I travel a fair bit for work, and if I'm going to a new (to me) city I'll often google "X hotel chain Y city" to see what options I have. Unfortunately Google has been victimized in their search results on this for a long time; it's not just redirects to various third-party hotel sites but it can be other sites entirely as well. This can lead to outdated or completely inaccurate information, and bad phone numbers too. Sometimes I'll see the correct link about 5-6 entries down, but that's not guaranteed - and if chain X has more than one hotel of name A in or near city Y the results could well be missing some locations on the first page.

This is the old googlebombing technique from years ago (remember "miserable failure"?), but deployed for profit instead of politics.

All this noise from Trump is intended to get you to forget about his ties to Epstein. Is it working?

Granted, the SCOTUS has already declared that laws do not apply to him, so it doesn't really matter. Nonetheless, he is wearing himself thin trying to run his own interference plays here.

That is an offense that has been committed by very nearly every automaker that sells cars or trucks in the US, and it is exceptionally well documented.

Today's Nissan Altima is larger than the Nissan Maxima of the 1990s.

Today's Subaru Outback is bigger than the Subaru Forester of the 1990s.

Today's Toyota Corrolla is bigger than the Toyota Camry of the 1990s.

It's just manufacturers responding to how they read the market. It doesn't mean it's right, it just is. But this is not a matter of just the big 3 doing it, everyone else is as well. Even Hyundai/Kia are selling large SUVs and several years ago they launched a premium / luxury line as well.

There are quite a few vehicles with CVTs but quite a few more that don't use them. My work car is a mass market 2025 Chevy Equinox and it has a regular automatic with real gears. Conversely I had as a family car a Ford Freestyle years ago that had a CVT, and it made it over 200,000 miles without ever needing any kind of transmission service (never even changed the transmission fluid). A CVT is not inherently a bad thing, depending on the application and manufacturer.

Some people just hate the American big 3 automakers, and will jump at any (perceived) opportunity to dunk on them. Don't bother trying to hold a discussion on this matter with them; they may be completely reasonable people in other aspects but they will keep telling you about how much they hated their mom's 86 Oldsmobile and how it somehow justifies hatred of every single vehicle ever made by the big 3, ever.

Yes, I know Lenovo makes the ThinkPad. It's almost as good as the old IBM models, and it still carries the prestige even if it isn't. But really can't anyone else sell a laptop with any kind of trackpoint type device any more? I had one from HP for the first few years of my current job then they "upgraded" me to a new one that doesn't have it. Dell makes a few but they don't meet my needs.

We used to believe that the Infinite Wisdom of the Free Market would give us the best products in all industries. At some point we instead allowed the market to tell us what we really needed, regardless of our preferences. Give us back more options and I'll bring money; touchpads suck and touch screens suck even worse.

There was a good chance of 23andme being able to make full-genome sequencing (which they weren't yet scaled up to) a commoditized service with the privacy protections that need to be ensured for all customers. However the business model collapsed along the way.

Now we see the most predictable outcome - someone who knows they can profit from the data is buying the remains of the company (with the data).

Only in the USA is the genomic data that valuable, and there is one sector of the economy who can benefit from it more than any other. Regeneron knows which industry that is, and while they aren't a direct part of it themselves they know they need to serve it.

Regeneron bought the data to eventually sell it to the Health Insurance Cartel. The Cartel was granted effective license to print money with the passage of the ACA, but they want more power. They still own an overwhelming majority of congress - on both sides of the aisle - but they want more power. With the genomic data they can start rewriting the rules on pre-existing conditions. As all other plans go up in price they can start offering plans that are less expensive if you consent to DNA testing, which will lead to treatment for some conditions being denied.

We can't win as long as the system is set up this way. We can't change it when the people who benefit from it control the people who set the rules.

The Trump administration has been largely a copy-paste production. When they initially wanted to "replace" the ACA back during his first term, their plan was to replace the ACA with the ACA - made better by putting his signature at the end instead of the signature of President Obama. When they were finally called out on that, they quietly dropped their efforts to repeal the ACA, instead focusing on various things they can do in the name of "border security" (nevermind that no effort has been made this term for the wall that he used to talk nonstop about).

This store reflects a retail model that is simply dead now. You don't go in to a surplus store looking for something specific, as you likely won't find it. You go in with general ideas and you see what you find along the way.

