1974 is a really odd year to pick. It had a bad housing market with several parallels to today: dropping new construction the two previous years, stagflation, significantly increased housing prices compared to the prior year, high mortgage interest rates (~9%!)…

And the North Face zip up.

The bathroom in my LGS literally has free deodorant openly available for use, and the owner reminds everyone whenever the store is really packed for an event. Unfortunately some people still do not get the hint.

It is because Apple has been dominant in the premium smartphone market for years, including in China. Huawei have started to make a big dent in that tier in China after eating Apple’s lunch in the lower price categories.

This is a feature that Huawei brought to market before Apple, which was kind of a first. Until recently, they were just following Apple’s innovations. It’s early and I wouldn’t want one now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smartphones-that-fold-out-into-tablets was the standard by the end of the decade.

I was at a friends and family barbecue recently, and it just so happened none of the parents there brought tablets for their kids. It was just kids running around the backyard being kids. The parents generally let them do whatever but were attentive enough to prevent them climbing on the shed and stuff.

I can’t remember the last time there wasn’t some kid glued to a screen at that type of party. It was a joy to see.

And he never shut up about how embarrassing Biden apparently was.

If one of my friends showed me a collection of hats with their name on it, I would pull them aside and ask if they have considered getting professional help.

Technically, yes criminal conversion is certainly a thing. If the laptop was expensive and you lived in a really low crime area where the cops were bored that might get pursued. My experience is that cops are practically more likely to say, absent a court order, to sue the person because it’s he-said she-said. It’s just too much effort for a potentially muddy situation.

You’d be surprised how often things that are theft/technically theft are not actually pursued by police in the US. The property crime clearance rate (resulting in at least arrest) is <15%.

Holding onto a rental car, on the other hand, is both expensive and cut-and-dried enough (contract states definitive end date ahead of time) to be a bad idea.

No, at least not in the US. It does not meet the legal definition of theft because (I believe) the property was initially acquired legally.

Otherwise, the police would be doing repo for things like delinquent car loans, which is dystopian corporate hellscape stuff.

I imagine many of those are ordinances intended to regulate fraternities and sororities—or similar college student shared housing situations.

I don’t have a Boston accent (RI) and say Wusstah, as does everyone from the area (including surrounding MA) I’ve known.

It’s more Wusstah than Wooster in my experience.

I dunno about that. I bought a house well within what I could afford. The bank actually thought we made a mistake and reminded us they would approve a loan double the size of what we asked.

All it takes is two or three really expensive things needing work at the same time to blow your budget out of the water. And often there’s no clear answer on what’s truly urgent.

Water is entropy manifest to constantly remind you that anything you do is temporary and laughably futile on geologic timescales.

Gotta love having an old house. It’s simultaneously reassuring and deeply stressful when a professional looks at something that seems really bad and just says, “Well, I can tell from the layers of paint that’s been there a long time. So if it hasn’t become a problem in all that time, it’s probably fine. But give me a call if your house starts falling apart.”

Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.

To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.

I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.

Zoning sounds great until you want to start a small business on your property, and you have to spend years convincing several councils and review boards that a photography business is not going to destroy the neighborhood character… and then you need to pay for a traffic study to prove it won’t negatively impact parking or meaningfully increase car travel on the street. And if it manages to get approved, then some retired busybody with no life will complain at every town council meeting that it’s attracting a bad crowd, and there’s too many people around now.

There is definitely a place for reasonable limits, but almost nowhere in the United States has that. People need to accept that neighborhoods change, and expecting them to be frozen in time is literally insane and fiscally irresponsible.

There are certainly stories of overzealous enforcement, but the context of Loi 101 and its amendments is worth considering.

Québecois is really interesting. It has a lot of old, outdated French in it due to the colonial connection with France being severed hundreds of years ago, where it evolved distinctly and the locals made different decisions on what to change and how to adapt to new concepts.

One could argue the French government has been obsessive about policing language much longer with the académie française.

I saw a local restaurant with its branding on it the the other day. Well, there’s one restaurant I never need to try.

Yep. He wasn’t really reviewing the nuts and bolts, just the drive experience. I didn’t get the impression he got a ton of time with it and only spent an afternoon puttering around. It felt below his standard honestly for thoroughness.