Charge Up

That’s been a big change everywhere in my lifetime, the hidden fees and predatory up-charges that are pervasive in every industry.

Let’s use her example, ice cream. Back in the 1980s it was like a $1 for a cone. For that, you could get any kind of cone you wanted — waffle or plain — and usually a topping of some kind. No up-charge.

Now nearly everything is extra, often even with a hidden but mandatory gratuity on top of the normal tip as well as some BS “service fee.” All of this should just be banned, IMO.

The AI Risk

The risk of AI is not that it doesn’t work. It already does, no matter what the BlueSky clowns claim.

The risk is that it eliminates jobs and funnels even more money to the rich while creating a permanent underclass of former white-collar professionals.

Unlike what economists believe, those people won’t find any other roles as anything else they could do can be performed better and vastly faster by AI. And no one seems to be dealing with this fact at all in any credible way.

Four Scenarios for a Postwar Iran.

Can Europe Ever Thrive Again? Not without forcing out Islam and a ton of remigration.

Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company.

Blue light filters donโ€™t work. Why controlling total luminance is a better bet.

Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Good.

A war foretold:how the CIA and MI6 got hold of Putinโ€™s Ukraine plans and why nobody believed them.

Syria asks Germany not to deport its citizens back home, warning it would make country โ€˜unsafeโ€™. LOL.

Donโ€™t expect lower prices now that the Supreme Court has ruled against Trumpโ€™s tariffs.

Police โ€˜turn blind eyeโ€™ to sharia courts in Britain.

Big Tech still dreams of mass surveillance โ€” now people are pushing back.

Ukraine is the biggest and most consequential of all the American betrayals.

Over 65? Congratulations, You Own the Economy.

Cosmologists collaborate to sharpen measurements of the Hubble constant.

NASA moon rocket hit by new problem, putting March launch with astronauts in jeopardy.

The Risk

Brad R. Torgersen on X: "Yesterday I saw someone object to VA as a vet entitlement, saying, "Why do vets get free stuff when none of the rest of us get free stuff?!" That's an honest question. From the outside looking in it can seem like vets do indeed get a lot of money, and also explicitly vet-focused" / X

Death and serious harm are, unfortunately, "business as usual" in a lot of military stuff. You don't have to be shot or blown up to be seriously hurt, or even killed

Indeed. Was at serious risk of death at least three time in the military, and in danger far more often than that. And I was never in combat. Not unusual at all. Luckily, I never received a really debilitating injury.

Also, we don’t just “get” those things. They are part of the signed contractual compensation.