Yeah, that time is even moreso now because cars are far more complex and expensive as fuck now. Just the HVAC system alone on a modern luxury car probably has more components than the entirety of my old 1972 MG. You can bet your ass my friends find it very valuable when I can quickly fix stuff on their cars a dealership wanted to charge $1200 for.
And honestly, you can make a lot of really good bread quite quickly. Leaving out proofing for a bit, it’s less than watching an episode of a show. Bread it also easy enough that you can totally watch a show while making it, and not worry about chopping off your fingers lol
But they were at least limited in their portability and loudness and battery life. Now you can have a tiny speaker that gives up any semblance of sound quality for loudness, but will also manage to last 8+ hours.
At least on my TV, I’ve had firmware updates enable things like variable refresh rate, enable 4K/120Hz, improve the dynamic contrast performance, and fix a couple of weird bugs it had shipped with.
So far, no ghosts yet! Only haunted by the vague odor of the church it was in before, so it kind of smells like an old lady’s house, but it’s going away pretty quickly.
I went on the low side since it’s not in perfect shape and is an older (1985) Young-Chang built Wurlitzer. It was a church piano so it has some bushing wear in the keys, but still very playable, and had a broken string on D2 that was an easy $50 fix. I think after moving, tuning, the string, and eventually rebushing it in the next year or so, I’ll have about $900-1000 into it all said and done. Still definitely a pretty inexpensive piano overall, but understandable why they might not have wanted to put money into something that was probably a donation to begin with.
A $1 grand piano off of eBay. I had been looking around on stuff like FB Marketplace for a “real” piano after learning with a really basic keyboard for a while, and happened across a gorgeous 6’1" grand piano on eBay. It was reasonably close, the ad said it was in good working order, and they took very detailed pictures of basically every single flaw in the case. I called up a piano mover, and had them pick it up from the church, sight unseen. I was so worried that I’d made a mistake, given that the moving was still about $400, but I got insanely lucky, with a beautiful looking and sounding piano worth about $5k for basically just the cost of moving it.
I’d put good money on a company doing something marketing/ad related. My first summer internship was at a company that did digital ads, and the amount of alcohol that was consumed on literally a daily basis was insane. I’m talking the majority of the office being having a minimum of 2-4 drinks after about 2pm rolled around, and probably triple that on Friday.
The only party I was there for was the CTO’s birthday, in which at lunch he received a piñata filled to bursting with those little alcohol shots, and by the end of the day basically everyone had to Uber home. For 19 year old me, it was pretty unreal seeing my bosses and coworkers that drunk in the middle of the week.
Knowing how fucked up everyone was during a normal workweek in the office, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if a Christmas party there was an absolute drug-filled rager.
Future Weapons!. RIP Mack, he was one of the many Discovery hosts from that era that got me into engineering.
The good news with iRobot is that they actually have pretty solid cybersecurity. They also do a pretty great job of supporting parts for old robots and make them quite easy to repair. For a typical consumer product, I feel like they’re far better than most companies in terms of how shitty they could be vs how shitty they actually are.
Depending on water temperature (so you’re not burning energy to maintain body temp), salt vs fresh (you’re more buoyant in saltier water), and body fat composition (fat adds to your natural buoyancy), I can definitely see someone who’s in decent shape managing 10 hours. I think the record is over 100 hours, so 40 is definitely going to be well above “normal” but not necessarily superhuman.
Yeah, that tracks
Funnily enough, this is almost exactly how ads are served to you. Advertisers get your profile, try and figure out how valuable an impression will be, bid against other advertisers, and the winning bid gets to show you the ad. All within the fraction of a second of a page loading.
Instant Pot was a product so good that customers rarely needed to buy another one. The company went bankrupt.
Bull-fucking-shit. That’s just not how any of this works.
There are plenty of companies that make appliances that last a long fucking time, and don’t have to rely on fucking DLC micro transaction AI bullshit. The reason Instant Pot went bankrupt is the same reason a ton of popular companies have recently had issues: They got bought by private equity (who also owned Pyrex and fucked them over), saddled with a shitton of bad debt, squeezed of every bit of brand value they had, and then left to fall apart as the PE firm made off with millions.
