I'm not gonna try to defend any platforms, but at its best streaming is amazing. I have found so much music, old and new, that I absolutely love. It makes my spine tingle and makes me laugh with delight at how good it is. It reminds me of when I was young, discovering music for the first time. That sense of discovery and a whole huge world out there. Algorithms have their faults but they sure have figured out what kind of stuff will appeal to me.

I see upcoming concerts for artists I like, had no idea they were touring. I've gone to dozens of shows in the past few years I never would have known about if I was grimly playing the same old music manually. I love music more and more each year and keep going to the best concert of my life, blowing my old high water marks away over and over.

It's so easy. I don't have to decide what I'm in the mood for or pick through my unwieldy music collection.

I'm not really a great cheerleader for all this stuff. I am naturally very averse to corporate stuff, popular stuff, middleman leech stuff. I refuse on principle to pay for it, or endure ads, somehow thinking that makes it less greasy somehow. All that said, it has enriched my life quite spectacularly.

They add hundreds if not thousands of dollars to the bill, they require a special physical trip to a facility, and they can be used to justify other tests, surgical interventions, and specialist visits. They are nearly entirely useless diagnostically, but they are wonderfully effective tools to extract money from society.

The sharp edges of the caps gouge tiny pieces of plastic from the tops of other caps as they tumble around in storage, manufacture, and application. I've noticed a dust of this plastic in boxes of bottle caps. Bags of caps that have been handled roughly for extended time have visible scratches on the tops of many of the caps.

All joking aside, asbestos is probably a lot safer than the PFAs in everything we use instead of the old materials

I'm confident that if it were made our top priority it could be done. It would take years and cost a fortune. After many billions of dollars and millions of hours invested in this heroic task the most important question we should ask ourselves is WHY?!?

We could tackle other issues with this kind of investment. We could cure cancer. We could solve poverty, develop nuclear fusion energy. It seems futile to take a working codebase and refactor it just because arrogant ignorance doesn't grok COBOL.

Zero is pretty optimistic. Once you subtract the cost of all the mining and transaction energy the intrinsic value is pretty strongly negative.

You could experiment with lowering the heat after it reaches boiling. There is no reason to boil noodle vigorously unless you are lacking a hobby or need the brush with danger to make you feel alive. Some folks even turn the heat off after it boils and allow it to cook covered with a stir or two for luck. I started doing this and noticed zero difference to the end product.

There are cheaters known as spoofers who provide false GPS location to access game objects without physical travel. They can instantly teleport anywhere in the world. I can't wait until our AI overlords grant us this ability, just think how much time and energy will be saved when we don't need to waste time traveling and can just blink wherever we want to go!

Every new phone this happens: I get a useless alert, something about a stupid kid with the wrong parent 3 counties away, it's gonna be hot or windy or cold somewhere within 500 miles, an old person is confused in some city I have never visited.

I angrily turn them all off and forget all about it until the next new phone.

If by some freak happenstance I get an alert that is helpful or relevant I will leave it on. If it is stupid that's the last "emergency" I know about on that particular device.

Cans taste different. Try it! I suspect it is due to 2 factors, they use different plastic for the liners than the plastic bottleses, and the liner is thin with imperfections which result in metal contact. Modern cans will develop pinhole leaks because of this if they are stored for very long. The old cans from 20 years ago would last indefinitely but new ones will have a surprisingly high failure rate. I opened a 12 pack of seltzer water that was still barrely within the "best by" date and 2 of the 12 had lost pressure due to pinhole leaks! I routinely find a blown can here and there if I am not meticulous about rotating stock.

my ev car gets 5miles/kWh. my econobox gets 30mpg, so if gas is more than $3/gal the ev is cheaper (aside from other maintenance costs which add up fast)

The average EV battery is 1000 pounds. Even a tiny extension of 10% of the typical battery would be way too heavy for people to safely handle. I could handle 50 lbs if it was well designed but I don't know if most folks could. If they had 50 lb extension packs I would need to wrangle 20 of them to double my range.

Dropping one would probably ruin it. I remember hearing about swappable battery packs long ago but nobody has figured out a way to make it happen yet. Between how expensive and fragile they are and how tough they are to swap I am doubtful anything like this is in the cards until we get some huge advances in battery tech.

I was shocked to learn that handling cash is typically 2-7x as expensive as handling cards. It's at the higher end in poor neighborhoods where theft is more likely. link

I drive an elderly light sedan and a modern EV regularly and the dinocar stops noticibly shorter than the EV despite having lackadaisical brake and tire maintenance. The EV has monster acceleration but its weight (roughly 2x) makes stopping the victim of physics.

The EV has antilock brakes and 20+ years newer tech but still needs more room to stop! Normally it doesn't matter. I don't touch the EV brakes very often - usually once a month to keep them from rusting up. I drive single pedal using motor braking unless there is an emergency.

I don't understand your attitude. What else are you doing while standing there at checkout? I marvel at the folks who stand there doing nothing while the cashier rings everything up, then stand there doing nothing while the cashier bags everything up. If I'm at a staffed checkout I will bag things up myself and be out the door a couple minutes faster. Sure I am "doing work" but it ends up costing me less time and I am helping keep their margins which lowers cost for everyone. I do self checkout when available and am quite efficient at that. I help keep prices down, spend less time at the store and see it as a win-win.