...and thanks for all the fish.

Most of the restaurants I go to don't even serve alcohol. Of course, I live in Utah, which is at the very bottom of the alcohol consumption per capita chart. Here restaurants all have normal fountain drinks, water, and then a wide array of specialty drinks, many of which are just normal sodas with some stuff added in.

Being a restaurant owner is hard. The margins on most food is slim. The margins on drinks (alcoholic or not), on the other hand, are ridiculous. There's a reason why sit down restaurants start you with something to drink, and why fast food places bundle sodas. To a very real extent these businesses make their money upselling you from drinking plain water.

Precisely. This is going to be used against the owners of the hardware, not for them. I suspect that these containers are very secure. It's just too bad that my phone is the one device that I own where I do not have root access. This security is not going to be used to protect my data from Google, but to protect Google's data from me.

Hooray!

That's what I assumed as well. Buy Now Pay Later loans like this have a long history of being predatory. So I took a look at what it would cost to accept Klarna (as an example) as a merchant. The reality is that they have transaction fees that are very similar to credit cards. In other words, these companies do not need to rely on missed payments to make a profit.

These companies are apparently setting themselves up to replace traditional credit card payment systems, which suits me right down to the ground.

The difference is that it is much easier to get a Klarna account, and it isn't (yet) as widely available.

I felt the same way at first. Traditional BNPL schemes were very predatory. However, Klarna (and others) appear to be playing approximately the same game as the traditional credit card processors. They charge transaction fees that are roughly the same as credit card processors, and like credit cards their customers don't pay extra if they pay their bill on time. Klarna, in particular actually appears to give customers interest free time.

The difference, for consumers, is primarily that a Klarna account is much easier to get, and it isn't universally accepted. From a merchant perspective, depending on your payment provider, you might already be able to accept Klarna, and it appears that it mostly works like a credit card. It's even possible that charge backs are less of an issue, although it does appear that transaction fees are not given back in the case of a refund.

Personally, I am all for competition when it comes to payment networks. Visa and Mastercard are both devils. More competition for them is good for all of us.

In America we have essentially legislated against small vehicles. Our CAFE standards were supposedly designed to push us towards more fuel efficient vehicles, but the reality is that the easiest way to pass CAFE standards is to simply make the vehicle larger. So the United States ends up with larger vehicles, and the smaller vehicles that we do get tend to be more expensive than we should be. We have essentially legislated away the category of a ultra basic small car. That happens to be a pretty popular segment in most of the world. The small cars we can buy are nearly as expensive as their larger brethren and so they make a lot less sense.

EVs are an even better example of how U.S. legislation skews things towards larger ICE vehicles. The most popular EVs in most of the world are the most basic EVs. I personally would love to buy a basic EV to replace my current commuter car. I have a house and a place to plug in an EV. My commute is short and even the most basic EVs would be fine. However, the only vehicles available in the market are essentially luxury vehicles. I can buy a whole lot of gasoline for $30K, which is the least expensive new EV available here, but if I could get my hands on a cheap Chinese EV for $12K I absolutely would do that. For the price of the least expensive EV you can basically buy a Toyota RAV4 that is a much more capable vehicle.

Yes, verifying the citations is trivially easy, which is how these people get caught. You will notice that the lawyers in question say that it was an honest citation mistake and not "fabrication of authority" which is a legal term for a crime that carries jail time and fines. The problem with that defense is that the article that they cited doesn't actually exist. They say it has an inaccurate title and inaccurate authors, but I suspect that is legal speak for, "AI made up the article."

Now, if an article exists that happens to say approximately the same thing, and it just has a different title and authors then it is possible that the lawyers in question might be able to pretend that they really did just goof up the title and authors. If not, then what they did actually fits the definition of fabrication of authority. At which point I think that they should throw the book the fools.

