I’ve noticed that anecdotally as well. There are a lot of good points already listed in other comments, and I have a couple merely additive points.

On an individual passenger basis, direct flying has always been operationally cheaper if both options exist, because it’s a more efficient use of resources. In practice, financial efficiency also requires keeping all flights as full as possible, so it was maybe helpful for an airline to incentive a customer to keep hub flights full by pricing connections lower than a direct. The direct flight is arguably more valuable to a customer because it’s a better experience, so it can cost more. All three flights are going to fly anyway, so making the sale is most important to the airline.

But equally or more important, the overall volume of air travel passengers has grown enormously over the past several decades. I’d bet that many direct routes didn’t used to have enough pairwise volume to run a regularly full profitable flight, let alone multiple competing direct options. Now I expect a ton more pairs of cities to make economic sense.

Looking at it another way, that increased travel volume over decades also came with larger airports to support more total trips, and each of those new flights need to go somewhere. Airlines can add more options throughout the day to cities already served, and they can add new cities. They naturally choose both, therefore more direct routes are created. As more direct routes have supporting volume, the inefficiencies of the hub and spoke model dominate the bottom line.

The billionaires are this much in charge, and I fear for the political future of the US. They will never give back willingly either the control or the climate data. The US rich have reached an inflection point in escaping their increasingly flimsy pen, helped greatly by the Russians in a surprise twist Pandora’s box delayed ending to the Cold War, smoldering for years like a peat bog fire. European power will collapse following AMOC collapse. Russia and China win every step of the way. Too much of the US populace is under the spell of an old, unhealthy mad man. Some billionaires will attempt to choose his replacement, more corruptly than the last time.

Climate change is WWIII.

Use Signal.

Support free and open source software.

I’m sorry, -An American.

Happy 4th of July. There will be fireworks tonight.

The agency said its actions were warranted because the employees had signed the letter using their official titles and because the letter had denigrated the agency’s leadership. “The Environmental Protection Agency has a zero-tolerance policy for career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November,” the E.P.A. press secretary, Brigit Hirsch, wrote in an email.

What an unpleasant snowflake!

Very interesting paper, and grade A irony to begin the title with “delving” while finding that “delve” is one of the top excess words/markers of LLM writing.

Moreover, the authors highlight a few excerpts that “illustrate the LLM-style flowery language” including

By meticulously delving into the intricate web connecting […] and […], this comprehensive chapter takes a deep dive into their involvement as significant risk factors for […].

…and then they clearly intentionally conclude the discussion section thus

We hope that future work will meticulously delve into tracking LLM usage more accurately and assess which policy changes are crucial to tackle the intricate challenges posed by the rise of LLMs in scientific publishing.

Great work.

Hard to tell from the video, but it doesn’t seem likely that the trucker is at fault here. The work crew seems to be trying to cheat and avoid lane closures, but they’re operating the bucket too low for that. There’s probably a middle manager somewhere who decided that lane closures were too expensive and unnecessary, standard procedure be damned. People forget safety rules are written in blood.

Gable-mounted still incurs direct vibration into the structure. I have a QuietCool whole house fan that is suspended in midair from the gables, to reduce that vibration and noise, while being ducted from a framed opening in the hallway ceiling.

Whole house fans are pretty great during the right season, but you need to be aware of the humidity level outside or you can make things worse even if seems cooler at the moment. I also have central AC that gets run either when it’s too humid or too hot at night. But overall I’m very happy with the whole house fan and only having moderate insulation - the house resists heat incursion during the day and then we can quickly cool things down in the evening without using too much electricity.

Signal is very actively and directly working to pioneer a new financial model for long term software business stability that does not rely on surveillance capitalism. Your experience with young companies enshittifying into monsters is the natural cycle for the surveillance economy, and if Signal does eventually go that way it will be a profound disappointment, but I expect the foundation would rather die first. Check out this interview from last year with the president of the Signal Foundation for more depth on that.

You must be one of those weirdos on Lemmy. Nobody has even heard of that place! /s

Signal provides all the privacy I need, and it’s nowhere near as skeezy as most of the alternatives mentioned in the comments here. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, but if OP would like to detail their objections to it, I’d be happy to hear them.

Signal.

Almost everything in that list of new features sounds negative to me. A few are neutral, and one might be positive depending on how it’s implemented (having the phone monitor a phone call while sitting on hold). Pretty disappointing, Tim Apple.

It might! But the article I linked also suggests it might destroy ozone and have a net warming effect. We just don’t know. The upper atmosphere has never before had this level of direct pollution injection.

Even though it’s not a space trash problem, it is a regular upper atmosphere polluter of aluminum oxide ash. We don’t yet know the long term consequences.

Google bought up GrandCentral years ago and turned it into Google Voice, where they could freeze the feature set and ignore the product and any possible innovation. Multiline autoringing and speech-to-text on voicemail was it, forever. If innovation had stayed on the table, we could have had rule-based personal phone trees, maybe with different greetings and options based on known/unknown/masked caller ID.

25 years ago, I pressed 7 and got to hear the duck quack. We didn’t know at the time that it was a golden age.

Copper won’t be chewed by rodents that unexpectedly gain access to the attic or crawl space, and it doesn’t degrade in sunlight.

From the article:

While drug companies profit from the sales of unproven drugs, everyone else — patients, insurers, and the government — pays a heavy price. In just four years, from 2018 through 2021, the taxpayer-funded health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid shelled out $18 billion for drugs approved on the condition that their manufacturers produce confirmatory trials that had yet to be delivered.

I’m guessing their citation only includes Medicare and Medicaid because those have publicly-available data for the study to review, but I have to assume that private insurers pay a ton as well. I can see your point that insurance denials result in angry sick people, but there’s not really a lot of nuance in “that medication has never been shown to be safe and effective for your (or any) condition.”

I dunno. Everyone sucks here.

American health insurance companies are famously miserly, and this seems like a great area to use penny pinching for good. Where the hell are the insurance CFOs who should be demanding efficacy proof instead of being swindled along with the masses?

disassembly is the reverse

More like carefully cutting through the ferrule without damaging the barb.

I wouldn’t have expected a worm clamp in here, but a standard air hose is crimped onto a threaded end (same as on the pigtail for this reel). Female threads on an angled exit from the swivel would make hose replacement easy, without adding significant labor (there are already two threaded connections on this unit).

Yesterday I just cut the hose short to get up and running again, but I’ll use your suggestion later when I get fed up with the short hose and open up the reel again. Thanks!

Thank you for the name of the part! Yes I might be able to find a third party fitting of the right size knowing what it’s called.