So if I walked into a restaurant that specialized in a certain cuisine (choosing the right one out of hundreds is a skill, right?) and wrote down a list of ingredients, and the restaurant made me a meal with those ingredients according to however the restaurant functions (nobody can see into the kitchen, after all), does this make me a chef?

Most retail stores and restaurants already have cameras everywhere. I had a boss who would sit at home watching the feed and then call the store to yell at us when he thought we were burning sandwiches.

There’s still the issue of birds, which do not like these things in their airspace and, depending on the size, will absolutely either attack drones or be maimed by them. Also, helicopters and small planes often fly quite low. We haven’t had a great record with autonomous cars, but sure, let’s try autonomous flying drones. What could go wrong?

I feel like this will be a boon to all the restaurants who aren’t paying their staff well. Their prices will stay the same. Meanwhile, restaurants trying to pay a living wage will have much higher prices but won’t be able to tell you why. Customers will “vote with their wallets,” putting the higher paying restaurants out of business.

Overall it’s a good idea to get rid of extraneous fees, but I feel like they didn’t quite think it all the way through.

I’ve never seen a restaurant lower their prices. Restaurants don’t really work that way. They can’t negotiate for lower prices of the food they buy, especially if they’re buying less (you get a better deal buying in bulk). The only way to cut costs is to cut staff, which then leaves service lacking if they do get busy, or buy cheap low quality food and freeze it. People definitely stop going when service or food quality gets worse. This is the restaurant death spiral.

Bury your power lines, people!

(And by people I mean city utilites. Do not attempt to do that yourself, lol.)

But what about a car? Cars are as smart as smartphones now, and you certainly wouldn’t notice the small amount of power needed to collect and transfer data compared to driving the car. Some car manufacturer TOS agreements seemingly admit that they collect and use your in-car conversations (including any passengers, which they claim is your duty to inform them they are being recorded). Almost all the manufacturers are equally bad for privacy and data collection.

Mozilla details what data each car collects here.

I’ve tried. Marge’s voice is like nails on a chalkboard. Most of the voice actors are so old they don’t sound like the characters at all anymore. At least they stopped doing the trendy celebrity guest of the week on every episode.

An enormous chunk of housing sits unused and empty because real estate speculators want to rent them out at exorbitant prices rather than use it for it’s intended purpose of having a roof over people’s heads.

If they are renting it out at exorbitant prices, then it’s not empty. If it’s empty, then they get zero money. You’re saying it’s both, which makes no sense. Interest rates and property taxes are both high right now. It costs investors money to hold empty property without renting it out. They don’t have to wait for people to pay inflated prices. The demand is already there.

I’m all for more regulation, especially for developers and investors. Stiupulate that at least 50% of all new housing built be affordable. Give incentives to rehab old condemned properties. And stop letting AI algorithms determine rental prices.

When I looked it said 13.9 million. But how many of those are habitable? Does that number include Airbnbs? Properties stuck in probate or the foreclosure process? How many of them are in senior communities that don’t allow younger people or families? The census data doesn’t specify any of that.

Because there isn’t enough housing that already exists.

It’s a little harder to lug around millions in cash without anyone noticing.

Not all secret transactions are illegal, but the people who are doing illegal transactions will do anything they can to keep them secret.

I’m the same. I like reading about different worlds, but magic systems are so boring. I’m currently writing a book like what you describe - set on another planet but there’s no magic, and everyone is human. We should really start a new genre, because post-apocolyptic scifi doesn’t quite convey what I’m trying to do. But to call it fantasy would be way off. Problem is, most people assume other world = fantasy.

I don’t know if you are in a place where you can get CBD, but it really seems to help my dog when he has an upset stomach. It’s often the difference between sleeping through the night and getting up every hour so he can go eat grass outside. A lot of pet stores sell it.

That’s usually what it is, but I was confused why that particular group would even care about downtown zoning regulations in a place like Seattle. 🤷

Ha, they’re hoping they can stop the open heroin use by having construction projects take over all the sidewalks… yeah, sure, that’ll work. But seriously, what kind of source is this? Stop population decline? “Seattle loosen”??

They obviously put a lot of work into this.

The last one basically means “its absolutely worthless”.

So when someone says this about me they’re actually calling me worthless? This is why I hate talking to people. Everything means the opposite of what it’s supposed to.