Because if the FDA doesn't approve the vaccine for use you can't get it. I've been getting Moderna since the start of Covid, but this year I was not able to -- because the Moderna vaccine was not approved for people under 65. Yes, I was too young, as a grown adult, to get the vaccine I wanted. Also, Pfizer approval for under 65 was tied to being in a high-risk health group. If you did not have risks from respiratory illnesses and other types of chronic health conditions you could not get one. This actually happened to me. I filed for an appointment at a local pharmacy online and they called me the next morning and said I was not approved based on the medical information I'd submitted online. I was too healthy. Almost sounds like some nightmarish conspiracy by the health care industry to increase "customers" for their services by impeding preventative medicine.

EBay's buyer protections mean they will have to deal with more seller/buyer service disputes that may arise from people using agentic shopping assistants.

That's $10 per mailbox, where the old price was $3/mo per mailbox. Any organization with more than fifty employees and hosting their email on Rackspace is going to notice the cost being more than three times what it was before. That's $1800 becoming $6k for the year.

No! No blinking! No head turns! Those can also be construed as a legally-binding agreement.

You've completely missed the point of the article. Ben Thompson's problem isn't with wearing a helmet, it's with Apple trying to "direct" the immersive basketball experience for him as the viewer. He doesn't want multi-camera views changed without his input, graphics appearing in his field of vision, or even a play-by-play commentary from an announcer. He wants Apple to get out of the action and let him watch like he's actually sitting courtside, like he has before in real life. This would arguably be cheaper for Apple (one 360 view camera at the "seat" position and maybe a couple more at key locations the viewer can change to?).

But the closer the experience comes to actually being there the more I wonder if the cost to the fan will be adjusted to offset an effect on in-person attendance it may cause. There are plenty of people who prefer watching movies at home to going to the theater now because you can pause or rewind the content as you wish, eat what you want, avoid distractions from other audience members and excessive advertising pre-show, etc.

The purpose of fake data in maps is to thwart other companies copying your data into their own products. I would think either the source would not include that junk data to begin with in what they supply a government agency, and if they did, attempting to correct the data would likely run foul of the contract because you're now removing protections the source added to it. In any case, AI isn't going to be a good choice in "cleaning" it and may even add additional errors (fake data present in other map products that it was trained on, for example).

AI is not a tool to determine what is true or not, because AI believes what it sees as prevailing beliefs based on its training data. That data is not necessarily based on facts.

decided to take their Ballie and go home.

I know ghost towns are a thing and areas may grow from time to time, but how often are maps out of date when it comes to the existence of cites and towns? Certainly any map from 5 years ago (prior to AI slop) is still accurate today as to where and what communities exist in any state, so not seeing why they need to "consult" an AI to generate a new map to begin with.

Meanwhile, the land where people care what chat bots think of world politics...

It's pretty well known that alcohol consumption isn't nearly as fashionable with Gen Z as the previous generations, and makers are seeing the impact on their bottom line.

Empty point. All beverages containers are for practical reasons. Even disposable ones. The reason being you want more to drink than you can fit in your mouth at once. You don't have to carry a huge Stanley cup or a 1 liter hydroflask. People buy 12 oz cans or soda and 8 oz cans of V8 vegetable juice to stick in their lunch box. In those cases we have cans that are recyclable, but you can use a reusable container for the same thing just as easily. The reason always comes down to laziness -- measuring portions beforehand, carrying empty after consuming, and cleaning the container for reuse.

There will always be people who choose convenience over ecology, but that doesn't mean there is no reason to encourage better choices. if they want to be wasteful they can pay for it. The net result will still be less waste volume going out. The Moose cups were stashed in the backseat of many vehicles when they were popular. Some gas station chains did it too with cups for their self-serve soda fountains. My city banned single-use plastic bags a year ago. The result is most people carrying reusable shopping bags with them in their car. Some stores even give out nicer ones for promotional reasons on special occasions (not those ones that feel more like paper than cloth). You can still get single-use bags in grocery stores (but they're ol' fashion brown paper now). You get either a paper bag or a thicker, reusable plastic bag from most take-out places. Many charge a fee for the bag. I have one folded up in my glove box and hand it over to the drive-thru person, and they take off the $0.22 fee.

I use to use disposable flatware when eating my lunches at work, but it just started to bother me when I thought of how many cheap plastic forks I was tossing out over the course of months. So I got a lightweight metal set in a neoprene case off Amazon and stashed it in my work bag. Now even when I get carry out or there's food catered I can skip the waste from that.

Too bad, so sad? Environmental problems are something that will require changes in behavior from the general population. I'm not talking hippy-drippy levels of change here where we all start sewing our own clothes, ride bicycles everywhere, and grow all our own vegetables in our background gardens here, I just mean changes where we start using more durable goods and washing dishes comes back as a position at many restaurants.

One of the biggest trendy things of 2024 was literally that -- Stanley cups. For 20 years many people have been carrying reusable water bottles everywhere and filling them from spouts at drinking fountains. People who work outdoors (construction, road crews, law enforcement) have been able to get their personal travel mugs and thermoses filled with hot coffee at some businesses for decades as well. All I'm doing is extending that to other beverages. I remember having "Moose" cups from Hardee's in the cupboard at home as a kid. Bring this reusable cup in and get a refill on it for 49! They accepted them at the drive-thru, too. That's how you get people to do these thing, you incentivize it. or you de-incentivize the opposite. I have a couple similar plastic cups from a barbecue chain here now. I remember when we first went (5-7 years ago) the cost of drinks was a little steep, but they came in these cups. If you brought the cup back with you for future visits the drinks were really cheap then. But the cups were the only ones they had. There were no normal dine-in glasses or disposable take out cups to choose instead.

In a modern version of things a restaurant might serve a take-out drink in a cup with a surcharge, or you can get it at the counter in a (cannot take away) vessel with a spout or neck to allow easy pouring into something you have with you.

The drive-thru window and Door Dash is the only place this is a real problem. Any other situation where you are actually entering the establishment presents an opportunity for you to use normal durable drink-ware that is washed and reused, whether eating dine-in or just using it to pour from their container into your own (which would bypass any "sanitation" concerns most businesses cite). Businesses just don't like this because it creates extra labor costs on their side that they can't effectively automate away. Even a dish-washing machine still needs a human to load/unload it efficiently and confirm the cleaning cycle was sufficient.

Yeah... but they have to get to their destination under their own power. It's like he's forgotten the main reason people use motorized transportation to start with. Early automobiles were generally under 10 mph. A public streetcar doesn't even require you to deal with operating the machine yourself, if you don't enjoy that.

Because they are running on the street, hence the name. So they have slow down/stop for other vehicles like a car does. They don't operate on their own exclusive path like a elevated train or a subway.

Also they have to do that pesky thing of stopping to let people on/off. Where the fellow on foot can run as many blocks continuously since it's he's the only passenger.