Yep, once upon a time it was hard to get enough food to get fat, especially with all of the exercise that was required just to live. People didn't change, the environment did. I'm not sure why you think it's now a moral failing not to exercise the personal responsibility that was previously unnecessary. Why not just accept GLP-1 agonists as part of the new environment?

No, it has to do with food -- good, bad and indifferent -- getting far cheaper and more abundant. Americans spend a much smaller percentage of their income on food than they did, even in spite of the fact that we eat restaurant-prepared food far, far more often than we used to.

Yes, the availability of cheap, convenient, tasty and empty calories is a bad thing, and its cost has fallen faster than fresh food, but all food is much, much cheaper than it was when America was much slimmer. It's also relevant that Americans are more sedentary because transportation is cheaper and more work and entertainment activities are sedentary.

And with this you undercut your whole argument. Grades provide a way of sorting the student body by ability, whether said student body is composed of elite students or low-middling students (like my alma mater). As long as people want to know who the best of the best are -- and they do -- it's in the best interests of Harvard and the students to sort them effectively.

Note that the fact that Harvard Law has renamed A, B, C and D/E as High Honors, Honors, Pass and Fail, doesn't change that they are still giving those grades. My guess is that they did this renaming because rampant grade inflation everywhere has made people believe that A is good, B is bad and C is awful, and by renaming they enable professors to give C's without the stigma. It's a way to fight the grade inflation problem -- give new labels to the grades to shake off the negative connotations of the lower of the old labels.

Perhaps the rest of Harvard should do the same, and then their professors could go back to applying proper grading curves, so most students will get C, er, Pass.

Of course, unless the school can convince the students that hard grading is a feature, not a bug, this will just produce a renaming treadmill. Everyone will start thinking that only losers get anything less than High Honors, so they'll push professors to give mostly High Honors, so High Honors will lose its meaning and another round of renaming will be needed.

It's not clear to me which of the two you're saying is bad. I assumed that you were opposed to grade inflation in STEM fields at first, but your last sentence makes it sound like your concern is grade inflation in "useless" degrees.

Sure, but what the customer is buying is the prestige of being a Harvard graduate, and the further prestige of being a Harvard graduate with a high GPA, graduation Cum Laude, etc. But if the school isn't challenging that prestige will evaporate over time, because people will realize that Harvard graduates are no longer impressively smart or well-educated people. The value of the degree will decline and the customer will feel shortchanged.

I rarely use delivery myself; for me most of the point of eating out is the "out" part. But among the people I know who use delivery a lot, their starting point for ordering food is the delivery service app, and they choose who they order from mostly based on the user reviews. Restaurants that refuse to join are just invisible to people who primarily use delivery services.

If you can do that, then you could do the same thing with a mobile passport, in a future where everyone knows how to consume them. Assuming a proper implementation of a mobile passport, it would contain all the same data as your paper passport and would be digitally-signed by the issuer to prove authenticity and origin. Both paper and mobile passports should perfectly usable offline... though both could be checked online. I suppose the odds of a mobile passport being checked online might be higher, and a paper passport might be more durable if you need it to last a long time, though expiration would be a problem in both cases.

In reality, if you found yourself in this sort of situation your best best would be to sneak into Canada or Mexico and ask for asylum. If things were to get as bad as rsilvergun assumes, it would be granted.

The mobile driving license standard does not require you to hand your phone over, and indeed it wouldn't help the cop if you did because he'd have to hand it right back so you could unlock before it would send any data. It delivers the data to the copy wirelessly, via NFC, BLE or Wifi, depending on the context. What's on the screen (either a QR code or nothing) does not identify you or prove your driving privileges, so it's useless to the cop, intentionally so.

I was involved in the development and standardization of the mobile driving license standard and in the process spent some time talking to cops from a few jurisdictions. Interestingly to me, the response from the cops was universal: They would strongly object to anything that would require them to touch your phone. Of course, I was talking to the higher-ups and their concern was the liability that would be incurred if a lot of their officers broke peoples' thousand-dollar phones. Individual cops might have different perspectives, but their commanders thought it was way too risky.

As for passports, IMO any useful mobile passport should work the same: No handing over of the device, indeed the protocol should ensure that the device must be in the user's hand to present the passport.

