There was a time when CRT TVs were so cranky and reliably in need of service that your local drugstore had a rack of replacement tubes and even a tube-tester machine. You could pull a bunch of tubes from your set, test them at the store, and buy a replacement for whichever one was bad.
Are you living in Canada? Maybe no one has to bother to persuade you to pass up the Mrs. Butterworth.
If you consider liquor bottles, you will have to admit that the looks of the bottle must be a big part of the marketing and appeal. A lot of people in that business obviously consider it important that their bottles are distinctive.
And maybe it’s at least a little bit that way for syrup, too. If you’re asking people to pony up extra money for real maple syrup, maybe it makes sense to distinguish the bottle with extra cozy-homey-old-timey signifiers.
All that said, the brands of maple syrup I’ve been buying don’t have a vestigial jug handles. Many of them don’t.
Toucan Sam (he has a name – who knew?) never actually eats the Fruit Loops, as far as anyone can tell. Which should give you pause about your breakfast choices, should it not?
Someone in my family was briefly obsessed with the idea that Google had a habit of gathering information by treating its own users as guinea pigs. Sending users on routes that would help Google gather traffic flow information, rather than routes that made the best use of users’ time.
As far as I know, that was an internet rumor, not the result of evidence or investigation. But it’s the kind of allegation that’s pretty much impossible to disprove.
In my neck of the woods, the toll road is often much smoother. Compared to the overall costs of owning a car, road tolls in the US are almost nothing, unless you’re racking them up every day.
“In the UK,” it says. It’s referring to a different, earlier trial with a different outcome.
Depp v News Group Newspapers Ltd [2020] EWHC 2911 (QB) was a defamation lawsuit brought in England. The case was initiated by American actor Johnny Depp … after The Sun ran an article[b] that claimed Depp had abused his ex-wife … The article stated, “Overwhelming evidence was filed to show Johnny Depp engaged in domestic violence against his wife Amber Heard,” who “recounted a detailed history of domestic abuse incidents, some of which had led to her fearing for her life.” After a three-week trial in London in July 2020, Andrew Nicol, a High Court judge sitting without a jury, rejected Depp’s claim in a verdict announced later that year, ruling that the published material was “substantially true”.[2]
What’s a “cyber cafe,” grandpa? Is it a sex thing?
The ones I remember reading about all come with a big caveat: The organisms can only work after the waste has been through some capital and energy intensive pre-treatment, like thermal depolymerization, which makes the economics unworkable for recycling.
Maybe one day we can do the heat treatment with direct solar energy.
Maybe the way to fight GMail’s outsized power is to stop using GMail. You can do that without going all the way to self-hosting.
Flat Earther: Sheesh, looks like somebody’s never heard of the Great Jurassic Shake-Up
I appreciate all the work you put into writing about and belittling my experiences
What experiences?
More importantly I’m also empathetic
Heroin addiction will ruin your life. Gambling addiction will ruin your life. Watching your kids get used for target practice by invading soldiers will ruin your life. Watching your friends and neighbors get pancaked by a collapsing apartment block might ruin your life. These things, and other things like them, are really happening in other people’s real lives every day.
Flirting will not ruin your life.
Use that empathy of yours to find some perspective.
women don’t appreciate being approached by strange people
This is a very blinkered idea of what flirting is.
Just because you think that learning to flirt with people is a skill worth having…
I don’t care at all whether you decide to learn to flirt or not. I’m not telling you how to live.
It is your assertion that attempting it would ruin your life that makes me cringe. It is so utterly self-absorbed, so free of context or proportion, such a “I’m 14 and this is deep” attitude. I genuinely hope you grow up enough to see this one day.
You made it very clear that you’re talking about your fears. Not your actual experiences, but your imagined ones.
I’m put in mind of MRA Men, of self described “incels,” who are fond of claiming that even a single accusation of sexual impropriety can “ruin their lives.” But as far as I can tell, that just doesn’t happen.
Believe it or not, you can’t die of embarrassment. If one person decides (if a dozen people decide) they don’t want to hang out with you (whether they call you a “creep” or not), that’s not “ruining your life.”
Do you imagine that, given the billions of people who have lived and died before you, you are really a unique outlier, of such exquisite psychological delicacy that even the slightest embarrassment will create permanent psychic scars? It’s a fantastically egotistical point of view.
participating could ruin your life
I’m not going to tell you that flirting is easy or that there’s no wrong way to do it, but this is unreasonable. Hyperbolic.
I’m perpetually amazed that cheap packing tape is so bad, “optimized” to the point of becoming almost, but not quite, completely useless. And the good packing tape costs so much, considering it’s just a one-time-use strip of plastic. It’s a little thicker than the cheap stuff, it costs ~5x as much. Worth it, I guess. Ugh.
Maybe, in the best possible future, we’ve moved away from tape entirely.
I’ve had a Debian install brick itself on update / restart. As annoying as Windows is, it hasn’t done that to me. Nothing is perfect, there are horrible software crimes hiding under every system you could name.
What is the Venn diagram of “People who can’t stop arguing in online forums” and “People who have become addicted to obsequious, flattering LLM chats?”
Is there any overlap? Is it perfect overlap? Is it some boring in-between answer?
Star drive and Torx are so much better I can’t believe they haven’t taken over the whole world
My half-baked theory is that many right-wingers don’t have any sense of aesthetics at all. Instead, they perceive signifiers. Which is why so many of them like ugly tacky garbage, as long as it looks shiny and new and expensive.
Plastic surgery can be a signifier – if it’s obvious plastic surgery. That’s where “Mar-a-Lago Face” comes from.