We can take action. We can grab the die that Joel McHale has tossed into the air.

I’ll wait and see if they can add some AI to it. But if they can, I’ll invest my entire life savings.

I see you subscribe to the Wolfwood school of pacifism: “I didn’t kill anyone!”

Yes. That’s what AI actually adds - plausible deniability.

My partner and I used to use location sharing pretty much 100% of the time. We just felt better knowing we could find each other.

But today, we do not, because the trust is shattered.

Google just cannot be trusted with our locations.

“Hospitality/ Nevada”

I see we’re still playing along with that euphemism. Haha.

Yes. I’m not sure what else has gone on, but NAFTA and the US China Relations Act sweaping all of the manufacturing out of the country could account for the whole change between the two maps.

“We could be in serious legal trouble.”

“Don’t worry. My billions will protect me.”

The little squiggles are necessary to ensure election outcomes acceptable to the ultra rich.

I’m joking. (Mostly)

The squiggles are probably county line divisions, and probably simply the smallest existing land divisions with good population data available to make the map from.

I say “mostly joking” because existing county line divisions are already weird in some cases, to ensure election outcomes acceptable to the ultra rich. So there’s an unpleasant grain of truth in my joke.

the very fact that there is a big urban/rural cultural divide is one of the things killing America.

I agree wholeheartedly about the problem. But blind highest count vote on every topic is one of the big dividers between rural and urban folks.

Rural folks will simply never have the numbers to influence outcomes in a pure vote count scenario. They’re aware of this, and it leads to animosity.

Incidentally, I agree that financial decoupling would be ruinous for both, as well.

The real solution is represtational seats that give everyone a voice - no matter how the voting zone is divided.

I suspect that requires doing away with first-past-the-poll. The winner of that race will almost always be a city person, by raw numeric chance. That’s fine, city folks have some good ideas. The problem is when there’s no rural voice at the negotiation, at all.

And I think any sensible person realizes we also have to put a stop to all gerrymandering.

Also, we need to give seats to what remains of all of the first nations, while we’re at it.

This still has the representative issue that each of the narrow bands are narrow due to a huge metropolis within them, and the rural population of that band will always live with rules created by the metropolis for the metropolis.

It’s a pretty map, though.

And is still makes more sense than “carefully negotiated by powerful ultra rich a few hundred years ago to protect each of their giant egos.”

I’m forced to assume that you are now surprisingly attractive, as well. That’s the way out goes with the person I never noticed in school.

Of course, part of it might be that my definition of attractive grew up to be a lot healthier than it was when I was a kid.

That’s exactly my experience, as well.

The PineTime is the best current option for a pebble enthusiast, since the Pebble.

But I still have to charge the PineTime every week or so, and that is with the screen off most of the time.

I miss the Pebble’s battery life.

Oh!

As they say, them who laugh lasts, probably needed a minute to think about it. Today, that was me.

I don’t see how even Amazon can try to kill the competition in a market that huge, regardless of price or convenience.

So I assume you wrote this after picking up groceries from your locally owned grocery store? Because you still have one - it didn’t collapse due to a Walmart coming to town?

Most of us have a solid example of what driving a grocery store out of business looks like, though.

“Not everyone in the union will celebrate this corporate partnership. Some members have legitimate concerns about tech giants shaping classroom priorities through financial relationships.”

When has a corporation and a Union ever not seen eye to eye?

(Please don’t answer. This is sarcasm. Otherwise RIP my inbox.)

Wow, I totally missed the part where Microsoft had a gun to your head.

Yes. Microsoft is good at hiding that part until it’s too late to do much about it.

There’s no industry pressure to be on Gamepass, yet.

Microsoft doesn’t willingly lose money on something unless they think they can make it into a market distorting rent extraction hellscape. something very profitable later.

Many firms are now slashing their number of new hires.

Yes. This sucks.

The main cause of this is artificial intelligence

Unlikely.

The main cause for a chill in hiring tends to be uncertainty about the future. And we know that folks are feeling high uncertainty about the future, right now. (Gestures broadly at current headlines in general and “Not The Onion”, in particular.)

Historically, uncertainty about the future is particularly high when the people have low confidence that existing and new laws will be applied in a predictable manner.

I’ll leave exactly what changed on that front as a thought exercise.

AI is interesting, but it is not the primary cause of the chill in hiring new graduates.

It can be hard to guess who to bribe, or how big each bribe should be?