Perfect Delta ad.

Our fast, free inflight Wi-Fi from Starlink is game-changing. Now it's time for you to make a change. We’ll match your hard-earned status when you switch to United now: united.com/switchtobetterwif…

CEO of @Delta Trashes @elonmusk To Explain Rejecting Starlink — “It’s All True What They Say About Him” viewfromthewing.com/delta-ce…

McDonald's is spending 8.5 billion dollars to find out why families stopped coming. I can save them the 8.5 billion. They took out the playground. The plan, announced Wednesday at investor day. Better food, faster service, new equipment, AI tools, hospitality training, and a bigger push into chicken and beverages. They call it Next. The goal, they say, is making customers feel more comfortable. Wall Street loved it so much the stock fell 5 percent to its lowest since 2022. Over five years McDonald's shares are down 3 percent. Burger King's parent is up 14. The owner of Taco Bell and KFC is up 13. This is not a hamburger problem. This is a McDonald's problem. So let us talk about who used to eat there. Parents. That was the whole business. Parents at 5:40 on a Tuesday with three kids in the back and nothing thawed at home. You did not go for the burger. You went because your kids could run screaming through a plastic tube for 40 minutes while you sat with a coffee and experienced silence. That was the product. The food was the cover charge. The first PlayPlace opened in 1971 in Birmingham, Alabama, and for fifty years it did one job. It made small children demand to go to McDonald's. Then 2020 arrived, every play area in the country closed, and a great many never came back. The equipment came out during a remodeling program named Experience of the Future. The Experience of the Future turned out to be a touchscreen. Their own chief executive said he did not know if ball pits were in their future. Sir, you were not selling ball pits. You were selling forty minutes. So now there is no counter, no playground, and no reason for a seven year old to want to go. A screen, a window, and a bag. And for that we pay prices that require a moment of reflection in the parking lot. For thin, overcooked, oddly uniform pucks that taste like a memory of beef. I did not love them because they were good. I loved them because I was eight and there was a slide. And have you seen the new buildings. The old ones were unmistakable. Red roof, yellow arches, legible from a highway at 70 to a child who could not yet read. The new ones are a flat gray box with a small logo and a drive through wrapped around it. A regional claims office with a fryer. They removed the color, the characters, the counter, and the playground, and then hired consultants to find out why it no longer feels like anywhere. Which is why, when I have to eat fast food, I go to Chick-fil-A. Not for the politics. For the competence. They have led the customer satisfaction index for fast food eleven years running, and average 8.5 million dollars per location against McDonald's 4 million. More than double, while closed on Sundays. Fifty two days a year with the lights off, and still double. A seventeen year old hands you a bag and says my pleasure and means it about 70 percent, which is 70 percent more than a touchscreen has managed. McDonald's is spending 8.5 billion on hospitality training. Chick-fil-A earns 8.5 million per restaurant by just having some. So here is my consulting proposal, free of charge, on behalf of mothers everywhere. Put the playgrounds back. Not a nostalgia campaign. Not a retro cup. The structure. Tubes, slides, a door the kids cannot open from the inside, and a bench where a tired woman can sit. And understand what you are buying, because it is not lunch. A six year old does not know your food is bad. He has no basis for comparison and no functioning palate. He thinks the burger is incredible because he is standing in a castle made of tubes. That is the window. That is the only window you get. You catch them before the taste buds arrive, and thirty years later they drive past your sign, feel something they cannot explain, and pull in anyway. That is not a menu strategy. That is imprinting, and you shut it down in 2020 to save on cleaning. Eight and a half billion dollars for AI tools and hospitality training. Or a slide. 🦋

🚨#BREAKING: An employee for Flock told a reporter that if he wants privacy, he can "opt out of society." So that reporter filmed a Flock worker installing a Flock cam on a public road next to his house... ...so Flock called 3 POLICE OFFICERS to pull over THE REPORTER for following them Yep, you read that right... the surveillance camera company called the cops because someone was surveilling them install surveillance. The reporter's name is Brendan Keefe. He's a national investigative reporter who has been digging into Flock and police abuse of its surveillance network since January. Flock happened to be upgrading a camera about a mile from Keefe's own house, so he parked at a distance, put out his press placard, put on a yellow vest, and pulled out a news camera. The Flock installer saw him, packed up his ladder, jumped in his vehicle, and took off. Keefe followed several cars back to document the next installation. The Flock employee picked up the phone and called 911. "I work with Flock Safety, and I'm getting followed, harassed pretty much, taking videos and pictures." Next thing Brenden sees are THREE Georgia police cars with their lights on behind him. "The reason why I'm stopping you is because there is a vehicle that says that you have been following them." He was released with no charges. Because he did nothing wrong. Filming in public is legal in all 50 states.

Bicyclist Wants To Be Treated Like A Car But Also Be Able To Just Kinda Break The Rules When He Wants To buff.ly/nTSvgRf

ANTHROPIC BUILDS BIOLOGY LAB TO PUSH AI INTO DRUG DEVELOPMENT Anthropic has quietly established a Bay Area wet lab, moving its life-sciences ambitions beyond computer simulations and into physical biological experiments. The company wants Claude to direct laboratory robots with limited human intervention, potentially accelerating research into rare and traditionally “undruggable” diseases. Anthropic says it will focus on preclinical research rather than clinical trials, avoiding direct competition with pharmaceutical companies.

Replacing tactile car dashboard buttons with a flat touchscreen that requires navigating three submenus just to adjust the windshield defroster while driving 70 mph in the rain is a massive safety downgrade disguised as modern minimalism.