Sounds like someone watched Her (2013) and ran into the office freshly missing the point.

I admit I was at first intrigued by the vocal interface presented in the movie. It just doesn't match my use cases.

I recommend the film, it had a pretty prescient take on personal AI. Back in 2013.

Attempting to play devil's advocate:
From https://www.dmv.virginia.gov/v...

It's a pay a you go method, so I guess with some hand waiving and wringing I could argue the odometer reading method:

A) Delays payment for one year, creating a one time arrears in fees (boo hoo, I know)
B) Could get dodged if you move out of state before re-registering (boo hoo again, I know. Suck it up state.)
C) Subject to odometer tampering? Unlikely I presume.

That's the best I can come up with to rationalize no odometer method, and it look pretty damned weak to me. Devil's advocate fails, IMO.

As currently implemented, the USA's observation of DST is purely to get consumers out there spending. Golf courses, restaurants, shops etc benefit from the later light because people are more likely to go out and spend.

Nearly all medical opinions on ending the time change recommend sticking with Standard Time. That won't happen, they will stick it to Saving Time because of the economic pressure. The US doesn't end Saving Time until November for god's sake. This is in part due to the candy makers lobbying to put Halloween into DST so that consumers would buy more candy out of concern that children would continue to show up to houses what with the longer evening light.https://www.npr.org/2007/03/08/7779869/the-reasoning-behind-changing-daylight-saving/

I personally hate DST, particularly during early August when it is still light out at 9:30 PM and the pool parties are still whooping it up on a work night in the neighborhood. The time shift has some use, I agree, sunrise at 4:00 AM is tough. But we start too early and end too late IMO.

...80's vintage classic...Anytime a contemporary pickup or SUV (pretty much everything on the roads now) passed in the opposite direction, nothing but dazzling lights in my face

While my 2001 Sentra is by no means classic, I too am low to the ground and large vehicles behind me have lights that hit me right in the rear view mirrors.

When stopped at intersections, I have gotten pretty good at grabbing the center mirror and swiveling it to do a sweep across the following drivers' eyes. It's passive and petty but it does seem to get them to drive further back and/or pass.

Yep, I get it. With that said, there are better ways of getting insurance. You know, like getting an...insurance policy.

They could always just buy Put Options, where someone agrees to buy your shares at a specified price.

Shorting is traditionally defended as "increasing liquidity"; i.e. nobody is selling so we'll let someone take the risk by borrowing shares and selling them. But it has been weaponized. I think it's one thing to borrow shares guessing it will drop, but another to borrow shares and actively drop the price, which is what I see happening most often.

I thought surge pricing was billed as a way to entice more supply, i.e. more drivers. If taken honestly, this is the opposite, reduce demand.

Unless they intend to get more workers into the kitchen by offering the surge price difference, I see this as nothing more than gouging a captive audience. My lunch break is from 12:00 to 1:00, I have no option to eat my lunch at 3:00 when it is cheaper.

AMC at least worded their price change as a "discount during low demand" rather than an increase during high demand.

Well that explains my weight gain during Covid, all that ivermectin killed my hookworms!

It's an economic stimulus. People do more consumer stuff when it's light out after work. That is why the duration of DST has been increased. The most recent under GW Bush was at the behest of the candy industry. They pushed the fall back out into November so that it would be light outside another hour after school for Halloween, and people would buy more candy for fear of running out of treats to give.

Dining, golf courses, shopping and more all benefit from the shifted hour. It's purely economic now, and a nasty one in my opinion (Consume you little consumers!)

In the case of ants, it's more complex as you have supercolonies where data is passed from one colony to neighbouring colonies. This can stretch over thousands of miles. Even if an individual ant colony is no more sentient than an individual neuron, and even if the colonies as a whole were reacting purely mechanistically, there may still be sentience exhibited.

I'm on board with this and the emergent property you mention about the human brain. An interesting thought came to mind concerning the speed of communication of an ant traveling to chemically signal something versus a synapse firing.

We have sci-fi stories of long time span mega intelligence, galactic scale systems. Connected ant colonies,with their low speed communication system (relative to brains) probably lack the speed to react with sentience to similarly large scaled stimuli. Given infinite time, the slow moving network might be equivalent in power to our fast moving network. But it would be reacting to a long gone scenario. Individual ant colonies can react quickly to invading armies of other colonies. There, the scale of communication and its speed suffices to run back to the nest spewing war pheromones.

I guess I'm saying a model of sentience might need to include sensor and communication attribute values to rank its level and capacity, which would define what scale or order of reality (need a better term) it operates at.

By that logic, one could argue every time a shopkeeper buys a pallet of goods at wholesale cost, posts an advertisement about the goods, and sells them to customers at retail cost, then they have defrauded the consumer.

Yup, I totally let them know "enough of those core desktop features of the GUI that facilitate my use of the computer, what I want you to spend your time on is shoving more ads into every nook and cranny you can find!"

Totally.

What does NYC give back to rural America?

Science
Technology
Universities
Employment
Culture
Tourism
And buyers for the rural productions so that the rural population can have more than a subsistence living by selling excess production to the city, facilitating their purchase/consumption of the above mentioned list.

If this list had an entry for Global Thermonuclear War, someone better call the boys at NORAD and give them a heads up for scruffy looking Seattle kids.

like a colossal waste of money, all the resources required to do this could go into something more useful and meaningful right here on earth where we have real world problems that effect everyone's lives, but nope, they want to blow it on sending a bunch of hardware to another planet

Buzz Aldrin: How much percentage of discretionary funds would you like to solve all the problems here on Earth? 100%? We want to sit back and watch the Chinese populate Mars? We want to sit back and watch the Russians populate Mars? That's not exciting or inspiring for- https://www.wnyc.org/story/buz...