Humidity is currently 91% in Yangsan.

City Council member of a non-listed Twin Cities suburb I know:

FBI is involved. Most water systems use one of two control/alert systems that are old and make them easy targets.

All they did was shut down components of the systems e.g., wells/sewer lift stations. Most cities were able to cycle manually to get back up and running. There was not messages warning or ransom of which I am aware.

They could have done a lot more damage if they wanted to, rather than just shutting things down.

I live in Plymouth; there was no city communications about this nor did I see any issues. So, I assume there were no physical disruptions to service.

I had one breakthrough DMT experience where I saw 'the machine elves' (I just saw what I describe as fast-moving fractals that I 'felt' were beckoning to me); but, we have matching experiences w/the other primary psychedelics: I only had relatively minor on-top visual distortions with even the largest doses of LSD (1500+ mcg) or mushrooms.

That said, everyone is different. I know that some of my friends absolutely lost their fucking minds on a few tabs of LSD and, purportedly, experienced wild hallucinations that I have to trust were real to them but haven't ever experienced myself.

I had VERY SPECIFIC requirements and I wanted the extended warranty. I would have paid 2x at a dealer. I know what I was doing.

I bought a used 2020 XC90 from CarMax last week. I did everything online from shipping it from Texas to Minnesota to financing the extended warranty. I walked in the door, gave them a cashier's check, and drove away within 10 minutes.

That's how it should be.

https://archive.is/uyPhk

---

Anthropic is prepared to loosen its current terms of use, but wants to ensure its tools aren't used to spy on Americans en masse, or to develop weapons that fire with no human involvement.

The Pentagon claims that's unduly restrictive, and that there are all sorts of gray areas that would make it unworkable to operate on such terms. Pentagon officials are insisting in negotiations with Anthropic and three other big AI labs â" OpenAI, Google and xAI â" that the military be able to use their tools for "all lawful purposes."

https://livingwage.mit.edu/met...

Typical annual salary, according to MIT's Living Wage Calculator for the NYC Metro, is $84,860.

Poverty wage is $7.52/hr (no kids) and minimum wage is $15.50 which, according to the calculator, should cover 1 adult with 3 kids.

The Brearley School, regarded as the best private school for girls in the nation and charging around $70K, is a non-profit.

What shareholders?

For Aldi, which uses Instacart, I assumed it was because there is no 'fee' for pickup, but they have to pay someone to shop for you. I consider the difference a convenience fee.

That said, by not shopping in store, I end up getting only what is on my list and end up paying FAR LESS than I would if I was wandering around.

I found GP2.5 to be great at academic-style research and writing; it was absolutely awful at writing code. So; I would tell it to plan some thing for me and write it in a way that could be used by another agent (Claude Code) to build the code to do the thing. In this way, it has been great! I haven't yet attempted it with 3.

That said, I found GP3.0's page to be hilarious:

It demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanityâ(TM)s Last Exam (37.5% without the usage of any tools) and GPQA Diamond (91.9%). It also sets a new standard for frontier models in mathematics, achieving a new state-of-the-art of 23.4% on MathArena Apex.

It then proceeds to show, lower down on the page, an example of what it can do, by showing off 'Our Family Recipes". If there's anything that touts PhD-level reasoning and writing, it's a recipe book.

No; it's absolutely a terrible idea. It may be great for the businesses; but, it's absolutely fucking terrible for the consumer.

This is absolutely fucking insanity. Imagine having to carry 6 different cards and wondering which one a particular store is going to take.

You can lament all you want, Ken Fluffernutter, but I will not work to pay for your vacation. That's not going to happen. Stop trying to make it happen.

No amount of definition twisting and and grandstanding will change the fact that no, I will not pay for your plane tickets and parcel deliveries.

The taxes I pay are extracted from my income. And my income is compensation for the time I spend working away from my family, breaking my back or numbing my brain and a return on the the skills and education I spent years and many thousands of bucks to get. With the costs of living and housing rising sharply, it's difficult enough as it is. I will NOT spend a single dime on taxes to pay for the vacations of other people.

Not happening, Ken. Pay for your own stuff.

Where did you learn to use a calculator? I didn't even check your sources and values, because the math, logic and subject area knowledge alone are terrible enough.

First, maths: you're off by one order of magnitude. 26,8 billion dollars for 16,4 million flights is 1'634 USD per flight. So it's 1,6k per plane, not 16k.

Second, logic: you've duly noted that only 55% of those 16,4 million flights are passenger flights, but calculate them as if they're all passenger flights with 104 pax average per flight, even compounding rounding errors as you go, omitting the 45% cargo-only flights and pretending that shippers for cargo don't need to pay for air traffic security.

Third, subject area knowledge: there are no true scheduled "passenger-only flights" in commercial aviation. What laypeople call "passenger flights" are actually only flights where some air cargo capacity is used by passengers and their luggage. Especially on transcontinental and long-haul flights, "passenger planes" carry an extraordinary amount of air freight and their profitability is hugely dependent on that as well. Making the airline passengers pay the entire flight security tax of that flight would mean the cargo shippers ride tax-free. That's not what we're after.

Cargo shippers, commercial operators, producers, assemblers, too, have their choice of using long-haul trucking, trains, air freight, boats, pigeon carriers or switching to localized production, bulk transport, to and from just-in-time logistics etc.. If company A wants to avoid setting up a warehouse near their production facilities to store all the bits and pieces they need on-site and with sufficient stock to allow for bulk transport, that's their prerogative. Only they can know if the capital assets locked in raw materials are too much compared to just-in-time logistics buying and transporting only the part that's actually needed right now. And air freight costs and air traffic costs play right into that. If company A wants to do just-in-time logistics and company B and C optimize their logistics, localize their production, keep reserves on site? Guess what, A pays the air traffic safety tax, B and C don't.

Same thing. And we can't count the number of boxes or metric tons of cargo vs. passenger counts and the number and weight of their luggage to even properly estimate the actual cost per passenger.

To re-use your simplification to get the absolute upper bound of that tax: if all those 16,4 million flights were passenger-only, air cargo didn't exist like you pretended, and all the flights had 104 passengers on average, then the cost would be 1,6k per flight or 15,71 USD per flight per passenger. Fifteen bucks per flight, at the very maximum, if air cargo didn't exist or was tax-free. And 104 passengers per plane is an absolutely ridiculously low number that applies only to the US domestic market. It doesn't even include the transcontinental flights coming and going to the US, because those are wide-body twin-aisle aircraft that have a LOT more than 104 seats. The top 10 current wide-body aircraft models for long-haul routes have over 200 (737) or over 800 seats (A380). Except these two extremes, most other types carry between 300 and 400 people. They're not flying 70% empty for that "104 passenger on average" number. If airlines actually allow to fly their planes half-empty, that's not a problem for the taxpayer to fix.

No taxation without representation. No taxation to correct or support voluntary and luxury decisions by others. You want it, you pay for it. End of story.

Any plane will only be given takeoff clearance, if all the costs required to guide it safely to its destination have been paid for.

Anyone who takes off without that clearance gets forced to land by air defense and will be forced to pay for all the costs involving that. Nobody will risk that.

Anyone who lies about the payment of the costs to get that clearance gets docked with these costs and a punitive fine after that. People who risk that will pay later or lose their license to operate an aircraft.

And all of a sudden, all the air traffic safety expenses are paid in full, before the plane took off in the first place, so no plane is ever in the air without air traffic safety.