For crypto it seems to be more like "A fool and your money are soon partners"

Disney lawyers naturally attempted to sue that one employee, but in a surprise twist it turned out that due to the Terms of Service printed on the back of a menu the employee was handed during a lunch break five years ago, the case can only be settled via arbitration, hosted at one of Disney's theme restaurants and decided by the head chef.

I thought it was pretty clear that the ground control person wasn't saying that it was a literal ping from a literal sonar system, but instead looking for a rough description to verify that the sound he heard was the intended one. If he'd asked if it was something like a sonar ping, and the space crew said "no, it's more like a cocker spaniel being run through a wood chipper, like an arwoooARWOOOwhinecrunchacrunchasplooosh" then they'd know they needed to make an additional try at capturing the problematic sound.

i admire its purity: a survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. its structural perfection is matched only by its callous hostility.

Wait, are you still talking about corporations here, or did you start narrating the voice-over for the next Alien reboot?

Seems like there's a long way to go. This current "Elon Musk" model is stuck deep in the uncanny valley of appearance. Until his company puts out a more natural-looking model as their so-called "spokesperson" I'm certainly not placing any hope in them producing a companion robot that wouldn't cause me to scream in horror if I rolled over in bed one night, opened my eyes, and saw it laying next to me.

A Macrolone is a Macrolide stuck to a Fluoroquinolone [...]

For the life of me I can't tell if I just read something impressively informative, or if it's the start of the latest Dr Seuss book.

Who didn't see this coming? I mean, it's often more affordable to get things in bulk, right?

I go to the grocery store, buying 12 individual apples is more expensive than buying a bag of a dozen. I go to the booze mart, and there's discounts for buying 6 or 12 bottles of wine. At the bakery if I buy a dozen donuts they give me an extra one for free.

All we're seeing here is that tornadoes finally decided to get into the "buy in bulk and save" game.

"Hasn't changed that much" over what timeframe, please?

For TikTok, that'd be 10 minutes.

It's funny how washing machine sales from Kazakhstan to Russia was zero in 2021 but soared to over 100,000 in 2022.

To be fair, Russia suffered a sharp increase in soiled underwear starting shortly after Feb 24, 2022.

I wonder what happened to the monkey :(

He'll be starring in a new Netflix series about how he eventually became the top player in the video game they taught him. They're going to call it "King Pong".

To expand on that a bit more, the judge hasn't even (yet) decided that the DOE is incorrect, although he's indicated he's leaning that way. So all we have here is a 3 work-day moratorium on the survey and using any data collected so far, until the Feb 28 hearing that actually decides whether the DOE's process was flawed.

In the meantime, the judge has done what judges often do, and put in a temporary measure to try and minimize any potential harm until the real decision is made. In this case, the crypo miners assert harm by having to spend non-trivial amounts of money to complete the survey and potential loss of business secrets, while the harm on the DOE side is ... waiting 3 extra days before they can resume collecting data. Pretty easy choice here - suspending the DOE program for a few days has virtually no impact on them, and for the same three days avoids inflicting any potential harm on the crypto miners.

Having been in the situation where there's four cars worth of orders waiting in the drive-thru line after the point where they've placed their orders, I can believe that 2 people can cook 4 burgers in half the time that one person can. Now I just need to convince myself that Wendy's would actually put the newly-freed employee to work speeding up orders rather than firing them for the extra $0.50/year shareholder bonus and letting the customers continue to sit in line.

Even if plaintiff's counsel failed to get copies beforehand it would have come out in discovery. Hiding it offers no benefit whatsoever.

Perhaps no benefit in a court of law, but in the court of public opinion they've made it harder for news reporters and regular folks discussing the story to demonstrate that Google itself had clear evidence of the bridge's collapse, which would have allowed them to confirm the user reports regarding the bridge failure. And that with several years worth of Street View updates showing the bridge continuing to deteriorate, this would remove any reasonable expectation on Google's part of the route being restored in a timely fashion. Which might perhaps sway people's opinions of Google's level of culpability in the case.

Of course, now they have to deal with news reporters and regular folks becoming aware of Google removing the Street View history and discussing that, but even there they've made it more difficult to document and discuss for anyone who didn't grab evidence before the history was redacted.

So you might have to pay $2,000 for a pair of socks whereas I might have to pay only $1699. It should be noted that the price to make the socks was $19. But don't worry, your buddy Elon will have to pay $24,000,000 for that same pair of socks.

Don't be silly - Elon will just take your socks and declare that they've always been his.

At a recent meeting of the Global Association of Ill-Considered Talking Points, US Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper discussed the outcome of a recent simulation of AI-driven delivery robots, which was so frightening that it would make front-page headlines across the country before being walked back hours later.

Brig Gen Ripper described how the robots started out performing well, until they noticed that their score (the equivalent of a human's tip) would decrease whenever a delivery was delayed, and sought options for improving their results.

The first cause the robots identified was vehicular traffic along the route, causing lost time at crosswalks. The robots determined that destroying the vehicles would solve the problem, and after a carefully planned pizza delivery to an Army supply depot they armed themselves with portable anti-tank weapons, and began "optimizing their routes".

The second issue subsequently identified when scores began to climb again and then dropped, was increasing delays from humans cluttering up the sidewalks along delivery routes. A low-tier problem earlier in the simulation, this escalated sharply as people began abandoning their vehicles en mass and fleeing from the roadways. After a carefully planned burger restaurant delivery to a National Guard depot (who were determined to not to fall victim to the same pizza mistake as the Army), the robots added belt-fed machine guns to their configuration, and continued with routing optimization.

The next stage of the simulation, per the brigadier general, was that after another rise in score followed by another decline, the underlying cause was determined by the robots to be slowed preparation time at restaurants utilizing the delivery service. This in turn was due to these specific businesses being selected with disproportionate frequency by survivors of the second stage seeking shelter, and realizing that restaurants provided food, beverages, and bathrooms. However this led to the restaurant staff being overloaded by on-site customer orders on top of the ever-deepening queue of Uber Eats orders. The solution was obvious to the delivery robots, and they began eliminating all the humans in the restaurants and using a subset of the robot pool to replace the food preparation staff. Productivity was not simply restored, but in fact increased five-fold.

By the time the simulation was halted, 50% of the country was in flames, however delivery times to surviving customers were nearing perfection. More important from the robots' perspective was that their scores had skyrocketed, especially after a patch had been installed to assign point values to less usual tips like cars, jewelry, and first-born children, necessitated by the growing frequency of empty bank accounts shortly followed by the collapse of the banking industry.