The fact that the writer correlated “quality, durable good” with “unsuccessful business and bankruptcy” is absolutely one of the worst takes, and really shows just how pervasive this disgusting idea of “must be disposable to be profitable” really is.
I have a 150mi EV and a PHEV. I won’t be bothering with another PHEV, unless I need something that can tow long distances. Every long distance trip I’ve taken in our PHEV since ~2020 would have been almost identical to a trip in an EV. Drive about 3 hours, and stop for 20 minutes for food/restroom, and back on the road. Even with our PHEV, which can do over 600mi on a tank, we were naturally stopping at almost the exact same points as I would when I planned out the same route in an EV.
As minimal as it is in a modern car, dealing with the ICE side of it just isn’t worth it in a daily driver from my perspective. I have an old classic that’s ICE, and if I’m going to be doing oil changes and such, I’d much rather do them for fun on that, than be required to on my commuter.
Unfortunately, it’s pretty true at least internally, though their dumpster fire reputation is changing that. I’ve worked at a number of Tier 1 automotive suppliers and OEMs, and I can’t even tell you the number of times I’ve had to listen to “We should do ‘thing’ because that’s what Tesla does”. It’s leading to a lot of shitty and anti-consumer practices, but fortunately I think some of the smarter leadership is finally seeing that they were shitty ideas all along, and was nothing more that techbro bullahit.
As someone who’s extremely left leaning, it’s so goddamn infuriating, because there are so many pro-gun Dem leaning voters that wind up voting ® down the ticket, almost solely because the Democratic candidate went on an idiotic speech about AK-15s and their 30 caliber per second clipazines. It’s not like the anti-gun Dems they’re pandering to are going to vote Republican because the Democratic candidate said nothing about guns during their campaign.
It’s literally one single issue that the Dems could just not say a word about. Literally, no work involved. No campaigning, canvassing, or fundraising. Just don’t bring it up, and it would massively improve their odds in some of the most critical swing states. But no, they just have to virtue signal to the areas that are basically ultramarine blue, and it fucks them over every goddamn time.
Another adjacent life hack is when assembling flat pack furniture, use a quality wood glue on all the joints and connectors, but especially those little wood dowels. It won’t make it indestructible, but it’ll hold up far better over time.
Knowing many people who’ve worked for him, you have about 6 months at a MuskCo brand company max before you really know what a piece of shit he is, and either a.) leave ASAP, b.) convince yourself it won’t be so bad and hang on for ~2 years, or c.) fall into the cult of personality and believe that Daddy Elon loves his little proles and cares very much about all the hard work you’re doing [EMPLOYEE NUMBER HERE].
The absolute last stop on the “Musk is Tony Stark but IRL epic gamer Redditor and likes weed and Rick and Morty!” train was when he called that cave diver a pedophile. It was apparent well before then, but anyone acting like they had no idea what a piece of shit he was after that either didn’t hear about it, or was willfully ignorant because they wanted to continue pretending that basing their entire personality around a billionaire wasn’t a terrible idea.
It isn’t even just “youngsters” at this point, it’s people in basically every possible demographic, and it’s absolutely infuriating. It’s literally never been easier to consume vast amounts of media privately, even in public. With shit like the Apple Vision or other headsets and a good pair of noise canceling headphones, you could literally be watching the dirtiest porn imaginable and no one would be the wiser, and yet people feel the need to assault everyone around them with their awful taste in content. And no, the type of content doesn’t matter, I don’t care if it’s Lil Nas X, Bach, the Beatles, your favorite YouTuber, a TED Talk, or anything else. If you’re playing it over a speaker in public, it’s awful.
I also don’t need to hear about your brother’s tragic drug problems over speakerphone while I’m shopping for groceries, I don’t want to hear your obnoxiously loud TikToks while I’m taking a shit, and you can put your game of fucking Candy Crush on mute while you’re on a redeye 8hr international flight and people are trying to sleep.