Have you never been screened where they swab your items and stick it in a machine? That is to detect explosives. They can use the first machine to target people for follow up screening.
I have, but what’s relevant is that I’m always commanded to dump out any liquids in containers bigger than the 3.4 oz limit before going through security unless they’re like a prescription medication. What I’m unclear on why that’s changed if the improvement that’s been made is in detection of liquids in packed bags.
If batteries were standardized and replaceable I bet they would force you to not bring your own, and only ones purchasable passed the gate could be used. Maybe that a silver lining to the repairability issues.
On Scoot (Budget Singapore Air) they let you bring your external phone batteries on the plane but do NOT let you use them. You have to rent one of theirs.
Skyphone installation by the airlines led to "flight mode" because the horror of not paying is far more important than safety.
All of this fake, useless theatre undermines real security and makes us less safe while picking our pockets.
Fluids to bring down a plane? FFS every human is equipped with a bladder. Why was this charlatanism ever tolerated at all?
The intention/purpose of the limit on fluids was to prevent people from assembling liquid explosives inside the plane. The contents of your bladder would not help with that.
So if you drink some of the fluid in front of the goon instead of being instructed to pour the water out, that would show it's not explosive and everything is fine? Test for is this fluid water isn't complex chemistry right? So we're good to go, yeah? No.
It's an attack that never happened and wouldn't. It's nuts.
They should have banned underwear because the underwear bomber /did/ happen. But sure, that's awkward and would impact revenue, (I don't wanna go nude so I won't fly unless I have to), so the ridiculousness of doing so triumphed where it did not with water and shoes.
Lock on the cockpit door was worthwhile (unless the threat is a psychotic German copilot, worked bad then). Also the successful terrorist strategy had expired useless even before the end of its first use on 9/11 as passengers found out, realised new rules: fight back now, hard.
Bastards at Heathrow stole a sealed jar of Fortnum & Mason jam from me. For security! Because onion jam could blow up a plane. FFS. But sure, you could buy the same stuff once through security and take it on the plane at inflated prices. Where there was a financial incentive to do so and a secial interest to lobby for it, the idiocy stopped. In 5 meters.
The purpose of these moronic rules was /not/ what you think it was. It was just a sequence of moronic compromises around dumb ideas influenced by special interest. You can't respect it and respect your own intelligence. Security is actually important, do better.
I don't even think it's the same across viewers. When my partner and I watch some shows, we make prediction for the plot and evaluations of characters. We even have a bet book where we record and score predictions for some shows. It's makes watching much more engaging, especially if the creators hide details and foreshadowing in the background. But you don't even need high quality content to do this, just tighten the restrictions. Law and Order and Hallmark movies only get 30 seconds of content before we make predictions.
It's much more stimulating than just passive consumption. If I don't do this I feel like brain turns to mush after a few hours of TV.
My wife and I do this for Survivor and The Amazing Race. We’re very engaged, debating strategy, making predictions. And then we watched with other people and they just … watched.
I've seen people be smug that they read books and don't watch TV before, but this is the first time I've seen someone be smug that they watch reality TV better than someone else.
You're right, this does come off as smug. It was really more of a culture clash; they were annoyed at us for talking over the show, and we didn't realize that not everyone talked over it. We enjoy engaging with the shows this way, but no disrespect or superiority was intended.
Below Deck is our guilty pleasure for reality TV. We make predictions on who is going to get with whom, at what stage in the season certain people implode, who will get fired. I think Aesha from Below Deck was on the Australian Amazing Race. Also the show has an upstairs/downstairs dynamic we like. It's similar to shows like Downton Abbey.
Writing down predictions with some weighting for confidence is a great way to find out directly just how goddamned bad humans are at predicting things and how good we are at forgetting all the bad predictions we make.
Or just otherwise forcing yourself to be accountable for your predictions is a great way to moderate your ego.
Hobbies are often personal, or at least self serving. Unless your hobby is volunteering. You can hear this in how people talk about out them. "I do this for me."
Alcatraz isn't really that far from land, about a mile away. They have events where you can swim to and from it. The currents make it dangerous, but the distance is unremarkable.
There are local clubs which swim from the island on a regular basis, year 'round. If not absolutely daily, several times a week.
Water temps vary by time of year, but are particularly mild from late summer through late fall. Even winter-time temps aren't particularly challenging. A dog could easily make the swim.
Currents are a challenge, but mostly if you're planning on landing at a specific point along the shore. If your goal is simply to make it to shore, they're far less an issue. Just swim cross-channel and you'll make it.
The physiological and psychological challenges are greatly overblown.
The 36th annual Rottnest Channel Swim will be held on Saturday, 21 February 2026.
Mind you, that's largely Australians who grow up swimming more than many US Navy SEALs do.
