Good call.

I dunno, they seem to be tossing around the idea of investigating Super Bowl stuff this week.

I’m not seeing the downside. Have you seen that cable management?!

This is amazing. Especially out of context.

Squatting on a party-line to play WoW is just a wild pairing of technological eras to me. If we go by the invention date of the former they’re more than a century apart (1878).

Also: rude!

Obligatory Moonbase Alpha TTS

Gonna need a functional government with a functioning regulatory body for that.

Edit: also, Congress seems to be able to just lasso anyone and pull them into a hearing to make a show of damn near anything. We could really use one of those for this (and many other) boondongles right now.

I only got $10 on me. Can I pay you the rest using my company’s stock?

The problem isn’t necessarily the branding on the cards. The transaction networks that carry the data from point-of-sale (merchants), to transaction processing facilities, to banks and back, are the problem. That infrastructure is run by Visa, MC, etc.

They also have a defacto cartel, not only due to owning the networks, but by complying with the very complex credit card compliance regulations. Combined with vendor lock-in for merchants and others, this creates a space that makes it obscenely hard for anyone else to join in. Just ask the folks over at Discover about that.

A few things to consider here that have nothing to do with exercise or diet:

• Aging trajectory. Remember when everyone was at a completely different point in physical development back in school?¹ It turns out that everyone’s body-clock for biological aging is just different, and folks hit different milestones at different points.
• Genetics. Some people are dealt a bad hand, and inherit all kinds of unfair stuff. Things they may not openly talk about.
• Resilience. We get less physically resilient when we age. IMO, it’s inflammation related. Again, everyone has a different timeline for how fast or slow this happens.
• Sports (in the past). Some people tore up their bodies playing high-impact sports. Those injuries come due later on, usually in the form of joint problems. At the same time, being sedentary can exacerbate that condition - they made choices as a teenager that obligates them to keep exercising or going to PT.
• Circadian rhythms. Some people have lifestyles that do not line up with their body’s need for sleep and wakefulness at all. This results in a sensation of being permanently jet-lagged, because they are.
• Stress. Whether it’s psychological or physiological, it all adds up and does wonders for complicating all of the above.
• Entitlement. IMO, it’s a natural inclination to feel entitled to a comfy, pain-free existence when you feel that you’ve done everything right so far. That said, your body may decide to have other ideas one day, and leaves one feeling kind of betrayed by forces beyond their control. Not everyone is equipped to handle “it is what it is” and just accept it out of hand. It’s a recipe for complaint and, honestly, requires psychological support to overcome.

So you may be (naturally) making better life choices in these areas that fit with your particular biology, and/or you have really good genetics at this stage in the game.

¹ - We all knew that one guy that was rocking an adult body at 13, in the same class as some kid that was still waiting for puberty to hit. Shit was wild.

I won’t dox myself, but the handful of places I recognize are very non-white areas. Is that what everyone else is seeing?

Ricky Martin: Living la vida loca.

Kid rock: Living la vida coke-a.

For those not in the know: this has been a thing for a while, is available to anyone (at least on AWS), and I have very deeply mixed feelings about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing website with which businesses can hire remotely located “crowdworkers” to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do as economically. It is operated under Amazon Web Services, and is owned by Amazon.[1] Employers, known as requesters, post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as identifying specific content in an image or video, writing product descriptions, or answering survey questions. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers or crowdworkers, browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a fee set by the requester. To place jobs, requesters use an open application programming interface (API), or the more limited MTurk Requester site.[2] As of April 2019, requesters could register from 49 approved countries.[3] It is named after the Mechanical Turk, a chess machine.[4]

Have you seen this show? It’s like 10 years of that.

The problem here is the for-profit model that drives mass (over-)production and planned obsolescence.

We can do away with this if a company embraces a completely different model. Instead of doing the usual thing, go 100% on-demand with pre-orders, and only build what people want to buy. Then, keep moving horizontally into other product lines, following the demand and manufacturing need. Once pre-orders hit a given theshold, manufacturing starts for a given product. This eliminates all kinds of overhead and allows the company to survive by investing in multiple revenue streams. As a bonus: it’s a lot less wasteful since you never make more units than you can sell.

Subscriptions are like insurance and gym memberships. They’re profitable only if they represent value that is never fully realized by the consumer. They’re a really bad tax, and people dislike them for good reason. I want to buy a thing from a company, and that’s all; it’s not my responsibility to keep them afloat after that transaction.

If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price.

There’s another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it’s an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn’t be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.

So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new “buy for life” economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.

Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.

This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it “realizing the actual cost of things.” Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you’re going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.

Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we’ve been saying “buy nice or buy twice” for a long time now.

or my son.

I kid you not, when the realtor showed the house they brought their rambunctious 7-year-old with them. Kiddo wasted zero time and did a running full-gainer into the conversation pit, tucked into a roll on landing, and sprawled out flat to stop in the middle of the room. Realtor/mom was NOT amused. Frankly, I was impressed but also relieved that there was no staged furniture in that particular room.

I hosted a few house-parties over the years and always had to keep a watchful eye on guest’s alcohol intake and all the steps and railings. It was kind of exhausting.

It needs to happen. We’re in a situation right now where media is captive by the same forces driving EVERYTHING right now. Re-establishing a free and honest press is pretty much required at this point.

I used to hang with a lot of hard-partying night-owls. Combining poor sleep, cigarettes, and alcohol can age a person pretty damn fast. If you add hard drugs to the mix, or even some legitimate prescriptions, it happens faster.

As they say: “never meet your heroes”. Two out of three ain’t bad.