Dusting yourself with reactive nanoparticles does seem likely to backfire in exciting ways

Interesting! Not heard of those here in the midwest, although I know the orchards that I'll visit are open about spraying their trees with pesticides despite otherwise having organic vegetables.

Around here we have lots of apple orchards and, similarly, apple varieties, and when the kids were small they asked about why there was only one kind of bananas but several kinds of many other fruits so we learned about where they are grown and how they are imported (and supposed that some places in the world likely only have one kind of apple imported). It is interesting to see the pacific banana photo, we've been able to get plantains here more easily lately than in the recent past but even those aren't near that bright.

As a rule of thumb, I find smaller fruits are more flavorful than the large ones. But large, colorful fruits presumably sell better. You can grow your own strawberries and raspberries pretty easily if you're in a temperate climate, keeping them from spreading too much is the only trouble. Between deer and drought I've had tougher luck with apples but maybe next year I'll have some again.

I don't get the vibe that it can eat enough jobs to pay for itself once it isn't a "loss leader" anymore. Like the only thing I depend on it for now is searching Outlook because the builtin search is busted now that we're off the PST files and in the cloud. The rest is Better Intellisense and Interactive Stack Overflow. It saves me some time, but I'm still not sure it is worth the cost of the license.

Right, they're paying their way into servitude since their "credentials" won't transfer anywhere else.

"Biyani said the academy plans to grow its enrollment and open a two-year program, pending regulatory approval, starting in the fall of 2028. Tuition is expected to be on par with the cost of an elite private university..." An expensive way to vibe educate yourself.

This worked kind of opposite in my district, every classroom had an Apple II and then the library had a few nice computers (with CD ROMs!) so the brand was associated with old crappy stuff for us.

Public school in the first place was to provide factory workers for industry and literate conscripts for the military. See also the push for more kids to get into trades because they can't build the AI Slop factories fast enough.

Easier to disable, harder to steal, I'd think. How would you get and maintain control of it vs just pushing it into the cosmos to never be seen again?

Could be, sure, plenty of normal reasons to have bought video game hardware to resell if you think it'll sell out. It also wouldn't surprise me if there are paid randomized lootboxes for some of the games for in-game hats that people put real money in for or similar type behavior that pools money that is otherwise nontrivial to extract again.

I buy games there, I don't use it to store money I need to cash out by pawning hardware and can't be bothered to figure out why anyone would do that. I'm just aware it is 'a thing'.

When the controllers went on backorder instantly I'd heard that it can be hard to "launder" money out of Steam, and so first party hardware that you can sell third party is more attractive than most platforms. I'm not sure how people tie excessive value into Steam that they want to cash out in the first place but perhaps it is more prevalent in genres of games I don't play.

Acupuncture and chiropracty are examples of things that are mostly scams, but do have some narrow treatment windows where there can be some mild benefit. But you'll see chiropractors claiming to be able to cure allergies and other nonsense. Likewise, acupuncture for anything other than pain management is going to be woo.

Yes a laser is different than the LED mask at the grocery store. It's also going to obliterate exposed bacteria in the area, too.