- Literally nothing keeps the power equipment industry from making their carb parts out of components that won't rust except being cheap asses and wanting to sell parts and kits and keep their dealers happy with repair business.
- We still do for piston aircraft, thanks to intense lobbying by the aviation piston engine industry.
There's even a 100LL alternative that has sailed through most tests the FAA requires but the FAA has been stonewalling them for something like a decade. The FAA is full of paper-pushing corrupt beaurocrats who are firmly in the pocket of industry, as demonstrated by the thousands of victims of Boeing crashes from the idiocy of the MAX program (wherein Boeing did not want to spend the money to redesign an aircraft for bigger passenger and cargo loads, so they just stretched the plane, which put the Cg out of whack, which meant they needed to have a computer help fly the plane...and then skimped on redundancy.)
- That manufacturer falls under "fool, money, parted, easily." A Finalmouse which is probably the pinnacle of lightweight gaming mice, costs about $180 and they want $100-ish more than that?
> Yes, it's expensive but it still costs less than replacing mice over and over.
I have a ten year old Razer Ultimate still going strong, buddy. $100 new.
> My otherwise mild skin condition completely destroys the shitty grippy/gummy rubber they put on scrollwheels and sometimes the sides of the mice.
No, whatever you're putting on your skin is. In any case: buy a $20 set of grips/pads and problem solved...
> the carbon fiber rod that snaps into place horizontally across the shape makes it more rigid than the stock mouse.
If you're having issues with rigidity of your mouse, you're holding it too tight...
- The biggest issue with Logitech mice is that they're purposefully designed to fail.
Logitech uses shitty microswitches that either stop working or start 'bouncing' - a single click becomes two or more clicks.
This has been an issue with logitech mice for 10+ years and it's so prevalent it can't possibly be by accident. Their mice are disposable as a revenue model.
Mice should not fail, and in fact, I've never had a non-logitech mouse fail.
A friend heard me say this and said "Well I love my logitech mouse" and I said "and how many have you bought?" They admitted they'd had to replace it several times because...drumroll please...various buttons on it stopped working or started double/triple clicking.
I have gaming buddies who have had their very expensive logitech gaming mice fail, repeatedly, barely months into owning them. My ten year old Razor is still going strong, save for reduced battery life. The battery still lasts for many hours while gaming, which is plenty for my purposes, so I haven't bothered yet.
The real joke would be Xbox Elite controllers. Several hundred dollars and infamous for failing sometimes within months. Never, ever buy one without a replacement plan.
- "So bad"? They're nineteenth in terms of highest murder rate among US cities. The rate had been falling for over a decade, save a brief spike in 2023.
- > DC is one of the highest murder rates in the country
If by "highest" you mean nineteeth in this year's tally so far, then....I....guess?
https://freedomforallamericans.org/highest-murders-in-us-by-...
St. Louis, MO's rate was 69 per 100k and DC was 17 per 100k.
St. Louis has a murder rate four times DC, yet curiosly no talk of deploying the FBI and national guard there.
- The country is predominantly Catholic. So both prudish views on sexual content, but also wanting to pretend sexual abuse by priests in their religion, and their religion protecting those priests, isn't the problem - nope, it's the interwebs creating child abusers. That is coupled with racist fear of terrorist attacks being committed by the African and middle eastern immigrant populations.
Sure are a lot of white elephants in the room with you...
- cough Patriot Act cough
...which Republicans swore up and down was temporary and yet, oddly, kept getting renewed wirth no evidence whatsoever it was necessary to stop a planned terrorist attack or that it would have stopped the WTC attacks themselves.
I bet 90% of the population or more has no idea that the Patriot Act was dumped and replaced with the nearly identical FREEDOM Act. Which took multiple tries to pass because they knew if they just kept hammering away, they'd eventually get it passed.
Yeah, they called a wildly invasive domestic spying bill the "freedom" act....
- Alternative path, like with General Electric:
Invent seemingly fantastic new material. Discover it is harmful to humans and wildlife, accumulates in groundwater, etc. Bury that discovery.
Get caught after decades of wild profits, the occasional secret settlement, and spend a decade more fighting legal action before finally running out of appeals or the writing is on the wall, and accept it and pay out.
Start selling water filtration systems, thus profiting off people dealing with your pollution.
