It saddens me that the new CEO and board at Southwest seem so deadset on transforming into an also-ran in the industry. Kelleher built something truly great. Kelly, unfortunately, neglected upkeep leading to poor policy choices and utter performance failure of their scheduling system. Now Jordan seems intent on cooking the goose.

I don't know for certain whether I've ever had it but I had something in Jan 2019 that hit me like a sledgehammer of a flu - coughing like a maniac for a dew days and fatigue about as bad as mono - and as it finally broke, I noticed anything I ate tasted absolutely amazing. I didn't think anything of it until about 2 years later when my parents caught covid and I took off work to take care of my mom while my dad was in the hospital. About a week into it, she started making comments about any food I gave being really flavorful or extremely salty or extra spicy. My guess was that as a lost sense of taste returned, it was just picked up as "brighter" or "louder". It also made me wonder whether than Jan 2019 thing I got could have been an earlier version since in 2 weeks of live-in support, I didn't catch it.

Given the shoddy traffic-dodging directions I get from google maps, I sure hope none of my tax money gets used for this service. Here in the LA area, it seems like the best case scenario is getting led to drive 10-20% more miles to arrive at the same time or later, and about a 50/50 chance of "this route will save you 5 minutes" taking 10-15 minutes longer than the original ETA.

...for freely distributing patented pollen to fields that haven't licensed the technology from Monsanto.

Sounds like a placeholder bill. Just put any useless garbage on paper to have a live bill, then once it's in committees, completely change it so whatever pork spending nonsense that would a third rail through the general vote, has a free ride to the governor's desk.

The idea of a small in-home nuclear reactor can be rather concerning so it''s a relief to see it attached to a company as trustworthy as Enron...

It can't be restructured enough. Current IRS takings are around 4.5 Trillion. Congressional spending budget exceeds that by 1.5-2 Trillion. 12,500/year to every America comes out to 4.125 Trillion. That means everything else the government does would have to fit into less than 400 Billion for a balanced budget or about 2 Trillion for a status quo deficit. And it doesn't take into account the inflation stimulus effect that would occur. Look at how the CPI moved in 2021-2023 after the Covid stimulus and "Inflation Reduction" Act. Both were spending bills dropping money from helicopters to citizens and corporations. Now imagine seeing that time 12 and choose which hyperinflated eceonomy you's like me to say it would look like... Weimar? Zimbabwe? Nicaragua? Yugoslavia? Hungary? I'll be more than happy to show you where each ended up in bloody times because of it.

There is a significant problem of scale to virtually every proposal on how to fund this. 50 grand fun for 4 people... ok. There are 330,000,000 Americans. I presume by the moniker "Universal" that it is meant to be paid out to everyone. 330MM times 12,500 per person is 4.125 Trillion dollars. If that is gleaned from investing in the S&P500 and was from a 5% annual return, that would require approximately 82.5 Trillion dollars in the fund. If you owned every share of every company in S&P's bundle, your fund would be worth approximately 40-45 Trillion. But it's not realistic to own and sell every share. If we look at just one company (actually the largest company in the S&P500) - Apple - it has over 15 Billion shares and in a given year, there might be 40-50 million that get transacted. That's about 1/3 of 1% of the market that actually moves. So if we take that ratio and extrapolate out to the whole S&P500, assuming your fund could consume all the current traffic of all the stocks in it and that APPL is reasonable representative, that would give about 141 billion to work with or about 11 million of those $12,500 annual payouts. Far from universal, and yet still way more than would be realistically possible by that methodology. If the funding could be found for even a million payouts, I would be shocked. And then at that point, it wouldn't even be UBI. It would be just another Welfare.

The story started strong but part 2 was weak and part 3 turned kind of cliche.

My guess as to what happened is they had a really killer vision in part 1. The subtle and quiet Lovecraftian themes were present mostly as foreshadowing and I have a gut feeling the original intent was for Shepherd to die at the end of the first episode. The lack of creative control led the primary minds behind what was an amazingly conceived story in the first one left, small themes remained in part 2 like Shepherd being killed in the opening and strange supernovas possibly related to the use of FTL technology. But by the third one, it had to get wrapped up so the best they could come up with is "machine life fears organics and pre-emptively kills them" which fell way short of the promises in the first one when Sovereign monologued about something incomprehensibly large purpose the reapers had. What could have been a really amazing piece of sci turned into a simple and rather basic "shoot them before they shoot you" war story. But it had a starchild and different color endings so I guess it was a gaming masterpiece.

I'm calling it now: Star Wars Episode 10: The Wing Commander.

Hyperspace has collapsed and now Rey must seek out and find an old Jedi Navigation specialist played Freddie Prinze Jr. and his quirky ace pilot buddy played by Matthew Lillard.

correction: longitude. But you knew what I meant...

Split the difference. At the center latitudes of the time zone, when the sun is at its zenith, the time is 11:30 AM.

Selling off all the parts of the business probably is the right move. They have a very public and literally deadly track record showing that it has not been managed well. Being proactive about it before a full-on collapse could prevent a much more difficult situation when a lack of liquidity and viability force it to happen.

Having worked for one of two small companies in a big industry 95% controlled by two very large companies, trying to get initial qualifications through Boeing R&T, supply chain, engineering, and quality, I'll say flat out I hope MOST of the "professionals" that I worked with are in that 10%. Especially the R&T side... their arrogance was matched only by their ignorance. I got so tired of hearing "because that's the way we've always done it". God forbid they actually study whether it's effective or even necessary. I wish I could scream out some of the nonsense they insisted on but it would be too identifying. Or the things our product managers saw when visiting their production floors... things you'd hear about GM Fremont just prior to Toyota deploying NUMMI. That said, the supplier quality guys I dealt with were both fantastic. Very practical and down to earth and seemed almost regretful when the R&T parts of their contingents started making demands that we function exactly like the much larger competitors in our field (which the lead one previously worked for)... the fact we didn't was why we could sell our products at about 30% less than one and 50% less than the other. And that was with out products performing better and more consistently that those from the competition, and 99.7% on-time rate compared to maybe 90% for one and 70% for the other....

I don't know if it existed or wasn't aware of it at the time if it did. Amtrak's booking tool only showed itineraries up to SLO on the coastal route and only offered the central valley + bus trip for booking between LA and SF.