I can tell if China is worried about current Russia or a future US under Trump.

I’ve edited my post for accuracy, it was genuinely an honest mis-remembering of the attack; thank you for the clarification.

Picking a fight with a superpower is generally a poor idea. Killing military members - even in Jordan - might be considered a bit beyond mere commerce.

Edit: I did misremember the attackers in Jordan and thought that was part of the Houthi organization. The Houthi’s are attacking US warship(s) in the area, but haven’t directly killed an US service members that we know of/yet. The Jordan attack was (now that I’ve checked again) by one of the groups operating under the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

My only defense here is that all of these attacks on US and UK vessels (merchant and military) are in retribution for the US support of Israel. And, yes, there are a lot of groups backed by Iran and Iraq who are using the Israel-Hamas/Israel destruction of Gaza as an excuse to lash out at Western powers who (generally) provide support to Israel. My apologies for the error.

Can we add a down vote bot for bot posts?

That’s what a contract is. In promise to pay and you promise to deliver. Would the corporations only accept $650M each if it ended up costing them $100M less to make each one? No, of course not, they’d bill the full $750M because that’s what they bid. Finding out that you underbid or under negotiated is a risk of contractual business.

Corps need to put their big girl panties on and deliver. Maybe pay the executives less next year instead.

With the small carve out exception of people who are fine with the antisocial behavior and management style of the owner, Inertia is the only reason. Governments, influencers, corporations- they all have a following and an established channel which involves minimum expense to maintain.

You know, if I were going to pick a fight with a military world power, I’d at least have the good sense not to do it during the run up to a head-of-state election.

Many these cities are unsustainable as modern cities. Their creation and golden periods were marked by lavish spending of royalty and/or wealthy merchants (today’s billionaire class, but without jets and yachts to spend on). It’s almost impossible to rebuild to modern, tourist level usage without massive cash infusions and disruption of services for that maintenance.

Oh, fine - if you’re going to just Willy nilly divulge your (checks notes) family Secret Santa present list to just anyone. You may as well write your medical history with a nude picture of yourself on a postcard and send it via UPS to People Magazine!!1!

I just hope Gaza can hold out long enough for Trump to win the US presidency and restore peace to the region. Only Jared Kushner has the knowledge and charisma to bring the two sides into harmony like he did in 2019.

I think I read your title differently - as in, gravity would ebb and flow like wind or rain or barometric pressure or temperature. In normal days the gravity might be mostly constant, or may fluctuate a few percent as the day goes on, rising and falling over the diurnal cycle. But at times a gravity storm could blow through, causing wild fluctuations from just a few percent (or even reversing!) to a couple hundred percent, causing travelers to lose their un-secured cargo or to be pinned in place until the storm subsides. Locals would know the dangers and have things easily tied down, or beds for riding a gravity storm in relative comfort, but any huge storms people would evacuate, praying that the fluctuations wouldn’t destroy their homes or farms. (And now I’m imagining the end of O Brother Where Art Thou with the cow on the roof)

That’s an urban legend. Prices are aggregated and cataloged by ITA matrix (purchased by google/alphabet a decade ago). The only time a price change is when the airline itself changes the current retail price.

Now, if you’re using a third party service - like Priceline or Travelocity - to check and book tickets (which is a terrible idea, btw) they may track your history and alter their price, but the master index (served by google flights from ITA matrix) will not change for you, personally, or your specific ip or other identifier.

Note: Airlines will adjust their prices based on interest/purchases, so if you’re hitting a flight with requests to bill so hard that the airline thinks the flight is popular, or you go through the reservation process far enough to “fill” a particular fare class, then the price will change - but it will change for everyone, not just you. Similarly, Amazon will raise pricing during a buying surge - but it’s for everyone, not just you.

On the (mostly) plus side for untracked browsing - as long as it’s so tight that you’re hopping ips and avoiding any back end fingerprinting of your system - Many merchants do source-based pricing. Ex: if you go to book certain services direct vs following a referral link (like via a cash back site or association) you my find different pricing. Using and AARP link to some travel services will result in a 25-30% price increase, to offset the 20% rate coupon they offer, plus a little coin for themselves. Other sites will also trigger cost basis alterations - especially for services which are hard to identify or compare a fixed cost.

All my main numbers VoIP are Google. I’ve got two others at a large (Canadian, iirc) provider.

A second sim is the only options for some. Either ChatGPT or one of those requires a real-world mobile number. Anything on a VoIP is blacklisted. I literally can’t sign up for it or a couple other oddball services (like the Dunkin’ app*) because I refuse to divulge my carrier number to anyone but my family and 2-3 close friends. I have a (former) mobile number and two former landline numbers on VoIP that are my real, active numbers but some services simply refuse to use them.

* I’d use my freebie backup sim for registration, but many use that # as their required+sole 2FA “security“ so signing up with it is useless as I’d have to use that phone every time I interacted. Maybe it’s time to look into eSIMs.

Your passport contains biometric data (your photo - not as complete as a depth scan or multi-spectral image, but still biometric).

There are two (well, threeish, legitimate) reasons for biometric. First, it is currently harder to fake. Digital passports are difficult but not impossible and non-digital are relatively easy, especially for state actors. Second people are stupid (or unlucky) and lose their passports, which leads to a shit-ton of paperwork to fix. Third, and this is really the rule for which lost docs are a sub-problem, efficiency. Even the cheapest front-line human costs about $100 an hour, including management, training, benefits, etc and I’ve yet to meet an international (or domestic) traveler who enjoys waiting in hour+ lines to get through passport control. Less contact time / zero friction interfaces are both better for passenger attitude and cost efficiency.

Until we stop the practice of drawing imaginary lines on the planet and regulating which side each person is allowed to be on, nearly every travelers and pretty much all the boarder control apparatus is going to want to spend as little time and money on one another as possible.

From a practical perspective? They could eventually cross reference the exits to arrivals, automatically flagging those who have overstated their visa (or, more specifically, automatically clearing those who have left). The data (exit data) is generally useful for all sorts of mundane statistical work. From an automation standpoint it’s both cost effective and time saving. Anyone who’s queued up in an hour+ line to get through border patrol will attest that the prices can be infuriatingly slow.

Of course, that the data can be used for non-official or privacy-adverse uses doesn’t make the collection ok, but that fact also doesn’t mean that the data isn’t useful for its overly intended purpose (automated tracking of everyone who leaves)

The whole idea the internet is interlinked sites. Then again the whole idea if the internet was also a robust, reliable, multi-nodal, non-corporate architecture for redundant transmission of data, so we’re headed into the shitter already.

But, more to the point, if you start charging people for links you break the purpose of being able to link things. It will kill Canadian journalism first, but it will wound a portion of the internet in the process. And if it spreads it will do net harm to both sides, everywhere.

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Evernote. I’m not sure why I even stayed with them for so long; probably the pain of moving after so many years. Switched to Joplin before they doubled their fees for zero new (useful) features.

What kind of cheap-ass, stripped down AutoDesk suite are you getting for $200/mo. Last I checked, the architectural suite was north of $4500/yr.