And even the East Coast is severely lacking on EV infrastructure. The only chargers in my hometown are a pair that they installed with the new elementary school, and those are locked all day because they don’t want random people sitting at an elementary school when there’s kids there. The stupidity of the design aside, the next closest charging station I know of is about 75 miles away.

I’d drive an EV if it was practical, but when you can really only charge them on a self-installed home charger, it really impacts where you can go with them.

I could say the same, but perhaps you need to get out more. It would do wonders for your personality.

Third time’s the charm?

It was so bad that companies could kick you off of insurance mid-treatment for something like cancer and then deny you for having a pre-existing condition.

Only those who are totally tubular.

Check out Habitat 67 in Montreal - an architectural student solved this in the 60s. Apartments where everybody gets their own rooftop terrace. Given the funding, the original plan was for a 30-story terraced hill of mixed-use and apartments in an A-frame with public green space underneath that mixed the density of apartments with the benefits of single family homes.

Since everybody thought he was crazy, he only got a fraction of the funding for what he ended up building for the 1967 World’s Fair, but those apartments have the longest occupancy time of any building in Canada (some seeing 2 or 3 generations living in them) and a 5-year waiting list on units.

Last year, a 3d model of the original concept was released for Unreal Engine: www.unrealengine.com/en-US/hillside

My dad had a friend whose apartment would frequently be broken into. So he started leaving the TV on 24/7, and he never had a break-in again while he lived there.

It probably has to do with strict character limits and the habit spreading. Twitter is only, what, 156 characters? I know text messages used to be something similar, and early on, they cost around 3 cents a letter and you had to hit the numbers multiple times to cycle through to the letter or punctuation that you wanted. It’s where stuff like l33t speak came from, at least.

Also, there’s the cost and community aspect of games. For the price of a movie ticket and popcorn, I can buy a game that I can play with friends for easily dozens of hours instead of us silently sitting next to each other for an hour or two.

With the increasing death of third places and the increasing cost of existing outside, video games have become their own sort of third place for people to get together and just hang out.

Again, that’s literally what airlines and some hotels do. Based on how often you frequent the site and how often you search for flights for a specific date and location, they will change their prices for you specifically. The more interest you show and the closer it gets to that date, the higher the prices go. And your local pizza shop does this on a broad scale. They base their prices on demand - the more people willing to come in, the more they can raise their prices until they hit the threshold of what people are willing to pay.

This is literally just taking targeted ads and applying it to pricing. A cross section of different values can identify you as an individual based on things like browsing habits and web searches, and companies can use that digital fingerprint to tailor online prices for you the same way that the airlines do. Even at a broad scale, they can tailor prices based on your income level, hobbies, and predicted price tolerance. Hell, with this concept they could even run fake sales at an individual level instead of site-wide like Amazon does during their Prime Day “sales.”

This is one of the more irrational fears/predictions about the dynamic pricing infrastructure grocery stores want to implement - that they’ll start tailoring prices on things that you buy frequently or try to get you to buy extra with prices that look like a good deal. But it’s a lot more practical to do online than in a physical store.

Airline companies and hotels have been doing this for years. They track the location, time of year, and how frequently you’re looking to adjust their prices for you. You can sometimes get a different price for the exact same flight or hotel by using a private browser. You know those freezer doors with the display in them instead of a glass panel? Those have a camera in them as well to track which ads you spend the most time looking at so they can roll the most viewed ads more frequently. Some grocery stores are attempting to roll out digital pricing systems in their stores so that they can “dynamically change prices on items due to demand.”

It’s only a small step from using an algorithm to create a profile on you to serve ads tailored to things that you’re interested in to companies using that same profile to “dynamically adjust prices due to demand.”

I’m old, too, and it absolutely was because I’ve never once seen it spelled “psych.”

On the one hand, yes, and Fandom is a blight on the internet.

On the other hand, AI like ChatGPT are wrong some 53% of the time. The fact that this is another “use nontoxic glue to keep your cheese from falling off of pizza” situation doesn’t mean that Google isn’t equally culpable for doing nothing to prevent these sorts of occurrences even when the sources are right (AI is as likely to make things up that aren’t even in its cited sources as it is to actually give you info from them).

But according to the story, he was buying at full price. No bulk discount. Jim was demanding more than his regular price. And, depending on when in the day he showed up, the price that Jim demanded fluctuated.

There’s gotta be more to this.

There are two kinds of bi people:

I’m not gay, but…

And:

Look how tall she is! And look how small he is!

Everything else is a variation of The Exception or Bisexual Panic.

There’s a train bridge like that in my hometown, but it’s directly over the base of a fairly steep hill. Pretty much anything bigger than a work van is likely to hit it, and I’ve seen a couple of box trucks with the top 6 inches or so of their roof peeled back like a half-open can of sardines.

Freedom of religion, but not freedom from religion! Checkmate, atheists!

/s

Like a record, baby.

But these are the things people are complaining about - not AI itself, but the people making it, the reasons that they’re making it, and the consequences that that is having on the human condition.

For your example, people don’t complain about it making Google obsolete or something, but about the fact that LLMs like ChatGPT are wrong about 53% of the time and often completely make stuff up, and that the companies making and pushing them as a replacement for search engines have collectively shrugged their shoulders and literally said “there’s nothing we can do to prevent it” when asked about these “hallucinations” as they call them.

If they haven’t been swayed already, this won’t do a damn thing.