One option I haven’t seen suggested is a wag bag. They’re a bag you do your business into that solidifies everything and makes it safe to dispose into the nearest garbage can. You’ll see them used by no-trace backpackers, climbers, and dispersed campers. Carry one in your bike’s bag and rest assured you have a fast and traceless method.

Don’t forget to bring sanitizer or dry leaf soap for hand cleaning.

I use Cleanwaste brand, but there are plenty of choices out there. Find a local manufacturer of them.

Additionally, carry extra TP or bring a bottle-top bidet. The kits tend to not have much TP included.

Q3 just ended. These layoffs are because the books are not looking good. Everyone is hurting with inflation and higher interest, tech being particularly vulnerable to high interest rates.

I can only hope the execs cut correctly. A second round of layoffs at a company can destroy morale enough to sink the company. Who wants to continue working at a place that fired your close peers, wondering if you’re next?

They may have cut themselves. Usually high level cuts are announced as “leaving for an amazing opportunity” or to “focus on family” or similar. That happens a month or two later after a deep layoff round and reorganizing. We’ll see if these recent layoffs included executives by Q1 next year. Watch LinkedIn if you’re that curious.

Still, it’s unfair to the lower levels, including line management, because they don’t get that option. It’s a “thank you for your service” and a boot out the door.

Note: not all tech companies are like this. Gumroad is an excellent example of a very open and ran-differently business.

I’m not familiar with that YouTube channel, but the story absolutely repeats itself. A business will eventually die if it cannot turn around its finances and cannot raise money.

Tech has been in aggressive growth mode since 2008 because the Fed was handing out free money (interest rate lower than inflation). That allowed investors to dump money into tech businesses in hope of rapid business expansion, which in turn makes the business more valuable.

The free money dried up. Now these tech businesses are going to find out if they’re sustainable.

This is a regulated area, one that the SEC oversees. They’ve prosecuted insider trading on crypto: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-98

What an unfortunate outcome. I hope his family and friends remember their good times together.

Hopefully John’s death helps push for even safer cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure in Tucson. They’re one of the best, perhaps the best, cycling city in Arizona. Residents there will provide political backing behind building safer streets.

There’s no way we’ll know this soon but, given there’s been a huge push at the SEC to clamp down on crypto-related financial crimes[1], I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near this debacle.

Before I go, I’ll just leave this link: Report Suspected Securities Fraud or Wrongdoing.

1. Dot your i’s and cross your t’s with crypto and dancing with the SEC. LBRY failed to register as a security when they pre-mined and yesterday it sank their company. Charges are pressed in bursts of new cases almost every month.

Those are two different theys. Huston is against freeway expansion. They even sued in a desperate attempt to prevent it.

I’m so glad to see my own tax money is being spent to pave over Huston. It’s certainly what they want.

As is typical, this science reporting isn’t great. It’s not only that AI can do it effectively, but that it can do it at scale. To quote the paper:

“Despite these models achieving near-expert human performance, they come at a fraction of the cost, requiring 100× less financial and 240× lower time investment than human labelers—making such privacy violations at scale possible for the first time.”

They also demonstrate how interacting with an AI model can quickly extract more private info without looking like it is. A game of 20 questions, except you don’t realize you’re playing.