Ok, but with asbestos, it's not even harmful unless it's released into the air. Plenty of people have old asbestos tile floors made back in the 1950's, and/or similar tile that was glued down with asbestos-laced glue. Not a concern whatsoever, unless you go to tear them out.

There's a lot of baseless fear around the material, but the reality is a bit different. I'm just saying, there's not currently a real reason to have great fear of microplastics turning up in our bodies in trace amounts or in the soil or even the water. It still bears more investigation, obviously. But the last I heard? The majority of it found in our water supplies came from vehicle tires, as they wear out while people drive. So possibly not even the substances or sources most expected.

What I consistently see are businesses asking for a laundry list of skills/talents/specialties but at the end of the job posting? They've got a salary listed that means nobody in the field for decades will entertain it.

Except for maybe some of the "startups" run by younger people, I don't really run across a lot of "ageism" against older I.T. workers. People generally acknowledge we're the crowd with real world experience with a lot of tech that evolved into what's out there today - and that's a plus. It's more that places decided they don't want to PAY for that much skill/knowledge so they'll take the young, eager and smart candidate who will work for less.

?

Microplastics *are* being found everywhere, but plastics are generally inert and fairly non-toxic. That's why we hailed plastics as innovative for the medical field for things like surgical tubing, and why nobody is really worked up about all the groceries you buy being wrapped in or contained in plastic.

Most microscopic particles of things found to cause cancer do so when they're breathed in constantly and lodge themselves in the lungs (like asbestos fibers).
I don't think anyone has seen a big increase in lung cancer from microplastics?

I've always been at least a "fiscal conservative" and more libertarian-minded than anything else. But I'd say the vast majority of my good friends generally vote Republican. And I really know *nobody* who is exactly "Pro Putin"? I'm sure these people are out there -- especially if they mindlessly support every single thing Trump ever says or does. But let's at least stop pretending the extreme or fringes speak for the majority.

What I typically hear from conservatives, right now, is simply the feeling America needs to stop funneling millions and millions of dollars to the Ukraine to fight this "war by proxy". And personally, I agree, just as I feel we need to stop all the financial support to Israel.

I'm not "Pro Russia" or "Anti Israel". I just believe that unless we reach a point where another nation is directly threatening us or directly interfering with our importing/exporting of goods with a nation we're conducting trade with? The situation doesn't rise to the level where we should get that involved. Nothing wrong with making official statements that a country is "wrong" for doing X,Y or Z. But our government is so many TRILLIONS in debt already, the last thing we can afford is to fund other people's wars just on principles.

At the end of the day, the Ukraine needs to fight for its own freedom, and they left a bad taste in my mouth from almost day 1 when they came at American leaders with an attitude of "Give us money! Now! We need it!". I couldn't believe politicians practically fell over each other to hand it to them! It's not even like the Ukraine was some bastion of American or Western ideals in the first place!

And as others have commented here? If NATO falls, I don't see it as all that significant for America regardless? There's definitely an argument to be made that via NATO, we "kicked the USSR while it was down", decades back. And that's largely what sparked Putin's rationalizing of conquering nations around Russia in recent years. He views it as Mother Russia picking itself back up from those times and putting itself back together. I don't agree or support that -- but there are MANY things in the world I don't support or agree with. I don't support the drug cartels running Mexico like they do today, for example. I don't support the human rights violations China commits daily, either. Does that mean we need to get into a war with Mexico or China, or fund someone else who will? I think not.

As a guy living in a duplex right now? I've considered AirBnBing out the upstairs unit before. (Currently, it's a non-issue because my adult daughter moved back in with me and is using it. But at some point, I'll be back to it being vacant again.)

I don't have indoor cameras set up in there (only a few outdoor ones). But I feel like first off? AirBnB has no leg to stand on to demand I "inform customers of their presence"? I don't necessarily mind telling them I have them? I feel like really, it's for their own security as well as mine, so they should consider them a benefit. But I've seen outdoor cameras on the side of almost every hotel/motel I ever stayed in and they didn't inform me about them first! There's no legal expectation of privacy for anyone standing outdoors in the open, especially on private property they don't own. Maybe it would be different for a back yard enclosed by a privacy fence, since the fence itself implies the increased privacy? But fine -- write the AirBnB rules to make that an exception.

