If you mean "permanent standard time" would be preferable, I agree. But permanent DST is better than changing the clocks twice a year.

What they should do is define 6:00 AM to be whenever dawn happens.

It's more in democracies lots of people are squeamish about things that don't directly benefit them, or which they aren't used to.

If people cared about humanity to animals, the way chickens are raised would be illegal.

You're going to need to deal with immune rejection first, and in a way that doesn't disable the immune system.

I've done a lot of food delivery "gig work" over the years, as well as having friends in the restaurant industry who deal with it from the opposite end.
The apps like DoorDash absolutely rip you off as a customer. They add large percentages on to the restaurant's normal food prices and then you still have to pay the driver a tip, which is really a "bid for service" since you pay it before even getting your food. In the past, they really soured some smaller restaurants on them too, with stunts like adding them and their menus to the service without even asking the restaurant first (and would generally just set those up so Dashers paid with their pre-paid debit card upon arrival).

I don't quite get restaurants saying the food delivery is "killing them" though, either? If your food is popular enough so lots of people will pay huge upcharges just to have someone deliver it to them? You should be able to sell it at a profit and get the benefit of your place not being too full and turning dine-in customers away.

Most of the time? The places I see who claim services like DoorDash hurt them are just upset they have to adapt a bit. Their one cook in back can't make food fast enough and they won't pay for more labor, for example?

It's not clear to me which of the two you're saying is bad. I assumed that you were opposed to grade inflation in STEM fields at first, but your last sentence makes it sound like your concern is grade inflation in "useless" degrees.

Sure, but what the customer is buying is the prestige of being a Harvard graduate, and the further prestige of being a Harvard graduate with a high GPA, graduation Cum Laude, etc. But if the school isn't challenging that prestige will evaporate over time, because people will realize that Harvard graduates are no longer impressively smart or well-educated people. The value of the degree will decline and the customer will feel shortchanged.

I rarely use delivery myself; for me most of the point of eating out is the "out" part. But among the people I know who use delivery a lot, their starting point for ordering food is the delivery service app, and they choose who they order from mostly based on the user reviews. Restaurants that refuse to join are just invisible to people who primarily use delivery services.

I think there's a strong argument to be made that people often consider Apple's control over their app store (and indeed, control over their hardware and software ecosystem in general) to be a FEATURE?

The fact that Apple vets apps that get published on its App Store adds value for a certain class of consumer. I completely get that there are people out there who want to buy only devices that give full freedom to install anything on them they can get their hands on. But a whole lot of people simply want to buy a reliable smartphone that they feel is relatively safe from malware/spyware or other "bad actor" applications.

I'm one of those people who usually owns/uses a combination of Apple products and other computers running Linux or Windows. I like the toolbox analogy... that while you might find your screwdriver an incredibly useful tool you're regularly reaching for? Sometimes a hammer is far better for a given application. Apple's whole ecosystem is, IMO, superior to the buggy mess of drivers/software and sometimes poorly tested OS updates in the Windows world. But when I want to play the latest AAA game title? The Mac is usually the inferior tool. And by the same token? I like the consistency of iOS devices over Android, where various handsets have front-end apps bolted onto them, depending on who made the device -- and where Android OS updates quickly become unsupported on many of them. I also like them for being able to give one to a fairly non-technical person while not fearing they'll click to download an app that steals their data and locks them out of the handset.

Buyers and sellers don't negotiate on the App Store from Apple but neither do they on most web storefronts I know of? If you don't host your own, you're stuck paying what the hosting service charges you to have a presence there, period.

There are LOTS of specialized niche forms of business that AI can do to a certain degree. Often as well as, or better than, people. (Remember, LLMs are only one facet of AI, though a very publicized one.) More usually, at least right now, the AI can only do a part of the job better than people, and totally can't handle another part. But that means you need fewer people.

OTOH, expect most AI applications to fail. That was what happened when computers first started to be widely applied. But the ones we remember are the successes.

