I am happy to see this and hope it spreads. A lot of us, IMO, would pay more for physical buttons - which is really a way to go about this, even though logistically it's problematic. If you want physical buttons, pay for it, if not, go with digital capacitive touch. I think cars should be like airplanes - physical controls, able to be felt and pushed without taking eyes off the road. The digital buttons far too often require my attention to be diverted, or pull over.
Alexa was abandoned bout 5 years ago and has continued to wither on the vine. This smells like nothing more than a money grab. The device and its services are little more useful than turning on the lights. Amazon has abandoned Alexa and there's zero reason to put more money into it as a consumer.
Ostensibly Microsoft has a goal, and they realize that the public is adamantly opposed to the way they are going about that goal. So the calculus for Microsoft management must be either: 1) We are right, doubters be damned; 2) This will be profitable and people will go along with it whether they want to or not, we're Microsoft, what are they going to do, use Pages?; or a total uncertainty as to the future but really hoping this path pays off for a variety of reasons.
I hate the future of Microsoft. I hate the future, and current iterations of Outlook and Word. I hate AI. I don't want CoPilot. What I WANT is competition in this space so Microsoft has to actually care what the consumer think.
This is precisely how I felt. Being obese is not, nor ever, ok. The body positive movement around obesity should have been to help people to 1) nto feel ashamed at being obese, but also 2) to reduce the negativity around it and turn that into positive reinforcement for healthy eating. Instead it became a dogmatic, self righteous movement of encouragement to continue to live that way because others judged it negatively.
No one should be harassed or made to feel bad by the way they look, but at the same time, it's not wrong to want others to be healthy.
GLP-1 drugs have basically thrown out the idiotic idea that people were fat because they were sloths or gluttons. Our genetic and epigenetic predispositions very obviously played a huge role in whether on not people became obese. Body positivity was a reasonable coping mechanism for folks who drew the short straw at birth or in youth, and would never be able to have the beauty our society holds above almost everything.
Not we have a drug that fixes these predispositions. Yay! It’s basically the equivalent of “teeth positivity” going away after the advent of braces. The point was about helping people cope in an uncaring world… and then there not needing a coping mechanism after the problem people were coping with gets solved.
My hypothesis is that GLP-1 drugs are basically counteracting the effects of various chemicals interfering with the natural processes of our endocrine system. I think something (microplastics, chemicals in the water, hormones, ultraprocessed food, etc) is interfering with how GLP-1 is interacting with our body in the first place. So the GLP-1 Drugs is helping bring this back to normal. I think different people due to genetic differences are affected by these environmental factors differently, that's why two people can both eat the same food and one is still starving and one is full.
I realize this is a nuanced discussion, but could you clarify the predispositions you're referring to? I'm asking because there are people who blame obesity on a predisposition to hunger (obese people have a stronger hunger drive than thin people) but also people who blame it on a predisposition to weight gain, meaning that obese people can eat the same amount of food as thin people and still be obese. Are you saying GLP-1 drugs have refuted the idea of the latter?
I'm actually saying quite the opposite. That GLP-1 drugs have refuted the idea that people do not have built in biological mechanism that make them obese, whether or not that's on the hunger side (say, ghrelin) or on the amount of stored energy per calorie (say, metabolism, gut microbiome, etc).
I think this is a good thing and do not understand the negativity in the comments. We should want systems to function more efficiently, regardless of how that comes about or who does it.
I think the US is giving up control willingly and turning more isolationist. It has been building for some time but I do not thing it is forced. It is a deliberate policy shift turning away from trying to control and police the world. America is pushed in and on to other countries and societies that a retraction might be the best thing
I don't believe it's trying to give up control, the current US administration don't want to be the world police but still wants the control given by being the world police, both can't exist at the same time and some sort of reckoning will happen.
They're currently threatening to invade Venezuela!
Mind you, another consequence of the regime is that nobody knows what's real and what's keyfabe any more. They were also threatening to invade Canada, lost a colossal amount of goodwill as a result, and got bored and moved on.
The US is pulling back from NATO and simultaneously re-asserting dominance in the Americas, i.e., the Munroe Doctrine, which has suffered setbacks in recent decades.
This is so interesting. I remember as a child my family would go to S&S Cafeterias, and Piccadilly. It was like the lunch line at school. Regrettably the closest I've gotten to an automat was when I taught in a prison, the classroom had vending machines of sandwiches, desserts, etc.
I think we still have automats. Ikea cafe for example, the cafeteria in the basement of the Natural History and Science Museum in Washington, D.C., any number of places where you get food, checkout, sit, eat, leave without interacting with anyone.
Ya'll need a trip to Japan. So many versions of the automat approach. One favorite is ガスト (Gusto). Self seat, Order from the tablet at your table, food delivered by a rolling robot with "Kitty" theme, and self checkout with the reciept/ticket at an unstaffed kiosk. They put all of the human labor effort into kitchen staff and great ingredients. Better food than the best Denny's or IHOP in the heyday of the late 80s or early 90s, and breakfast for two totaling under 12 dollars. Its a winning twist on Automat, and other examples of this are around the corner in almost every town. Its the future we were promised in the 50s that never got delivered beyond some Art Deco public works buildings.
This is deeply worrisome and brings to mind when Russia attacked Chernobyl, and then their soldiers got radiation poison digging latrine trenches etc. Let us dangerously hypothesize that if Confinement begins to fail catastrophically, who will step in to fix it? Russia? Is it.. possible Russia will allow the leak as a form of weapon?
I don't think that Russians care about this. This whole invasion can be summed by 'Russians don't care about trivialities like human life or impact to nature'.
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