All I know is I appreciate their slow roll. Everytime they break something I replace it with the non-Google option. I’ve got a small nuc as my main HTPC tied into my plex. Been waiting for an excuse to swap my first Gen Google hockey Puck from like 2012 in my bedroom.

Not Japan specifically, but I’ve got say I’m jealous as hell about the snack scene in east Asia.

I generally don’t have a sweet tooth, and things like potato chips don’t have that umami I like. I try to keep snacks around because I forget to eat, but nothing appeals to me. But man… all those pre-packaged tofu squares, various bits of marinated meat… that’s my deal. There’s one solid “Asian Mart” near me, I’ll stock up a few months worth at a time.

Closest you get in the US is basically jerky/slim jims, which are great but expensive and kind of one note for flavor.

Wow that is fantastic. I’m surprised no one “imported” that one to the states in “make everything a start-up!” days early-mid 2010s.

As a tip, it’s not quite as convenient but most hotels will let you check a bag with them, even if you’re not a guest. I’ve done that at different conferences (usually 1st day and/or last day) when I had a day left, didn’t want to haul my bag, but couldn’t go to from my hotel. I think I got turned down once and it was simply because they were full.

I know this isn’t the point, but I’ll never get over that something as big and expensive as world class hospital could be built and they named it “chop”. No one said anything?

I’ve seen it brought up before, the notion isn’t that it’s ethical or OK, but some people think that the draw post any of that stuff will be gone because anyone could do it and you’d never know if any of it was authentic. Kind of like if you flooded the market with lab grown rhino horns to crash the price and stop poaching, and then also the demand goes away because there’s no allure anymore.

I don’t know if Id bet on it, but it’s different than saying “I can deep fake porn of anyone without their consent so who wants revenge porn”.

The browns gas thing (usually “using water as fuel” by splitting it… Using power from the engine) actually has insanely specific be credible use case.

It turns out that in very specific engine types, you can gain additional engine efficiency that’s worth the energy it took to generate the gas. The us army did a whole proper study. That net gain was, however, only present in vehicles not maintained on the usual schedule. So it did infact help some engine types that were not well maintained.

I know this because I did a dive years back. Effeciency be damned, building a reserve of browns gas that I could dump in when I wanted for a power boost sounded fun as hell to me. You wouldn’t gain any effeciency (probably loose a ton) but you would have more power when you were mixing in the reserve you’d built up. I wound up not doing it because 1) the vehicle I had in mind was carb not fuel injection so no power gains there. And 2) dealing with generating, pressurizing, storing and delivering a gas isnt a ton of fun in a “for the lolz” project.

So I’m trying to find an academic article, but it’s not just the substrate. They blew right past it in the article but there is electric potential applied, and the substrate is slightly conductive which is what allows it. They seem to imply that leads to better root growth but like I said the article barley mentioned the actual e of the e soil lol.

But bioelectrochemistry is a thing. I work on the other end, where microbes are depositing electrons, but I am aware of different technologies where the bugs use a potential as an energy source for specific reactions, usually around remidiating some nasty stuff in the ground.

Im less aware of it affecting a plant directly (I’d assume it changed the soil bugs or something) but it’s not hard to picture. Good be something as simple as the potential changing the osmotic pressure and making it easier for the plants to take up nutrients or something.

But yeah, pretty far from a rod in the ground, although in some cases that is basically all you’d need. The bioelectrochemistry field always had junk science to contend with.

Boffing some of the details here but: poor dude with the last name “Noid” also happened to be some kind of skitzophrenic. So unlike many people struggling with that, people really WERE talking about him… Kinda…

Poor bastard had a multimillion dollar ad campaign with radio, tv, bus stops saying “avoid the noid” which to him was “avoid this man!”. If he was receiving help, he would have heard those ads on his way home from his appointments. He would have junk mail through his slot with anti-noid propaganda.

Anyway he took a dominoes hostage. He released all the hostages I think he was the only victim. Just one of those insane things, like anyone else with that surname it would have been a material for their tight five stand up bit a decade later, but in this case it lined up with a man struggling with the exact mental disorder that made it the worst thing possible. Merry Christmas!

You’ve heard the insane trivia about the “noid” promotion right? About the guy with the same name?

You’ve heard the insane trivia about the “noid” promotion right? About the guy with the same name?

I mentioned this in another thread on CQ, but can you imagine getting brought into that kickoff meeting and just thinking “great, another soulless marketing game” and then realizing everyone including the client is on board with you making THAT.

Its not like it broke any real new ground (other than a bar for promotional give aways) but in a time when crappy doom clones were a dime a dozen… CQ went HARD.

