If you are getting your elementary schooler child their first personal electronic device, the default choice should be a programmable graphing calculator.
Linux is far from perfect and is not ready to replace Windows for regular users. Being a mainly Linux user for a bit more than 3 years I still feel frustrated at times.
Cats are an environmental disaster and if you let your cat roam outside or feed wild cats, you're just a bad person and directly responsible for hundreds of bird deaths.
My version of the "could care less" pet peeve (which is annoying but tolerable) is when people reverse the order of the cases in a "let alone" phrase. The entire point of "let alone" is that you fail to meet the general case, so of course you don't satisfy the specific case.
For example, if I asked someone "Have you ever been to Germany?" they might answer "I've never been to Germany, let alone Europe!" As is, this is nonsensical, but if you reverse the order, all is well. Most examples in the wild aren't this obvious, but they're commonplace once you start looking for them.
I can't imagine there is a good business, that communicates effectively, that is built on Microsoft Outlook.
I never appreciated Google's productivity software until I was forced to use Microsoft's at a large company. People just openly accept this broken system and the fact that they'll miss important communications and spend far too much time accounting for the SW's shortcomings.
FUCK Microsoft Outlook. The executives making decisions for the team's designing and maintaining that product are committing crimes against humanity.
It actually does get solved with other systems. I can tell you that because I worked within Google platform for over a decade in the same industry, add with differs companies/environments and probably invested a total of 1-2 hours collectively in thought and setup deliberately for that system. It worked, and it improved over time.
Especially when outlook does things like give a notification that you've replied to a thread on a given date, but clicking that text doesn't jump to that mentioned reply AND the reply in question is not shown in line with the message you responded to.
I'm the last person to champion Google, but in comparison, Gmail handles conversational email threads intuitively and without deliberate setup or skill required. It follows the logical human expectation for the course of a natural conversation between parties. It also collapses less recent messages and surfaces more recent, relevant ones on longer term threads. But everything is logical and accessible.
I have a list a mile long of little features that have blocked me day to day in outlook mail and calendar that break productivity flow compared to gmail. They require deliberate setup and a learning curve to get something that feels close to usable and even then, glaring omissions in the product.
If your work isn't very complex and you don't communicate often (i.e. You're coding all day or reading/responding jira tickets), I can see you having that take. If you're forced to interact with these systems constantly though, it is objective trash. It's stale and afraid to change due to enterprise malaise and already approved workflows with said broken system.
Those big SUV like Ford f150 should be illegal, for real. They are super long and tall, the driver can barely see what's right in front, it's dangerous for everyone not in the car. Cars should have stricter limits on size, if it's bigger, you need a special license.
I kinda agree and disagree with this POV. I think it’s more of a cultural issue and not a legal one. At least in the US, people think it’s trendy to buy a big truck, but as someone who worked in a blue collar field for years, a lot of these people that drive trucks do it because they need it for their jobs. Trust me, most of these people don’t like spending thousands on repairs and $100+/weekly. for gas
Not sure what the solution would be, but I don’t think banning them would be it. I think it would mostly affect the blue collar worker and not the people who are actually the problem.
Also, I used to drive one of those big ass trucks for work, and I can assure you that visibility is not an issue. They are tall, open, have huge mirrors, and have seats that are high up. I could see a lot more and a lot better than in my current sedan.
What kind of jobs mandate the use of a pickup instead of a regular old van? Maybe tree surgeons and gardeners? Not sure who else specifically requires an open bed. Even then the open bed vans are far more spacious and practical so still not sure where a pickup is ever the correct choice.
Anyone who lives in the suburbs where doing lawn maintenance, tree trimming, and other such stuff is required due to HOAs and other such nonsense typically requires either owning a truck, or having a friend with a truck, because every now and then you have to pack it full of lawn crap and haul it off. I have to do yearly fire protection on my property, that includes cutting out bushes, trimming trees, and creating defensible space. Loading that into a van would be a pain in the ass, loading it into an SUV means I'm never getting the sap out of the carpet. Throwing it in the back of a pickup bed means I don't even have to think about it.