This is what I find so frustrating about "the fight against cancer." I'm convinced cancer is so prevalent because corporations are poisoning the shit out of our environment, and thus our water supply, our food, our air. Because we're not equipped with timestamping chemical detection systems, it's difficult to identify the exposure that caused it or increased the person's risk, so industry gets a "freebie" death nobody can pin to them. As long as the chemical isn't toxic enough to be obvious - the companies get away scott free, despite an extensive history of the chemical industry time and time again coming up with some major novel chemical that comes to be used all over society and turns out to be toxic.
Bill Moyers once submitted his blood to a lab and asked them to test for everything they could identify in terms of industrial chemicals, pesticides, etc. The blood was a veritable toxic soup (and some of the control sample containers were contaminated from the supplier, showing how pervasive the toxins are): https://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/problem/popup_bb_02.html
You don't "fight cancer" doing walks and charity balls and cute-kid-starts-fundraiser-because-friend-dies-from-leukemia. You fight cancer by addressing the toxins being pumped into us in the name of profit and "bettering society", allowed to get away with it because of how difficult it is to show any particular chemical directly caused the cancer.
- According to Passmark the Pentinum 4 1.3Ghz is 55 times slower than a Raspberry Pi 5, so I'd guess it's at least two orders of magnitude. The original Pi is 16 times faster than a P4 1.3Ghz...
You can recycle e-waste (and yes, I know SOME e-waste ends up in China/India/etc. Not all does.)
The e-waste is of substantially less concern than the massive difference in carbon footprint from power consumption.
- It's a bit odd to declare "citation needed" and then claim things like "rare usage" which just so happen to suit your argument, while ignoring things like, say, the fact that NiMH batteries mean batteries are only shipped to the end-user once.
I use NiMH batteries in all my thermostats, two scales, etc. Bought them 10 years ago or so. The thermostats get charged every few months and the scales every few weeks.
I think ~12 or so NiMH batteries have replaced, by this point, by rough back-of-envelope-math, thousands of of alkaline batteries.
Did it occur to you that probably one of the most energy-intensive parts of a AA battery's life is its transportation from factory to user? Which NiMH batteries only have...once? And most of that transportation is powered by non-renewable fuels, etc.
- The problem is not the cameras, it's the contracts.
The very simple solution is to prohibit camera companies getting a cut of ticket fines, direct funds to the state coffers, and mandate cameras can only be installed after proving via paperwork with photos that the stretch of road has proper signage.
Red light cameras? They drastically reduce t-bone impacts (which have high rates of serious injury and death) while slightly increasing rear-end collisions (which have very low injury rates and were the fault of the drivers speeding and following too closely, and/or driving distracted.) Not the fault of a traffic camera...
- I see all these people in the comments talking about how they have no idea how much their services are going to cost and my only thought is "how is this legal? how has the US FTC not stepped in, or EU regulators?"
- It should be noted that the author thinks ESP is a Thing, and it's worthy of study / research. They're essentially concern-trolling / no-true-scotsman-ing skeptics - that they're not the right kind of skeptics or occasionally skeptics also did misleading things, and bullied those poor poor ESP researchers and hurt the field of ESP research and that's why we don't hwave any proof ESP is a thing. That a skeptic didn't perfectly skeptic-ize a ESP researcher (or two, or three) doesn't mean ESP research has the slightest legitimacy or value because regardless of a skeptic's methods, the burden of evidence on something as extraordinary as ESP is purely on the researcher claiming ESP exists.
Of James Randi, he complains in another article (which for some reason BoingBoing published...) on his site: "[Randi made] it more difficult for serious university-based and academically trained researchers to study ESP and mental anomalies, and to receive a fair hearing in the news media."
Uh....Yes? That was the point? Randi dedicated his time and energy to debunking shysters. At best they were seeking fame while popularizing paranormal crap and hurting scientific literacy...and at worst taking advantage of people finanically to varying degrees.
TV used to be awash in idiots claiming to be psychic or able to do absurd things like magnetize their bodies with their mind. I remember Randi was on such a show with such a "magnetic" person, watched them stick something metal to their body...then he whips out a container of baby powder, applies it to the guy who claimed to be able to magnetize himself...and wouldn't you know, the "magnetism" disappeared....because the reason something metal stuck to him was because his sweaty skin had enough stiction (and probably using some rosin to 'help') and use a part of their body angled a bit from vertical. And Randi then demonstrates this, showing he can "magnetize" himself, too.