Also standardizing hardware. Part of the iPhones success was that developers had to develop for A phone, singular. There were a lot of cool palm programs and whatnot, but having a single hardware set to bug-smash had to be a big part of making the app-market go into hyper drive.

I don’t own a single apple product, but credit where credit is due.

I don’t know the ins and outs. But I have a flipper and an android. It looks like the issue is on the UI more than overwhelming the hardware like a DDOS. My android gets a bunch of bogus connect attempts for random Bluetooth headphones that don’t exisit, but there’s enough time in between each to go in and turn off Bluetooth if you wanted. The iPhone made it so you just always had one, so you couldn’t do anything else with the phone.

So way late, but no that’s shifted a lot. This is anecdotal but does speak to a lot of industries: my understanding is that pizza shops now live or die by cheese prices.

Labor, while fluctuating, doesn’t move a ton month to month. Dairy can.

That’s like I said anecdotal, but broadly, real-estate, equipment purchase/finacince has all been so hyper optimized it squeezes the business owners out.

It doesn’t matter the market. PIZZAOVEN-XL will sell it to you, let you leverage payments against your home equity, grab it back and resell it. They can deal with the cash flow issue. They are “assembled in America”. They don’t care if you go out of business. They’ll do it again for the same person that moves into the same space trying to do the. Exact. Same. Thing.

And I’m not trying to draw a blanket statement across all industries. I’m just saying the wheels that make every industry move are smarter and literally longer lived than anyone starting out, and there’s a reason “John deer” and “John deer finance” are seperate companies.

Responding to like three of your comments at once. But I used RES since like 2010. Until June I, and I imagine many others, had zero idea what “vanilla” reddit even looked like.

But yes, I only do r/NFL because I haven’t found that in fediverse yet. When I’m there and the muscle. Memory kicks in and I click the logo and go to the home it’s… Bad…

I’ve popped in once or twice in the niche communities I used to do. There’s activity, but it’s stuff I would have called filler posts two years ago. Not bad just… Not good.

Yeah… I don’t know if the person you’re mentioning meant productive stuff or not, but I was in a pretty niche community there. One where parents were dealing with their kids on operating tables, but not often. It was as exactly the kind of thing internet forums were made for: medical advice from doctors, venting and whatnot from strangers who’d been there. I said a lot of practical helpful things and a lot of meaningless nice platitudes at the right time.

And I was happy to do it the same way I swapped guitar tabs as a kid.

There’s honest money in making a community space.

There’s no honest money in monetizing a community.

I’m newer to linux, and kind of a moron, but I 1) bounced off Ubuntu and 2) haven’t seen this crap with Debian.

So I’m stretching it a bit because at the end of the day this really does apply to more than restaurants, but the other commenter had it right.

Things like rent, insurance, etc go into the cost for well above the plate. So the ingredients are one thing, but you have to make up the cost of rent, paying the staff when there’s low customer volume, all the insane amount of costs that go into running a business. That server has to make up for the cost of printing menus and delivering them by mail.

None of this is the servers fault, who should get a fair wage, but it all adds up in a way that makes it hard for the owner. In fact, the person who sold them the grills, refrigerators, and all the other equipment, knows exactly and empirically how hard it is and sets their prices accordingly.

And it’s not like that company’s delivery drivers, techs, and fabrication workers also don’t deserve a wage. Or the Tyson folks that are plucking the chicken delivered.

The issue is, at the end of the day, those companies probably should be less profitable. But instead of accepting that, we put all of the companies that make all the stuff that run that restaurant into bigger companies that are now part of mutual funds, and they sell it out knowing they can grab it back if it goes under.

So you might be able to get away with making a few plates and some money, but trying turning it into something that will let you pay your rent and put your kids into a school. “Bob’s Burgers” is pretty true to life.

Restaurants have notoriously thin margins. I’m not defending this bill, and there are definitely awful practices out there, but it ain’t easy. Even a $34 dollar steak only kind of covers all the ancillary costs that make it happen.

The biggest issue with the crunch we have going on is that food (prepared or otherwise) should be way more expensive, and that shouldn’t be an issue because most people should be making way more money. All of those should/shouldn’ts got way out of whack over the course of decades, and the circus only continued because people found crappy ways to keep it going.

It’s a lot of industries. Construction is a great example. The developers make money. The material vendors make money. The builders make money. The sub contractors who actually put the parts together get haggled on invoices and take the lower amount because they have payroll to make and equipment loans to pay. Loans that are happily given out because the equipment can be easily repossessed.

It’s a very good thing everything is correcting, but it’s going to be an ugly process as workers get their due and pass the burden on to the small business owners.

This is why I don’t park near Teslas lol. There are other cars with that feature now but boy does Tesla seem to not care that stuff isn’t ready.