Come on down, the waters fine, the sharks rarely nip.
I'm suprised to see a HN comment along the lines of "most people don't ...", after all, most people don't program computers, start million and billion dollar companies, build out datacentres, fly planes, ... etc. The site is littered with people confidently doing things most people do not.
Worth noting that the water in San Francisco can be up to ~20 degrees colder than the water off the coast of Australia. Which adds to the difficulty some.
Sure, there are also a number of cold water long distance swims - the English channel is famous, the Tasmanian ones less so .. but they're cold, long, and have some wicked currents depending which one you take.
The Rottnest swim is just a long warm bath for those that like to dip a toe in and start easy.
To the best of my knowledge few ever attempt the horizontal falls even at slack tide - the waters are warm but the salties and the sharks can be off putting .. come tide change the stoppers will eat people.
> than the water off the coast of Australia.
I should note that Australia is a large continent with an area equal to that of mainland contiguous USofA .. it's not all Gold Coast Qld, just as the US is not all Florida.
Eg: the current water tempreture in San Francisco ( 12.5°C / 54.5°F ) is on par with the September water tempreture when surfing offshore breaks in southern Western Australia (not Perth, the south coast where all the fun is).
If you're a regular to the Australian beaches and headlines I visit you'll see a shark every week .. sometimes daily - and after five decades of swimming once a week if not daily you might get brushed up against once or twice - but it's unlikely you'll be bitten.
You will, however, almost certainly know or meet someone that can flash the scars of a bite.
As far as sea misadventures go, easily the funniest thing I've seen (sorry, we're like that, laughing at danger) was a young kid surfing with a pod of dolphins getting fully pancaked by a breaching dolphin that cleared a wave top, made serious air, and landed smack centre on the kid and his board.
He (the kid) got winded pretty hard, did get his (damaged) board back, and was laughing about it afterwards.
Notice the age range is 65 or older. There is a large cohort of Boomers/GenX/Millenial drinkers who are aging up. The overall downtrend is that younger people are not starting to drink. But those who contributed to the initial rise are getting older.
I imagine that would be one positive effect of endless entertainment being ubiquitous- since people can zone out in front of a screen with any entertainment medium of their choosing, they are less likely to opt for alcohol.
Though interestingly, drunk driving fatalities are rising despite lowering alcohol consumption[1], even discounting the pandemic contriting large jumps up. So of the people that do drink, they're more likely to drive after doing so? It seems like an interesting topic to study.
Anecdotally the drinking culture that existed for me in my youth has completely disappeared. House parties, a staple of my college years, are nonexistent. Talking to recent grads from the same school, their social life looks very different.
I think this is connected to social media but in a different way. Young people are very aware that any deviant behavior will be recorded and posted. Also they are deathly afraid of being "cringe."
Talking to some recent grads (last few years) last summer, parties were pretty much confined to frat parties. The school had a very vibrant house party scene circa 2010, but it sounded dead even pre-Covid. The people I talked to were at a music festival, so high cross over with those who would have attended the parties, not those who spent college locked in a dorm. I was very shocked to hear the difference in experience with within a decade.
This would be a true test of can LLMs innovate or just regurgitate. I think part of people's amazement of LLMs is they don't realize how much they don't know. So thinking and recalling look the same to the end user.
Does this 5% include people who have fallen out of the unemployed bucket into some sort of long term bucket? I know multiple people who have been looking for 6 months+. Not to mention underemployed.
It never has. The labor force participation rate for 25-54 year-olds is a better metric for such things.[1] Last time it was this high was 1990s through 2002. (Before that, it was never this high.)
The shape of that graph is roughly equivalent to the shape of labor force participation for women [1]. I don’t think that detracts from your point in regards to the last 20-30 years, but in regards to “before that it was never this high” I think it’s evident that the societal shift of women joining the workforce is the reason, not an improvement in the economy.
Nah, you'll just be on it for the rest of your life. Drug companies prefer chronic illnesses since they cannot be cured, and recipients take the drug for life. All these hormones (GLP, testosterones, hrt) will need to be taken forever. Very few people come off GLP-1 and keep weight off.
I mean, obesity is a chronic illness, so is hypogonadism. If your balls don't work they don't work.
Chronic illnesses require chronic medication. The same is true even WITHOUT the medication. If you're obese and want to lose the weight, you need to manage your diet and exercise. Forever. Until the day you die. You can't ever stop that or you'll be obese again.
Some things just don't have one-time solutions, and that's okay.
Gilead has made bank on Solvadi, a drug that cures a previously-chronic disease [1].
> Very few people come off GLP-1 and keep weight off
Rebound can be close to 100% if you’re severely obese, but for most people it’s much less [2]. (Everyone I know who was taking it two years ago is off it, and they eat and exercise healthier than they did.)
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