Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

We know that cached data will leak, eventually.
So why keep so much data?

(We know the answer, because they can sell it.)

I fully understand that details of people's driving habits absolutely can usefully inform car design. No issue. But it could be anonymized at a quite low level.

Ultimately until the penalties for data loss exceed their value to the firms (not just car companies) literally farming us for data, this won't ever stop.

I think the renaming of the Dept of Defense was stupid.
I think there was no legit reason to move Maxwell.
I don't think Trump is a pedo, because that doesn't square with his tossing out Epstein because he was a creeper, and poor Miss Giuffre could EASILY directly have implicated Trump but didn't.

Any more questions you disingenuous coward?

It's HER point you moron.

And?

What's your point?

That we should continue to make things we don't need because they "only" cost $56 million?

I don't disagree that there are bigger things out there, but the bigger things are, the more bloody the fight and in a country split 50/50 that's hard to accomplish.
Look at the FUROR surrounding the obliteration of USAID; this is a program that *started* under the premise of using US aid dollars to funnel toward CIA goals of undercutting foreign governments. In the latter few decades, it has become a $30-$40bn/yr slush fund for woke bullshit if not outright Democrat-promoting propaganda.

Personally, I wish Musk was still in there slashing the SHIT out of the federal budgets, but Congressional Republicans showed their true colors - that they're just a different color of hog, feeding at the fucking trough - so he bailed and I don't blame him.

The federal government needs an AXE on spending. And this is to sacred cows both left and right. I would personally FREEZE spending in all deparments as-is (you could take an average over the last 10y or whatever to smooth out beneficial/detrimental spikes) no inflation increases, until the budget = income.

Cool Story, Bro time:

My domestic partner is very pretty and the dbag who runs the nearest Tesla dealership was trying really, really hard to get with her. He let her borrow his dealership's loaner Model S Plaid for a week as part of his "That Guy" package.

We thought we'd have some fun since it's supposed to be this super cool sports car. It turned out to have a governor on it that limited acceleration and top speed to something any Honda Odyssey owner would find comfortable.

I'm not sure whether it was that guy's doing or is that's something directly from Tesla itself but we both thought it was hilarious.

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

Samsung makes three tablet lines: the A, which is a value product that isn't bad for around $200; The S6 Lite, which is a specific mid-tier offering that is updated less than annually and has its own model specs per release. There's also the full-fat Tab S line, which are premium tablets.

I have an S6 Lite from 2020, a Tab S8 and an S9+. The S8 has a fairly normal 10" screen and is actually my favorite of the bunch; I find the 12" screen on the S9+ too big since I mostly want a reading device rather than a watching or playing device. I use the S9+ as a portable monitor and video capture device for my camera when I'm shooting photos with models. It's big and bright enough to see even in outdoors in broad daylight. All three of them have reasonable Qualcomm SoCs and big-boy amounts of RAM. All three of them have an SD card slot for big-boy storage. Newer Tab S series tablets are also water resistant, if you're someone who might use such a device in the bath or near a pool.

Not everybody wants to buy a premium Android tablet and I'll admit I don't pay full price for them either, but they're superb hardware, and I have no problem recommending the S6 Lite or the comparable Lenovo M11 for general use. Those aren't waterproof and they don't have high end SoCs, but they have nice screens, work well in their intended ecosystem and they aren't saddled with a sub-par mobile OS like Apple or Amazon hardware.

Yes, I know it's possible to add the Play Framework to a FireOS device. The problem is that you have to fight to keep it that way since Amazon updates will eventually reset your settings. As far as I know, there's no cure for the limitations of iOS, which is why I'd never bother with an iPad.

And buying more than one item negates that store tactic.

This is a long solved problem. Round the final bill up or down to the nearest 5 or 0.

US military in Europe did away with pennies in 1980. The only place you could use a penny was the Post Office.
Nary a problem.

Round up or down to the nearest .05 or .0. It averages out over time.

...you realize that pennies don't solve that "problem," right? We already have to round the final total for virtually all purchases after calculating the tax.

I found Sonder because I was desperate to book a weeklong stay in Manhattan that didn't cost $2k and wasn't in some bedbug infested nightmare in Times Square. I was essentially checking every short term rental on Google Maps when I ran across it.

Once I got in their system, I found rentals everyplace I wanted to go. Getting a very cheap flight and a Sonder apartment has been my recipe for an interesting long weekend every few months ever since.

Sonder doesn't really have staff as such. The locations have maybe one cleaner, who doesn't enter your rental during your stay, and MAYBE one person in the lobby, if your location even has a lobby.

Your rental is an apartment, and like any apartment, you're responsible for cleaning your room and doing your own dishes while you're there. That's not to say that the lobby person couldn't stick a note under a door, but I understand that minimal staffing is one of the reasons Sonder rentals are so affordable.

The busiest Sonder I've ever visited had at most two employees in the building. Most of them, you'll never see an employee at all. I've only seen staff in downtown Chicago and in Manhattan and I've stayed at 14 different locations.

If you were looking for a live person to ask, you probably wouldn't find one.
On the other hand, they do get back to you instantly if you message them about something.

Or the people who made the web site were contractors and there's no one doing maintenance.
I have active (future) reservations and I still haven't gotten any direct notification that there's any operational status from the company yet, even though I've been seeing news about this for the last three days.