We used to spend a lot of time in bear country. We both carried .45 pistols on our hips. We didn’t plan to shoot at the bear, we planned to make a whole lot of noise shooting into the ground in front of us. We also had bear spray on the other hip.
When we went into town, we always were very aware that we were armed. As responsible gun owners, we felt it was our responsibility to keep them on our hips because it is hard to safely secure anything in a soft top jeep.
So that’s another reason for someone to be carrying a sidearm into a diner. They got hungry and didn’t want to risk losing their weapon if their car got broken into.
I will agree that it probably wasn’t the case, but you never know.
“Unalived himself” is just such a boneheaded construction. There already was “took his own life,” or the old obituary euphemism “chose to leave this world on his own terms.” Or go all Camus and proclaim that a free individual has the right and duty to examine their own existence and may choose to renounce it. Or “patently remained on the line through Customer Services’ delaying tactics and cancelled his subscription nonetheless.”
It came about on social media as a euphemism because content bots on Youtube or Tiktok will demonetize or age-restrict videos with the words “suicide” or “killed himself” in them. (There’s one channel I watch that spent several years referring to covid as “the Backstreet Boys reunion tour” for the same reason.)
Using it in real life is, as the kids would say, cringe.
Kroger, which will be the biggest grocery chain in the country if its merger with Safeway goes through, wants to use AI to profile its customers and raise prices on the fly if it thinks they can afford to pay more.
Aside from the fact that such a scheme is nakedly avaricious and would almost certainly discriminate against customers on prohibited grounds, it’s not even anywhere near feasible - Amazon’s “just walk out” stores were vaunted as being AI-powered but turned out to just be hundreds of people watching cameras at a call center in India, and their stores are about the size of a 7-Eleven. We’re nowhere near where that could be scaled up to a grocery store with 50,000 square feet of sales floor and hundreds of customers at a time.
I used to work for a company that is heavily invested in AI, and I still have some of their stock. So I don’t exactly hope it busts soon. On the other hand you are quite correct.
And I work in a grocery store (not a publicly-traded one, fortunately, but I do own about a quarter mil in company stock) where people will throw a fit if they think the price on an item should be ten cents less than what it is. I can only imagine the arguments that would ensue if we were literally changing the price for every customer.
I even participated on another message board about a particular tabletop RPG (I won’t say which one) that had discussions about half-orcs and other half-monsters which would inevitably bring up the subject of rape and how gaming groups handled (or avoided) the subject in their games.
The people who ran the boards put in a filter that automatically changed the word to “surprise sex” in posts.
I think the worst euphemism I’ve heard is “Kermit sewer slide”, because at that point you’re getting so oblique with what you’re trying to say that you may as well be speaking in rhyming slang or Polari or some other kind of secret language that you have to be “in the know” to understand.
What we’re seeing now, like we did 25 years ago, is a speculative bubble around a technology that isn’t nearly mature enough or sustainable enough to deliver on what the hype artists are promising and what the people pumping billions of dollars into it expect from it, and it isn’t going to be profitable any time soon, so the sooner it bursts and people stop acting like LLMs are going to replace all human labor in time for the Q3 earnings statement, the better.
And of course, the internet was USEFUL and low overhead. Most people don’t need or want AI products, and with the energy consumption they require the only way to actually make them profitable is going to be to discover cold fusion.
We have had bears break into our cars 3-4 times. Lost count. But if your car door is open… Umm… I don’t want to just poke my head in there, I prefer to have a quick escape into the house. Last time I shot a .357 into the ground near the car. If a bear was still in the car, I should be able to see movement by waking it up, the car would rock a little. In twilight, you really can’t see through a cars windows from a distance. I like to stay at least 20 feet away and have a shorter distance to my house.
Haven’t seen bear this year. although my neighbor had one in a tree. He said he thought it was a cougar because it hissed at him. Nope, bear.
