And a heavy duty three pack nonetheless! I didn’t realize packing factored into so many genders. Learn something new every day!

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.

Whenever I see “Culture War” in a title I know it’s going to involve a shit take from selfish regressive pricks.

People are so incredibly fucking selfish.

They want them because they’re being lazy/cheap. No, seriously. They’re called widowmaker cords for a reason, but inevitably some muppet with two plugs and some wire will come up with the brilliant idea that one of these will work for.

One really sneaky and dangerous place these get made are generator backfeed cheater cables for houses. You see them in RVs, Xmas lights etc too, but generator backfeeds are super dangerous because they’re also juggling two potential power sources. A backfeed is where a house/building is disconnected from the grid just by flipping off the main panel breaker, then it’s “backfed” by a generator going into another breaker in the panel. Usually, without any type of safety interlock to keep the mains voltage off when the generator is on, or vice versa.

Afaik, this is illegal per housing code almost everywhere that I’ve seen, but still every now and then some yahoo thinks “wait, if I make a two-ended cable and put a receptacle on the house, I can remove the generator easily without any of the expensive safety crap!” And then grabs a live male plug when they fuck up and didn’t shut off the generator or mains voltage…

Electrified double-sided dildo sex, no less!

Photo for reference (sorry, reddit link): https://www.reddit.com/r/recycling/comments/1dg9gnm/is_this_true/

Fun trivia in case you didn’t know: that’s a domino’s advertisement printed on their pizza box in which the box claims to “dream of being another box.” It’s actually horrible for the recycling stream. Essentially every legitimate recycler explicitly states that grease- and cheese-contaminated cardboard is not allowed to be recycled because it degrades the quality of the recycled product and causes messes at recycling facilities.

So basically, this dream is a manufactured corporate lie and belongs exactly where we see it.

(Well alright fine, if you need good news, the good news is that in some areas while they still don’t belong in recycling bins, pizza boxes can go in your green bin compost. Although this is heavily dependent on where you live and what type of compost stream is used there. Don’t assume it’s ok to recycle or compost without checking, and never trust the packaging labels!)

For those unaware: -196°C (-320°F) is the approximate boiling point of liquid nitrogen. Call it creative marketing I guess!

And yes I used to do lots of charpy impact testing hence that knowledge is engraved in my brain forever. DBTT gaaang

I have a foot pedal button assigned to mute my microphone.

(And no, I don’t stream or anything, purely a QoL thing 😆)

Oof, yeah I’m pretty picky about some keybinds and games that lock down keys can be almost unplayable.

Helldivers 2 doesn’t let you remap interact to F (which is the only muscle memory interact key I can use) and I haaaaate that so much. I had to get a workaround just to fix it.

Hmmm, for some reason the first thing I thought of was “www.customgiantdildos would sound better than www.giantcustomdildos because of how the words flow.”

“I’ve got in two fights before”

Excuse me? Over what, having to yield for 10 seconds to someone else? Fucking children.

Try living in an older section of my city, where all residential roads are all effectively narrower than these NIMBY childcare center candidates are whining about. Forget getting in a fight, yielding and learning how to negotiate with cars, bikes, peds, and muni vehicles is called life. If you get upset about it here you’re clearly not a native to city life, and it shows.

Yet another victory for manged ⁠☆queeromacy☆

Ah shit, that reminds me I need to go get killed by the airstrikes of internet randos in helldivers again. 10/10 game

It doesn’t help that carmakers get incentivised to go big by fucked up fuel standards. Here in the US the CAFE standards were gutted during their creation to carve out looser standards for obese pickups and hummer-sized SUVs. The bigger they get even within a given segment, the less stringent the requirements are.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popularity-federal-policy-pollution

Plus people “feel safer” and all that other jazz when they drive them. It’s just… It’s so stupid to have to watch people continuing to chose shit like this.

IMO it’s such a multi-faceted problem that at this point about the only thing that makes sense is to switch lanes (heh) and focus on other transit methods. More people will take transit or bike if it’s easier than parking their mile long farm vehicles in tight urban spaces and being helplessly fumigated by standstill traffic.

Yeah I was going to say, phones are currently growing bigger after hitting a sort of “peak small” lol.

They’re getting so huge that it’s hard to find a small one without ordering an old model. I like to be able to see things and all but at a certain point they don’t fit comfortably in my pockets

“Too broke to play PC” is a vanishing argument IMO. People have been saying that forever, to be fair, but given how bad Xbox and Playstation have gotten I don’t anyone who’s actually into gaming purchasing a new one today. Maybe used, that might make sense if it was really cheap.

A budget gaming PC can check out at slightly over 600 now. PcPartPicker has two recommended builds priced right at 600, though honestly there might be even cheaper ways to arrive at that level of perfromance. Compared to 300-400 for the less garbage Xbox, and there’s not much argument to lock someone into the xbox’s ecosystem vs something you can upgrade for much less.

Now I think it’s a different matter if it’s a hand-me-down or given for free. There’s no reason not to do that.

I gave my last console away and got a friend of mine into gaming, then helped them build a decent PC when they actually wanted something new.

The US Navy hates this one simple trick!

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).

To echo the OP’s reply below, there are a lot of different reasons combining right now to make them popular.

One of the factors that has improved the most over the last 5 years is how much more access people have to safe and cheap optons. Buying a cheaper e-bike even just 5-6 years ago had you gambling on components and hoping your battery and charger were certified and sourced reputably. And, while you could order online, the experience wasn’t always great.

Nowadays it seems like almost everything has certified chargers and batteries, and the overall build quality of cheap bikes and scooters (bikes especially) has improved as well.

Combine that with being able to order a bike or scooter online, ship it to your door in just a week or two, and get going with minimal assembly and adjustment. Boom, that’s an attractive option, even before you hit incentives. E-bikes and scooters are so insanely cheap to own and operate compared to a car (even a super cheap car) so it just makes a ton of sense that people would choose them.