Randi was a magician, saw people abusing lazy/shitty magic to rip people off, and didn't like that. And the world is a better place for it. That he had an ego, or that his methods weren't perfect, or he was too aggressive for the author's taste - is all completely irrelevant.
What's next, complaining that some doctor is an asshole for appearing on TV to refute people claiming ivermectin cures covid, thus making it impossible for people to seriously study ivermectin's covid benefits? Or that they were too aggressive in responding to the shyster?
- No, it's spreading because corporations are waking up to what an insanely good deal "pay my employees for me" is.
In my state an employer is only responsible for raising an employee's effective wage (for the entire pay period) to minimum wage if the tips don't.
You can tip someone working as a waiter $100 and unless they've already hit minimum wage for that pay period, all you're doing is handing $100 to the owner because it's $100 they don't have to pay in wages. Once the waiter has met minimum wage, then the money actually goes to them.
- The Lightning connector is superior for everyday use. It's exeptionally reliable, tolerant of debris, and difficult to damage. It was designed to last, unlike every single USB device port ever made, which was designed to fail so you'd need to replace the cable and device eventually. MiniUSB, MicroUSB, and USB-C. It's all trash.
Lightning has a perfect mechanical design. The pins phone-side are nearly possible to damage because they're well supported and only poke out in a bump shape that can't hook on anything. The cable side is the same way - no pins to catch on anything. The port is easy to clean out. The cable end is trivial to clean. The retention mechanism doesn't rely on anything that can wear out or break.
Meanwhile the USB-C connector puts a fucking thin wedge of plastic in the middle of the connector and even worse, there are pins around that center thin wedge and they're easily broken/damaged because they have no protection whatsoever and poor mechanical support. Oh, and the retention mechanism sucks just like it has in every
The USB-C port on my airpods is contactly getting fucked up while once in a blue moon I need to tick a toothpick in and rummage around a little to get some lint out of my phone's Lightning plug, and it's good for a couple more months...and that thing lives in my pocket, whereas the Airpod case spends most of its life sitting around on tables.
It's also a substantial plus that Apple tightly controls the cable spec. Just go look at the pages where people document USB-C cables that are so shitty they'll destroy the electronics in one or both devices.
- People do not go "teeth first through the windshield into the back seat" when hit by a sedan. They go up the hood and up the windshield.
Euro-NCAP crash standards are specifically designed to "help" this by means of hoods which crumple and/or shift position in such a case.
That is infinitely preferable to hitting the flat face of most American and Japanese SUVs and specially pickup trucks, which are designd primarily to look "aggressive" and "angry" because that's what pickup truck buyers want.
- So just to be clear: your theory (which has absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support it, and is entirely your personal anecdotes of which there's no causal relationship established whatsoever) refutes both broad evidence of how much damage pesticides do to outside of the target species (and to humans, and birds) but also refutes extensive scientific evidence that we are living through a time of massive ecological die-offs of species?
Let me guess, you live in rural America?
- Except that because of all those things, the government is more likely to use it so the "it's cheaper!" argument doesn't hold water.
The comparison is not between "do it without smart bombs and drones" vs "do it with smart bombs and drones" and the former costing more.
The comparison is between "if we didn't have the smart bombs and drones, we wouldn't have done anything because whatever it was wouldn't have been worth the cost in money and American lives" versus "we spent a million dollars blowing up some stuff because we could do it on the cheap and with no risk."
On a broader scale the US's involvemnt in the foreign affairs of other nations skyrocketed when we went from having volunteer armed forces to a "professional" armed forces. Ike predicted as much in his rant about the military-industrial complex.
- The entire camera clearly dips and then rises during the fault slide. It's not the fault moving in a curved path, it's the camera dipping and rising. You can clearly see that just by placing your finger or mouse cursor on any feature in the video.
- Incredibly advanced? Bullshit.
Among the G8 we probably have the least-electrified, slowest rail network with the worst Positive Train Control. Probably the most dangerous, too, given how disastrous Precision Railroad Scheduling has been for safety. We also likely have the highest crash and derailment rates.
This is a sad joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control#Deploym...
ASES, ACSES, ETMS, CBTM, CBOSS, E-ATC, ITCS, and whatever Union Pacific is using. That's over half a dozen different systems and none of them are inherently compatible with each other - specialized systems are required to tie the systems together on railways that might have trains with different systems.
