Just doing a simple web search will tell you a few things about Hantavirus that make it far less of an issue than some would like it to be. The primary source of the disease is rodents. The main transmission vectors from an infected rodent are aerosol or droplets from feces, urine, saliva, or blood; bites or scratches; skin or fur particles from grooming; or eating contaminated food. You will also find that human to human transmission requires extended close contact, possibly just intimate contact, though evidence is not entirely clear.

The media... be it legacy or otherwise... rely on the scare tactics. The constant bombardment with information does not help. People used to have some down time and were able to process the information in a more calm and rational fashion. These days it's all about clicks, eyes, and distractions.

So then you support laws that empower unions to do more than just fund leadership's politics?

The manufacturers aren't the problem. They aren't the ones who make the rules about how their product is used on public thoroughfares.

The context of that phrase is almost always used for people who invite regulation with their own foolish/dangerous behavior.

At least this time you presented something more nuanced than "people can't afford housing because they spend too much on other things". You could have led with that.

Also, I live about as far from California as is geographically possible within the lower 48, so I'm not assuming any blame for what happens there.

What makes you think it's rich people who are doing the hiring?

Pretending that the cost of housing is a problem only for people who refuse to live within their means is certainly one way to show why resentment of the rich is near an all-time high.

Why would anyone want to work for a company that does stuff like this??

This looks like the latest escalation in the tug-o-war between employers and remote workers. The relatively few people going to extraordinary efforts just to avoid doing the job they're being paid to do is going to ruin it for everyone else. Do you want to make return-to-office mandatory? Because creating AI fakes to pretend to be on work meetings sounds like a good way to make that happen.

I still see it as laziness of design. It goes back to the days when sites required you to use Internet Exploder, er, Explorer... because it followed a different implementation track than Netscape/Mozilla, and IE accepted broken HTML because Internet Insecurity Server (IIS) would serve it that way. When you have defined standards and follow them with your site design, the browser a user chooses when visiting your site should be 100% irrelevant, and if it is that is the fault of the browser maker because they do not implement the standard. If you develop your site to require a certain feature of a specific make of browser be used, the fault is yours for developing a browser-specific site.

Same happens where I work. They default everything to Chrome but allow you to use Firefox and a couple of others as well. I just restrict my use of Chrome to the corporate intraweb stuff (training, help desk, etc). Overall, it's laziness of design of those intraweb sites... they force the developers to use one methodology over another instead of building things to a browser-agnostic standard.

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

Except that "micro" means "small," and there's nothing small about the shit they produce... so MacroShit?

This all changed when Congress started creating a lot of the 3+ letter agencies and gave them power to create regulations as if they were law... and those agencies report to the President. Executive Orders should never be law, and were only ever meant to be something that provides guidance on how to enforce certain existing laws. If we really wanted to go back to the way the Founding Fathers wanted it, those agencies would report to Congress and would work to produce things that Congress would have to enact as legislation. By creating all of those agencies, Congress abdicated its power to legislate to the Executive branch. Anything enacted as a regulation by the agency should be converted to legislation if we really wanted to get back to where we should be.

Trouble is, Congress refuses to do its job and likes to play games like Budget Brinksmanship instead. Remember, for members of Congress, job 1 is to get elected, and job 2 is to get re-elected. Anything for their constituents runs a distant third to those two.

This is all party neutral stuff. Both of them do it. Both of them make back room deals to keep themselves in power and screw us all, and woe be unto anyone who attempts to disrupt that ruling class of people who know better than all of us peons.

... when everything released by Microsoft is nothing but a gigantic public beta test.