There was a soda machine a few feet from the TSA line. I bought one and noticed the agent looking my way. I walked up to them within a minute (small airport) and they took my unopened Coke, that they watched me purchase, and threw it in the trash. It was a dollar more at the machine on the other side.

This was a while back when the TSA was a new concept. I had no idea you couldn’t carry a closed bottle of soda through the checkpoint and was very irritated at the lack of common sense.

Another item I didn’t have confiscated but did create a big stir with was a bullet on a keychain. It contains some of my dad’s ashes. I put my keys with the keychain in the basket and several agents were shaking it saying “there is something inside there” they took me aside and I explained it was my Dad and they dropped it like a hot rock and apologized. I was surprised by that reaction given my soda experience.

Did they shoot it with a shotgun?

I must admit, even though he was down in the polls, I still expected him to win somehow. It gives me a little glimmer of hope that the world may not become an authoritarian hellscape.

Nah, let him stay here and try one of those fancy detention centers that he is so fond of. I’d hate to see our tax dollars go to waste.

I was in awe at their bathrooms the first time I went to one.

He’s in his 20s so he is only slightly more likely to take my advice than he was as a teenager 😆

Yeah, he is pretty tough. I wish I could hug him, he is about a 10 hour drive from me. That tube was nightmarish from what he’s told me.

Yeah, I’m in the US and I agree. Though it is going to take some serious change to treat the problem. In the meantime, this is at least a stopgap solution for people who don’t have a lot of options.

I may have become too cynical but, as is often the case when you dig deeper, this sounds like the result of lobbyists trying to protect licensing rather than people.

We can be dumb, but we’ve been doing web searches for legal and medical advice for ages because it is too damned expensive and time consuming to go to professionals for every little thing. Not to mention, doctors have so little time for you that it is hard to get them to listen to the whole story to make connections between symptoms.

The LLMs already tell you that they aren’t licensed professionals and, for many, provide citations for their sources (miles better than your typical health website).

As a personal anecdote, my son was having stomach pain but was planning to tough it out. He checked with ChatGPT and it recommended he go to the ER. He did, and if he hadn’t, he would likely be dead now. He spent 3 days in the hospital having his bowels unobstructed through a tube in his nose.

There is value in people having that kind of information at their fingertips.

Regulation is absolutely needed, but I would rather they focus on protecting us from AI being used for military purposes, mass surveillance, etc. rather than protecting citizens from ourselves.

If nothing else, maybe it will bring Epstein back into the news cycle.