Erm... notice a pattern there?

Most of these nations are equatorial or not that far off it. Most of them between the 26th parallels. As you get closer to the equator, there is less difference between the hours of daylight between summer and winter, as you get further you get a greater differential.

In Perth, Western Australia (36 S) there's about a 3 hour difference, in London, UK (51 N) there's an 8 hour difference and this difference does not neatly line up around 12 PM so if you had permanent GMT you'd have the sun getting up at 3 AM in the summer disrupting sleep and if you kept permanent BST you'd have darkness until 9 AM in winter causing chaos on the way to work/school.

Perth doesn't have DST (but the eastern states do so that causes problems) because the differential in daylight hours isn't much of an issue (that and Perth is incredibly backwards and resistant to change but that is another discussion entirely) however London does because there is a huge difference in daylight hours between winter and summer.

Before we had mechanical clocks, we used to adjust to the hours of daylight automatically. Daylight Savings came in because we needed to keep doing that as the hours of daylight changed with the seasons, so the solution was to change the clocks.

With most clocks being automatically updated these days, you barely have the excuse of having to change the clocks to oppose DST. You go to sleep on one time and wake up in the new one.

Well, there's been at least 3 posts about it so clearly, somebody cares.

Most McDonalds locations, they are franchised by individual franchisees. A franchisee can own multiple restaurants, but many don't because the buy-in is so insanely expensive.

What the tool here is doing is comparing pricing in your area compared with franchisees near you and across the country to estimate a price sensitivity of your customers, then suggest higher prices. So if you are charging $2 for a hash brown and a nearby different franchisee is charging $2.89 and people are largely still buying it, it can "suggest" you raise the hash brown price to $2.49 or $2.59 or $2.89.

The legal argument falls on what RealPage is arguing about YieldStar, that the tool provides advice, the franchisees aren't officially all agreeing to set prices, and it's "just a suggestion", when in reality the end goal of the tool is to help franchisees understand the maximum price the market can bear by collaborating via a dataset McDonalds owns. The legal argument is that the franchisees are not sitting down together to price fix, they are all "talking to a guy named Bob" (the points of sale reporting the sales and menu item prices per location to McD corporate in this tool) and the "guy named bob is merely suggesting prices" (Bob knows information that would not be trivial to gather and provides a recommendation).

McDonalds wants to make it attractive to be a franchisee so they're providing this tool to help franchisee profits. They're attempting to abandon liability by putting in the fine print it's just a suggestion bro, if you get sued it isn't our fault.

God bless corporate America!

OpenAI isn't doing an IPO because the finances are bad, US Bond yields are >5%, Oracle's 5 year CDS is above 200bps as overall concerns about AI debt mount...

This entire pretext of "oh god it's so dangerous we can't release it" goes at least back to 2019 where OpenAI refused to release GPT-2 under the hype of it being too dangerous (and yet GPT-3 was released a couple years later). Anthropic did the same thing with Mythos (where everyone got access a couple months later).

What it is is that the model improvements are not explosive enough to justify the insane amount of money OpenAI is burning, so you have to seek an alternate reason for a lack of meaningful progress on newer models. They were pleading for the government to do it so it would be a regulatory moat giving the incumbents an absolutely ironclad reason to not have people question said lack of progress, so with the current US administration being unwilling to do so, they're now doing a voluntary pause to seem socially responsible, and the reason for the pause isn't that the new model isn't that much better, it's oh my god, it's so much better, you wouldn't believe it, once we put some rails to safeguard and limit this thing it's going to be AGI and replace all white collar workers within 18 months (for real, the umpteenth time this prediction has been made). Believe us bro.

Sam Altman may also have a bridge to sell you, you should ask...

A good cop in a corrupt society is the same as a "good guy with a gun" in a society obsessed with guns and violence... such a tiny minority that they're pretty much non existent.

