StrictDabbler

I haven't been in Canada in a while. I don't understand why you are tipping on an iPad mini. Are you Doordashing it? What changed since I left?

I'm not worried about privacy on any of that. Maybe a little about locations, but it's not like I'm randomizing my fast food visits to hide my tracks.

My concern is Goodhart's law.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Named after British economist Charles Goodhart, it means that once you reward or punish people based on a specific metric, they will game the system to optimize that number, destroying its reliability.

With McDonald's, this is quite clear. They have always aimed at minimizing the drive thru time. To support this, restaurants now tell you "please pull around and park in spot X", then they bring the food out.

But when you're in spot X there are downsides. First, you have to go through the extra time to park, which may be affected by lot traffic. Then, if they forgot the soda or a condiment, they have to run all the way back in to get it. They need extra staff running those orders from the back to the cars and the staff are now clogging the restaurant entry. They're even losing some of their HVAC with the main door opening more often.

Trying to minimize drive-thru time actually made the drive-thru experience less efficient and less effective.

So when I see a company getting data-driven in a way that doesn't really affect my privacy, much, I have a second concern about how the data they're pulling will distort their operations.

Maximizing average spend is one of those things. It suggests they're going to try to rejigger the menu so that ordering items ala carte is unexpectedly pricey.

And indeed, it turns out that the best way to order two hamburgers, fries and a drink, currently, is to order the two cheeseburger meal without cheese, because any other version of the order is a money trap.

This also gets you a fresher hamburger because it has to be handled as a special order and isn't out of the Universal Holding Cabinet.

But that makes McDonald's less efficient for anybody who isn't trying to hack McDonalds' latest data-driven menu decisions.

All of which is to say, I recommend purchasing citizenship in Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong while it's still inexpensive.

(That is, read Snow Crash, and understand that is the dystopia we're actually headed for - apart from the main plotline - rather than the Big Brother world people generally fear)

As a West Coaster, I had to look up nearly every term in this article. As usual, "Canadian" almost entirely means the central/east areas.

Oh good, I've been waiting for this.

I'm glad to see WCRI is still there, though it's hard to claim it's fully "off-campus".

There's no single cause. Forming memories requires many parts of the brain. Injury to or illness in any one of them can cause anteretrograde amnesia.

It's like asking "what makes a person unable to walk?" Arthritis, paralysis, muscle wasting, MS, Parkinson's, a broken bone, an amputated foot... some are temporary, some are permanent.

Walking is hard, even though most of us can do it. Forming memories is similarly hard.

The pronunciation of the word is already on the boundaries between "awk-toe-poos", "awk-tuh-puhs", and "awk-tah-piss" depending on your region just in America.

So adding an additional "-es" that can be "-ehhs" or "-iz" gives at least six possible pronunciations.

A human or animal corpse that was accidentally mummified is still called a mummy. It's a technical term. A lot of mummies are just people who died in a peat bog, desert or ice cave.

Many mummies were also made cruelly rather than respectfully. The Maori mummified the fallen as trophies of war. The Inca would leave sacrifices to be mummified by the mountain ice.

So yes, somebody who dies in a derelict building and dries out is a mummy.

The drying is straightforward, water evaporates, but do you maintain a personal mikveh?

I'm reading through the requirements and this is a serious piece of plumbing, expensive to install at home.

But it has such a purifying ritual function that I think showing up at a communal mikva'ot with a toaster would be awkward.

Does everybody expect that some people will have toasters? You take out your dental bridge and your earrings, trim your nails and your calluses, pick up the toaster and walk on in?

These facilities mostly resemble nice spas.

I'm not mocking the belief here, just curious what it's like as a human participating. If I were trying to purify a toaster I'd pour deionized water into a rubber tub but I gather that doesn't count.

Edit:

To answer my own question, it looks like communal mikva'ots are built with separate sections similar to a sink just for the immersion of things like dishes and toasters and don't require as much personal cleaning, so that's simple and human. As these things usually are.

I hope they can get access to the materials collected by "The Art of Sierra" team. That team went around collecting hundreds of documents including many original background paintings and then completely failed to produce the intended art book.

"The Art of Sierra" was started something like 15 years ago and it's been 9 years since their last facebook post. The project is totally dead but they still have all that priceless memorabilia.

Oh, of course. My reply wasn't intended as a challenge. I'm just enthusiastic. It's one of my favorite "bad" games.

I have also been obsessed with "Below the Root" since it came out.

Dale Disharoon/DeSharone had an odd insight into textures. Look at the ladders. Look at the vines, both those that can be climbed and those that can be cut with a "trencher beak". Look at the way the trees evoke growing wood. The visuals are much more evocative than should be possible at this resolution.

Dale also did a Disney-licensed Apple II game based on "The Jungle Book" which is similar in character to "Below the Root" and a game based on "Alice in Wonderland". Both are strange and mystical and full of odd vines that remind me of the patterns left by the cellular automaton "Langton's Ant".

All Dale's games were unfair and opaque but that was the state of the art.

I enjoy the similarity between this and the famous "Huey Lewis and the News" rant from American Psycho.

Appreciate it.

Sincerely,

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