Also every single one of them is on Spotify!

What bothers me most about unions is the increased bargaining power labour gets when they work together. As a manager, my employer expects me to use every trick possible to pay those actually making the company run as little as possible and unions make it much harder to get my bonuses.

But I use one neat trick and pay the employees the money that then gets directed to running the union as a deduction from their paycheck and many of them don’t even notice that the difference in overall take-home because of that increased bargaining power is higher than the union dues. They focus on the nickels and dimes and don’t even notice the dollars!

And the fact that I need to meet certain criteria before I can fire them due to the union contact doesn’t even show up on the paycheck–they often don’t even think about it until it’s too late!

Just install a barbeque lighter near the leak and set a timer to regularly light it and just flare off anything that has leaked since the previous flare. Then, when rebuilding after the fire, add a pressure sensor to the new setup that reduces the interval if the pressure increases beyond what it was when the interval was first calibrated.

Not only gas prices, some trucks are priced similarly to mid end porsches. I’ve always seen them similarly as I see minivans or SUVs: something circumstances might dictate you should drive instead of a car. Minivans if you need to haul kids, SUVs if you need to haul sports equipment, trucks if you need to haul things moved by front loaders or outdoor tools. Or maybe if they do some offroading, certain trucks work well for that (though I’d personally rather go for a jeep, Suzuki, or something small).

But for some reason there’s people who get a fancy liner so that their groceries don’t scratch their truck bed and their tires never touch dirt until maybe they want to show off and end up stuck in some mud or something because they forgot to set it to 4WD.

What happened?

Telephoto lenses have a low field of vision. You’d want very high resolution wide angle sensors. Or maybe a combination of the two, where the wide angle cameras spot interesting things for the narrow angle ones to look closer at.

The difference between the two would be like when they went from U2 spy planes to satellite imagery, going from thin strips of visibility to “here’s the hemisphere containing most of Russia”.

Ok lol now I realize you’re just trolling and probably aren’t even a delivery driver. Almost had me going for a sec there gg.

I wish they’d just use the postal service. In Canada they’ve set up nice secure package boxes and leave a key in your normal (also secured) mailbox. And if it takes a few days to arrive, so be it.

They should change extra for packages too large or urgent for Canada Post and use that money to hire professionals that understand not everything revolves around their delivery schedule and that random cyclists that happen to be passing through the area have nothing to do with their orders.

That’s pretty smart, using it for legal documents. If the accuracy is high, it might be nice to just copy paste any tos or whatever to get the highlights in plain language (which imo should be a legal requirement of contracts in general, but especially ones written by a team of bad faith lawyers intended for people they don’t expect to read it and deliberately written to discourage reading the whole thing).

You can load a truck with fuel cells to extend range beyond what the current infrastructure can handle.

It’s more complicated with batteries that need to be charged. Sure, there’s a grid in many places, but if combat capability depends on the grid, it’ll get targetted. And even before that, capacity is a concern and if the grid can handle a tank battalion wanting to plug in every tank so they can be ready for whatever comes next ASAP.

Fuel cells mean they can set up behind the front lines and use power more predictably and refuel tanks quicker than gas.

Wouldn’t surprise me if that neighbour has been in a few accidents, gotten a bunch of speeding tickets, and/or is a young male.

Also depends on what they are driving.

Many bigots feel entitled to their bigotry but would probably be outraged if they knew some of the other things the people around them at the rallies they attend believe.

And if you enable the mouse while line numbers are set to be displayed, you can highlight multiple lines without needing to include the line numbers when you paste it later.

It is possible, though I think it’s one of those products whose success is based more on customer testimonials than actual statistics about it’s effectiveness.

They might exist, but I haven’t met anyone who has said they were able to use duolingo to become fluent or even competent in a language.

But then again, my German learned from a class in high school isn’t much better. Hell, my French leaned from being in French immersion all through elementary school followed by normal French classes in high school isn’t even at a competent level, though I can at least communicate a bit in French. I can still see those subject-verb conjugation tables though lol (though I’ve lost the French version of “them/they”).

Lol Spanish is one language that I had assumed might actually work decently with that approach, but I can’t say I’m surprised it doesn’t.

And yeah, they do seem to design the exercises to be easy. Like translate a sentence to English, but they only give one verb option, or sometimes they don’t even provide any options that aren’t a part of the sentence and it becomes “can you string these English words together to form a valid sentence with hints in the language you are learning?”

I’m using another app specific to Japanese that at least has grouped the answers in ways that make it harder but more effective because I need to tell the difference between similar looking kanji. It’s frustrating, but at least the frustration comes from being annoyed at my own pace rather than from getting a false sense that I’m doing very well only to realize I barely know anything without multiple choice hints.