I don't own a pickup, but I have multiple friends with pickups, and you get into a beneficial "I'll buy you a tank of diesel if I can borrow your truck for an afternoon" relationship. They get 100 bucks in fuel, I get my lawn crap taken care of.
I'd definitely consider a flatbed transit personally, but there is definitely a "cool" factor that is lost on something that looks like that. Not that "cool" factor is a good argument for something to exist, but it is what it is.
And I could probably do that, but I'm in a pretty rural area and services like that tend to have a very long wait list around here because there's too many people that need the same work done, and not enough handymen/services willing to do it. Not to mention the cost tends to be several hundred dollars.
Let's go one further and just... basically ban all cars. Almost nobody should be driving all of the time in a city, and when you start to think about how many problems and how much of a nuisance cars are it seems painfully obvious.
Yes, there's problems that we'd need to solve in order to do this, and some things would just be a little less convenient... But cities would be so much safer, quieter, and have much better air quality if fewer people were driving. Bikes are very effective for getting around for most people (especially if you don't have to worry about cars murdering you), e-bikes make it a little more accessible, and you can't tell me we couldn't have an absolutely bitching public transit system if 1) we didn't have to account for so many cars, and 2) even a small fraction of what everybody spends on their own personal motor vehicles went towards public transit infrastructure.
Sometimes we need cars to haul stuff, it totally makes sense to have motor vehicles for emergency situations and stuff, but pretty much nobody needs a giant SUV to commute to an office job by themselves. The amount of huge cars you see driving around with only one person is super depressing when you start looking for it.
For the United States, I agree mass Transit should be a much more prominent thing than it is, but suburbs and mass transit is difficult to deal with. 50% of the U.S. lives in suburbs, 20% of the U.S. lives in rural areas.
I couldn't live where I live without a car, and we literally have no mass transit. My nearest tiny grocery store is 3 miles away. I'm not putting a family of 4 on bicycles to make a run to the store to buy groceries, loading it on a bicycle, then hauling it home.
Part of the issue of mass transit, cities, and cars, is if I'm in a suburb 5 miles from a proper urban area with access to amenities, and I have no mass transit to get there, I have to take my car. And if I have my car when I get to the city, why would I park it to then take mass transit?
Mass transit actually has to become a realistic option for the 30% that live in a city before we even start to talk about mass transit for the other 70% of the U.S.
Yes, obviously with how things are currently it's not always practical to live without a car, but I don't think it means we should be defeatist about it and assume that that's the way things have to be. Yes, change will have to be gradual, but I think it's reasonable to look into changing zoning laws so suburbs don't have to be barren wastelands without any nearby shops. Yes, biking to get groceries is a little less convenient, but realistically many people and families can manage this just fine (especially with a bike trailer), and a 3 mile bike ride is like... 10 or 15 minutes?
Obviously things need to improve for these to be more reliable options for more people, and there will be inconveniences along the way, but I kind of think it's worth thinking about shifting things in this direction, instead of cementing things the way they are? Like, walkable neighbourhoods are great, and having good public transit and biking infrastructure makes a city more accessible and gives people more freedoms and makes it so not having a driver's license or car (e.g., due to disability or finances) isn't a death sentence... And it's probably better for the environment and people's happiness and safety too. I'm really just kind of tired by how much money and effort is spent on catering to cars, which in my opinion makes our public spaces so much worse.
And if I have my car when I get to the city, why would I park it to then take mass transit?
I don't think it's unreasonable to have to do this? From an individual perspective it's obviously better to just be able to drive everywhere and park near your destination, I can totally empathize with you there... But there's plenty of situations where you end up with sub-optimal solutions when everybody tries to follow their own self-interests. When everybody drives into the city all of the time that's more carbon, more vehicles, more pollution, more noise, you need more infrastructure, more maintenance, and more parking... Things have to get further and further apart to support all of this infrastructure, and there's more traffic and congestion which makes everything less efficient.
I mean, to be clear, I'm not saying this always makes sense... And I don't want to see you suddenly have a 3 hour commute either. I want you to have good options for getting into the city... But I also don't want you to be trapped in the suburb unable to come to work if you lose the ability to drive all of a sudden either, and I don't want you to have to deal with finding parking or sitting in traffic either.
