Then, after the last version self-destructed, I discovered that a silly game I like (Planetary) would no longer work. From my own archives, I pulled the installer file for Flash 32.0.0.344, which appears to be the last version that does not self-destruct. I installed it but still set my browser to disable it. I enable it only when playing Planetary.

Am I the only person who archives old installer files?

Absolutely! A company can easily determine the value of an employee and pay that employee accordingly.

Unless the company totally invades the employee's privacy, it really cannot determine the employee's living costs in order to pay according to those costs. For example, should a company pay an employee more simply because he or she is living with someone who has a health condition that requires equipment that consumes a lot of electricity? How about paying the employee based on how many children he or she has or how many children are attending college? These all go into the employee's living costs.

Paying an employee according to where he or she lives can only increase living costs in high-cost areas and increase poverty in lost-cost areas.

I don't know which is more highly processed: computer-generated beef or all-vegetable so-called "Impossible meat". In either case, highly processed foods are unhealthy.

As my brother once asked: "If we are not supposed to eat animals, why are they made out of meat?"

Without a bank's physical location, where do I go for a safe deposit box?

The products of Future Meat Technologies represents the ultimate in ultra-processed foods. Real
meat -- including chicken -- is natural. Cultured chicken breast is definitely not.

"McLaughlin ran a gauntlet of media outlets to drag SpaceX through the mud and criticize both the company's technology and response"

gauntlet: a large glove that extends above the wrist

gantlet: a form of military punishment in which the offender ran between two lines of men armed with clubs and whips, with which the offender was struck as he ran

Thus, the phrase is to "run the gantlet", meaning to traverse a route with danger close on both sides.

How reliable is a report by someone who does not know the difference between a chronograph and a coronagraph?

chronograph [ kron-uh-graf, -grahf ]
noun
1. a timepiece fitted with a recording device, as a stylus and rotating drum, used to mark the exact instant of an occurrence, especially in astronomy.
2. a timepiece capable of measuring extremely brief intervals of time accurately, as a stopwatch able to record fractions of a second as well as elapsed time.
verb (used with object)
3. to time by means of a chronograph.

coronagraph or coronograph [ kuh-roh-nuh-graf, -grahf ]
noun Astronomy.
an instrument for observing and photographing the sun's corona, consisting of a telescope fitted with lenses, filters, and diaphragms that simulate an eclipse.

Late in 1996, I decided that -- having been a software test engineer for 27 years -- I should finally buy a PC for my home. I chose Pacific Bell Internet (PBI) as my Internet service provider (ISP) for three main reasons:
* Rather than giving PBI my credit card number and having the charges automatically appear on my Visa bill each month, they would bill me on my phone bill. I had heard that too often it was difficult to stop automatic credit card charges once they started.
* PBI was part of Pacific Telesis (a unit of AT&T), the dominant company in telecommunications in California, with a reputation for excellence.
* With dial-up being the primary method for Internet connections, PBI could offer 33.6 Kbps instead of the more common 28.8 Kbps.

What a mistake!

PBI's service proved unacceptably deficient, both the actual Internet service and also the technical service provided by PBI's personnel. Outages in POPs, peering, news servers, mail servers, and even DNS tables were not rare. In the meantime, technical support generally reacted to any reported error as if the subscriber -- the customer whose monthly fees paid the salaries of the support staff -- were always at fault. Worse, the support staff often knew less about the Internet than the subscribers and even tried to talk subscribers through "corrective" actions that would be destructive.

The merger between Pacific Telesis and Southwestern Bell, leaving the latter in charge, did not result in any improvement. Finally, after almost two years with PBI, I canceled my account.

Today, where I live, AT&T is still the "phone company", having bought up Southwestern Bell and serving much of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles. (North Hollywood is a neighborhood of the city of Los Angeles. It is definitely urban.) I use Spectrum for my Internet connection. While the connection is very good unless Southern California Edison has an outage -- several times a year during which Spectrum's system dies -- I do not like several aspects of Spectrum's service. Thus, I use Spectrum to connect to Sunset.net, an ISP that does not otherwise serve my area.

From a column by David Lazarus published in the Los Angeles Times on 15 January:

The Trump administration didn’t hesitate to side with a Colorado baker who nearly a
decade ago insisted that his religious beliefs allowed him to refuse service to a
same-sex couple seeking a wedding cake. . . . But President Trump and his allies were livid when Twitter exercised its own commercial prerogative and banned him — not to mention tens of thousands of his conspiracy-minded supporters — after Trump’s incendiary words helped spark last week’s rioting at the Capitol. They were equally incensed by Amazon using similar reasoning this week to remove
the conservative social media site Parler from its web-hosting servers. . . . The message from conservative quarters is that a company has every right to refuse service to customers it doesn’t want, except when those customers are people conservatives like.

No, I do not have even a dumb phone, only land-line. When I leave my house, I enjoy leaving the phone behind me. My wife has a dumb phone. When we travel to other countries, we leave it at home. Does that mean we will be prohibited from traveling?

Yes, I will be vaccinated for COVID-19. I will not be the first in line. I will likely wait 2-3 weeks after my priority group is eligible.

I do believe vaccines work. I had an uncle die from diphtheria because he was not vaccinated. One of my grand-fathers was disfigured by smallpox; he grew up in Czarist Russia where vaccinations were not common.

I worked with people who had polio before Salk or Sabin. One had a limp; the other needed heavy braces on her legs. In high school I had a friend; when I visited him at home, I saw that his mother was living in an iron lung.

Before shingles vaccines were available, my mother had shingles. She had severe pain for months. I later received both kinds of shingles vaccines: Zostavax and Shingrix. No, they are not 100% effective. I later got shingles, but I had no pain. I had occasional mild itch. It was gone in less than three months.

Anti-vaxers are delusional. They are also dangerous because they spread diseases to people who, for medical reasons, should not be vaccinated.

By the way, a platform might have policies and terms that effectively say "anything goes". That would be okay. It would also tell the rest of us that what appears on such a platform could not be trusted to reflect reality and could even be dangerous. At least we would be warned.

Making Internet platforms liable for what its users say could eventually eliminate platforms. They will go bankrupt because they will be seen as "deep pockets" and sued for vast sums. Instead Section 230 should be modified.

The terms of service and acceptable-use policies of a platform should be required by law to apply uniformly to all of its users. There should be no exceptions for any individual, organization, or business. There should be no exceptions for any politician or government agency.

Then, if a platform fails to enforce its policies and terms uniformly, the exemption from liability in Section 230 should be presumed by law to have been waived. This would create a strong incentive for platforms to go beyond lip service in decreeing their policies.

The futures are for California water??

For those water users on California's state water project, the state sets the price. That price does not usually change more often than once a year. In southern California, it is sold by the water project to the Metropolitan Water District (MWD), another government agency, which again only changes the price once a year. MWD is a wholesaler, selling water to local governments, who also only change their prices once a year.

The city of Los Angeles owns the source of its water, and its price is set by the City Council (except for the water purchased from MWD). The same is true for San Francisco. Then there is the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD), another government agency that provides water to counties on the east side of San Francisco Bay.

Private, for-profit water companies have their prices set by the California Public Utilities Commission.

Thus, a futures market in California water must involve, not contracts expiring in a few months. Instead, the contracts must be for a few years. And then what happens if the buyer of an expired water contract demands delivery of the commodity? Will the seller have pipelines and reservoirs needed to settle the contract?

Where will the seller of a water future contract obtain that water? Most private water companies -- and government water agencies too -- have an inverted pyramid price structure that charges more for the last drop than for the first. To buy a large amount of water to satisfy an expired water contract will cost much more than the average water customer pays.