His "before" teeth look better than mine.
Apparently, dentists these days expect to put a retainer or braces on nearly everybody. I might have to disrupt that if nobody can explain to me why my son's teeth have to be better aligned.
Makes it harder for forensics to identify him by the bite marks on his victims.
OK, so we're talking about a guy whose teeth were perfectly functional, he was just self-conscious about them looking crooked. So we're talking about very minor work. He wasn't even looking for braces or anything that would be bonded to teeth, just a retainer. This guy also has access to an engineering college's 3D printer - I don't know much about that technology but I assume that colleges have access to something much more advanced than a private citizen could reasonably get today. And analogizing it to laser eye surgery seems hyperbolic when you put it like in the OP but it's fair to ask about not-immediately-obvious consequences.
Interesting story, but a long way from making orthodontia as we know it obsolete.
Apparently Moby is older than I thought. I become a certified senior citizen in four months' time and I can't remember when American kids weren't standardly in braces. Mrs y, whose teeth are every which way, says that she was often the only kid in her class without them.
I bet lots of colleges have really nice lasers.
I'm old enough to remember when colleges had lasers in the sky to shoot at popcorn.
Anyway, maybe one person in my class had braces. I think my town had a very relaxed dentist.
2: I look forward to a generation of unsmiling monsters-of-reason trained to eliminate all emotion, like me.
Without looking at the link, which is loading slowly on train wifi, isn't installing them a different proposition from making them?
1: I had the same thought. I've had braces, but I have a particularly determined tooth that must have really liked being out of alignment, because over time it's moved back.
Oh, it's just a thing you wear.
Yeah, it'd be nice to make it all easier/cheaper but specialists still need to be in the loop in some way because you can't count on it being as simple as "make this shape then put it in your mouth". And then of course at the same time specialists are biased toward their own careers/essentialness. Shit is complicated!
"make this shape then put it in your mouth"
If I could make that shape, I wouldn't need talcum powder.
One of this year's mock-worthy Y Combinator startups was a company that will dispense prescriptions for birth control (and deliver it via the mail) without having seen you, which is in one sense admirable and in another representative of the Silicon Valley idea that no domain expertise is important unless it was learned by an undergraduate Stanford CS major.
14: Yeah, it's the process my wife is just now completing. (Invisalign) The bits in the article about getting a series of retainers and wearing them in sequence is exactly the process that she went through.
I also spent years with braces/retainer/etc. only to have my teeth cheerfully move right back to what they'd been like before (possibly worse) within maybe ten years of finishing that stuff. Apparently now a lot of orthodontists just recommend always having a retainer, as in, for the rest of your life to hold the teeth where you want them to be, which actually kind of makes sense when it comes to anything more than very minor aesthetic changes and also fuck that. I think everyone has a point at which snaggleteeth become a more attractive option, and for me it's way before that comes up as a possibility.
I think even back in the eighties when I had braces, you were sort of supposed to wear the retainer forever. I stopped, but I never got permission from the orthodontist to stop, I just got too annoyed with it and gave up.
19 - Same here. I remember "losing" the retainer. Oh no, I can't find it anywhere!
I'm still plagued with a lower retainer my orthodontist fixed to my teeth in junior high. The removeable upper met with the usual fate. Without braces, though, I would still be entering rooms teeth first.
Should you maybe see somebody about getting that taken out before it rusts or something?
One of the joys of parenting with an English person is imagining the looks he gives the dentist when orthodontia is mentioned. Kid's teeth are fine, but apparently from around age 6 (!) they started pushing braces. Ha! Fat chance, folks.
I had straight enough teeth to not get braces as a kid,* but they've gotten progressively more crooked as I've gotten older. I also chipped the front bottom tooth this Christmas, and the filling/bonded material has fallen out twice, each time taking slightly more of the tooth with it. What was a minor chip is now pretty noticeable. Part of the problem is the broken tooth sort of sticks out, so the patched part kept knocking on the back of my top front tooth. None of my close friends in grad school have had braces either, which is pretty crazy when you figure we're all more or less middle class American millennial/Gen Xers.