I get that these are unpopular opinions --- people like their cars and they're convenient for many things, and the thought of transitioning away from needing them as much seems scary because cars are basically people's life blood at the moment... But I kind of feel like cars are killing us (often literally) with how expensive they are, how they limit access for people, how they shape our cities and make communities more isolated, and how they damage the environment.
Don't mistake me, I would much prefer to just hop on public transit and get to where I want without having to drive. Whenever I travel I take great pleasure in being able to use public transit that actually just "works" and not having to rent a car or drive my own car around
That being said, I think bicycles and "walkable" cities are the stupidest pursuit people who want to change the system pursue. It's easy to make a bike lane to point to and go "see! progress!" when no one will end up using the bike lane with any real consistency because the city is still laid out like garbage and getting from one end of even a small city to the other by bicycle lane is frustrating at best and dangerous/suicidal at worst.
I don't think bicycles and walkable cities are a stupid pursuit at all, but I do agree that often times bicycie infrastructure isn't given the care or respect it deserves! That said, I think sometimes these changes are incremental progress that can get better over time... Sometimes you end up with bike lanes that aren't great to get to for instance, but they'll eventually make more sense when the network expands (and each additional bike lane makes this exponentially better). Plus, I get the sense that drivers often don't have a good sense of how much other transit infrastructure is used and relied upon by other people. I've often heard complaints about having to wait for trains at lights, for instance, and it's a bit silly because the trains have hundreds of people on them, so they really should take priority, even if the traffic waiting at the light looks bigger because it's so much less space efficient. I suspect in a similar way the usage of bike lanes is often underestimated because they're quite efficient at getting people through in a small amount of space with little congestion. Bike lanes support some pretty serious throughput, so even if they get some pretty heavy use they might seem empty and unused... You just never really have a traffic jam or anything on them because they're so effective at moving people through.
It’s “I could not care less” not “I could care less”. If you could care less, then that means you care. If you can’t care less, then that means you are all out of fucks to give.
I've read somewhere that English teachers and grammarians agree that "I couldn't care less" is the correct one, and it makes more sense to me too.
Although, I can see how "I could care less" could mean that: you care so little that if you wanted you could care even less, but you don't care enough to do that.
Subscription services are not worth it, period. Phone and internet bills are all you need to get everything you want at the best possible qualities in the best possible formats. Subscription services are only convenient for the lazy who don't know how to use the internet.
This is more of a meta thing, but relevant to a lot of comments I’m seeing here. Having an opinion about pineapple on pizza is the most uninteresting cultural phenomenon. I’ve spent the last 4 years on dating apps, and at least 1 in 3 people write in their bio about this “issue”. It’s not something that people truly have strong feelings about, it’s like straight men saying Ryan Reynolds is attractive, or people arguing over the definition of a sandwich. It’s an opinion that people hold as a proxy for being somebody with strong opinions.
Phones are for talking, navigating, and casual content consumption. Desktops (and laptops) are for actually getting things done. Both are useful, but the former is not a substitute for the latter.
Tablets are oversized phones that can’t even phone. I don’t see any use for them that isn’t better served by something else. They’d actually be useful if they ran a desktop operating system, and some early ones did, but modern ones don’t.
The original 151 Pokemon had just as many bland, poor, and lazy designs as any generation since (and legitimately good designs, dont get me wrong) and anyone claiming the ice cream cone is automatically worse than ‘pile of goo that becomes bigger pile of goo’ is just talking through nostalgia
I think “pile of goo that becomes a bigger pile of goo” does seem a lot more plausible than a literal ice cream cone. I’d take more issue with the self-destructing pokeball pokemon, Voltorb. What kind of evolutionary mechanism brought that on?
Taking one for the whole of the species. Say everyone is getting tamed by humans. But if some member explodes themselves, then humans may stop trying to catch the rest. It’s like a monarch butterfly having a horrible taste. A bird eats one, and ignores the rest because of the bad experience.
Unless it’s boiled before they bake it, it’s not a fucking bagel, it’s doughnut-shaped bread. Bagels also do not contain blueberries, and any suggestion to the contrary should be met with a swift ass whooping.
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