Cardinal Richelieu once a said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". Show me a cop in the US that's never taken a bribe, even just a sweetener for doing the right thing and I'll show you a liar. Even if just through the people who contribute to their pensions. Even if you can find someone who has managed to walk through that and some how remained completely clean (in the words of Londo Mollari "I can only assume you have not been paying attention") then back to what Richelieu said, he'll have still done something technically wrong even if it wasn't morally wrong. For example, the nice officer who let me off for speeding on the A4 near Heathrow a few years back with a bit of a tongue lashing, technically he broke the law as I was speeding and he should have wrote me up but he didn't as I wasn't a knob or driving like an idiot (and clearly the officer wasn't a knob either.. this is what happens when nice people meet).

And that's the UK, the US has long tolerated higher levels of corruption but in recent years that seems to be taken to truly herculean levels. With the egregious and obvious levels of corruption you're tolerating in your highest office, and there is no "I didn't know" excuse, you elected him twice... why would you expect the people with a little authority like beat cops to be goodly and honest when your entire country is no longer simply permissive of corruption, nor just expecting of it but openly supporting it.

Often they're not even doing the design themselves but Google has never claimed to be a hardware company, their branded phones were always and openly, someone elses, right back to the Nexus series.

Of course they realise that... Which is why Palantir and AI have been blamed already, they know that they can't keep relying on the Republicans to keep them out of trouble so they're laying the groundwork to make sure when heads start to roll, it's not their head. That way they can retire and get a cushy private sector gig before the investigation even finishes let alone any kind of war crimes tribunal (which the US will still protect them from).

It's not just desperation but also greed. Especially in countries where workers don't have many rights and a lot of costs like the US.

Greed is the most successful attack vector in most scams. The temptation of more money tends to blind even some of the most astute people, especially in a mercenary culture.

It could be worse, Consumer.

This is pretty much the last media company Disney doesn't own... although it is owned by Larry Ellison so it's not really that much better.

Remember to consume mindlessly Consumer, and it can get worse, it can always get worse.

This is the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about, especially those who are benefitting from it.

Social media isn't just targetting kids, they're targetting everyone and it's not just the under 16 who are vulnerable. Loads of adults are as well, in particular the elderly. Social media is radicalising a large number of older people as well. If we're going to restrict SM for younger people, we should also be doing it for the older people who are just as susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, in many ways, more susceptible.

Top Of The Pops must have made many enemies over the years (and not just because of Jimmy Saville).

Jokes aside, this is largely an American problem as companies there are permitted to be as abusive as they like.

If a store tried to force me to use their app and refused to take an order via their web site they'd lose an absolute shitload of business (not just from me). Same with banks, however there are laws with banks that mean they must meet standards of accessibility and forcing people into a proprietary app is going to violate a few rules there. My bank still uses a OTP sent via SMS.

Obviously the long term solution is legislative, but good luck with that given you keep voting in corporate shills.

Yep, pretty much this.

When you have a physical datacentre, you take backup off site in case the site fails, when you're in the cloud you're really just in one physical location unless you're paying through the nose for co-location.

"Cloud" has pretty much taken the LCC (Low Cost Carrier, A.K.A. Budget Airlines) model to compute and Amazon is the Ryanair of that world. Sure, they advertise a £19 flight to Magaluf but want a seat that isn't shit, pony up, want to take luggage, gonna cost you, don't want to take the red eye flight from "London" Isle of Skye airport... you get the idea and before you know it that £19 flight is a £190 flight. Amazons price structure is the same, cheap headline price, what you actually pay is much, much higher.

A good manager would... Sadly there are a lot of bad managers out there.

There is a grey area here.

Yes, following someone around in public can be considered harassment if it were done with the intent of harassing or disrupting the person in question. A journalist with a legitimate interest can use that as an excuse provided they were not intentionally being disruptive or harassing in order to get a story. If a "reporter" starts getting in your way to force you to react and does so repeatedly, this is harassment.

Intent has a lot to do with it, if you're following someone around without cause then you're pretty much on the wrong side of it.

Also, a good investigative reporter (or private dick) doesn't want to be noticed by the person they're surveilling. It tends to taint the results of the investigation (and here in the UK the police can use the results of a journalists investigation in court) and this affects their livelihood as no legitimate news agency wants to deal with a reporter who is a well known nuisance (as they can be sued as well as the "reporter" in question).