Tyler Perry strikes again?

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Ive looked again and realize the data is old enough to be before the mandates were put in place so it may be less likely to include many cars with the artificial noise makers, but it should still be more clear whether or not any such vehicle is included in the data set.

Looking again at the data set used and it is old enough that I now believe it likely doesn't include many cars with noise makers as I believe that was only put into law more recently, but still the data should clearly reflect whether or not that is taken into account.

Exactly. My car has the mandatory noisemaker and I hear tons of them when I'm out and about in parking lots and whatnot, EV's and Hybrids alike that are new enough to have the noise maker on them are common now and if they're included in the data it's a pointless study, as a significant portion of the pedestrians hit by EV's and hybrids are probably of the noise making variety.

Important question.

Many EV's, hybrids and PHEV's already have fake engine noise systems as required by law in the US. I have a 2023 Ioniq5 which has it, and I hear a lot of cars pulling into and out of parking lots from Toyota etc. that have it at low speeds now. So, unless I missed something in the study, I don't see this differentiation being made in the data set, only whether its an EV / Hybrid or Petrol based. If they're lumping the EVs, PHEVs and Hybrids in with the traditionally powered vehicles, then what is the point of the study because it's obviously not studying noisy cars vs. quiet cars, and seems to just be a hit piece on EV's.

Speaking strictly from a consumer perspective, self-checkout works for me for a few items or at a Wal-Mart where there is ONE checkout open out of 30 and there is a couple folks lined up there with 100 items each. In general though, when I go to the grocery store for example, I never use self checkout because it sucks dealing with those small areas and large shopping trips (family of 5 doing a weekly grocery run).

On the other hand, Wegmans for a while allowed you to scan items using the Wegmans Scan app AS YOU GO. So, I could open my reusable shopping bags and scan the barcodes of items as I go, and bag them as I see fit in my bags in the cart. Produce? Weight it with its corresponding code and the scale actually gave you a barcode / QR code to scan that would insert the item correctly into your "shopping cart" and you didn't even have to bag and label the item, you could just put it into your shopping bag and be on your way.

When it was time to finish up, pay and leave, you went to the self checkout, scanned your phone with the self checkout register, it populated everything you had scanned throughout the store, you tapped your payment, got your receipt and left... No removing things from your cart just to scan them and then bag/rebag them, just so much easier.

All I could think of was Silicon Valley, Jian Yang's "New" businesses.

There is a pattern to this as to what it does when, but it does bother me that it changes. By default, if you're doing something that qualifies as media playback / game sounds etc., the volume buttons will adjust the media / playback / sound volume. If you're just at the home screen / lock screen with no media playing it will adjust the ringer/notification volume.

This sucks, in my opinion, so a better solution overall for me was to go into settings -> sounds and haptics and turn off "Change with buttons". Then, set the ideal ringer/notification volume there (which obviously only applies when the ringer/notification mute switch isn't in the silent position). From that point forward the volume buttons only duty, no matter what or where you are, is to adjust media/general sound volume. I habitually drop that to a very low if not no volume when not being used, TBH. Then I use the mute switch on the side of the phone to either enable or disable my notifications/ringers. I don't need to regularly adjust what volume level the ringers are at, so if I ever do want to make an adjustment, it's easy enough to go into settings -> sounds and haptics and make the change there.

I actually prefer it, as I can't accidentally hit the buttons and turn my ringer to really low without realizing it. The silent switch was hard to "accidentally" flip, as it was pretty small and a tight switch (this is good IMO), and once you put a case on your phone it's easy enough to flip when you are actively trying to but difficult for anything to accidentally flip it. This new action button seems like a step in the wrong direction to me. It will eliminate the tactile feel. I carry my phone on my belt clip, and if I'm walking into a meeting I can reach down and feel whether my phone is silenced already or not and switch accordingly... No visual cue needed, no worrying about "did I feel it vibrate to indicate I made the change or not"? etc. I did not have to wake the screen, if it was lying on my desk I could see the current state at all times.

I am OK with gas stoves and don't believe we need to make them illegal, however I will say that the number of times I've seen this comparison come up in various places surprises me.

Gas stoves use less gas overall than water heaters, baseboard heat boilers, furnaces and dryers, but they are also directly in your living space and in a large number of cases are not vented outdoors at all. All other appliances vent directly outdoors and in some cases even use outdoor air for ignition and then exhaust outdoors, with basically 0 impact on indoor air.

I think if they're worried about losing viewership they should consider making it easier to view. Apple TV+ Friday night baseball exclusives? WTF. Why does the game have to be exclusive to yet another place where I have to go to watch it? I literally pay a huge cable bill every month to get a higher package that includes SNY (regional sports network for the NY Mets), and yet there are so many Mets games that get exclusively played elsewhere.

Cut the crap. Let me watch the game and I'll watch it. Baseball may have boring bits, but a robot umpire isn't going to fix that.