I'm guessing no other country in the G8 has issues with freight train movement such that trains routinely bisect towns and entire counties for hours or more and force police, fire, and medical services to reroute, as well as require children to crawl underneath the trains (which could start moving without warning) to get to/from school.
Why? Because the feds are not regulating train lengths nor mandating that trains cannot block road intersections for more than a certain amount of time, so the railways do whatever they please.
I'm guessing no other G8 country has problems with the government (federal, state, or local) having no idea what hazardous materials are being shipped and where...no way to look it up, not noticed by the railroad, nothing.
- Well given Rivians rank among the worst EVs in the world efficiency-wise, maybe if you care about not spending your life at charging stations, don't buy a Rivian? Or a Tesla for that matter, since Tesla lies about their efficiency numbers and the real-world numbers are middling at best.
- Yeah, because that's worked so well in other sectors.
You know how Tesla makes a fuckton of money? Selling their carbon credits to industry so they can pollute. So all the pollution reduction caused by people driving Teslas enables industry to pollute instead of controlling their emissions, reducing energy waste, decarbonizing, etc.
- All the people claiming EVs wear tires faster probably don't have the slightest idea that tires even have treadwear ratings. That coupled with the total uselessness of personal anecdotes...
Performance oriented EVs, just like performance oriented ICE cars, are going to have softer, stickier tires that wear faster.
- Tell me you know nothing about transaction overhead without telling me you know nothing about transaction overhead. All the blockchain currencies require orders of magnitude more power to process a transaction compared to a debit or credit transaction. Bitcoin is primarily used by governments (like NK), hacker groups, and organized crime to launder money.
The solution is not blockchain currencies. European credit card transaction costs are a fraction of what they are in the US because US regulators just sat back and allowed Mastercard and VISA to establish a duopoly.
In much of the rest of the world it's also possible to near-instantly wire-transfer funds to pay for things, at negligible cost. In the US, everything is forced to go through the federal reserve, is expensive, and slow.
We are the laughing stock of the rest of the world. The banks have tried to set up alternatives. Zelle is a good example, but Zelle's most annoying problem is that you can only have one account per phone number or email address.
- "Employees might sabotage stuff" is something parroted constantly and there's never any proof it is a significant issue.
- The Stasi network was infamous because of how enormous it was, not its mere existence. And it likely had a crippling effect on their economy. They were also drowning in information, and the information was very poor because anyone with a bone to pick just made up some bullshit about the other person.
Today, tools created by US intelligence make the data collection trivial, but more importantly, the data analysis is trivial as well.
- > Neuromancer and The Matrix is from the perspective of the outsiders.
The primary difference being that in the latter, it's an allegory about being trans, written by two trans women who had not yet come out. Which makes the most superficial interpretation of the movie's themes by toxic masculine types all the more hilarious...
It's buried enough to have kept Hollywood's morality police from killing it and if memory serves they never discussed this with Reeves until well after. There still had to be concessions; I believe Switch's character was originally more androgynous or outright trans, not just a butch woman with a male partner.
> Japan never really did counter-culture as mainstream as the US does.
...what? Bosozoku (for example) has its roots in WW2 veterans who struggled to integrate back into society. Japanese manga and anime is waaaaaay more diverse and counterculture. Christ, can you imagine a comic book and cartoon in the mid/late 80's about a character who repeatedly switches genders both by accident and on purpose?
What? Low light is ideal for OLED compared to most LCDs where in low light contrast is poor due to bleed-through on the black areas via the backlight. The problem here isn't the laptop, it's between the keyboard and chair.
> I narrowed it down to two options: Buy a refurbished M1 or M2 Macbook and run Asahi Linux Buy a Framework
...or stop being a dogmatic baby about your OS and run MacOS, which is infinitely better than Linux as a desktop OS?
> I looked at some other brands but it appears that in 2025 there's just aren't many good options for Linux users
A market of less than 1% has terrible options? *gasp*
The only people still using Linux on desktop are people who think that *twenty five years* into "the year of the linux desktop" this will be the year that Linux doesn't stop being the worst option for a desktop OS.
If 2/3rds of the current linux distros hung up the hat and went to go help with other distros, there _might_ actually be progress on this front - but the nerds are too interested in fighting over asinine personal preference type things nobody else cares about, to actually make a distro that works properly and reliably. The Linux world is so hopelessly fragmented and there's thousands of people doing the same work as at least 6 other people all because they think their particular way of installing a linux package is better or their file layout is best.