PolygonSheep

That's pretty crazy. I wonder if it will stall the engine for extra realism if you let off the clutch pedal too fast starting off. Perhaps also a "money shift" option that burns up the electric motor if you shift from 5th to 2nd at speed.

This reminds me of how manufacturers started adding fake shift points to their CVTs, kind of defeating the whole purpose of the transmission being continuously variable.

> Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.” She said the agency’s “priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.”

> Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

Much as I can sympathize with that, the CDC withholding massive amounts of data seems like throwing gasoline on the conspiracy fire.

Look at what happened when the FDA said it would take 75 years to publicly release the Pfizer vaccine data. Yes it was justifiable but it didn't exactly calm conspiracy theorists down.

Has anyone figured out how MM/DD/YYYY got to be standard in America? It makes no sense but I can't find any solid answer on this.

This seems to have been more of a publicity stunt by Neiman Marcus and/or Honeywell. From what I can tell no one ever expected any of these to sell for kitchen purposes.

They also had business jets, real Egyptian mummies, and submarines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neiman_Marcus#The_Christmas_Bo...

I do think human progress and welfare would have been much better off without Twitter and Instagram. I think WhatsApp is basically neutral and I haven't used WeChat or Snapchat so I can't comment on those.

As an American I see imperial as no worse than time measurements. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 7 days in a week, ~4 weeks in a month (which can be from 28-31 days, depending) and 12 months/52 weeks in a year.

If you can manage to keep all this straight (and from what I can tell the rest of the world has no trouble using clocks and calendars) then you won't have much trouble with inches/feet/miles or ounces/pounds/tons since it's pretty much the same deal.

Yeah I've noticed this too. Everyone says Hershey's tastes like vomit but you never see anyone calling Parmesan cheese "vomit cheese".

Because if Coral doesn't buy the ad that shows up when people search for "coral" one of their competitors might. "Looking for Coral? Try our better intimacy app instead!"

Some people will also click on the ad result instead of the actual search result, resulting in Apple/Google earning some money for the click.

I do wonder if too many warning labels leads to warning fatigue. I remember the first time I saw a Proposition 65 warning it gave me serious pause wondering if the product (a set of Christmas lights) was even safe to handle with bare hands. The 10,000th time I didn't notice at all. "Yeah everything causes cancer nowadays whatever who cares". Meaning there is now a chance I will end up ignoring the warning on something that is actually really carcinogenic because everything I buy says it can cause cancer and reproductive harm.

LTT Labs could end up being like BuzzFeed vs BuzzFeed News where a site famous for its clickbait, inane quizzes, and half-assed listicles started doing serious investigative journalism.

If you told me ten years ago that BuzzFeed's news site would end up winning many prestigious awards including a Pulitzer Prize I would have thought you were joking.

Will NIMBYs become an endangered species? A lot of regulations are aimed at keeping property values high with the idea that most (or at least a substantial portion of) voters own real estate and want it to appreciate. If we become a nation of renters with only a tiny minority owning real estate then who cares about keeping property values high anymore? It's not your problem! Your net worth will no longer be impacted by changes in the market value of the house you live in. Housing will be an expense, not an asset, and "the rent is too damn high!" might catch on.

What puts me off electric cars is battery wear. Every laptop or phone battery I've had has noticeable wear after a year or two. In a $50-100 battery this is no big deal (and for phones the device itself is probably nearing end of life anyway by the time battery wear becomes an issue).

I know gasoline car drivetrains wear too but a new gasoline car is probably good for at least 5 years/60k miles before it needs serious mechanical attention, and with a bit of luck you may even get up to 10 years/100k before you get a 4 digit repair bill. And even past that unless it's in seriously bad shape it will still get pretty much the same mileage out of a tank of gas as it did the day it rolled off the assembly line.

