I think about how much the planet is heating up because people like me are a little too lazy to be competent. I am glad my nieces and nephews get to pay our price we are raising every day on their behalf, to improve their world supposedly with our extra productivity, right?

The amount of times the shit breaks down combined with the slower speeds means it doesn't really matter if they work 24/7 right now. Yes, robots are coming, but amazon has been acting like they will be here tomorrow since it's inception. The reality is robots that cost less than people that at least do comparable work in the same time frame is still a decade or 2 away optimistically. Amazon trying to force it doesn't change that. Amazon is to robots what meta is to vr. Dumping tons of money trying to force the 'future' today.

It is common in the military to give commissioned rank to certain positions for the higher pay grade. The fast tracking takes away from the belief everyone serving with you went through (roughly) the same basic training as you.

I have been chuckling like a dork at this particular patent since such things first became searchable online, and have never found any evidence of it being manufactured and marketed at all. The "non-adhesive adherence" is illustrated in the diagrams on the patent which you can see at the link. The inventor proposes "a facing of fluffy fibrous material" to provide the filtration and the adherence; basically this thing is the softer side of a velcro strip, bent in half with the fluff facing outward so it sticks to the inside of your buttcrack to hold itself in place in front of your anus and filter your farts through it.

There may be several reasons for this. If I had to guess, they found a critical flaw and had to shut it down for security reasons.

If I went to the USA now, they'd probably put me there after looking at my social media activity anyway

Only way I'll want a different phone brand is if it comes with ZERO bloatware and has an excellent internal memory/storage cleanse that has nothing to do with Google's Files or a random app I'm not sure I can trust without paying or rooting. So far my A series phones do what I need mostly and in my opinion is superior to the Motorola's my fiancé prefers minus the phone-phone charge ability his has, everything else I'm just glad I have enough control to tweak things to my liking, however these days Samsungs seem to be infested with Google bloatware and apps that insist on opening themselves back up regardless of the widespread battery restrictions I've assigned (even was sent a "Stop Closing my Apps" notif that sent me to an article ) short of Disabling many unnecessary apps bc fully rooting my devices is something I rarely do anymore. I have a random Chinese brand tablet where I actually have more control over the apps than either of my A series phones whee Force Stopping STAYS that way when I tell them to! I hate being listened to for ads and the unwanted draining my battery life and data (I live off-grid and pay data rates because "Unlimited" is some throttled BS) so my ability to control what's going on in the background matters a lot to me, enough that I'm anti Meta-apps and avoid all non-essential Google apps. I can't afford topline phones and the largest data plan, so I work with what I can afford and I'm sad refurbished A lines seem to be getting more expensive while giving away my control to companies. Last A line I bought that was supposed to be my first 5G phone was network locked, so I got ripped off, but it still serves me well in off-grid life. Only app that actually regularly malfunctions when I Force Stop it's background presence is Roku, which I find to have very an almost insidious presence in our lives. Google Play, Chrome, and Spotify never acts incompetent in any way no matter how I have to open the setting every single time I turn Airplane Mode off. Don't need Gmail with Chrome and DuckDuckGo has been awesome at intercepting self-loading ads. I hope one day DDG gets better bc Google seems to be terrible lately and I even caught their AI contradicting itself when asking about if Homo Florensis is considered Human (yes) and then asked the oldest age of human remains, and was fed the outdated narrative of 300,000 years versus 700,000+ years bipedal pre-humans have been carbon dated outside of the Cradle of Humanity in South Africa. SO sorry to go off-topic, but I've got a big gripe with Samsung's partnership with Google, especially considering the launch of Quantum Computed AI that is still being fine-tuned with company-approved censorships.