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I must be well out of the loop because I had no idea that the notch was anything other than a cosmetic trick to hide the camera.

I was working in Sydney and the instructions for dropping off the off-site backup tapes said "turn left at the Woman In Red fountain".

I had never heard of the Babylon Bee and I just took a look at it. Are you saying you think The Onion is the very political one, or did I misread your sentence?

When a company says "cost of living" they mean their own, not their employees. So-called COLA adjustments are for Cost of Hiring, or Cost of Employee Retention. The distinction is that it is calculated based on minimizing unwanted attrition due to wage competition elsewhere, and has nothing to do with how much rent or milk prices may have increased.

Maybe they did. Do you suppose they got scammed on eBay - which they "perfectly" remember buying it from - or from the Red Cross, which they have an invoice for?

Not all of the videos are Matrix City, some are real places.

The bigger companies used their cash during the pandemic to go on a hiring spree, both bloating their headcount and their overall salaries.

The smaller/lower tier companies did not have the cash to compete with this, and now do not have as much to fix.

Also the layoffs in smaller companies just aren't big news.

At the same time, it also seems to accept unintelligible grunting as a correct pronunciation for many questions, and not just German.

I'm sure it's not the best language learning tool around, but it has taught me enough of three different languages to visit a foreign country, ask for directions, order things, etc, with a number of conversations never falling back into English. And all for the price of free.

Wasn't one of their initial monetization ideas that crowdsourced translations - from amateurs, not even paid contractors - would outperform AI translation? The translation thing never came close to panning out, from what I can tell.

Back in the day you used to be able to see a mini discussion thread about any exercise. The comments in these threads - from unpaid users - were frequently much more helpful than the official teaching notes. But they got rid of those a while back, too. At the time people suggested it was because they wanted to push people into some sort of paid tutoring offering that they'd announced. But I don't see any hint of that around. Now I'd guess it's because the questions are no longer hand crafted by people, and are now autogenerated by AI, leading to an inability to have discussions about specific questions.

Delivery from online, it's not just for spammers.

In fact, every medical insurance provider I've had for years has tried to push me onto their in-house pharmaceutical delivery service. Traditional pharmacies have been getting squeezed for a long time.

They keep opening new branches around here. They are glorified ATM lobbies with minimal staff who will often direct you to use an ATM for anything that an ATM can do. But they do keep opening them. I sometimes wonder if it's just a complicated real estate investment play.

To be extra pedantic, he only said that "early systems" had that limitation, and that that drove username culture.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if more runners do die from cancer. Because they're not falling victim to all the other things that are improved by cardio fitness, etc.

YMMV, apparently.

For me, the standard medium for a meeting for decades been face to face, with videoconference in second, long before covid changed everything.

I have always hated phone calls, and conference calls specifically are one of the circles of hell.