The reality is that our current legal system relies heavily on lawyers not pulling these kinds of stunts. The system is adversarial, for sure, but it is generally assumed that the opposing counsel isn't making things up whole cloth. That's why fabrication of authority carries such high penalties. No one has time to check every citation. The assumption is that the person writing the brief is citing correctly and not misrepresenting what is actually said. The fact that these particular lawyers took it a step further and included a citation that doesn't even exist is absolutely ridiculous.

Yes. And they probably need to use Google Messages and not whatever Samsung (or whatever) sets by default. The Apple user also has to have iOS 18 and a carrier that supports RCS for iPhones, this is definitely not all of them, although the big three now support RCS on iPhone.

I suspect that there were lots of cases, in a company the size of Microsoft, where someone didn't get along with their boss, or had problems with a team that they were on, but that still had friends and allies in other parts of the organization. So they might get let go from one part of the organization, but when another part of the organization had an opening they then got rehired.

Like most rules of this type I would bet that the new policy has an interesting story. I would bet that one particularly toxic employee got rehired enough times that management finally created a policy against it. The whole point of the new policy is that people fired in this manner can no longer work for Microsoft for two years, even if some other part of the organization wants them.

Personally I would rather pay a flat rate (even a slightly inflated flat rate) than hand over my location data to the government.

I do agree that at $200 per year that is quite a bit steeper than it should be. The current federal gas tax is $0.184 per gallon. That means that you would have to burn 1087 gallons of gas to spend that much. At 20/24 MPG you would have to drive at least 21,740 miles to spend that much. That's hardly typical. If the price were $100 that would seem a lot more equitable.

More importantly, I don't know why commercial vehicles should get a pass. Commercial vehicles don't currently get a pass when it comes to gasoline taxes, and it is all too easy to get your vehicle labeled "commercial." We can't hardly pretend that commercial vehicles don't wear down the roads. I understand why this was done. A lot of businesses (most notably Amazon) have switched to electric vehicles specifically to dodge this particular tax. In certain parts of the U.S. (including where I live) electricity is cheap enough that a lot of businesses have already made this switch.

If the tax was closer to equitable then this would not be a big deal. Yes, electric vehicles would lose some of their relative competitive advantage against internal combustion vehicles, but at least our roads would get paid for. Electric vehicles still get substantial direct subsidies.

I am a lifelong conservative. The first time I didn't vote Republican for anything was the first time that Trump ran. It makes me crazy that the party of free trade has somehow become the party of tariffs.

That being the case, I suspect that Trump is going to Jimmy Carter the economy. Rightly or wrongly, Jimmy Carter was blamed for wrecking the economy to the point where Democrats didn't have a chance of winning the presidency for 8 terms. Not only did Reagan win twice, but Bush won twice as well.

The midterm elections are already going to be rough for Republicans. I suspect that even without gimmicks like Amazon showing us what these tariffs are costing us that prices are going to go up across the board.

Exactly. My current daily driver is a 1996 Honda Civic, with just over 200k miles on it. I bought it in 1996, and it has never let me down. That being the case, after 30 years of being run hard and put up wet it is getting pretty worn down. I have other vehicles that I use for long trips, and for transporting larger groups of people. What I need is an economical and reliable runabout.

When I was in Peru last year I even took a look at the inexpensive BYD electric cars that are available there. If I could get one of those here I probably would do that. They are even less expensive than the Slate and basic enough that they probably would hold up.

However, the idea of getting a small pickup for just a little bit more is appealing, and I will admit that I absolutely love both the aesthetics and the simplicity of this vehicle. This is precisely the sort of vehicle that I think is going to bring electric vehicles into the mainstream.

I'm being lazy and you can pick this apart all you want, but the evidence is that it worked and was very well into statistical significance range:

Interpretation
Our results showed that US counties with higher proportions of persons 12 years of age fully vaccinated against COVID-19 had substantially lower rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths—a finding that showed dose response and persisted even in the period when Delta was predominant.

From:
https://www.thelancet.com/jour...
County-level vaccination coverage and rates of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States: An ecological analysis