Why nuclear blasts - that also introduce lots of particles in atmosphere cause a cooling effect - "nuclear winter"?
But even with that the amount of warming this continuous effect creates is quite small and negligible compared to greenhouse gas warming and isn’t really worth talking about.
I had to walk away from a $600 ticket that I booked at the last minute b/c in the 30 seconds between the time I paid for the ticket and the time the booking returned, the connecting flight filled up and I had to wait a day I didn't have for the next one. Couldn't get a single consideration from anyone, they said they couldn't cancel the ticket b/c the first leg was still available. Just had to walk away from the money and find another airline.
I'm sure it happens on every airline but man I was pissed. They go to the bottom of the list until the next tomfoolery occurs.
I was now not even in a premium economy row, but just a normal seat. I tried telling the flight attendant, who gave no shits - she just said "the plane isn't full, sit anywhere when we are in the air."
Fine, I found a premium economy aisle (still no extra legroom exit row seat, but whatever), and then filed for a refund when I landed.
They responded to my request for a refund with a form letter apologizing, but no refund. Then ignored any follow up. I had to do a charge back (no joke).
Them:
> I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to sincerely apologize for the seating issue you experienced during your recent flight. I understand that you requested an exit row seat and were not able to be accommodated, which is understandably frustrating.
> We strive to honor all seating preferences, and I regret that we were unable to meet your expectations in this instance. Please know that your feedback is important to us, and we will review our seating allocation processes to prevent similar situations in the future.
> Thank you for your understanding and patience. If there is anything further we can assist you with or if you have any other concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
> We hope that you put your trust in Lufthansa and partners also in the future and continue to fly with us.
Me: This wasn't a seating preference, I paid $130 to reserve this seat. This is something I purchased. I'd expect you'd at least issue a refund and extend me some sort of credit to make up for this.
Them: crickets
FWIW, I just took such a flight and didn't notice anything that compares unfavorably to a domestic U.S. airline. (To be clear, it certainly wasn't better either.) Is there anything specific you can point to?
There were actual commercials played before the safety video, the cabin crew warned passengers to make sure children cannot see the adult content they're watching (can you get more American than that?), and their credit card was offered multiple times during the flight. At least the WiFi was reasonably cheap.
Over here, that stuff would never fly (no pun intended), except maybe on Ryanair or other extremely low-cost carriers. On e.g. a Lufthansa longhaul flight, which are priced similarly and cover the same route I flew (fra-ord), it would be unthinkable.
Try flying Lufthansa (or one of their half dozen subsidiaries created almost entirely to give worse service) anywhere inside of europe. Everything is a money grab and the service and boarding are terrible.
United maintains a relatively consistent experience between domestic and international, minus the free alcohol.
The cost of raw coffee has nearly tripled in 18 months, that's what's driven the price increases. That has not been due to the cost of processing and shipping so much as poor coffee growing seasons in major growing areas reducing primary production. Though growing, processing, and transport inputs have all suffered a lot of inflation in the past 5 years too, to be sure.
Brazil is generally known for mass production low quality coffee grown at a lower altitude, which might be what you find in a can like grandparent said, but is less popular in the more premium scenes.
It is the first model to get partial-credit on an LLM image test I have. Which is counting the legs of a dog. Specifically, a dog with 5 legs. This is a wild test, because LLMs get really pushy and insistent that the dog only has 4 legs.
In fact GPT5 wrote an edge detection script to see where "golden dog feet" met "bright green grass" to prove to me that there were only 4 legs. The script found 5, and GPT-5 then said it was a bug, and adjusted the script sensitivity so it only located 4, lol.
Anyway, Gemini 3, while still being unable to count the legs first try, did identify "male anatomy" (it's own words) also visible in the picture. The 5th leg was approximately where you could expect a well endowed dog to have a "5th leg".
That aside though, I still wouldn't call it particularly impressive.
As a note, Meta's image slicer correctly highlighted all 5 legs without a hitch. Maybe not quite a transformer, but interesting that it could properly interpret "dog leg" and ID them. Also the dog with many legs (I have a few of them) all had there extra legs added by nano-banana.
I passed the AIs this image and asked them how many fingers were on the hands: https://media.post.rvohealth.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2...
Claude said there were 3 hands and 16 fingers. GPT said there are 10 fingers. Grok impressively said "There are 9 fingers visible on these two hands (the left hand is missing the tip of its ring finger)." Gemini smashed it and said 12.