I agree. Throughout the whole years if I want something, I buy it. If I don’t want something, I don’t.

But all of a sudden around November or December I need to hold off for a bit because someone else wants to buy it for me instead. And it’s usually not quite the same thing that I wanted- I don’t want to be rude, but I would have rather just done the research on my own and made my own purchase.

Or worse, I get gifted stuff I have absolutely no interest in. So I need to make space in my house for it and remember to pretend like I use it on occasions when I see that person for a couple of years until we are past the statue of limitations on getting rid of it.

Just more plastic and emissions. More money going to big corporations. It’s an inefficient purchasing process propped up for the sake of the emotions of irrational people. And corporations like Hallmark seem to exist specifically to amplify these traditions for the benefit of modern shareholders.

There was the whole big lie about Obama’s birth certificate because he was black.

John McCain was born in Panama but no one seemed to care about him.

Melania Trump was an illegal immigrant and that didn’t stop her career or prevent Trump from winning the presidency.

Raphael “Ted” Cruz was born in Alberta yet no one seems to care.

White and Right is alright. I’ll cede that maybe if some useful idiot with dark skin and murky citizenship rose to power conservatives might decide to look the other way, but you need to be at least one for them to do so.

Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.

I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.

I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.

I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.

I kept on checking throughout the day yesterday- Verizon’s website said no outages, but istheservicedown showed most of the east coast of the US was down.

I also heard from friends with business class Internet that they were fine.

Neutorypical here (possibly a touch of undiagnosed autism but not a lot)- I don’t get into them.

My wife and I take a very proactive approach to communication. We talk through decisions before either of us gets emotionally attached to an answer. We trust each other to have good decision making processes when that isn’t an option. We have thoroughly established that both of us are putting the interests of the household first. We know both of us are acting in good faith, we both apologize, and we accept each other’s apologies.

In previous, less healthy relationships, I realized what made a “fight” was that her or I wanted it to be. Maybe one of us wanted attention or affirmation or had some inner problems was taking out on the other. Perhaps we just didn’t feel like we were properly heard unless we were angry. Whatever the actual fight about was usually something that could’ve been resolved without emotional energy.

As for how long to recover after… When it happened it always depends on the specific fight. Sometimes hours, sometimes days, eventually the big one was that we broke up permanently. If the issue has been resolved and someone is harboring resentment because the other party disagreed with them, there’s more underlying emotional issues that need to be resolved.

Why is this story suddenly getting posted to dozens of communities that in seeing in my feed?

It’s one 73 year old tribal elder who complained that today’s youth don’t respect tradition. This same story has been pre-printed for thousands of years.

I really miss front-facing speakers. It’s one of many features that phone manufacturers have removed from phones over the past decade.

Counterpoint: what if older societies already put in place censorship laws that were so successful, they effectively scrubbed any cultural memory of similar “works”?

Perhaps we should write our rules based on what we want in the future rather than what our ancestors did?

Do Europeans use metrinomes now?

Most baking doesn’t require the precision of weighing. They are rough proportions, not an exact science.

An experienced baker, or really any kind of chef, will learn over time to make minor adjustments based on a lot of stuff. Maybe a bit less sugar, to taste. Maybe a difference in the brand or exact type of ingredient compared to what you’re used to. Maybe it’s a particularly dry day and you need to add more moisture to the dough.

If it’s something I have a lot of experience with I don’t even bother with measuring at all, just eyeball it.

I’m not a copyright expert either, but I would think it goes one of two ways.

One is that the original rights holder of the IP could sue these binders for profiting off of it.

The other is that they can’t because the work is sufficiently transformative, in which case it would fall to he fanfic writer. From there, it probably depends on how they released their work. Some websites might claim ownership of anything published there as part of their ToS. Some authors might explicitly release their works under more open licenses to encourage community involvement. If it was just posted somewhere without addressing these questions (which I would guess is pretty common)… Sounds like a mess for the courts to sort out.

Perhaps one day humanity will look back and ask whether the lack of Internet in the thousands of years prior damaged the development of everyone who grew up without it

I do both. Jellyfin is way better if you put in the work of having a good folder structure and file names for metadata to scrape.