Is this any better for electric car batteries? The laptop I'm typing this on now is ~11 months old and the battery has lost 15.4% of its capacity after 272 cycles. Undoubtedly I wouldn't average anywhere near 1 cycle/day with a 300 mile range Tesla but the thought of my car's energy storage losing capacity like that just makes me extremely nervous. I know I can "supercharge" my car's gas tank as often as I need to and it will not lose any capacity regardless of how often I empty it and fill it up again. This is very comforting to me.

> 5G vaccines, QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are.

I do wonder how many people are in these movements. It kind of reminds me of the Westboro Baptist Church who succeeded in getting themselves a ton of media attention despite being ~70 people. I think Qanon is probably a couple orders of magnitude bigger than the WBC but I would be surprised if the core following exceeds 100,000 people in the US.

I personally believe these things are more a manifestation of underlying mental illness than anything else and if you somehow pushed a magic button to delete all traces of Qanon from the public consciousness they would immediately become sovereign citizens or Holocaust deniers or something (if, indeed, they aren't already). If someone's in Qanon or a Flat Earther it's not because they didn't read the Snopes article debunking Pizzagate or that they didn't understand how the Foucault pendulum works.

I don't think this can be fixed with better information. These people are not well and they need psychiatric help.

I built my last desktop with parts from Best Buy (except the SSDs which I was carrying over to the new one). They don't have a huge selection so you won't be able to build anything very high or low end but it was very competitively priced and I was able to get it all same day pickup. Their case selection is pretty much limited to the glass side panel/RGB LED stuff though.

This was in very early 2020 just right before everything got crazy so I'm not sure how it is now.

I sometimes feel like a weirdo because I just don't miss the cathode ray tube that much, either as a PC monitor or as the living room TV. I'm 34 so I think I'm on the tail end of the last generation that used them when they were still common.

I've never once pined for them. I really don't miss moving them. I don't miss 17" displays (and lets be honest most people weren't using high end ones). I don't miss 21 inches being the biggest you could get unless you had insane money. I don't miss 1024x768.

Yeah the blacks were good but I wouldn't go back to using a '90s CRT monitor as a daily driver even if you paid me a thousand dollars.

The only thing I do miss is the 4:3 aspect ratio. If someone could do a nice large high dpi 4:3 LCD monitor that would be "shut up and take my money!".

I remember being in grade school while this was happening and a girl was explaining to me how it worked, that such-and-such Beanie Baby was being "retired" and only a few thousand of each one was made. I just didn't get it. Why wouldn't they make more? I mean it's not like we're going to run out of polyester and plastic pellets anytime soon. Not to mention the company itself doesn't benefit if they appreciate on the used market. Why would they leave all that money on the table by deliberately making less than people wanted?

There were also rumors going around that the whole thing - production of all Beanie Babies - was going to end in the year 2000 which actually turned out to be very briefly true before it wasn't anymore.

As an adult I was smart enough to miss cryptocurrency 10 years ago because I thought it sounded like Flooz.com or Beenz. Magic internet money you can earn by solving sudokus? Who the hell wants that? I then missed NFTs (won't they just right click?) and now I'm too scared to get in for fear I will end up as the bag holder.

I'm probably going to end up learning the wrong lesson from this and throw fifty bucks into every crazy-sounding scheme I come across from now on in hopes one of them will hit it big. But that's not so different from venture capital. Just on a smaller scale.

Punitive taxation and restricting trade with Africa wouldn't be a good look...

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

(Not to say it's only Africa by any means, but you do have to go quite a ways down the list before you hit a non-African country).

All grocery stores were like this a hundred years ago. You didn't walk around the store shopping but instead you would give your order at the counter and a shop assistant would fetch the stuff for you. Though I think this was more about customer service than a shoplifting deterrent. Much the same as my father hates self checkout because he sees scanning and bagging items as an employee's job, not his.

The innovation of self-service shopping was novel enough that Clarence Saunders, founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain, was granted a patent on the business model in 1918: https://patents.google.com/patent/US1242872A

So I guess we're come full circle back to the old ways of retailing.