Requires a cellular data plan to operate, which is where that expensive operating cost comes in. For a family dog, I could see the expense being worthwhile, but for a number of things (wallet, keys, purse, backpack, etc) that AirTag tracking typically targets as their use case, this would get quite expensive rather quickly.

Look at the link - does it have a token on it to identify that particular survey invitation as the one they sent you? I'd wager that's what happened rather than it being some deeper tracking. A stock standard survey monkey survey can do the same thing.

That's 2 if's. Sure, IF both of those things were true, maybe it would net out, but still be a paperwork and cashflow delay for the company (pay the duty today, get the money back at some point in the future) which sucks liquidity out of the market and generally holds back growth and investment.

But that isn't particularly relevant since neither of those two things will ever happen. The tax cuts will go to the top earners, and retaliatory tariffs are very much a thing and cannot be ignored.

In the display that TSA agents are given, the image is no longer shown and instead the system shows an outline of a body with the questionable area marked. This was added after the aforementioned outrage from travelers so that every TSA agent didn't get an x-ray view of your naked body. The scanners are the same, but the agent doesn't see it anymore.

108 days of the year fall in that end-of-the-month window where they belong to the astrological sign associated with the month that follows, so almost 30% of all possible birth dates become harder to guess. (Your comment made me curious as to just how significant this variability could be in practice - a lot more than I would have guessed)

That would be a bad idea if the "correct" option is available. This is a DoB check without actually displaying your real DoB on the page, which could be used as PII verification by a malicious actor. If the correct astrological sign is listed and you say "Does not Apply", it will count as a wrong answer.

Crappy way to do this, but they're trying to walk a line between confirming your identity (or at least that you know the sensitive data of the person you're spoofing) with multiple choice questions and not creating a security vulnerability where someone can leverage their site to compile sensitive data on individuals.

*Second best army in Russia

I absolutely agree, but you're talking about a situation where we already have 10 different ways and 20 EC2 instances. When you get to that point (or start approaching it), yeah, do the complex thing - no argument at all. The challenge is to wait until the last responsible moment to make that pivot and to not dive deeper into the complexity than you need at the current time and place. I've worked with countless small companies and teams in the past that have created whole K8s clusters, Terraform provisioning plans, and the whole kit for a single low volume service because "we'll need it when things scale out later" and later never arrives.

This is great until

I think that's the point. Don't jump to the complex right away. Keep it simple and compose the capabilities you have readily available until you need to become more complex. When the task requires it, yeah, do the complex thing, but keep the simplicity mandate in mind and only add the new complexity that you need. You can get pretty far with the simple, and what about all of the situations where that future pivot or growth never happens?

The philosophy strikes a cord with me - I'm often contending with teams that are building for the future complexities that they think might come up, and we realize later that we did get complexity in the problem later, but not the kind we had planned for, so all of that infrastructure and planning was wasted on an imaginary problem that no only didn't help us but often actually make our task harder. The trick is to keep the solution set composable and flexible so that if complexity shows up later, we can reconfigure and build the new capabilities that we need rather than having to maneuver a large complicated system that we built on a white board before we really knew what the problem looked like.

Yeah, I don't think the dying on the inside is the particular sort dying that is notable here.

The Guardian's story on this has more of the important details

The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs’ testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with PVC. The study demonstrates a correlation but further research is needed to prove microplastics cause sperm counts to fall.

The testes analysed were obtained from postmortems in 2016, with the men ranging in age from 16 to 88 when they died. “The impact on the younger generation might be more concerning” now that there is more plastic than ever in the environment, Yu said.

The study, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences, involved dissolving the tissue samples and then analysing the plastic that remained. The dogs’ testes were obtained from veterinary practices that conducted neutering operations.

The human testicles had a plastic concentration almost three times higher than that found in the dog testes: 330 micrograms per gram of tissue compared with 123 micrograms. Polyethylene, used in plastic bags and bottles, was the most common microplastic found, followed by PVC.

It won't matter if there are ways to side load or circumvent, though. 99.9% of users will not be willing to be bothered with such things and the US market would effectively die for the app.