>Aren't toll roads the norm?

No. I won't say they're rare but they're not especially common in the US.

Yes, bill for plate OCR is typically a lot more expensive in addition to having to logon to a site etc.

Toll collection used to be much worse in terms of collection efficiency (revenue-cost)--perhaps 50% as I understand it. With all the automated toll booths I assume it's much better today.

"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.

Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.

You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so.

Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.

And if you're presumably paying a premium for a nice resort, why wouldn't you spend a lot of your time taking advantage of it?

Yes, if you want to get out and do things, better to go for low or mid range. You don’t want your room to feel like a huge sunk cost.

I tend to default to a midrange place as I'm not much interested in spending a lot of time by the pool. And when traveling on business, if meals weren't being covered, I didn't actually much care for resorts when I felt like a bit of of a prisoner in terms of meals etc.

I'm not sure quite how that works. Google Docs will suggest various changes which I take into account or don't. And they certainly correct misspellings. You can choose to decide that's not AI but it's a grey line.

For writing I've sometimes used LLMs to speed up some essentially boilerplate. Never used for something that's not pretty much routine that I could easily do but would probably spend some time doing so.

For anything that might be a Nebula submission, it's hard to imagine LLMs doing anything beyond the copyediting level (which may not be well-defined but seems a reasonable threshold).

I'm not really a resort person. But I do subscribe to some travel feeds mostly in the vein of maybe finding some places/attractions/restaurants/etc. that I'm not familiar with. The number of hyper-scheduled spreadsheets I see is amazing. Doesn't mean I don't often have some itinerary and even book some particular, popular attractions/venues. But the 30-minute block scheduling is something I do for work (if that).

ADDED: I'll just add that I created a loose spreadsheet for a ~week-long NYC trip with (I think) just one timed admission for a recently reopened museum and no times otherwise. I think I ended up dynamically scrawling over the printout with changes for most of the trip.

I have an upcoming trip planned in asia - never been before.

My firm rule is - have a loose plan, aim for one activity per day, an emergency option, or two, if the weather plays up, and that's it.

It's the type of plan that has worked for every holiday that I have taken that involves a different city to the one I live in.

This is typically what I aim for.

One or two core activities for the day.

If it works out for more that's great but it's not expected or necessary.

I've traveled with some people who seem focused on just getting pictures in front of as many things as possible which seems a poor way to really take in a place.

My family went to Hawaii a couple of years ago and in the exact middle of the trip we took a day doing absolutely nothing and it was kind of great.

I think that's a good plan. I do tend to book hotels, planes, and usually longer trains. But, especially for a longer city trip, I loosely map out--even if just mentally--things I want to see and do but, for example, one museum a day is mostly enough unless another convenient one is small.

one of the funniest things about going to NYC with a toddler was how very chill it was to go with a toddler

there are parks everywhere!

There are! Central Park of course. But also pocket parks all over the place.

Money is a factor.

I went from, if not scraping by, never really recovered from dot-bomb to a pretty good job at a medium-size public company latterly. It was "mostly" good. But the difference in money set me up in a way that I previously really wasn't (even if not top tech levels).