The title is solid clickbait (it’s not actually 100% car-free, duh) but I can forgive it considering the reality of living in Tokyo. I have a couple friends that have been there for a while, and while they haven’t kicked the US car-brain sickness completely they’ve had to admit it’s easier to go most places without one.

Not verifying the load capacity of a customers vehicle.

My past job made the customer sign off the paperwork before we loaded them up and this guy did sign off on the paperwork that his truck could take the load. So, I wasn’t technically liable. I was newly certified and was the only driver around that day. We were a small shop that only took a few deliveries a week, and customers wanting samples back after delivery was even rarer (destructive testing is fun!).

Since I was new to this, I didn’t intuitively know the difference between a flatbed and a normal passenger pickup. So yeah. In my ignorance and with this guy’s sign-off in hand, I try to load his ~1000lb pallet of bigass metal test samples into his. Personal. Pickup.

The truck just kept squatting and squatting, even though I still had weight on the forks… until it finally made a horrific creaking noise. I immediately unloaded the pallet and went to apologize. The guy was mortified but he kept it cool and called his actual delivery guy to come with a flatbed the next day. I did that one too, thankfully his delivery guy just cracked up when I explained what happened (even gave me some quick advice too!). They kept doing business with us, at least, but his reaction in that moment is still seared into my mind.

Startup times getting down below 20s definitely helps with this. I haven’t had a machine that took over 30s for a few years now… even my phone isn’t that slow.

Was recently asked to look at a laptop because it was “running slower than normal” and “takes a long time to resume from sleep.” Hmm, ok. It’s only a few years old, probably just bloateare.

I powered it on and immediately got served an early-2000s size dose of 10+ minute startup time. This laptop from only a few years ago still came with a spinny disk drive… Ugh. Didn’t even bother trying to optimize it. It’s getting cloned up to an SSD before I even try to work on it.

I hear you. I want to be positive about this because I want to keep playing, and the reversal (for now) makes me OK with doing so.

But Sony has a horrid track record. Edit - so does Msoft, people often forget how bad both of them are.

I also expect they’ll try to work it back in somehow to capture more revenue and/or data. If it’s not this again in a stealthier form, then it’ll be something similar. No crossplay without PSN or no credit store without PSN, something like that.

Exactly, Sony played bait-and-switch tactics. If the requitement had been there from launch, people just wouldn’t have been able to buy it and would have stayed away.

But this forced people to throw away money, or at least try to get a refund for the base game.

Not sure if those stupid credits were refunded to people who were gonna get screwed by this but I doubt it (yet another reason never to do micro transactions).

It’s weird here too because states set sales taxes. I live in Oregon, and we don’t have a standard sales tax here. That means what you see is what you pay at the register for most things, and it’s so freaking nice.

About the only thing I regularly see is the bottle tax (0.10/can added at the register). That’s refundable too, at least theoretically, so it’s not that bad.

Hmmm, I’ve never noticed what you mentioned on my recent phones. That said you should test a newer android yourself before making a purchase!

More of my personal experience… I have a Pixel 7 XL and a work Iphone which (edit) is an Iphone 12. Generally they are the same in terms of having no scroll lag or input lag at all. But, there is some lag on both when they are overheated, especially on the Iphone if I put it on a higher power charger (I trickle charge both when I can).

From a design perspective the biggest difference I notice is that my Pixel feels significantly smoother because of the 120hz display, and just the larger display in general. While I said neither of them have much lag, the Iphone feels noticeably less speedy. That said, I’m sure if you compared my Pixel to a high end Iphone results would be flipped. My work isn’t shelling out for whatever pro max stuff they sell (and neither would I!).

Beyond that, I can’t offer guidance. In my personal experience the Iphone UI is so frustrating that I can’t judge which one performs “better” or not, because only the Android feels comfortable to me. Between that and the lack of labels in some places (like the pull-down settings menu) it is impossible for me to daily drive the apple.

Democrats touting a road widening project… why celebrate a carbrained regressive idea. No it’s not murdering people in Gaza or Ukraine but seriously folks, not the right move. May be democrats in name but not progressive in practice. That’s increasingly why I’m frustrated with dems and the two-party shit system.

What’s really happening here is that advertisers can use the Reddit Ads Manager to create normal user posts and then pay to make them appear prominently on the site and in the app as promoted posts, aka adverts.

