I took Tuesday and Wednesday off.

Aside from voting, I have some other things to do on Tuesday.

Wednesday is reserved for just sitting and staring. Perhaps some rocking back and forth and curling up in the fetal position. I’ll see how it goes.

I can’t be sure, but I think that look means, “you post it, you die.”

If you don’t have a car that can drive in snow, don’t drive in snow.

Last blizzard I was in, I had to pull over to try to help two people get up a small hill.

The first woman was afraid to steer while me and and a tow truck driver pushed her up. She wanted one of us to steer her car, but that just couldn’t happen. She ended up paying the tow truck driver more than $300 to tow her.

While that was going on, a Honda Civic ended up sliding backwards down the hill. I pushed that one about 100ft along the road until it leveled out enough to move on its own.

We have a Civic, but it sits in the driveway for blizzards.

If you get serious snow where you’re moving, and you have to drive, get something with all wheel drive. Just remember that all wheel drive doesn’t mean you can stop. You still need to drive like a Granny in Sunday church traffic.

Yes, just what we need! Finally there’s one source of news without that left wing bias!

/s

So, one more item in the “Pro” column for voting against Trump.

Then maybe we can work on fixing the problems here.

Someone once posted that rather than calling it Christian Nationalism, we should call it Nationalist Christianity, because it has a convenient and easy to remember abbreviation: Nat.C.

Wear gloves when they hand you that guideline because they might be pulling it out of their ass.

I’m tall and long in the torso. The last serious car accident I was in my head bashed against the ceiling in a frightening way. Or, it would have been frightening if I had any memory of it. I had a brush burn on my forehead which could only have happened if my head was pushed way back from hitting the ceiling. Before you ask, I always wear a seatbelt.

Anyway, that’s not why I’m replying. I’m generally ok with car headrests, although I usually have to lean the seat back pretty far to just fit in.

I bought a new office chair. I specifically chose one without a headrest, but it showed up with one anyway. At it’s highest adjustment it sits right between my shoulders.

The world seems designed to fit such a narrow range of people.

I’ve often thought LLMs could replace all of the C-suites and upper and middle management.

Funny how no companies push that as a possibility.

Which is just “reduced staffing” in different words. If the kiosks weren’t there, they would have hired more workers, built more restaurants, etc.

Except the study specified that the increased sales were related to the presence of the kiosks. They could do point of sale promotions that just weren’t reliably done if a person was in between the customer and the computer.

Not really related to the post, but I feel like sharing.

Big boss where I work wanted all managers to read a book. He had staff scour the Internet looking for copies of this book so that they could give every manager their own copy.

He said we were going to have meetings with the entire management team to review chapters of the book one at a time.

The gist of the book was: take the time to make sure you hire the right people for the job, retain the good ones, and get rid of the people who don’t work out.

I think we covered two chapters in meetings.

After that, an upcoming hiring freeze was announced, and everyone was told to fill all their open positions within two weeks or the position would be cancelled.

I refer to this as companies wanting to hire the person who just quit.

I don’t have a link handy, but there was a study that showed that fast food businesses didn’t reduce staffing when they replaced cashier’s with kiosks. Rather, they shifted employment to areas that couldn’t be replaced with a kiosk, enabling the staff to meet the increased demand and increased sales that were a result of the kiosks.

If you find out what happened, let me know, because I think it’s happening to me too.

I had a professor in college that said when an AI problem is solved, it is no longer AI.

Computers do all sorts of things today that 30 years ago were the stuff of science fiction. Back then many of those things were considered to be in the realm of AI. Now they’re just tools we use without thinking about them.

I’m sitting here using gesture typing on my phone to enter these words. The computer is analyzing my motions and predicting what words I want to type based on a statistical likelihood of what comes next from the group of possible words that my gesture could be. This would have been the realm of AI once, but now it’s just the keyboard app on my phone.

The solution here, IMO, isn’t to increase the minimum wage (that’ll end up reducing jobs)

Research has found that increasing minimum wage does not reduce jobs.

https://www.epi.org/blog/most-minimum-wage-studies-have-found-little-or-no-job-loss/#:~:text=Most minimum wage studies have,job loss | Economic Policy Institute

https://sp2.upenn.edu/study-increasing-minimum-wage-has-positive-effects-on-employment-in-fast-food-sector-and-other-highly-concentrated-labor-markets/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2023/05/20/does-raising-the-minimum-wage-result-in-job-losses-in-small-firms/

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/higher-minimum-wages-support-job-growth-economy-recovers-covid-19/

https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/press-release/new-study-analyzes-impact-of-californias-20-minimum-wage-for-fast-food-workers/

Many, many years ago, the hospital where I work had a medical transcription company to transcribe dictated radiology results.

At the time, users would access the server via DEC terminals or a terminal application on their computer.

One radiologist set up a script in the terminal application to sign off all his reports with one click. Another radiologist liked it so the first let the second copy it.

Later, the second radiologist opened a ticket with IT because all his reports were being signed by the first radiologist. Yeah, because he didn’t update the script to change the username and password being used to sign the reports.

That’s an amusing anecdote, but the terror comes from the fact that NEITHER RADIOLOGIST WAS READING THEIR REPORTS. BEFORE SIGNING THEM.

The reason they are supposed to sign the report is to confirm that they reviewed the work of the transcriptionist and verified that the report was correct.

No matter what the tool is, doctors will assume the results are correct and sign off on them without checking.

start at something like $10-12

Which is still garbage. How does someone survive today on less than $25,000/year?

The Trumpublicans in the U.S. have access to independent reporting, yet they choose instead to limit themselves to lies that make them feel like they’re better than everyone else.

We have a 2020 Honda Civic, and the automatic breaking in that is absolutely fantastic. The closest I would say it gets to a false positive is when you’re following a car on the highway that takes an exit. When the car in front starts to slow after taking the exit, the Civic will sometimes slow a bit even though the other car isn’t right in front of us anymore. It’s a simple matter to push the accelerator to override.