*When you factor in a European attitude towards teeth and HMO dentistry.
OT:
I finally booked the summer beach vacation that you people helped plan. Thanks again for all the suggestions--truly appreciated. They all turned out to be useless, but I grant they were well-intentioned. Anyway, to get to the point: when making my hotel reservation I am almost certain that there was a glitch in the online reservation system, and a suite that was supposed to be $470/night was instead listed at $47/night. (I wasn't planning to stay anywhere that expensive, but when I was in the reservation system trying to book my economy room for $270/night, I noticed there was an option to instead book the larger nicer suite for $47/night. (Or something in between the two for $380/night.) Being value-minded, I chose the suite. My question is: will the hotel honor this reservation? I had to put a 50% deposit down when making the reservation ($186 for a full week's stay!), and I received an email confirming the reservation.
A suite for $47 a night? I look forward to urple's dispatches from summer vacation hell
The deposit for the week was $186, not the room. The room was $330. Still a bargain.
These are all rooms at the same hotel, and I was booking through the hotel's website, not travelocity or Expedia or whatever it is the kids use these days.
If it's a major chain they'll almost certainly honor it. Airlines do something similar.
I'd prepay the room now, I think. So instead of a remaining balance, it shows in their system as fully paid.
I am simultaneously wrestling with whether taking advantage of this apparent glitch instead of bringing it to their attention is unethical. I'm worried the answer is yes. I don't want someone to get fired.
You could do both (take advantage and bring it to their attention).
Thereby ensuring that someone gets fired.
O.K. New plan. Email me the hotel name and I'll see if I can replicate the error during a week that I can take off work.
I don't know, I'd be curious to see how long it takes them to figure it out. You can always tell them when you're checking out, and pay the full price then.
Or tell them when you're checking and say, "Kaa-ching."
I don't think it's unethical, unless it's some mom and pop b&b that will go bankrupt if they lose $3000 (assuming they could have booked it at the full rate anyway.) These kinds of errors are well known in the travel industry as fat-finger discounts, where the person entering rates in the system makes a typo. Same applies to grocery stores that have errors- consumer protection laws favor shoppers, if there's a discrepancy you get the lower price and if the checkout system errs too high you also get a free item. (Now, it would be unethical to send someone else in to get that same freebie before they have a chance to correct the system...)
These kinds of errors are well known in the travel industry as fat-finger discounts
So it's not an entirely novel hotel-booking act.
It's always possible that it isn't a glitch - maybe urple has picked dates that happen to have been picked by no other holidaymakers in the world (and, really, this sounds likely, doesn't it?) and so he's getting an incredibly steep discount because the pricing software is responding to an almost complete absence of demand.
and, really, this sounds likely, doesn't it?
Well, with urple you never know.
You have to be careful with these kinds of mistakes, because they're usually not required to honor mistake rates. (Mistake fares for airplanes have a bit more protection, though recently the rules changed so that airlines can give you your money back quickly and not honor the fare.). There are people who find mistake fares for fun and you can read what they say. For example: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/hotel-deals/1539724-hotel-mistake-deals-best-practices.html
They say calling is a big mistake and that you should have backup plans ready.
I love how that advice is divided into things to do and things not to do, but the things to do category has items that start with "Do not".
Wow, that thread has worse potential outcomes than I was imagining. Now I'm worried. Driving 11 hours with my kids only to be told in the lobby that my reservation was not being honored would be very unpleasant.
FWIW, the hotel in question is not a chain.
No. But it's not a nice place. It doesn't seem like the sort of place that would worry about its reputation.
45: Is it associated with any Republican presidential candidates?
45, 46 Or deceased Supreme Court Justices?
46: I'm not sure. How would I find that out?