EldritchFeminity

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.

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.

I think the first stat in the graph is the most important one and really speaks to the reason for the last one. I said this is another post about this article, but video games have become their own kind of third space. Going out with friends has become so expensive, whether you're going to a movie or something else, and in a lot of places you can't go to hang out without having to spend money anyways, so video games have become a replacement way to hang out with friends. And that's before you start talking about stuff like friends who moved across the country for work or something.

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."

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).