Twenty of the stations are located in Pennsylvania, while five are in New Jersey

I’m sure that’ll help people in Texas and Colorado.

Also: ewww, get that shit out of my state!

We can do better!

Is everything sensible or socially conscious Communism now?

This is the same program that referred to Fred Rogers as “an evil, evil man”. I don’t think they’re the best judge of people or motives.

I love Larry, and think it’s great that he comes along and joins in!

You should head over to Arts & Industries for the Folklife Festival!

Rehires them to better train their AI. They’ll be back out again shortly. :/

See, what I see is that Ford intends to keep using AI, they’re just temporarily using experienced humans to train the AI to be better at it’s job before getting rid of the humans again.

Sigh. That under Swedish law, it’s entirely probable that Julian Assange did rape that woman (reddit fanbois are a special kind of special).

That Elon Musk is not a real-life Tony Stark, but is in fact a slightly autistic narcissist who insists on inserting himself into the public eye and has an excellent PR team (reddit fanbois are a special kind of special).

That covid is real, and is bad, and is in fact deadly; and that vaccines are good, not a government conspiracy, and may save not just your life, but the lives of your families and friends.

Probably one of those three.

The trades have somewhat more risk of injury than, say, sitting at a computer all day, particularly if you’re working as hard as your schedule implies. Does your job, union or state have disability insurance, or the option for it? If not, can you purchase it from an instance broker ? If so, get disability coverage; and if there are multiple levels, get the one with the highest coverage.

Now, double-check all of the following with an independent insurance broker, as the rules may have changed since I did this, or your local area may be different than mine.

In my area, this is key: pay for your disability benefits POST-TAX. You’ll generally have the option to pay pre-tax (your income is reduced by the account of the insurance payment, then you pay tax on what you take home) or post-tax (your income including the insurance payment is taxed, then they deduct the insurance payment).

The reason this matters: if you haven’t paid tax on the premiums and you end up getting disabled, then those benefits will be taxed; but if you’ve paid tax on the premiums, then your benefits are tax-free. If you pay pre-tax, then you’ll have a little extra money each paycheck; but if you become disabled, then you’ll lose a bunch of your disability payments to taxes during a stressful period with extra expenses. If you pay post-tax, then you take home a little less money each week (not a concern in your situation); but if you become disabled, then you don’t lose any of your disability pay to taxes.

I’ll also add: for your car insurance, it’s entirely up to you what coverage you get for collision and comprehensive, but always opt for the maximum amount of personal injury protection you can get. And if you’re going to be stacking up your assets like you hope to do, please consider an umbrella policy to help protect those assets.

Good luck!

Even with gifted articles, the NYT refuses to accept that I’m not a bot (possibly because of my aggressive ad and JS blocking). I appreciate alternatives.

Honestly, fingers and movement have been two of the telling signs of AI photos and video for a long time. Just like they’ve used captchas to crowd-source house numbers for their maps, and vehicle information and street infrastructure for their attempts at self-driving vehicles, they’re now crowd-sourcing data for AI images and video.

Plus they’ll get geo-information on your location, and video of your immediate area - like the inside of your house. They’ve had code that processes images and gives feedback on the people in the photo, their likely income and interests, and suggests ads targeted to those people. With geo-location, fingerprinting your phone, and now pictures of the inside of your house, they’re really dialing in on their surveillance and ad databases.

Not saying that the opportunity to build facial ID banks isn’t a bonus. But don’t discount the opportunity to spy inside everyone’s homes, and to improve their ability to literally generate their own version of reality - or to produce “evidence” disproving your reality to everyone else.

You can’t just drop this and not tell us about this impossibly dumb rule you made years ago.

Also: welcome home, Critter!

A lot of sidewalks in major cities don’t have room for these. Especially if you account for traffic, light, and power poles, street signs, bus and trolley stops, subway and El entrances, sidewalk trees, garbage, trash and recycling bins, sidewalk grates, cellar entries, cracked sidewalks, etc, etc, etc. And suddenly you’re being asked to give up one piece of space that’s supposedly reserved for you, to yet another ‘move fast, break things, get permission later’ techbro “innovation” that no one’s asked for.

There’s no regulation over them, no standards that they have to follow or how to behave, no way for the public to specifically identify a robot when they encounter it in public (like, say, your robot ran into my car or whatever).

I’d only allow them if each robot carried a certain amount of insurance, was registered and had some kind of license plate, had turn signals (I don’t know if they do, the ones I saw didn’t), had limited operating hours and locations, were forced to move aside for humans, etc - basically make them the absolute lowest priority thing on the streets and sidewalks. Streets, bike lanes, sidewalks, subways, etc, were each built for specific forms of human movement. If techbros want to introduce a new type of system, they should be forced to build their own infrastructure to support it (no idea what that looks like for delivery robots), instead of just blatantly overloading already-stressed public infrastructure.

The void is hungry and wants chimken.

As for the buildings, maybe we’ll see some creative uses like indoor farms or something.

Nope, though I admire your optimism. They’ll get repurposed into concentration camps.

I’m looking forward to the 1.7 update of Stardew Valley. I love discovering new stuff and going through all the mods people have created.

The French nobles didn’t have private jets waiting to whisk them off to the far side of the planet.

Most likely because of the nuclear power plant.

I love the fact that multiple people actually read my three-comment-long story about crazy shit happening - it made me feel good :)

Various epilogues:

The FBI confiscated the crystal ball and the Osiris statue, and re-confiscated the stand, for “forensics analysis”. But the staff at the Museum had thoroughly cleaned the stand before putting it into storage, the housekeeper took obsessively good care of the crystal ball, and the Osiris statue had been through too many locations under different conditions and entirely too many hands for anything useful to be found. Eventually, after many years of us asking, they returned the items to the Museum.

There had been a reward offered for the successful return of the items - maybe $10k or something? The homeowner tried to claim it, but was turned down. I personally think it should have gone to Al the homeless junk guy: he explicitly saved the statue from the trash, his actions are the ones that triggered the whole recovery process, and he’s definitely the one who could have benefitted the most. But no :( Eventually they decided to give the money to Jes, who promptly turned around and donated it back to the Museum.

While the theft shows clear signs of some insider knowledge - that there would likely be no Security response to alarms going off, and that the garage would be open and homeowner away - they never caught the thieves. I personally think the number of people who knew both things would be pretty small, but no one was ever charged.

The FBI did a bunch of press conferences congratulating themselves on their diligent fieldwork and years-long persistence in recovering the objects - completely ignoring that they’d long since given up and that there would have been no discovery at all if Jes hadn’t wandered into that junk store. Years later, one of the FBI guys wrote a book and it turned out these were the guys from the FBI’s semi-newly-created Art Crimes Unit, and this was one of their first successful “investigations”.

And, finally: the artifacts have been lovingly cleaned and returned to their display positions at University Museum. If you visit the Museum today and head to the Rotunda, you can see the Dowager Empress Cixi’s crystal ball sitting proudly on it’s solid silver stand, while the Osiris statue lives just a few yards away.

Anyway, OP, that’s my answer to your question: a stolen, 2500 year old, 60 pound bronze statue of the Egyptian god Osiris. I can guarantee that it will cause much confusion over many years.