Out of a reflex of distrust, I refuse to participate in any kind of loyalty program of the outlet of the large retail store around the corner.

I tell myself that by refusing to join the loyalty program (which basically comes down to scanning an anonymous loyalty card every time I make a purchase), I prevent them from adding my correlations (what products I buy, in what combos, at what time) to their data.

But since I normally pay by card, I guess they can (and do) already do that with my bank account information?

If I would pay with cash, they can still see those correlations per purchase, but they can't track my purchases over time?

Does anyone know if there are any companies/organizations that offer the possibility to sail the Atlantic by boat as a passenger (so not as a (more or less) experienced crew member). Are there any? Or announced plans or something like that?

(I'm not talking about being a passenger on a large cargo ship. I'm curious about the possibility to cross the Atlantic with a low carbon footprint).

Do these "cost per click" figures actually represent the money Google receives (received) from these companies for every time someone ends up on their platform through the intermediation of Google?

After watching this video I am left with this question.

The video ultimately claims that humans will not disappear, but doesn't do a great job explaining why.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for the (or a) population to be and remain stable, the total fertility rate needs to be equal to the global replacement rate (which recently was 2.3).

And since the total average fertility rate appears to be currently at this 2.3, any drop in the fertility rate in place A would have to be compensated with a rise in the fertility rate in place B (assuming that, at some point, we would like to stop population decline)?

I guess one way for a population to remain stable, while women are having fewer than 2.3 children, would be to have fewer men? If a population has 100 women and 10 men, each woman would only have to have on average (a bit more than) 1.1 child? (Which would of course also require a collective form of prenatal sex selection.)

I realize that would be bonkers and unethical. Just wondering out loud.

Argentina's team is such a bunch of actors and lying cry babies (Messi). Winning like this is shameful. They didn't deserve the world cup and they don't deserve the Copa América.

El equipo de Argentina era (como siempre) actores y malparidos. Ganar así es vergonzoso.

This is a great way to travel through space and time, and get to know our planet better in a fun and beautifully designed way.

What could be reasons for my rsync, which is syncing two remote servers through ssh, to slow down over time like this? It keeps happening. How to check what is the bottleneck?

Does anyone else experience this? When I upvote a post and then bookmark it, the upvote disappears. I then have to redo the upvote.

Today someone told me that he heard through the grapevine that OpenAI has been selling it's ChatGPT (not sure which version) complete model to one or more key organizations (companies) whose policies simply do not allow it to store any data on external servers. Does anyone here know anything about that?