Unfortunately very nearly nobody shops like that any more. We have a chain of surplus stores where I live, and the last several times I've gone in I've walked back out empty handed as they didn't have anything I wanted. They had plenty of things that other people want, but nothing I was looking for at the moment. 500 feet of rope in 12 different diameters? Yep they have it but I'm not looking for it. Cartoon character umbrellas? Yep they have it but I'm not looking for it. Firewire cables? Yep them have them but I'm not looking for them. Strange animated movies I've never heard of? Yep lots of those too. The list goes on and on but if they don't have anything I'm looking for then they won't get any money from me.

The list of 6 speed manual cars sold in the USA is very, very short. If you drop the ones sold by Porsche you cut that list in half. If you then drop the ones from VW (yes I know Porsche is a part of the VW corporate empire but we'll acknowledge them separately here) after that you end up with about 3 vehicles, and you find that even those only offer manual transmissions in very specific configurations.

The bigger news is that this isn't really news, as the manual transmission has been dying a gradual death for decades here. People don't learn it, and they don't want to drive it. On the plus side it makes it a theft deterrent technology for those who do drive it.

The trade imbalance is a political football. One team blames it on the other if they need something different to use to paint their opponents in an unflattering light. Then the next month they won't care about it.

Many employers made a switch years ago to having only a vanishingly small fraction of applications read by humans; instead opting to have applications screened at the first level by algorithms that people don't understand or know how to adjust.

Now we see the next "logical" step in that process, having AI do even more of the process.

We can see where this is going, but we can also see what it is supposed to do. If this actually worked correctly, it would ensure that every applicant was actually given a fair shake, and evaluated without bias. Unfortunately no system that I've seen actually accomplishes that; and generally the most effective way to get from applicant to interviewee is to reach out directly to a human who can help you bypass the automation.

It does make me feel bad for Gen Z as they finish schooling and attempt to enter the labor force; they are being pushed into the fight with one hand tied behind their back.

NIH had originally proposed making this mandatory years ago. The date got pushed back (possibly more than once). The first "open access" mandate was over a decade ago but exceptions were carved out, and there were also some very long grants that were already funded that were exempt from new regulations. This is just the latest - and hopefully last - step.

The foot dragging came more from the journals than anything. It wouldn't be that hard for Nature, Science, Cell, and the rest of the most prestigious journals to just make all the new articles available for all; they still make plenty of money on review charges, page fees, subscription fees, and fees charged to people who don't reside in the USA. They just kept finding excuses and their prestige kept people from fighting back harder.

I have never met a scientist who earned a nickel off of journal paper royalties; I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure no such thing exists. I've worked with people who have published in Nature and Science and they never mentioned ever getting money back for their papers; I was a co-author on a paper in PNAS and neither I nor anyone else on the paper received any money from that either.

The big journals exist primarily because they have existed for so long. As I mentioned elsewhere, the academic journals aren't much different from health insurance companies; nobody likes them but they are so entrenched in our system that it's impossible to exist without them. Similarly both are parasites and neither are that different from many Ponzi schemes.

I will concede the journals do have some costs - just not anywhere near what they take in. They do need to store digital information - in some cases papers can have many gigs of data that needs to be stored for quite some time - and the archives of some of these journals now goes back well over 100 years. Arguably though the real racket to the whole system is in the review process itself; the reviewers are all volunteers and some of the editors are as well. The journals have almost no expense until the final article is accepted, and yet the scientists are paying money to them up front without a guarantee of publication.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic there or not, but publication charges are significant for the most prestigious journals. Even the journals that don't have print editions charge hundred of dollars (or more) for publication fees - and many of the print journals are also supported by advertising.

Academic publishing is similar to health insurance. Nobody likes it - except for the people making money off of it - but there is no other option so we put up with it.

I spent a lot of time in academia. I did undergrad and post-undergrad research. I was a grad student for far too long working on my PhD. I was a post-doc for several years after that, and a research associate after that. I know how the sausage is made.

You'll be hard pressed to find a researcher who favors paywalls. The problem is many of the most prestigious journals use them. This leads to a chicken-and-egg problem for researchers, as they either get their best work in the paywalled journals - where it gets read by more people - or they put it into less prestigious journals that are not paywalled. For years there was no choice; it was paywalled or less read.

The new regulation says that the previously paywalled journals have to make an open access option available for NIH funded research. This is a great thing. The publishers will still get publication fees, but they can't force readers to pay additional fees. Whether journals should be so expensive to publish in - and subscribe to - is another question, but at least readers will have access to more published work at no direct cost.

But make no mistake about it. The paywalls existed to generate revenue for the journals, the scientists themselves never favored them. As someone who spent quite a bit of time at a smaller research university (with fewer journal subscriptions available through our library) I know the frustration of not being able to get some journal articles due to paywalls.