Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina wrote: “We deeply value our partnership with first responders and our shared commitment to safety. Their ongoing feedback has been instrumental in driving impactful improvements to the Waymo service.” […] The company says it has conducted in-person training for more than 35,000 emergency responders across the country.

Instead of adapting Waymo to the needs of humans and emergency services, let’s just tell them how they need to change to fit us instead!

reflect long-simmering and sometimes vocal frustrations expressed by city leaders since at least late last year. Since autonomous vehicle operations are regulated in California and Texas by state rather than city officials, local first-responder departments and those who represent them can generally only request that developers like Waymo make specific changes to their operations.

Sounds like they don’t really value those relationships like they claim to.

to connect […] with Waymo operators to move the vehicle, […] it had taken up to three minutes to connect with a remote agent in the past. They reiterated that Waymos don’t always respond well to hand signals, especially ones from police mounted on motorcycles. Waymo declined to attend the meeting […] the Waymo spokesperson, said the company has "already had the substantive conversations this moment calls for,” and said the company has answered questions from city officials.

Translation: we’re tired of listening to you, get out of our way and let our cars run free!

“We will keep working with Austin’s leadership and first-responder community, because ongoing collaboration is how we build the trust this city deserves and make Austin’s streets safer,” she wrote.

Lol, that’s not at all what you’re doing. Are you taking Republican lessons in lying, double-speak, and aggressive non-listening?

The thing that absolutely infuriates me about this is that [?one of the fire chiefs? ?the county emergency manager? Someone] had been advocating for like 20 years to get a flood warning system in place, but it would have cost about a million dollars - less than $20 per person in the county. Except the county residents repeatedly refused to pay for it. Then the county got a bunch of pandemic funds which they could’ve spent on emergency infrastructure upgrades, but they decided to spend it on other stuff. And now they want the state of Texas to pay for it. Pay for your own damn infrastructure, assholes, and stop killing your kids.

Gotta have income to pay the lawyers. Plus, if you read the articles last summer, what kept a lot of families still going there was momentum and tradition. If the operators could have kept the camp open this summer, momentum and tradition may have carried the camp forward and they may have recovered, but this is the death knell for the camp. Some families will drop their summer camp tradition entirely, and a bunch of other camps are going to snatch up the remaining campers and do their damnedest to make sure those kids have a fantastic time and want to return to their camp and not Camp Mystic.

Gotta push them out on the streets, then arrest them for homelessness, and put them in camps with the rest of the homeless. Or push them out on the streets, accuse them of mental illness, and put them in camps with the rest of the mentally ill.

Once they’re crammed into the these hastily-built camps (minimal facilities for hygiene, nutrition, medical care, or even heating/cooling) – well, we wouldn’t want anyone to have to pay to support them, they should support themselves! I’m sure there are corporations that would live to rent them for a few dollars an hour, and we can use that money to pay for food and stuff - except someone will skim off most of that money. Then between the overwork and the lack of nutrition, hygiene and healthcare, the social murder machine will be all set to run!

They know it won’t pass, but they’re positioning themselves to run on “affordability”. Of course, if they win, they’ll “try” to pass a similar bill, but it’ll get watered down to “increase minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2035” or similar bullshit.

Sounds like an easy way to get out of going to a dinner where he was going to get roasted.

Ridiculous Fishing

“As of December 10, 2025, the Android version is no longer downloadable from the Google Play store.”

:(

I used to play the web version of Bee Sort. Unfortunately, I got stuck on level 371 and the web version doesn’t have the option to skip a level. Does the app version have that option?

Good choice - I was going to suggest Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection.

Congratulations, The Onion!!!

I think the elevator one is the same as escalators: to minimize traffic disruption. If you’re facing away from the elevator doors, you can’t tell if you’re at the right floor (causing a delay), you can’t see if there are people interested in entering (another delay), people interested in entering will likely assume this isn’t your floor (yet another delay), it takes time to turn around when it is your floor (delay), and you disrupt anyone behind you in the elevator who also wants to exit there.

So, the mandate is the BBC is (was?) to inform, educate, and entertain, which was the mandate they created Doctor Who under. The entertainment is obvious, but where’s the informing and educating? Go back to the first Doctor: the stories alternated between going back into the past and going forward into the future. To inform and educate the viewer, we had history teacher Ian and science teacher Barbara, who would briefly include some information within the episode.

Also, if you watch the opening credits of (I think, it’s been a long time for some of them!) the Doctors’ color episodes, not only do you have the Doctor/TARDIS going forward and back (movement in time), you also have the colors red and blue in the background colors, denoting red shift/blue shift (movement in space).

Anyway, I would argue that Old Who had a more factual/educational underlayer through most of it’s run, making it the more “science-y” of the two versions; while NuWho, while much flashier and with generally stronger storylines, is much more space opera/space fantasy, without the underlying educational layer.

I don’t understand the clock one.

Part of the western Florida panhandle (WFP) is on Central time. Part of southeastern Oregon (SEO) is on Mountain time. That puts them one hour apart.

In the fall, when we go back into Standard Time, when the clock hits 2am, you flip the clock back to 1am.

So, during a normal night, WFP would be at 2am and SEO would be 1am. But on the night the time changes, WFP hits 2am and immediately flips their clocks back to 1am - which means that, for one hour a year (until SEO hits 2am and flips their clocks back), part of Florida and part of Oregon’s clocks are showing the exact same time.

I kinda struggled over how to word this - they’re not in the same time zone, but for this one hour they might as well be.

For one hour each year, part of Florida and part of Oregon have the exact same time on their clocks.

Sharks have existed long enough as a species to have orbited the entire Milky Way Galaxy - twice.

.

First Luigi, now this guy.

And don’t spend money on fancy prescription sunglasses - that gives you an extra pair of expensive glasses to lose. You can get over-glasses sunglasses for like $20 each. They fit over your regular glasses; provide more sunglare protection from the sides, overhead and even reflected upward; you’ll still be wearing your regular glasses so you won’t lose them; and they’re cheap enough that you don’t need to worry about scratching or losing them.

Name eight members of his Cabinet that you think would’ve voted to remove Trump.

Vance didn’t have a majority of the Cabinet.

The New York Times also reported that despite polling his top advisers, he often only heard “what he wanted to hear,” and his team wound up serving as an echo chamber for his gut instincts.

Vice President JD Vance was the most vocal in his opposition to the United States going to war with Iran, while CIA Director Jim Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump that Netanyahu had “oversold” him on what could be achieved by the bombing campaign, according to The New York Times.

None of them, though, except Vance, went as far as to say to the president that war was a “terrible idea,” according to the report. The vice president is said to have played a key role in negotiating a ceasefire between Iran and the U.S. as Trump threatened to wipe Iranian civilization off the map.

Honestly, this sounds both like Vance is trying to recover his image after those disastrous press conferences, and Team Vance trying to position themselves as “the more responsible alternative” in the impeachment stakes.