Elmo found a government he could own rather than a company. Just yesterday he got the Bunko Artist in Cheap to promote Tesla's tat on the White House lawn, as if the swoon in the stock price had anything to do with not enough advertising.

And Elmo paid with that bit of advert by promising to spend $100 million on la Presidenta's PACs. la Presidenta accepted money from Beelzebub long ago in return for his soul. It turns out Beelz drives a hard bargain and that la Presidenta's soul wasn't worth as much as he thought.

Now nobody brings bigger bags, because they cost money. So instead of larger bags, they are smaller bags, which means you can fit more of them under the plane, which at least potentially means you can free up space for more pallets of mail.

I think there needs to be an entirely self-contained and autonomous routine, triggerable by riders in the vehicle, which cause the vehicle to come to a safe stop as quickly as possible.

The reason is I think that a fleet of autonomous vehicles directed by a central network of servers would be the juiciest target in the history of hacking.

It's not unbundling per se; it's the impracticality of price comparisons that's the problem.

That's actually a pretty thoroughly litigated area, so the guidelines are well understood. I don't recall what the numbers are, but there are well-established guidelines for sampling, and IIRC, scratching doesn't count at all as long as the rhythm and tune are unrecognizable, which is the case with most scratching techniques.

Legally speaking, they can pay below the state minimum if the state allows it, but the sum of wages plus tips must exceed the federal minimum, or they are violating the FLSA, and if they get caught, that's a huge fine just waiting to happen.

But yes, that means that up to $5.12 per hour of tips can effectively be stolen from workers and used to reduce their base pay, and yes it sucks that this is allowed.

It is never legal to pay below the federal minimum wage, period, because that's a federal law. States don't have the authority to override the FLSA.

The confusion here is that most states do not require that tipped workers reach the higher state minimum wage limits, which means restaurants that require tipping can potentially pay wages that otherwise would not be legal at the state level.

I started my career at the start of the computer age, and over that time informatics has enabled companies to evade price comparisons by enabling them to bundle things that don't belong with the product (content subscriptions with your phone) or unbundle things you need to use it (a reasonable baggage allowance and travel). In the case of health care, we don't know what *anything* costs until our insurance denies us. So sure, you can search for the cheapest flight on the Internet, but you don't know what it will actually cost to use that flight.

The ability of a consumer to price and compare products is fundamental to the reason free markets are the most efficient means of distributing resources and producing goods. It's fundamental to capitalism.

Capitalism has never really be in real danger from socialism. The real danger to capitalism is corporations developing ways to avoid price competition that consumers find intractable.

The weird thing is that on macOS, I can generally copy text from screenshots in PNG format. Built-in OCR has rendered PDF largely moot.

Speed? I suspect it may be because they plan to have rampant nepotism.

Unless you're flying alone, Southwest is by far the worst of the legacy carriers, and has been for a long time.

The first airline that assigns seats on the day of the flight will win. Automatically reorder the passengers to maximize the probability of families sitting together (with across-the-aisle being the last resort). Secondarily, give each person preferences for aisle versus window, but with weaker weight than any other group getting to sit together. Then compute a seating layout that maximizes the constraints, with weighting in favor of the people who booked earlier in the event of a tie.

If what they say is to be believed, then their execs don't understand their customers.

According to CNN, they started selling on flight finder websites and didn't see the expected increase in sales, and assumed it was because people preferred cheaper flights and to pay for their bags.

In reality, there's no increase in sales because the "good luck sitting next to your family" plan doesn't work for a lot of people, and most of those people avoid Southwest like the plague because of the nickel-and-diming upcharges just to have a chance of sitting together. As long as Southwest hasn't implemented reserved seating, and requires people to pay money to avoid a panicked rush 24 hours before the flight, when the people who are the least able to take the time to do that (people with families) are the most heavily impacted by the policy, then Southwest isn't even an option.

Besides, I guarantee Southwest isn't going to meaningfully lower their rates in exchange for not bringing checked bags. Every airline that has done this has ended up with longer boarding times and everybody bringing their bags and then gate checking them anyway when the plane ends up being full, which delays departure even more, but you'll notice that the prices on those airlines are still higher than Southwest, because most of the cost of air travel isn't the 60 checked bags weighing less than 50 pounds each. A 737 weighs 140,000 pounds. Those 3,000 pounds represent O(2%) of the cost of the flight. And I guarantee they aren't going to charge only $3 per flight for a checked bag.

No, they're not doing this to lower prices. They're doing this to encourage people to bring less luggage so that they have more room to carry mail and make a bigger profit on each flight . And that's fine, but it would be nice if they were at least honest about it.

Well since the list includes Australia and New Zealand I'm guessing they are like the UK which unlike the US is not made of "dirt" but earth or soil. Of course Canada is a bit different since it is made of Rocks and Trees...and water.

I thought the US was no longer a member of the WHO so it doesn't even have an interest in WHO air quality limits within its borders, let alone outside them.

I do 15%, scaling up if our party is difficult for the server or if we take a long time at the table.

I don't scale *down* except for really egregious misbehavior. I don't scale down for minor defects in the service or pet peeves, because it's someones living we're talking about and someone who isn't exactly raking in the dough. Maybe I'd dock the waiter for subpar service in a fine dining establishment where the waiters can make a thousand dollars a night I might, but I'd really hesitate to withhold some harried waitress's $7 tip because I was feeling a little dudgeon. People like that struggle, and I'm comfortable enough. If I don't get the pampering I expect it's no harm done.