I… feel like my entire life has been a hollow waste. 😆

We Americans really have a near total dearth of flavors in our processed foods. It’s been getting better over recent decades, but it’s still just industrial flavorings. The flavoring is just something Americans invented to cover up a lack of nutrients in our food. These processed foods have the added bonus of spurring us to eat more because the food is so nutritionally empty, yet tastes like it should be nutritive. Ref: “The Dorito Effect” by Mark Schatzker.

I’m mostly okay with these kinds of salary shenanigans, because those employers generally fuck themselves somewhere in the short to long terms. What grinds my gears is how employers think they get access to all of someone’s skills and their full work velocity despite deliberately underpaying. Almost invariably, this conversation comes up with one of my employers or contracts after they decided to cheap out.

“Oh, I recall that you have experience in [specific software engineering discipline].”

“That’s correct. I did that for [a bunch of] years.”

“So, we have this pro—”

“No.”

“No?! But you know this stuff. Also ‘other duties as assigned.’”

“And you’re not paying enough to get access to those skills.”

“That’s insubordination!”

“So fire me and see what you’ll have to pay to replace me AND get someone who will do [engineering thing].”

How did they miss “Jedi Master” in their list of qualifications?

The really fun bit: in order to smell anything, you necessarily have to snort in molecules of that substance. It’s a happy little thought whenever passing a sewage treatment plant.

Oh, I skip FB and IG ads completely. It’s crazy: I didn’t even have to install anything, and the ads just disappeared one day.

But seriously, the “your attention is being monetized” model makes for such an awful experience for me. I’m envious of people who can enjoy the world and the Internet when ads are everywhere.

It came from a speaker a few years ago at the Davos World Economic Forum. Davos is where the ultra rich gather each year to plot out how to be even more evil.

You have it backwards here. Apple needs to support developers. They make it expensive and inconvenient to develop on their ecosystem. But until Apple releases their stranglehold, I would be just fine if I never have to use their shitty OS, development software, and tools ever again.

my M1 Max MacBook Pro could run Baldur’s Gate 3 at max graphics with no performance issues. On battery. Over extended periods

I’m a bit skeptical on this claim, or maybe we have different ideas of what “extended periods” mean. My M1 Max MBP would have just under two hours of run time with VS Code doing .NET Core dev. It was even worse when doing Ruby on Rails work. And that was when MBP was new. My whole team were issued these, and our experiences were the same. Zoom calls were even worse, with about 90 minutes of run time.

The ARM architecture has amazing battery life when idling, quite unlike x86. But when it gets spooled up, it eats angry pixies just the same as x86. All of my x86 laptops can do .NET Core work… for two hours.

Anything worth doing is worth doing again.

This is exactly the case. Also, I worked for a credit union at the time, and employees got a 1% discount on interest rates for loans over a 24 months.

Liquidity. Buying a car on credit is mostly stupid, but there are cases when it makes some sense. My last car loan was 3.54%. My combined accounts were earning ~8%. Paying cash in that case would be throwing away money. Well, throwing away money on top of wasting it on a car.

You raise a good point on REI. I would trust any of those to not burn down my neighbor’s house. I would also trust REI to be able to work on any bike they sell, AND make sure it’s actually set up correctly before it goes out the door. At the LBS where my partner works, just about every day, people bring in bikes that would put the fear in you. The “new in box” mail order ebikes can fill a novel just by themselves.

I love what Priority is doing with bikes. It’s like they thought “What do bike commuters really need?” And then they built those bikes without letting the MBAs and bean counters getting in their way.

You can get a pretty damn good one in the 1k range, which seems reasonable given the price of batteries.

Avid cyclist here, former community bicycle mechanic, and my partner works in the biggest bike shop in town. There are no good electric bicycles under $2000. This is how houses burn down. Furthermore, shitty mail order bikes are an e-waste scourge.

They are difficult to work on, very frequently use proprietary parts that might be specific to that model year, often have mechanical disc brakes and no-name parts, and have crappy electronics and batteries.

You may love your cheap electric bike. I wish you the best of luck and many happy miles.

We truly are nothing but a bunch of barely evolved monkeys. We’re even smart enough to know better, but too stupid to do anything about it. “Hey, that’s a brick wall dead ahead.” Humanity at large: <stomps the gas pedal>

I’m okay with the price and range. I am actively averse to the parts and service lock-in, app requirements, subscription-based everything, data privacy issues, and all of the other “modern” bullshit that comes with modern vehicles. I think most people at least implicitly understand that the early gold rush is going to be a bloodbath and that new entrants to the game are going to sputter and trip on things that other companies have been doing for decades.

I’d buy an electric motorcycle today if it didn’t have an app requirement to get full power and level 3 charging, didn’t have any subscription bullshit, was entirely designed to be worked on by anyone with basic tools and knowledge, had user-swappable batteries, and had a strong data privacy policy.

So yeah, lots of niche players are going to die, and most of them absolutely deserve it.

They really can. And you should know your rights. The death industry is slimy AF, about on par with timeshares. My late mother-in-law was Lisa Carlson, a pioneer of funeral rights and ethics. If you are going to be dealing with someone’s death or planning to die (and you should be prepared), it’s important stuff. You don’t want to get suckered when you are so emotionally vulnerable, on which the death industry preys. There are a lot of options which the death industry tries very hard to keep hidden from you and lobbies to remove.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Final_Rights.html?id=-qxJEAAAQBAJ

Also: this is the offshoot of Carlson’s funeral ethics organization https://funerals.org/

Edit: I meant to say, “There was a phase and I missed my one chance to be cool?!”

Phase? I grew up poor AF, so it was either jars or beat-up, cast-off Tupperware cups, and I always hated the feel of putting plastic to my mouth. Now that I’m grown (definitely not grown-up, though) and actually able to afford excellent glassware, jars are just a great way to reduce and reuse. I’m all about multiuse items, and jars are one of my favorites.

Lots of things come in straight-sided jars which maximize volume stored with volume consumed. The jar comes with a sealing lid. They tend to be durable since they have to survive shipping. I can make a big cocktail or some great food to give to a friend without worrying if my container comes back. Yeah, I’m Team Jar all the way.

My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker’s comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.

Fake it til you make it!

Oh no! Anyway…

Another drop-shipper … err, I mean “manufacturer” of cheap Chinesium garbage bites the dust. The more of these companies on the trash heap of history, the better. Say hi to VanMoof and their stupid garbage when you get there, Juiced. It’s just too bad they didn’t eat shit far sooner.

I have negative sympathies for people who buy this garbage. “Why would I spend $8000 for a life-critical, high amperage transportation system with FUCKING LITHIUM in it?! I could spend $1500 and get something just as good! Oh shit, my house burned down/my bike can’t be serviced by the LBS/I can’t get any parts.”

Remember in grade school, when we had all those caveat emptor lessons? Does that just not happen anymore? Because I think it’s one of the few possible explanations for how much cheap, dangerous crap there is that people are buying. Not just crappy e-bikes, but the freighters full of shit that is all destined for local landfills.