I feel like the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2nd gen was a more direct comparison. Not only did it debuted 2 years before the Apple touch bar, it was determined it was a shitty experience and eliminated just 1 year later on the 3rd gen X1 carbon (again, they went and replaced the function keys so you had to choose: fun other functions or F keys), 1 year before Apple even introduced theirs. Unfortunately for touch bars, the keybaord and even the trackpad / mouse can usually be used with little to no glances from your eyes to type and do what needs to be done... Touch strips need direct visual cues to know if your finger is going to do what it's supposed to do. It may be a nice well designed interface for doing some funky specific tasks, but many I'm sure find it just easier to leave whatever that control was on the screen itself and use mouse interaction (or even a full touch screen) to do so without looking down.

Unfortunately, all the studios / producers of content want to circumvent Netflix getting a piece of the pie. It's become increasingly difficult for a content aggregator like Netflix use to be getting content. I love Parks and Recreation, but lo and behold, they lost the ability to have it on Netflix, because NBC etc started up PEAKOCK and now I can only get Parks and Rec there, which SUCKS. It's basically impossible for netflix to offer enough to NBC/universal to get streaming rights to it now that it's a Peacock exclusive.

The TV/Movie industry needs to be more like how the music industry works (from my perspective) at this point... I have Amazon Unlimited, and I can get darn near everything I could want. Sure, there may be some obscure oddities that I'd have to find alternate routes to get, but for the most part, I can go to my Amazon Music account, and there it is, whatever song I can think of. If I were an Apple Music subscriber, I could get just about the same level of "everything" there too, including most of the same songs I could get on Amazon, and other providers with similar subscriptions. I choose the delivery company that offers the service and price I'm interested in, and use that. It's a mixed up tangled mess to have to go to a pile of different apps, all with different interfaces (even if slightly), deal with a pile of subscription fees and account passwords, etc.

These companies have literally taken away the only GOOD thing that you use to be able to have with paying for cable, a one stop shop for MOST (never going to say all) content. At least when it was cable, the complaints were mostly cost and reliability, or the inability to UNbundle channels you didn't want.... Now, I have to sign up for all these online services to get one or two shows that I want from each, DESPITE also paying for cable because I also want certain things I can't get otherwise. They mimicked the bad parts of cable and overlooked the good. I'm sad to say that cable use to have a GOOD quality, but it did, relatively speaking. Now cord-cutting isn't cord-cutting, it's a big pile of cords all plugged into a haphazard janky splitter.

I am a Windows user, I'll fully admit. I am also the one who tries to think as logically and reasonably as I can when things change, and try not to immediately shut something down as problematic or "worse" just because it's different from what I'm accustomed to. I try to be reasonable, and even to defend changes and updates to my employees, friends and families who might otherwise shut something down as terrible due to change. Windows 11 looks "pretty". I have been running it on a few of my mainstream machines for work, and I can say that it "looks" good. This is purely opinion. That being said, I have run into many small thing that make me go "why"... Why can't I right click anywhere on the task bar and get to task manager? Why can't I get to the power button on the start menu as easily as I used to be able to (farther mouse travel to get there). Why isn't settings right where it belongs. Why, for the love of god, does the start menu button MOVE depending on how many icons are currently loaded on the task bar. Honestly, put it in the damn center for all I care, but having it left justified on an ever changing centered mass, makes no sense. Having it centered, and having the task bar icons hovering around the center of the screen works well for some scenarios (49" 32:9 display, for example), so I won't shut down the centered concept completely. Why, when I click the left justified on the center mass start button, does it bring up a menu dead center on the screen, instead of nearby where the mouse cursor was when it clicked the thing to bring up the menu? Anyways, that was all surface annoyances. Overall, I haven't had it majorly crash nor have any driver or software full-blown compatibility issues. That being said, I have to say it has graphics issues. When a video starts playback on various Thinkpad / Thinkcentre machines (state-of-the art machines, one or two I've tried with 11th gen Core i7 cpus with corresponding modern intel graphics), the screen flashes briefly to black when a video starts playing. Odd, and consistent. I have the same experience on multiple machines. A few times, I had the screen go black, and when it came back, everything got what I'd describe as a light digital fuzz over the whole screen. Odd to say the least, and it happened on multiple machines. Overall, I haven't had any other major issues, but I'm going to be facing some sh*t when this update goes out to certain individuals at my company. Yeah, I know, find ways to prevent it, find ways to hold off on big updates, but inevitably, someone will have it on some machine and be pissed by the new glitches.

The worst is when I go to a physical store (yes, still happens), and they ask me for an e-mail address at checkout. Nope. I'm not rude about it, but when they ask what my email is I just say no thank you. I get enough junk and have had my email addresses leaked and/or sold off to too many spammers already, no need to have an in-person purchase add to that.