VLC is good for weird file types or non-video media. If you want to have a stash of reaction gifs in a playlist, I don’t know if JellyFin has any way to do that. Or if you want the tablet to display a random slideshow of pictures, like a diy digital picture frame. Also it’s easier to use if you don’t have good file names and metadata scraping.

This happens again and again and again. At every level, public and private.

The answer is not “filter these people out of these jobs” because very often they have no prior records. Or sometimes someone gets phished. The answer is to stop enabling this in the first place.

I was having a hard time imagining which company this could be. Not that I’m a fan of Verizon or Comcast, but I think they know what side their bread is buttered on. Which one wouldn’t?

Then I remembered Starlink exists.

Queue all the people in the comments talking about ad blockers or alternative apps.

Those might be great (and ad blocking is important in general), but I’ve found I ultimately just watch YouTube less.

A good chunk of my favorite creators had been pushing Nebula for the past couple years, so I finally tried it out and it’s pretty decent. I’ve even found new channels there that would have been buried on YouTube. Still tons of room for improvement for the platform, but it’s functional now.

Other creators have their own websites with text content, or podcasts hosted elsewhere.

It’s only a small handful of channels I check for on YouTube anymore. It kind of sucks that it’s mostly small channels where video is a key component and they don’t fit with the edu-tainment vibe of Nebula, and I don’t know of another platform for them. Lots of DIY home improvement, self-sufficiency (not religious or conspiratorial lol), music videos, and channels dedicated to specific videogame franchises.

I know LTT has Floatplane too. I wonder if all of these other videos streaming options getting worse will start driving more people to smaller platforms.

Except it’s not private money. Private vehicles have been heavily subsidized for almost a century in the US. We’ve had decade after decades or tax credits, interest-free loans, and bailouts to the oil and automotive industries. Most local road maintenance is financed with debt, and that debt has started to bankrupt municipalities. Minimum parking requirements encourage sprawl and reduce the tax base by filling these municipalities with land that is economically unproductive.

This all applies to electric too. Tesla famously would not exist if not for years and years of government money propping them up and artificially lowering their prices. Plus all the incentives for building owners to add charging stations, and the billions of dollars going towards expanding EV charging infrastructure in general.

And if you want to optimize for efficiency, personal EV’s are still not even close to buses or trains. Personal vehicle ownership absolutely does NOT make economic sense for anyone except the owners and managers of the companies who profit from them.

American suburbs aren’t ever going to become walkable if everyone just keeps saying “well it’s just too hard to have nice things” and keeps throwing money at perpetuating the problem instead of using that money to get out of the hole.

AND all the emissions associated with mining, refining and transporting the fuel

Except it’s nowhere near that simple. Manufacturing and shipping batteries is hardly a clean process. And the impact of the fuel is dependent upon the method used to generate the electricity, and both in the US and globally fossil fuels are still used widely for that.

Plus a lot of the pollution and carbon generation is virtually identical for personal vehicles regardless of how it’s powered. You still have tires that wear, tons of plastics and fluids (even EV’s need lubrication), and of course all of the metals involved. Then of course there is road infrastructure: thousands upon thousands of miles of asphalt and concrete separating neighborhoods and habitats. Acres upon acres of impermeable pavement soaking up heat and occupying valuable space that could be used for something more productive.

EV’s are better than ICE options because they at least will get greener as the electrical grid does, but still have the same fundamental issues that all personal vehicles do. You could add in bil-diesel and hydrogen cars too. It’s saving pennies when things like better public transportation and more walkable cities saves pounds.

Ah see this is the problem with political discussion. It turns out he never actually said that.

According to the article, one tiny piece of the $1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure bill he signed committed two federal agencies to be conduct a study on that as a potential solution.

The Forbes article editorializes that significantly to say that beaconing has received the “federal stamp of approval”.

It’s like a kid asking their parents for McDonalds for hours and the parent says “I’ll think about it”.

No I don’t remember that. Any chance you have a link?

I remember Tesla fanboys crying when Biden appointed Cummings to the NHTSA, but I can’t think of anything else connecting Biden to self-driving cars.