Good point, and I'm not here to argue with you -- the problem when we talk about Costco is the Wing drone's max capacity of 5lbs. That's not a Costco trip -- that's barely a trip to a Costco food court :).

5lbs feels like not enough to really replace most trips to actually stock your groceries, unless you break up your shopping trip into multiple delivery flights. It's much better for impromptu consumption (though that said, I feel like most of my trips to the local hardware store are "oh crap, I need this one thing ... " which would be under 5lbs)

Go fuck yourself, asshole.

(You're welcome)

Dude, relax. It was a joke.

Not to mention that "Judy's" also conflicts with the contraction of "Judy is" ...

Reasonable stance, though I'd argue "some quarters are special" are a particularly good reason to stick with quarterly reporting -- because you don't get the smoothing effect of, say, bundling in your best quarter with your worst quarter. Most companies will have the same 'best' or 'worst' quarter YoY, so it's less about comparing, say, Q4 of this year with Q3 of this year, and more comparing Q4 of this year with Q4 of last year.

Or chloromidians? Was there any mention of chlorine on it?

In the absence of chlorine, would flouromidians form? Would flouromidian-based life have any unusual properties?

Or whatever it is that tricorders detect?

Or souls? Did it make a detour through our solar system to pick up a few souls for later use?

Niantic started life as an internal team at Google working on monetising location data. Being a revenue centre was the whole point from day one.

Only the "delivery robots" bit of this is actually news. Niantic being a datamining operation that tricked its users into scanning the real world for it is not. Hell Zuboff devoted a chunk of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" to it and that book came out in 2019.

I'm a Pokemon Go player; been playing it pretty intensely for the last 16 months or so, level 74 (of a max of 80).

Firstly, this is not in any way surprising or upsetting. Niantic's been pretty clear for a long time now that they were making location-based games for the purpose of training systems.

Secondly, I should note that POGO does not actually require you to take pictures of anything. It's an option, one way to do what Pokemon Go calls "Field Research Tasks" (FRTs), but "take a scan of that place" FRTs are a small subset of the FRTs you might choose to do (and when I was attempting to get as many as possible on my way to level 74 I ignored all the scanning ones).

Never would have believed it was a fake.

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

Maybe they're looking for the heat signature of crypto mining.

People are already being entertained buy the unending revelations from the Epstein files.

And shocked, though not particularly awed.

Interestingly, in one of the Gnostic Gospels, Jesus is quoted as saying when he departed that he had to go visit "sheep of other folds, that you know not of".

(paraphrasing from memory)

Most of it is aliens flying around in stealth spaceships. We can't spot them, except that they haven't figured out a way to hide their mass.

So galaxies with more DM are more technologically developed than the others. In this all-DM galaxy they must have used up almost everything else to build ships.