133K is upper middle class?? Wow, I have been a lot richer than I ever thought. Maybe in some flyover town that is big money, on either coast that is "at least I am not on food stamps" money. That is a school teacher married to a cop money. In places where a cheap house is $450K, that is not Upper anything.

This is key: My dog would eat roast beef until they were stuffed full no question, but they don't have easy access to it. Humans evolved in an environment where sweets were very rare and also contained important vitamins, so on the lucky occasion they found fruit they would really want to eat it. We are not designed for 24/7/365 supplies of sugar and fat. That said, back in the day we ate a horrible diet, sugar drinks, twinkies, McDs, etc, and were all skinny as a rail. I think pre-internet kids got about 1000 times more exercise than modern kids do.

Junkies are usually skin and bones after awhile, so maybe quitting fentanyl is the wrong thing to be quitting?

I am dealing with the dog issue right now. Every dog I have had previous to my current 2 basically did have the 100 pound bag of food. We filled their dishes whenever they got low and none of the dogs were overweight. My two now are different and different from each other. They are sisters and they eat the same stuff and get the same exercise. One looks like a supermodel, a gorgeous blue-eyed long legged Husky girl. Her sister has the same eyes but is quite overweight. Even being siblings, something is different with her where she gains weight rapidly from exactly the same diet that her sister does not. * keeping clever and very strong dogs from eating is not easy, if I don't feed them they go eat all the rabbits they can catch and start eying the cat too!

The shareholders VERY MUCH care about saving money and will kill any number of people that are not themselves to do it!

YMMV My last two car purchases from dealers were great, they did everything to make the process transparent. The one before that was like the 7th circle of hell, they did everything possible to rip us off until we left. The worst thing was it was a very rare car, we were not going to find another and they knew it. Even so, they went too far and we walked. * Shout out to Volvo, I did the whole thing over the phone. The salesman did a face-time in the car, took our word for it we would buy it, defended it against other salesmen with customers on site trying to buy it, drove it to our house with the paperwork to sign, and took an Uber back. The car has been great too. It was CPO, so it is under warranty, I would not have done that with a no-warranty used car. Car before that the Lexus dealer cancelled a sale when they found hidden issues with a used car and found us another that was a great car. To quote, "We are not willing to take the hit on you telling all your friends you sold us a crap car".

The old and oft-disproved story was everyone but Columbus thought the world was flat and only he knew you could get to India going the "wrong way", but did not know the Americas were in the way and thought he got to India and thus called the natives "Indians". Sailors has known the planet was round for a long time and the diameter was even calculated by ancient Greeks to a pretty good level of accuracy. * I am not entirely clear on if Columbus and his crew thought the Bahamas were islands lying WAY offshore of India or what, but they did call the locals Indians and then started killing or enslaving them, so maybe the real Indians were lucky Panama was in the way.

^THIS *15 years ago* I took a friend flying and he said it looked boring, I hardly touched the controls. The plane did 95% of the work, I did the first 5 minutes and the last 10 minutes. That is with gear 2 decades old.

I let the plane fly itself all the time. I am still in it, but if I set the autopilot to fly 200 degrees magnetic, I expect it to keep doing that, not suddenly decide to go to Denver because fuel is on sale there or something. "AI" in an airplane would HAVE to mean it is doing something involving controlling the airplane or it would just be AI on a laptop in the cockpit for making fake cat videos on boring cruise segments, which we actually already can do. What do you think it will be doing? Anything at all it does that controls the airplane in any way will be something by definition unpredictable and liable to do bad things.

Somehow SD dumped half the sentence. I cannot imagine anything I want less in an airplane than "AI" that will do some random thing it thinks is a good idea rather than what I expect it to do.

I am a pilot. I cannot imagine anything I want less in an airplane than "AI" that will do rather than what I expect it to do. We ALREADY have issues with corner cases in regular software for airplanes that have killed people, but at least once discovered they can be fixed because they will happen consistently.

The really cool thing about parrots is some of them learn to understand what they are saying, not just mimic sounds. Long ago we taught a macaw to say "fukfukfuk-fukOFF" with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. He would use it when he was annoyed LOL.

I have high hopes for this, I loved the originals!

If I confiscate the money from rich people and then eat them, between the extra money and not having to buy dinner I can buy a whole tank of gas and fly some more! Win Win * seriously, if you don't like airplanes, feel free to not buy one or ride on one. Americans are always slagged off as provincial morons who don't even have a passport, but then try and go visit some other country and we are evil for using airplanes.

I assume you do not own an airplane nor work for an airline. I can assure you there is plenty of consequence to your wallet when you refuel it. Airlines that randomly send their planes around for no reason are soon bankrupt. People not among the 1%ers who buy gas hog airplanes and fly around in circles get their credit cards taken away by their wived pretty quickly too. Also do not assume that the airplane is wasting fuel. The figure you want is "seat MPG". My airplane gets about 20 MPG and holds 2 people, so the seat MPG is 40. I can fly in a straight line to the beach and use a lot less gas than driving there which is not close to a straight line. A 737 gets around 0.5 MPG. That may sound bad, and it is if it is your private airplane, but split among 100-140 people or so it is more efficient than driving a car by yourself.