At first I thought they were making a sly joke by using the actual employee’s name.

Fuck that thing, and it’s unlimited factory ass. I’ve got your stonehenge, riiiight here.

I was surprised to hear neopets is still a thing. A friend went and checked it on a whim.

but it’s actually not as bad or ghoulish as it sounds

We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. I think decisions made solely for making the company’s cost as low as possible while actively choosing to not care about issues just because their chance is low (we’ve all seen fight club, right? [If A > B where B=cost of paying out * chance of occurrence and A=cost of recall, no recall]) even if devastating are ghoulish.

The reason is likely to compete with Uber, 🤦

A few points of clarity, as I have a family member who’s pretty high up at waymo. First, they don’t want to compete with uber. Waymo isn’t really concerned with driverless cars that you or I would be owning/using, and they don’t want (at this point anyway) to try to start a new taxi service. Right now you order an uber and a waymo car might show up. . They want the commercial side of the equation. How much would uber pay to not have to pay drivers? How much would a shipping company fork over when they can jettison the $75k-150 drivers?

Second, I know for a fact that the upper management was pushing for the cars to drive like this. I can nearly quote said family member opining that if the cars followed all the rules of the road, they wouldn’t perform well, couching it in the language of ‘efficiency.’ It was something like, “being polite creates confusion in other drivers. They expect you to roll through the stop sign or turn right ahead of them even if they have right of way.” So now the waymo cars do the same thing. Yay, “social norms.”

A third point is that, as someone else mentioned, the cars are now trained, not ‘programmed’ with instructions to follow. Said family member spoke of when they switched to the machine learning model, and it was better than the highly complicated (and I’m dumbing down my description because I can’t describe it well) series of if-else statements. With that training comes the issue of the folks in charge of things not knowing exactly what is going on. An issue that was described to me was their cars driving right at the edge of the lane, rather than in the center of it, and they couldn’t figure out why or (at that point, anyway) how to fix it.

As an addendum to that third point, the training data is us, quite literally. They get and/or purchase people’s driving. I think at one time it was actual video, not sure now. So if 90% of drivers blast through at the moment of the red light change if they can, it’s likely you’ll hear about it eventually from waymo. It’s a weakness that ties right into that ‘social norm’ thing. We’re not really training safer driving by having machine drivers, we’re just removing some of the human factors like fatigue or attention deficits. Again, as I get frustrated with the language of said family member (and I’m paraphrasing), ‘how much do we really want to focus on low percentage occurrences? Improving the ‘miles per collision’ is best at the big things.’

The ‘not significant’ part could be due to low numbers in general, so they can’t get the variances small enough to get low p numbers. It’s a quote that I can’t quite remember perfectly that is well known in sociology/psychology: “The only reason our findings aren’t significant is because we’re too damn lazy to drag enough people in for the study.”

DID scam patients, but there’s no justice if you aren’t ‘worth’ the police’s effort.

That’s a pretty shapely bag.

Okay, let’s make this simple enough for you. Pictures, everybody. Pictures for the man with the mind of a sloth. Exhibit A. Exhibit B.

Again, as somebody that was grown catholic, where are you getting that from?

Then, like most catholics in the wild, you don’t have much grasp of the tenets of the religion. It’s weird that I’m the only one in my family who actually remembers anything from the catechism classes, but it seems standard in my see (that I’m not a part of anymore, but when I was forced to attend mass and such) that no one has any idea of the various positions of the faith espoused by the church. Catholicism is one of the interesting christian sects because it actually has a long history of ‘reasoning’ its way to the conclusions that shape the beliefs, and its sort of sad that the average person claiming catholicism as their religion knows so little of it.

Anyway, back to the original point: No meat on Fridays has been a thing for a very long time, in the actual annals of the religion’s leaders. Go look at the council of Trent and their declarations. For the philosophy of it, read Thomas Aquinas and his (now) laughable idea: The idea that fish don’t inherit original sin because they don’t have sex. For the practical reasons, go read the NPR article that details some of the history behind it.

Um… are we talking about in Mexico? Because 40 year old virgin gave little me so many horrible thoughts.