I spent too much time searching for a video of someone who might have tried C.

No luck, but now I’m hungry for pizza.

Maybe they learned they need to air gap critical infrastructure, and leave the management to on-site humans who are paid well enough not to hold their inventory for ransom.

We all made it out unscathed, after about eight summers of doing it together. We were all in our twenties, and believed we were immortal. I haven’t been in many years, and won’t be going again. It probably IS foolish today with the options available, but still something is lost when we’re never incommunicado anymore.

Being comfortable away from civilization.

I mean, very few people go off into the woods anymore without some way to communicate in case of emergency.

In the mid-80s I’d go off backpacking with friends for a week or ten days, and the only hope we had if we something went terribly wrong was the occasional park ranger, or other hikers. We might run across four or five other people on the trail per day, but some days no one at all. We’d set up camp by a pond and be the only ones there, and probably for miles in any direction. We never thought about it, because there wasn’t the option of taking a GPS, or phone, and we didn’t bother with a radio because we never needed one before, so we just never thought to take one.

It was fine. We had skills, we were prepared, we had each other. We had experience. That’s all we needed.

I suspect that is very rare now. It would be considered foolish. Fewer and fewer people have the experience of being that disconnected anymore.

An aging Congress, out of touch with the AI revolution, could find itself out of its depth.

I’ll point out that term limits for Congress would mitigate this issue. And, term limits are better than simple age limits, because a young person voted into office could still have decades to become entrenched and corrupt. Whereas term limits keeps up the churn.

Apart from graphic design and advertising, art is difficult and risky for billionaires to profit off of. Human artists are notoriously flaky and difficult to work with. This is one reason Larry Ellison bought WB.

Billionaires want public schools to turn out people who are as close to robots as possible. We all know they’d prefer actual robots, but that’s not happening anytime soon, regardless of all the hype. So, public schools drop anything not reliably connected to billionaires profits. They’re thrilled at the prospect of getting rid of human artists.

I haven’t logged into my Amazon account in ten years, and this won’t make me do it.

Learn the difference between need and want. Stop buying crap you don’t need. And, never knowingly buy anything off Amazon.

Fuck Amazon, and Jeff Bezos. All excuses people make to willingly buy off that fucking site are bullshit.

For what we pay, every store could be this way, but the billionaires keep demanding more and more of the profits.

They’d only “need” to raise prices to keep their personal profit up. Fuck every single billionaire with a running chainsaw hard in the ass.

I’ve used delivery on a few items when it was free, and felt a little guilty about it. Once, I added some coffee to my online order that was only available to ship, just to get it over the $35 free delivery, because it’s something I buy every week, anyway. They fucking delivered just the coffee, free or not, such a waste. But, I won’t pay a premium for it. I’m not rich.

More crappy subscriptionware. No, thanks.

Also, the last time I went to a cashier, because it was the one time I saw a long line at the self-check lane, I stood in the short line, I was third, while the cashier chatted up the customers, left the line to help another cashier with something and was generally very slow. I suspect they’re not required to be efficient anymore, and perhaps even encouraged not to be. I watched as the guy I would have been behind in the self-check line left the store while I was still second in line at the cashier.

I’m sure they were shown a staged demo of how the camera and “AI” catches people putting items in the bag without scanning and that convinced them the tech was good enough.

But, the scan camera check only catches people who aren’t trying to fool it. There are easy ways around it.

It’s only free until they hook you.

I’m waiting for them to close the stores to customers entirely and go to pick up or delivery only.

I know that would kill impulse buying, but I think they might make it up by not needing to police the isles, and no theft.

Service Merchandise did tag pulls and pick up at the register for everything back in the 70s and 80s. That might come back.

I like self check because there’s never a line when I go. With cashiers, the policy was to only open a new register if the lines got over three deep. So, there was always at least three people in line, no matter what time of day, on average.

I’ve never waited in line since I started using the self check lanes.

The things we’ll do for the promise of sex.

I was raised without religion. Decided I was atheist as soon as I came across the word as a kid.

I’ve read large parts of the Christian Bible, in a “know thy enemy” sort of way.

Also, reading the Bible is one way atheists come to be atheists.

That said, I have zero interest in learning more about astrology. Yes, it’s completely nonsensical, and not worth anyone’s time pursuing. There’s nothing behind it. The “basics of how it works” is that it obviously doesn’t work at all. It’s complete bullshit.

You like their food (objective, so there’s no “lying” around that), and so excuse their politics. I get it, it’s like separating the artist from the art. Lots of people pay to see Tom Cruise movies, or now to see Ed Sheeran, or maybe Bill Burr.

Some people don’t.

Money can buy security.

People are naturally happy when they’re secure, so it seems like money buys happiness. Really, it’s just allowing you to climb out of the hole of despair we were all born into.