Second? I don't really understand how their original rules for indoor camera were problematic? If you tell people the cameras can't be put in bathrooms, bedrooms, etc. and can only go in common areas, that seems pretty reasonable to me. All the complaints of "being spied on" seem to stem from dishonest AirBnB owners who hid cameras in place that already violated this rule.

I'm in the camp of people who still question the whole thing, because clearly, the general public is kept in the dark one way or the other.
If everything reported comes down to our government and military doing "secret things"? Still means we have very little concrete information on what people are observing because they're withholding it from us.

And if it's true that we DO have at least evidence of one or two instances of alien life forms visiting Earth? It would only make logical sense that it would amount to a fraction of even 1% of all reported "sightings". Any serious UFO research would primarily involve weeding out all the "noise" of everyone from pranksters making fake crop circles in fields to mentally unstable people, off their meds, who are sure they were abducted.

I'm not even sure it means anything that somebody like Neil deGrasse Tyson notes astronomers are "among the least likely" to report a UFO sighting? They're primarily focused on studying very distant stars and things like evidence of black holes or supernovas. Obviously, they're also regularly called on to educate the public about things like upcoming solar eclipses or meteor showers. Their telescopes aren't going to do much good at spotting something like a UFO supposedly crash landing or flying inside our airspace, or suddenly diving into the ocean.

I would expect that the people MOST likely to report a UFO would in fact be the military. You're talking about people constantly doing surveillance, possessing the equipment to do it well, and potentially doing the types of things that some extraterrestrial life form might find curious or worrisome (such as claims of UFO sightings escalating around atomic test sights). Additionally? I find their testimony far more credible than what you'd get from the typical civilian. If nothing else? Active duty military folks have little to gain from making up some big story about aliens. They're not out there trying to sell a book about it or give paid speeches/presentations at conventions about it. It also seems VERY plausible that if military (whether our own or another government) did retrieve a crashed UFO or parts of one? They'd keep such a thing secret and pass it off to contractors to work on reverse engineering technology in it to use in future projects. I can't imagine they'd just openly tell the public about it?

Who even CARES if Apple wishes to maintain an "App Store monopoly" though? All the game consoles do this already and everyone accepts it as standard business practice. Can't just go running anything I want on a Nintendo Wii, can I? Won't happen on a Sony Playstation either.

The EU can go sit on a pole and spin for all I care.

Apple is first and foremost an American-based company, building products and services around the laws and norms for their sale in the U.S. Other countries increasingly want to meddle with all of it (like China demanding all the censorship of search tools/engines in the products, for example), or these repeated EU mandates that hurt the overall security of the product at every turn.

If you don't want to work with Apple and the "walled garden" they allow people to function in, then it's pretty simple. Just stop trying to develop anything for their platform! Apple has always been a niche, with a computer market-share I think never really got above about 12% at best. They captured a FAR greater share of the market with the iPhones and iPads -- but it's still pretty much an even split of who goes the Apple route and who goes with Android. The rest of the contenders couldn't hang in the race (Microsoft, etc.). But nothing is stopping them from trying again if they wanted to.

I've used Apple products since the late 90's and continue to do so. I'm not a fan of a lot of things they do, but so far, they've gotten enough right so I'm satisfied with the purchases. Security and privacy are important and I'm hardly seeing anyone else in the industry doing as much as Apple has done to preserve them. Lots of lip service out there, but few actions or steps that truly improve anything. Apple isn't out there reselling my customer info or statistics, so that alone makes them a front runner in this area.

I can't do a whole lot with my $1 bills in my wallet either. They're hard to write much on because so much of them is covered in print already. Takes too many of them to heat a room if you resort to burning them for warmth. At the end of the day, they're just another odd sized piece of fancy paper. Same for a $5, a $10, a $20 or even a $100 bill.

Yet, they're still valuable as currency because we collectively put faith in the *idea* they represent value for economic transactions.

For that matter, even gold isn't really very useful to most people who own it. Sure, you can melt it down and use it for things like fillings in teeth. But does your average person own a furnace capable of doing that, or even any interest in attempting it?

All that matters with these investments is the collective acceptance of them as symbols of value.