Look it’s not exactly revolutionary or new, google search has been littered with promoted ad results for years. But I still hate it. Fuck off, reddit. No respect intended. Icky. So glad I stopped using it.

For those like me who automatically pictured an industrial fruit/vegetable farm (i.e. only plants) when reading the title “factory farming,” don’t worry. I believe they are concerned about industrial animal farming.

I just skimmed the article and agree that it’s misleading without context or data. I didn’t look hard to see if it actually gave any.

That said my personal experience is that I get far more exercise with my ebike because I’m in the saddle more often. I rode my normal bike maybe once or twice per summer. I’m not into it as a sport or hobby, and there are too many hills and stop signs/lights that you actually have to stop at, which means struggling to get going when you have to jet out between cars. I don’t have billions of hours training my thighs into galactus legs so I can take off uphill in 6th gear. And let’s just be honest: I’m never going to.

My ebike solve those problems. As a result I’ve packed in a couple hundred miles in just the first year I’ve had it. So for me it very much is a case of fewer calories per mile but more miles overall exercised.

Smith said he purchased the Sun with his own funding, independent of Sinclair. The Sun (1/15/24) advertised the purchase as “the first time in nearly four decades that the Sun will be in the hands of a local owner.”

Let’s see how many days his alleged “private ownership” of the Sun takes to turn them into another regressive media turdfactory.

Remember in 2018 when sinclair forced hundreds of TV broadcasters to air pro-trump fake news bullshit? The same incident mentioned in Fair’s article above? Yeah. YEAH. That feels like just a little flex in hindsight.

I’m guessing less than 60 days personally.

I didn’t know chatGPT could spit out sources, that’s neat. I’ll have to give it a shot some time. Did you specifically ask for that or did it do that on its own?

The PET vs Glass study is fascinating, especially since the result favors PET by a significant margin. That’s a massive disconnect from the findings of the OP study. It basically makes PET out to be a fantastic option, but assuming it can be so clean, it’s even more infuriating that so little plastic gets recycled. I also wonder what the breakdown of PET recycling is, vs plastics in general? Is it just a tiny portion of plastic waste overall, or does it fail to reach the recycling stream? Something about that situation stinks, and not just of uncleaned bottles.

Considering that we have to reduce virgin material use in every sector, the more recyclable option should be the clear winner. Its frustrating to see this level of waste.

Crushed recycled glass (aka cullet) actually decreases the amount of energy required to create new glass products, as well as demonstrably lowering their CO2 impact. While it’s easy to assume that there’s a lot of waste because there’s a lot of heat involved, keep in mind that virgin material requires far more processing and even more heat and energy to result in a final product.

Unlike plastics, the problems with achieving a profitable (remember, capitalism) glass recycling stream are much more cultural and intrinsic to the subject nation. Here’s some further info on why the US, where I live, is dragging so far behind in this area: https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recycling-US-broken/97/i6

Putin might as well just say the quiet part out loud at this point. Classic sociopath dictator, gotta pretend blood isn’t on his hands.

Rest in peace Navalny. You and your people deserve better than this.

Yes, they all have progressive backgrounds. Unfortunately not a lot of swing states or regressive states are going to be able to pass bills like this soon - if at all.

Both Washington and Oregon (my home state) tend to work along the same lines with large progressive interests, but rarely at the same pace. Sometimes we’ll get our version of a given policy bill passed before they do, or vice versa.

Seattle and many of the surrounding cities and counties have set aside money for rebates (I think most of them go through installers or utilities?) so it’s not like they have nothing. But yeah, would love to see more statewide incentives!

I agree that pi-hole is an option here, but yeah, the reality is that most daily users don’t even know what it is. At least, not yet.

Adblock Plus and it’s betters became ubiquitous in large part because they were so incredibly easy to install. As easy as gramma accidentally installing yet another yahoo toolbar on accident. Like, too easy.

Pi-Hole isn’t hard to install, and there are some fantastic guides to help users get it running with essentially zero prior knowledge. But in my opinion, I think until it gets closer to “push-button” easiness, pi-hole and systems like it will really be limited to the <5% of users motivated enough to go through the steps, who aren’t mortified of logging into their router’s admin page. I want us to get there faster, and we’re a hell of a lot closer than 10 or even 5 years ago. But we’re not quite there yet.

Edit-typo