iwanttocomment

Now, in the last five years, mechanical keyboards are "in". All the cool kids are using them! I don't blame them - and I use a Keychron these days - but seriously, for us olds, it's weird. Why now? Why didn't these remain a thing? Why didn't normal people complain more about the awful membrane keyboards? Strange.

But there's a difference between peak pricing, which we're all familiar with, or when you can be left stranded or having paid money for something that suddenly escalates in price with the hour for no good reason, for no reason, and for no fault of your own.

I took an Uber to a show the other night and paid $11. Great. Suddenly, the ride home - same distance, no traffic, no weather conditions - was over $38. No way I could have predicted it in advance. I used a different service that got me home for, yes, $11, but sheesh.

Peak pricing is just business, and for a consumer, off-peak published rates present a valid choice. Sudden, 400x escalation in pricing for no obvious reason is chaos, the dream of monopolies against mere people.

"Processed foods" involve salt, sugar or oil added to unprocessed or minimally processed foods. Many premium ice creams are merely milk and cream (considered unprocessed or minimally processed), sugar and salt. Yet all ice creams are considered ultra-processed. Take that, ice cream!

Fruits in sugar syrup are considered "processed", yet sweetened juices are considered "ultra-processed". Huh?

Salted nuts are considered "processed" foods. Yet "salty packaged snacks" which would include salted nuts, are considered "ultra processed". Do I have to roast and salt the nuts myself? Where is the processing here? Is the package the problem?

Soups are considered "group 2" foods, which are unprocessed or minimally processed foods combined with oil, sugar or salt, but canned soups are considered ultra-processed. Yeah, OK.

Like, you can kind of see what they're going for, but when you start looking at all the edge cases, it devolves into lunacy. The actual mechanisms of ultra-processing need to be defined, not these examples which simply don't hold.

Oh, like, ones from this year? Hulu has modern Jeopardy, Press Your Luck, $100,000 Pyramid, Name That Tune, Match Game, a whole ton of others. (This is mentioned in the article, but somewhat dismissively.)

Plenty of hit game shows on streaming. Not a great article.

The US did not merely ban Huawei, it was part of a broader national security concern, where ZTE was also banned as part of the equation, and conceivably other major Chinese telecommunications firms with a strong enough foothold in the US would have been (or will be in the future) as well. Not to mention, use of TikTok is entirely an individual choice, a telephone network user does not choose (or have knowledge of) the origin of the devices their communications are transmitted through.

Just tax TikTok. Make Americans pay money to subscribe to it. Apply the same principle to any other social media entity based in another country. It's that easy.

Canada burned only half an exajoule of coal in 2020 per my source quoted above. That's, uh, .013 exajoule per million residents, far below China or Germany, or .05 exajoule per million square kilometers, again far below China or Germany. So yeah, Canada doesn't pollute with coal that badly. Good job Canada.

I still don't even know what "those actual consumers who produce it" is supposed to mean. Like, people who work at coal plants? Are you sentient?

Yet, when you replace MacOS on those well-engineered laptops, trackpad sensitivity and battery life suffers.

You can technically run other systems, but better to simply run MacOS.

In 2020, China was burning 82.27 exajoules, Germany 1.84 exajoules. Reference: https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...

According to their national censuses, China's population in 2020 was 1,419.9m. Germany's was 84.4m.

That's .0579 exajoules per million in China, .0218 per million in Germany. Looks like... less than half coal per capita in Germany?

There's some less reliable, more recent statistics, but nothing at all that hints that Germany is burning more coal than China per capita. Sources?

... which is to say, almost any laptop made over the past couple of decades.

I think the Flipper Zero is a super-fun design thing - "what if Teenage Engineering were RF hackers as opposed to audio people" - but there's nothing in the design of the device that poses any more of a security risk than any number of mainstream devices on the market today. "Oh no, it has a Dolphin mascot! It's got a fun UI!"

Roberto delightedly pours a can of Coke all over the ice cream and begins lapping it up with a spoon.

Oh. He only drinks Coke. What he eats, that's another matter. Uh, that's your own bad decision, man.

