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Vote with your wallet (wherever possible)

The last large airline to NOT charge for checked bags in the USA, Southwest airlines, has switched to charging for bags.

Oddly the ones that have the best outcome for the deplaning scenario from this bad situation of paid checked bags are the ones that also charge for carry ons like Spirit or Frontier in the USA. So there is an incentive to NOT bring a carry on because you’ll be charged for it and instead just pay to check a bag (which has more capacity).

If you haven’t used free Over-the-air TV these days you might be surprised that most cities have a few dozen channels of live TV right now. If your in a large metro area get the simplest of cheapest TV antennas, plug it into your TV, and do a channel scan. You’ll be surprised how many channels there are now.

If you’re in suburbs or rural, you’ll still likely have quite a few but may need a more substantial antenna.

it’s with one shoulder bag I usually just shove under my seat,

That isn’t an option for those afflicted with long legs.

Blame the airlines for that. Some are still allowing free carry on, but charging $75 for a checked bag. This is entirely a problem created from airline greed.

Especially recent history has shown that stable coins should actually be written “stable” coins. The analogy to casino chips is also a bit weak because casinos (in many countries including the USA) are highly regulated by the government. An example of a USA law is that if a casino goes out-of-business, the cash assets that were set aside must be made available for people that were still holding that casino’s chips so the person can turn them back into cash. No such rule exists for crypto “stable” coins.

When a “stable” coin goes under, you lose your money just like a non-“stable” coin. There are numerous examples from the last 5 years:

Most Expensive Stablecoin Crashes: The Biggest Collapses That Shook the Crypto Market

Encryption, in regards to computers, is a massive topic so I’ll take two individual examples:

• A file/disk is encrypted and the user wants to access it - Because the file is encrypted, the OS by itself, cannot open it and display the contents unencrypted. A software utility will challenge the user for the password, passphrase, or key. That will be stored in RAM in the computer (were the contents disappear when the computer is turned off). The decryption is done, and usually the utility discards the key. Another way this can be done is if the key is already stored elsewhere in the computer box. Such as an additional tiny computer called TPM (Trusted Platform Module). These have very little computing power, but the main computer can ask for the TPM to decrypt something so the main computer never knows the key.

• You want to decrypt the contents of a secure website being served to you. This is an example of asymmetric cryptography. There is one key that can encrypt and decrypt contents. This is called a Private Key. There is another key that can only decrypt those same contents. This is called a Public Key. The web site operator will use their private key (in an SSL cert) to encrypt the website contents. When your computer downloads the encrypted contents, theres a note telling where the computer can retrieve the Public Key. Your compute downloads the Public Key, and decrypts the website.

Ah okay, thats a different problem, with different a solution.

On its surface you’re expressing you don’t have permissions to just enjoy the moment, that there is some other pressing issue that you should be putting your attention to instead.

Instead what you have is a budgeting problem. Except our scarce resource isn’t money, but time. There are only so many hours in a day, and if you let it, an infinite number of tasks to complete. Knowing that you can only do so much in a day, and only a fraction of that time can be spent on “productive” activities. You have to give time to yourself or you’ll go nuts. So first, decide how much time of the day (outside of work and sleep) you are going to put to “productive” activities. That number can’t simply be all the waking hours that aren’t sleeping, working, or eating. Be realistic. Then along with that budget time to slack off where your only responsibility is no responsibility. If you are daydreaming during that slack off time, you know there’s nothing else you should be doing. The thing you should be doing is slacking off.

More pragmatically, instead of having a daily time budget, have a weekly one. You can work yourself hard one day if it means allowing yourself a longer continuous slack off time later in the week.

Has anyone else felt this way about not being in the moment when doing things?

I kind of have the opposite. Sometimes I have to fight myself from losing myself to the moment, exploring all the permutations of thought of what is happening in the moment, what its implications are, what else would compliment it or sour it, how others around me are experiencing it (or ignorant of it), the visceral experience, the light/texture/smell/temperature, the infinite possibilities of the circumstances of the moment and every branch the next second could follow. Then I realize I’ve been daydreaming again, and have to drag myself back to the toned-down reality of what life chore I have to do next.

You mention several things in your live that distract you (doomscrolling, steamdeck, etc). Those offer someone else’s prepackaged experiences for you to consume, which is their purpose. Distraction. There’s nothing wrong with those, as long as they aren’t consuming you all the time.

Can I ask if you allow yourself to daydream?

I don’t drink alcohol or use tobacco/nicotine in any forms. As to why, I simply don’t enjoy the experience of either. When I was a teenager I was offered and tried a cigarette. I hated the tobacco smoke flavor, it made my lungs hurt, and I didn’t like headrush feeling. For alcohol, I drank a few times as a young adult and even got drunk a couple of times. I didn’t particularly enjoy that mental and physical experience either. Even after that I drank beer a few times socially, but realized I wasn’t doing it because I liked it, but to “fit in” or impress other people.

While still in my early 20’s, I realized that if the only way those people would like me or associate with me was because I would drink, I didn’t need them in my life. I stopped drinking entirely, and I’ll admit at the beginning I did get socially pressured, but when I didn’t relent, no one ever got upset with me nor did I ever lose any friendships because I didn’t want to drink. I made it clear then, as I do today, that I don’t care if anyone else wants to drink, even if that drinking is around me. I have no judgment on them for what they choose to consume (as long as they aren’t hurting others in doing so). I will even buy alcohol for people I know that drink as gifts, because I know it is something they enjoy and thats what gifts are for. I have a decent collection of unopened bourbon bottles that I’ve never even tasted. I can get some uncommon bottles now and then. I’ve never had someone complain about getting a nice bottle of bourbon.

I will say I don’t really like hanging out with smokers in confined spaces, but that has nothing to do with a judgment about their personal choices. I just don’t like my clothing and hair smelling like cigarette smoke after hanging out with them.

GenX BTW.

Your very first interaction on Lemmy with this account is to ask this insulting question?

Obligatory West Wing Gall-Peters Projection link

That is just one person with their hands woven together. You can see the part of the hand coming out of the sleeve of the white coat of the other person the CPR person is next to.

What concerns me more is how she went from CPR to being on a CPAP sleep apnea machine in Panel 4.

I generally hold the same negative opinion of Leto as you, but was surprised that his acting in House of Gucci was pretty decent.

I liked him a lot in “Spanglish” and “Reign Over Me.”

Isn’t the real joke that that interns aren’t really getting hired anymore?

To put it in simple terms, Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up, oxidize them and get a final result that looks like candle wax but is in fact fat molecules like those in beef, cheese or vegetable oils.

So their process sounds like it creates synthetic lard, not butter. This can still be a good thing as the extra ingredients to make it “butter” aren’t really the hard/impactful part of butter.

Maybe if this happened in the 1990s, but I seriously doubt it in the last 25 years. That post said other students were using chromebooks so we know it wasn’t in the 1990s. Middle and High school kids are flashing ROMs on their phone by themselves these days. Even those that don’t understand command line know its used more than just “for hacking”.

Also on the high school “trouble” list, I have a hard time imagining the overstretched school system cares about anything other than students committing violence against teachers or each other, teen sex, drug use/sale on campus, possibly nicotine use, or possible consequences of poverty on students (hunger, clothing, hygiene). You know, normal teen stuff.

Understanding how LLMs actually work that each word is a token (possibly each letter) with a calculated highest probably of the word that comes next, this output makes me think the training data heavily included social media or pop culture specifically around “teen angst”.

I wonder if in context training would be helpful to mask the “edgelord” training data sets.

Sorry friend, I just got online to recharge my social batteries, not drain them further when they’re already near empty.