Setting aside corporate surveillance, I have started to have a love/hate relationship with AI transcriptions in meetings. My auditory processing isn’t great, so it is nice to have notes. And it’s not replacing a job that someone was doing before. At the same time, it makes me feel more on edge. Everything I say becomes part of a permanent record. And I am part of a public institution, so that is subject to FOIA requests AFAIK.

It isn’t really an imperial thing. It’s that, 250 years ago, when the tiny, newly independent nation was deciding on a name, no one bothered themselves with a new and unique name. And as you noted, American is the only part of that name that works as a description of a resident, even if it’s nonsensical.

If so, then okay. The idea is that single use plastic is used because plastic is so damn cheap. From what I understand, the precursor is basically a waste product from oil extraction. But add a small tax and it breaks the model.

A single cheap fork is less than US$0.01 on a commercial restaurant website. For many restaurants, that is easier to deal with than washing dishes. But let’s tack on a $0.05 tax per single use item or $0.50 single use tax. Pass it directly on to the customer on the check.

That puts single use more on an equal footing with restaurants that are reusing dishes. Single use plastic doesn’t have its true cost built in. A tax can do that in a transparent way.

I read a bit of the stuff from the tip line. Some of it is very raw, and that’s putting it nicely. Like, I had a neighbor who was troubled by delusions. Some sounded spot on like that, a story that wasn’t just absolutely wild, but didn’t fit with some known facts.

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Wish granted. Those apps are now all rewritten as Swing Java applets.