I'm an obese dude. I know a whole lot about nutrition and exercise. I cook for myself. I'm pretty active. Lets take a look at these recommendations:

* actions to support healthy practices from day 1, including breastfeeding promotion, protection and support;

I was breast-fed as a child. I am a big chonk.

* regulations on the harmful marketing of food and beverages to children; school food and nutrition policies, including initiatives to regulate the sales of products high in fats, sugars and salt in proximity of schools;

I ate school lunch and only school lunch as a child, which was certainly not good, and was almost certainly never adequate in terms of nutrition for my early 6'+ frame. I am a big chonk.

* fiscal and pricing policies to promote healthy diets;

And this means what? I am a big chonk.

* nutrition labelling policies;

It's important to have nutrition labeling. Let's say I'm on a blood thinner that's sensitive to vitamin K due to genetic issues. Will that be part of the labeling? No? Well OK then. Not very helpful. That said, I can read calories and the macros. Nevertheless, I am a big chonk.

* public education and awareness campaigns for healthy diets and exercise;

Look, there have been public education and awareness campaigns for healthy diets and exercise for decades or even centuries. I personally needed to participate in the President's Physical Fitness test in the US, which I understand has been present since (checks notes) ah, the 1800s. Despite participating, I am a big chonk.

* standards for physical activity in schools;

I fully participated in gym classes to the best of my ability. Even my PE teachers were impressed with my efforts, despite the fact that I was a big chonk. I have remained active, and likely more so than average, in adulthood. I am still a big chonk.

* integration of obesity prevention and management services into primary health care.

Indeed, I have had many doctors make me feel bad about being a big chonk.

Look, none of this matters. I'm a 6'4" big chonk that '70s medicine was totally unprepared for, and there's more of us now. Something is going on that is making us big, and is making us hungry. I don't know what it is. I've spent my life trying to regulate it, and... education is not the answer. I know calories, I know my macros, I know nutrition, and the question here is... what can I eat that doesn't make me hungry?

The recent GLPs have helped. But there's a bigger question of why this is the way things are for an increasing number of us.

If you personally purchased the laptop via retail channels, any software they could have installed to control or monitor the laptop would not survive a factory reset.

If somehow the laptop was permanently associated via Automated Deployment with an MDM profile and you did a factory reset, you would get a popup during setup with the name of the company indicating that they would have the ability to control the laptop. You could ask them to remove the laptop from their Apple Business account and/or MDM solution and reset again.

It won't happen immediately. People will already be there, at the drive-thru at the counter, and they'll tap or swipe their card, revenues will temporarily increase, and it will seem like the plan is working. But every single person will say "what the hell did I just pay for that meal" and then never, ever go to Wendy's again.

Ah yes, the 128TB SSD tantalizingly on the horizon... as tantalizing as the unrealistic dream of, uh, consumer 16TB SSDs, and for goodness sakes it's 2024 and why on earth don't we have those??

He hopes one day to release his masterwork, KRW, the new social media network that will replace your bank, your church, your spouse and your local fast food restaurant into one incredible virtual reality network that will allow you to see into the future and the past simultaneously.

A lot of the "science of obesity" has historically hinged on the notion of gluttony or of eating disorders, where it is assumed people are rejecting the natural feelings of satiety and deliberately eating beyond the natural feelings of fullness. Certainly gluttony and eating disorders are things that happen, but what if many obese people simply have felt hungry their entire lives and are merely trying to slake their intrinsic hunger?

The new GLP-1 and GIP drugs are fascinating, as they do seem to create feelings of satiety after reasonable nutrition in people who have never had that experience before.

Had to replace the terrible factory tires on the EV at 20k, a disappointment. Second pair lasted ~40k. Third pair is over 25k and doing fine.

Tires on the PHEV made it to 35k. Replaced them, they're still doing fine at 60k.

7k? Naah, man. Total garbage nonsense.

It is very much incorrect if you have a car that is worth tens of thousands of dollars, yet can be totaled by a "hit and run" or "act of god".