Someday we'll probably get an international standard for mobile passports, but it's not happening any time soon.

Until recently I worked for Google, on Android, and participated in the International Standards Organization (ISO) committee that would be tasked with defining the technical standard for mobile passports. To be clear, the ISO committee can't actually issue such a standard, passports are standardized through ICAO. But the relevant ICAO committee delegates the technical work to an ISO committee.

The current situation in those committees is that the companies who make passport booklets and passport acceptance infrastructure are successfully fending off attempts to define a standard to enable mobile passports. They have gotten a new standard (called the "Digital Travel Credential - Physical Component", DTC-PC) approved that allegedly facilitates mobile devices with passports but isn't actually usable. Apple has refused to implement it and Google isn't making any moves to support it (though someone could write an Android app that does; all of the necessary APIs are available).

One of the main sticking points is that the ICAO committee is currently specifying that any digital travel credential should not support data minimization, meaning the ability to present just a subset of the data. More precisely, they specify that data minimization is a non-goal, but since a protocol that supports retrieving and authenticating a subset of the data without leaking any of the un-presented data is always going to be a lot more complex than a protocol that sends the entire data set in a single signed blob, any technical proposal that supports data minimization will be shot down as needlessly complex.

The ICAO's position on data minimization is that the only use of travel credentials is presentation at border checkpoints, and at border checkpoints you always have to present all of the data, so data minimization support is unnecessary. The counterargument from many people is that passports are used in many contexts other than border checkpoints, and many of those other contexts don't need and therefore shouldn't get all of the data in the passport. Since both Google and Apple insist on data minimization as an essential feature, there's not much movement happening.

My guess is that it will take 2-3 years to break the current logjam on even beginning work on a real, usable standard, then another few years to define it and put it into effect, then a few years more for most border checkpoints to accept it, and perhaps a few years beyond that for people to become sufficiently confident in their mobile devices' reliability that they will travel without a paper passport booklet. So... 20 years or so.

The work with the TSA is on derived credentials that are based on your passport (and securely authenticated), using a protocol derived from the ISO 18013-5 mobile driving license standard. It does support data minimization and looks a lot like what an eventual passport protocol should look like (IMNSHO -- note that I designed big chunks of the 18013-5 standard), but will not be accepted at any border checkpoints.

A paper passport doesn't increase your odds of getting out. All passports are verified electronically by the airlines and TSA. If there's a flag on your passport it doesn't matter whether it's in your phone wallet or in your hand.

Sort of. System updates originate from Google but flow through the OEM, which is contractually obligated to validate them and then push them out. Apps and some system services (Play services, a collection of security-related system components, etc.) are updated directly by Google.

The expectation for Android Automotive is that systems will have a 15-20 year support lifespan. I think there are even contractual obligations mandating the lower end of that range. So I don't think you keep your vehicles long enough for it to be an issue.

Unless you derive great satisfaction from housework, why would you not want a robot to do it for you so you can spend your time on things you enjoy?

I think the honest answer to this is "find another career". I'm not sure software engineering is a good choice today. But, really, I'm not sure what is.

But FictionPimp and others refusing to take advantage of the tools that have become available won't stop the transition. Junior engineers are going to have to find something else, they can't rely on their older colleagues to protect their jobs.

Uh, no. Center of gravity isn't related to how high the driver sits.

Ah, I see, you think they should use low-floor buses. Those are a lot more expensive, have higher maintenance costs (especially the kneeling ones), require flatter terrain (buses don't go offroading, but where I live they can't stay on the pavement all the time and also have to contend with deep snow), and give up seating capacity because the wheel wells and rear engine intrude into the seating are. Their only real advantage is accessibility. City bus systems can't predict where disabled people will be, so all buses have to be accessible.

School districts, on the other hand, do know where the disabled kids are so it's much more cost effective to buy and operate less expensive buses for moving the 95% of the kids who can climb stairs and to operate a separate fleet of smaller buses equipped for accessibility to pick up the disabled kids. So, they save the money on buses and spend it instead on teachers and classrooms.

As a taxpayer and a parent and grandparent, I think that's the right choice.