Or for the example in the actual original post “ice box.”

I’m not sure that was true in 1990 in the United States. In the old analog networks, the central offices could route calls locally among phone numbers that shared the same central office, which was basically any number that had the same first 3 digits of the 7 digit number under the North American Numbering Plan. At least for the suburban neighborhood I grew up in, in the 80’s, the neighborhood pizza places had the same central office code as my home phone number.

It wasn’t until the rise of digital switching that the phone number itself got decoupled from the actual network topography, and things like number portability became possible. But in the analog systems they wanted to minimize switching where possible, so “local” calls weren’t all equally local.

Dan Flashes Mcdonalds is a very aggressive store. I mean, you walk by a store and you see 50 guys who look just like me fighting over very complicated shirts, you go in. Yes, you do. You go in.

physically uncomfortable

such an unnatural position

Have you considered that he’s been standing with his shoulders rotated forward for most of his life, and that his feeble body falls right into this position, rather than a neutral position where he’d have to expend strength standing up straight with a strong looking torso?

The current difference in apparent gravity between the equator and the poles is about 0.3%.

I think the centrifugal effect squares with angular velocity (plus the bulge of the earth would make the distance from the center of gravity ever so slightly larger), so maybe doubling the rotation speed would bring it up to 1.2%.

So maybe a measureable effect but probably not enough to actually overcome the biological limits on size/mass/weight.

Is he…your son?

I don’t understand any dog barks

That’s obviously false. Any dog owner knows when their dog is begging for help getting something out of reach or being let in/out of a gate, which barks mean “hey someone’s at the door” or “squirrel” and which yelps mean pain. Beyond that, growls and body language can communicate quite a bit, too.

The big players in AI aren’t highly leveraged

It’s not traditional leverage but the recent deals being announced where the AI companies are raising money from Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, AMD, Oracle, etc. and paying it back in stock or purchase commitments have a certain circular bootstrappy notion to them. The formulas for the valuations rely on feedback loops that are less stable and might create runaway feedback conditions at the slightest hiccup.

In any highly capital intensive business, you always run the risk that the thing you build is worth less than the cost it took to build it. And when that happens, collapses can happen pretty quickly, as everyone invested in these companies rushes towards the offramp.

I can think of a few catalysts that could trigger that initial realization that the thing made isn’t actually worth the cost to build it:

• A new model comes out from a competitor that was cheaper to build and almost as good. (Deepseek reminded everyone that this might happen.)
• New money stops coming in and the companies building things have to tighten their belts. This could be driven by a failure to monetize as much as previously modeled, so that the value of the company itself is questioned.
• Some kind of legal flaw threatens the entire foundation of some expensive models.
• Some kind of technical flaw causes one company’s flagship model to lose the race against other companies.
• Some key personnel are incapacitated in a way that robs the company of its momentum (this almost happened with the board of directors revolt at OpenAI).
• Something else I haven’t thought of.

But once a hiccup happens, something built on so many self-reinforcing loops is less resilient against the unknown, the chaos of the real world.