If you can do that, then you could do the same thing with a mobile passport, in a future where everyone knows how to consume them. Assuming a proper implementation of a mobile passport, it would contain all the same data as your paper passport and would be digitally-signed by the issuer to prove authenticity and origin. Both paper and mobile passports should perfectly usable offline... though both could be checked online. I suppose the odds of a mobile passport being checked online might be higher, and a paper passport might be more durable if you need it to last a long time, though expiration would be a problem in both cases.

In reality, if you found yourself in this sort of situation your best best would be to sneak into Canada or Mexico and ask for asylum. If things were to get as bad as rsilvergun assumes, it would be granted.

I'll agree that it's fiction created by an AI (probably), but not that it's what it meant by slop. Not unless it's very carelessly done.

What it *is* is AI generated deceptive advertising.

I'm sorry your co-workers have dysfunctional families. But they will move away to different places to find work, so they won't be near you to give support.

The mobile driving license standard does not require you to hand your phone over, and indeed it wouldn't help the cop if you did because he'd have to hand it right back so you could unlock before it would send any data. It delivers the data to the copy wirelessly, via NFC, BLE or Wifi, depending on the context. What's on the screen (either a QR code or nothing) does not identify you or prove your driving privileges, so it's useless to the cop, intentionally so.

I was involved in the development and standardization of the mobile driving license standard and in the process spent some time talking to cops from a few jurisdictions. Interestingly to me, the response from the cops was universal: They would strongly object to anything that would require them to touch your phone. Of course, I was talking to the higher-ups and their concern was the liability that would be incurred if a lot of their officers broke peoples' thousand-dollar phones. Individual cops might have different perspectives, but their commanders thought it was way too risky.

As for passports, IMO any useful mobile passport should work the same: No handing over of the device, indeed the protocol should ensure that the device must be in the user's hand to present the passport.

Someday we'll probably get an international standard for mobile passports, but it's not happening any time soon.

Until recently I worked for Google, on Android, and participated in the International Standards Organization (ISO) committee that would be tasked with defining the technical standard for mobile passports. To be clear, the ISO committee can't actually issue such a standard, passports are standardized through ICAO. But the relevant ICAO committee delegates the technical work to an ISO committee.

The current situation in those committees is that the companies who make passport booklets and passport acceptance infrastructure are successfully fending off attempts to define a standard to enable mobile passports. They have gotten a new standard (called the "Digital Travel Credential - Physical Component", DTC-PC) approved that allegedly facilitates mobile devices with passports but isn't actually usable. Apple has refused to implement it and Google isn't making any moves to support it (though someone could write an Android app that does; all of the necessary APIs are available).

One of the main sticking points is that the ICAO committee is currently specifying that any digital travel credential should not support data minimization, meaning the ability to present just a subset of the data. More precisely, they specify that data minimization is a non-goal, but since a protocol that supports retrieving and authenticating a subset of the data without leaking any of the un-presented data is always going to be a lot more complex than a protocol that sends the entire data set in a single signed blob, any technical proposal that supports data minimization will be shot down as needlessly complex.

The ICAO's position on data minimization is that the only use of travel credentials is presentation at border checkpoints, and at border checkpoints you always have to present all of the data, so data minimization support is unnecessary. The counterargument from many people is that passports are used in many contexts other than border checkpoints, and many of those other contexts don't need and therefore shouldn't get all of the data in the passport. Since both Google and Apple insist on data minimization as an essential feature, there's not much movement happening.

My guess is that it will take 2-3 years to break the current logjam on even beginning work on a real, usable standard, then another few years to define it and put it into effect, then a few years more for most border checkpoints to accept it, and perhaps a few years beyond that for people to become sufficiently confident in their mobile devices' reliability that they will travel without a paper passport booklet. So... 20 years or so.

The work with the TSA is on derived credentials that are based on your passport (and securely authenticated), using a protocol derived from the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standard. It does support data minimization and looks a lot like what an eventual passport protocol should look like (IMNSHO -- note that I designed big chunks of the 18013-5 standard), but will not be accepted at any border checkpoints.