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My observation as that there are ways to prevent the vermin from getting to the feeder and eating directly from it, but that birds are generally pretty messy eaters and will spread seed / feed widely across the ground while eating from the feeder and that this is what the vermin end up mostly eating.

The second one was the first iPhone with 3G networking (which had broadly been considered a required feature for smartphones when the original iPhone was introduced without it.)

I won't try to defend the 3Gs ;)

We just started doing meaningful bird photography (as opposed to true birdwatching) last year and I agree with you.

The couple of times we've gone with guides who are serious birdwatchers, it is impressive to watch their abilities in this area of multimodal species identification (and male/female/adult/juvenile) in challenging visual and audio environments (and recall of species names in Latin, English, and Spanish).

Meanwhile I'm out there with my camera like "Hey, look at that beautiful red+blue bird!" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Earlier this year a 92-year-old woman drove into our local Asian supermarket, killed three people and injured at least six. No criminal charges were filed. At least they pulled her driver license.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/westwood-99-ran...

I don't say this to suggest excusing autonomous car companies from bearing liability, but just for context.

Perhaps we should not make the regulations too punitive on the AV companies as that would reduce the speed of replacing bad human drivers who currently cause 40,000 deaths a year in the US.

My parents were a Nielsen household for about 20 years (after I had moved out) and they really, really, really loved Law & Order in its many incarnations.

Pretty sure they are singlehandedly responsible for years of renewals...

You mean by funding and supporting the rollout of the mRNA vaccines?

Not confusing for me at all. But nice try.

"Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust."

If only!

Unfortunately, it's often the case that the blast radius of the footgun (ouch, mixed weaponry metaphor) is bigger than the person who's holding the gun, and other users' security may be compromised...

Yes, we had phone books. And it was useful. But they didn't generally include personal information such as birthdates, salary, etc. And it was easy to opt out. Additionally there were not a bunch of online services with financial impacts that used phone numbers are primary keys.

And, importantly, they were physical in a time when it was hard to collect and collate the data in all of them. In 1990, there were about 5,000 distinct "white pages" phone books in the US. And OCR was pretty crappy.

Also, in all the places that I lived, mobile numbers didn't end up in the phone books, only residential landlines did. I don't know if that was universal.

Yeah, honestly I'd prefer the remote, simple hotel makes a physical photocopy which at least has a chance of being thrown out after a couple of weeks vs the government of "random country" gets a digital copy which will never, ever, ever be deleted.

I use my password manager to maintain unique answers to all of the useless verification questions about pets, movies, teachers, etc. Only way to scale it.

Is your implication that COVID was intentionally created in an American bioweapons lab with the goal of creating something both highly deadly and highly transmissible for use in future conflicts?

Great site - and lessons are still valid.

How you can tell it's from 1997:

The master fell silent, but on his way out he pocketed a 20 Gigabyte corporate backup tape that was lying around.

In general, health insurance is not insurance but (frequently subsidized) prepaid medical coverage, exactly because it is not underwritten with respect to risk.

It's clearly the case that people who are overweight, smoke, or consume alcohol heavily should pay more for health insurance based on massively increased risk of loss.

Fortunately, other forms of insurance (e.g., homeowners, automobile) are not regulated in this uneconomical fashion.

>> Notice how they weren't going to raise your premiums by $30 a year or whatever, but outright cancel your policy - in other words a massive overweighting of the actual risk from some bushes growing into the house.

Given that the annual premium is like 0.27% of the value of the policy, a change in risk of a few percent because some big tree limbs were hanging over the house or because some brushes might have enabled a fire to spread to the house more easily could clearly swamp the value of the premium to them.

And, to be clear, I didn't want to spend $2,000 to fix the problems, I would have rather not had to deal with it, but that's part of the joy of being a homeowner.

====

We live in a place (California) where the government has generally prevented homeowners insurance companies from effectively charging for risk (e.g., wildfires) and therefore many companies have stopped writing policies altogether. This doesn't seem like a good outcome. Note that this is the same state that won't let auto insurers charge based on "black boxes" either, so good drivers are subsidizing bad drivers (even more than in other places).

Presumably since many people opt in, they are not universally reviled. In fact, I'd wager that people who are safer-than-average drivers don't revile them at all and actually appreciate the fact that their premiums are reduced by virtue of the evidence of their safe driving habits.

>> The whole point of insurance is to manage risk by spreading it across all consumers.

Yes, but this does not imply that customers with (potentially vastly) different risk profiles should pay the same rates.

The canonical example is that 18-year-old single males with previous speeding tickets pay more for auto insurance than married 40-year-old women with clean driving records.

"Did you know that home insurers use aerial drones to study your rooftop? If the conditions signal neglect, they might cancel your coverage before an accident."

While there are certainly some issues of concern in the article and the reviewed book, the above seems like exactly what insurance companies should be doing: pricing (or making available) coverage based upon risk.

This is not much different from an auto insurance company raising your rates (or cancelling coverage) because you've received a number of speeding tickets, which implies increased future risk of loss.

In fact, I received a letter from my homeowners insurance company a couple years ago stating that they would not renew our coverage due to conditions that they'd observed (clearly from aerial imagery) including overgrown bushes touching the walls of the house and some larger tree branches growing over the house.

I had a landscaping company come and fix the issues, sent my own drone up to take new pictures, sent the company the pictures, and they agreed to continue coverage. And now my house has less future risk of damage. This seems like a win-win for both of us.

And knowing those demographics implies knowing something about those individuals.

When you buy a 600g loaf of whole wheat bread from Ralph's Supermarket at 6:17pm on Tuesday Sep 22 2026 for USD4.99, there is zero (0) reason to consider that any more your data than Ralph's data.

Just as you can use that set of facts plan and optimize your budget, so should Ralph's be able to use that data to plan and optimize their business.

Do you take out a lot of clocks? ;)

Cornell / Merlin / eBird publishes a global species frequency DB indexed by location and date (so, how likely is a species to appear in a place, on a day of the year)... In a project that I was working on, this helped a lot when used to influence the "raw" identification based on appearance alone.

See current situation where the Carpenters' Union in California is pushing hard against an initiative that would make it much easier to build more housing in the state because it would also reduce requirements for union labor.

Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon (and in many cases, the benefits are specifically to the more senior union members vis a vis the less senior ones.)

I mean given that effectively all other ISPs delivered nothing under these programs, it's a lot better for folks living in rural areas to get Starlink than nothing...

I'm sorry, but how does a business writer lead an article with garbage like this:

Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue.

Is it revenue or profit? They are not the same thing.

>> And a detection system that works 50%-90% of the time is better in a lot of cases than no automated detection at all. For example, universities need to make cheating with chatgpt risky for students.

I would say that's not necessarily the case unless there are zero false positives. In fact, your university situation is exactly where a detection system that works 50-90% of the time would be a nightmare if a meaningful share of the 10-50% errors were false positives.

A different but equally interesting book about extreme sailing (solo race around the world in the 1960's):

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6055.A_Voyage_for_Madmen

"Not guilty" does not mean "did not do it" - it means "the state didn't prove that they did it beyond a reasonable doubt."

"Disturbing" to be able to economically provide cooking, cleaning, laundry, yard maintenance, snow shoveling, etc., for an elderly parent who lives alone (by her choice)? Why is that disturbing?