Ok.... gotcha. I never even heard of Thrasio before this, so it's all news to me as of today. :)

Ultimately though? Still pretty unimpressed, then. There are new "brick and mortar" startups out there trying to get businesses going every day, and it's more useful for society and our economy as a whole if someone throws some money at keeping what they're doing alive/thriving (even if they're buying them out to then run it themselves).

I mean, for example? I have a friend with an adult daughter who just partnered with someone who helped her navigate getting her own small business started, mostly selling on Amazon. She makes diaries and other notebooks/notepads with custom front decorative covers and themes. She does all the art and her friend helped handle the end of getting the artwork into print production. So officially, she's another "profitable Amazon vendor" now. Practically-speaking though? It's a good experience for her in doing online sales and in drawing art for commercial profit. It's not really anything that helps a small town keep its commercial district filled with businesses leasing the properties and maintaining them. IMO, it's not even anything really worth "buying out". She doesn't have some established "brand" you're getting rights to as part of owning it. (Kind of like your Gilbert's Bicycle Wheels, in that respect....)

Hmm..... yeah. The part of this that makes no sense to me is why, if you can successfully accomplish this (automation of purchases from sites like Alibaba to auto post to Amazon Marketplace if/when it makes good financial sense), you would worry about building some business model around offering this service to other vendors?

If it really works? Why aren't you just doing this yourself and profiting? (Obvious answer is that it's not REALLY so profitable or worth the effort and/or technical issues involved, so they'd rather try to profit off getting OTHER people to use it.)

I work for a transportation company where we have several thousand drivers carrying smartphones using AT&T in most cases, running a kiosked app we use for scanning packages as they're picked up or dropped off on routes. Our entire system was pretty much non-functional from late last night until sometime this afternoon. And I'd be surprised if ANY of those drivers were signing in to DownDetector and reporting anything.

Looks like coincidence now, but in my city, we lost Spectrum broadband during pretty much this same time-frame. (The rumors I'm hearing though say a truck hit a phone pole and severed some fiber, and people saw many Spectrum trucks in that area all morning/afternoon working on it.)

I also find it suspect that Verizon claims their network was "unaffected" because I've read a number of individual reports of people with Verizon phones having no service or ability to call out this morning. They weren't talking about being unable to complete calls to AT&T customers. Might well be some AT&T hand-off code they updated/changed and broke the whole thing, including competitor's cell towers that started mishandling their own customer's signal/service as a result of it?

I sure didn't care much for Apple's attempt to copy-cat the Echo Dots with their HomePod smart speakers. Too little, too late, and nobody I know was that excited to be able to ask Siri things from one, anyplace in their home. I guess it might have been ok if you paid for an Apple Music subscription already and wanted to be able to play songs on command, streaming from it? But especially having already bought a couple of Sonos products by then, it was underwhelming to me.

The Apple watch was perfectly ok, yet not real exciting. My ex-wife bought me the "series 0" on launch day as an anniversary gift, assuming I'd love it. And in reality? It wound up just being an item I hung onto a lot longer than I wanted to, just because I didn't want to upset her that I wasn't using it.

I kept having issues with Apple's bands breaking my skin out if I wore an Apple watch every day, and the leather third-party band I tried that worked better in that regard never really looked that good with it.

I upgraded my Apple watch every 3 generations after that, but my series 6 just tends to sit on my nightstand, on its charging stand. I rarely even wear it anymore. It's just another gadget I might wear on some specific occasion where I think it might come in handy (like a business trip with meetings where it's unwelcome to take your phone out of your pocket to look at it, even if you're just checking the time).

I think Apple failed pretty badly with the latest iMacs too. The iMac was clearly part of Jobs' vision of what the staple desktop Mac should be. Since the original Macintosh, it was always about that "all in one" design with the display built into the box. But now, you can't even buy one with a 27" screen anymore?! And this is when big monitors and even curved displays are everywhere. Why not a 27" or even 32" iMac with curved screen, as a redesign of something more like the old "lampshade" iMac G4? There's really nothing even stylish/eye-catching about today's iMac. IMO, they don't even look good in most of their color options.

... businesses spent billions with broadcasters to get their marketing onto the TV screen in your home?

Now, businesses spend billions to buy Smart TV manufacturers to get their marketing onto the TV screen in your home.