It’s kinda funny, I’ve become so turned off to these manipulations that the gamification of duolingo just annoys me more than it motivates me. The whole point is to learn a language. Power ups that let you extend the time to complete a timed exercise don’t help with learning a language. Getting to the top of the leaderboard didn’t make a difference either, especially if it was done using xp boosts.

At this point, I just hate that it forces me to spend time watching various meaningless bars fill up after each lesson.

I’ve even missed a couple of days, thinking “oh well, there goes my streak, which also doesn’t really matter”, only to find that they cared more about keeping that than I did and have automatic freezes. Though it wanted me to buy more after the last one, so I’m thinking the next time I miss a day it’ll finally go back to 0.

Oh and yes, duolingo is a pay to win language learning game where you can give them money for boosts in the meaningless gamification shit. Even after buying a year subscription (that I don’t plan on renewing).

They also completely skip any of the foundational stuff and jump right in to phrases that they don’t explain. I’m a few months into Japanese lessons on there and it still hasn’t even mentioned that it’s been teaching the polite form and that other forms exist (which makes things confusing if you try to use other resources that generally use the neutral form).

It might be better for other languages that aren’t so different from English, but I do not suggest duolingo if you want to learn Japanese.

Tbh I don’t suggest learning Japanese at all if you aren’t strong with languages and memorization. There’s a couple thousand kanji symbols you need to learn for everyday communication, and each of those can be combined with others to form words that aren’t always intuitive, and then those words can be strung together into sentences that also aren’t intuitive to interpret.

And it’s why I hate capitalism as a consumer.

“People need an incentive to invent things!”

Well, if that incentive is making money instead of making a great thing, it’s probably not going to be a great thing. Great things make money.

I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even really care about new web features. It’s all come with so much shit that I can’t say the internet today is a better experience than it was back before marketers leaned into it so much and everyone wanting a piece of that data money drowned out much of the rest of it.

I’d take the current feature set with ad blocking and reader mode over any feature set without those. Well, reasonable feature sets. But then again, if I had the option of getting a star trek holodeck but had to let marketers regularly nag me about buying their shit any time I wanted to use it, I’d still be conflicted.

At least performance mods can improve efficiency, with the focus of getting more power from the motor to the pavement. If they are actual performance mods (as opposed to just making exhaust louder or adding a rear spoiler on a front wheel drive car), with exceptions of ones that do that by increasing fuel use.

Though even with that one, driving style can matter. Anecdotal, but my car has a sports mode and an eco mode, as well as a fuel use indicator. I found that using sports mode and then having a range of speed I’d drive at (accelerate hard to top speed of the range, then reduce power so that it slows to the low end then accelerating again) was the most efficient way to drive it. If I tried the same in eco mode, the reduced power meant I spent more time doing the acceleration, and either of those was more fuel efficient than just maintaining one speed. Though it was a frustrating way to drive (both for me and I’m sure for anyone who ended up behind me). You couldn’t go on auto pilot doing it that way and had to pay constant attention to your speed.

It’s kinda like the race to idle strategy for CPU/GPU efficiency. Use lots of power when it’s needed so that it can go back to using much less power.

I forget which crossing it was exactly. Might have been Windsor or might have been farther north. We drove several hours before switching to the shuttle in any case and didn’t get out to look around on the Canadian side of the crossing.

It could have been a biased sample. I mean, for all I know, one very obese family just happened to get on that same shuttle rather than it being a random sampling of what people were like in that area. Hell, they could have even driven several hours to get there themselves and thus didn’t represent the local population at all.

Could have been bias confirmation rather than culture shock.

I was only in SF for one day and had an event most of that day, unfortunately, so I didn’t get to see much of the city. I think I saw the golden gate bridge from the plane. The hotel they put me in was nice, though, most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in.

LA was hot and the traffic was pretty crazy. I was there for about a week for siggraph with work. Santa Monica was nice, it was cool seeing the Hollywood sign in person, and I do remember looking back at the city and seeing all the haze.

Six flags had rollercoasters that lasted longer than the longest one at Canada’s Wonderland (at least at the time, their 3 newest ones are a bit more comparable). I won a giant Scooby Doo stuffy because they had a game where I figured out the trick to it on my first play and returned later to upgrade my small Scooby-Doo to the large one (and bought the bag for the plane trip). The stuffy was pretty cheaply made though, so they might have still made money from the two plays I paid for lol.

Other bits and pieces I remember are the different vegetation they had (my first time seeing palm trees) and noticing the barbed wire on a bunch of flat roofs. Also it was weird to see commercials for prescription drugs.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot one of the highlights of the trip, going to Fry’s during it’s heyday. I was buying my own hardware at that time but it was the first time I saw an aisle of motherboards where you could actually see the boards on display. I think we ended up going there twice, once for cables we forgot to pack for our booth, then later for our own shopping trip.