With a laptop and phone which both can use it my backpack while travelling is so much lighter and less bulky. For me it absolutely was a game changer, I just don’t like that I need to carry a USB a to C adapter for all the legacy USB A ports.

Not sure who would buy it full price but in most of the apps if you’re not picky there’s always some amount of deals to get a meal under $5. I only go occasionally as the deals aren’t as good as they used to be across the board and the quality is universally terrible. Taco Bell is also its own unique thing which no other Mexican restaurant will get you so occasionally it just sounds good.

That being said in my area you can go to nearly any proper restaurant and get carry-out under $15 with Texas sized portions. As someone with an unhealthy work/life balance particularly in the evenings, this or bulk curry is how I usually eat dinner.

At least he won the popular vote, so it’s well and truly want the majority (who cared to vote) wanted this time. It would be much more frustrating if he lost the popular vote like in 2016, where the minority in votes had control of house, senate and executive branches. This time it’s what people wanted, and people somehow voted for fascism instead of the status quo.

Putin also was able to only serve for two terms, so he replaced himself with a crony until he could change the law to remove term limits…

NYT forecast is 90% Trump now. It’s crazy that anyone would vote for him, really shows that policy plays no part in politics. It’ll be interesting to see how he tears down the judicial system to remove the many charges against him.

I thought that without blocking cookies the tracking is still active, even if you’re not being served ads from them. In those same LinkedIn privacy settings you’re automatically opted into having your data used to train AI models.

LinkedIn has some of the most obfuscated and complex ad targeting settings I’ve encountered. There needs to be a retirement to have a one click solution to disable ad personalization.

We’re not possibly going to flip but hopefully with abortion now restricted we’ll be closer to a swing state than in quite a while. The biggest problem is how heavily gerrymandered the state is, there are some crazy looking districts to get some parts of urban areas to vote red. A simple majority of votes really won’t do it in the state of Texas.

Not a Tesla fan and I absolutely despise the cult around Elon. SpaceX is a bit different though. Luckily with Elon’s many, many side project misadventures he’s pretty hands-off with SpaceX. Ultimately it comes down to being largely engineer driven and given sufficient (but yes, still government) funding to try new things without the scrutiny of direct government agencies. The hours are usually terrible from what I hear, but this varies team to team.

My biggest complaint is that they do lowball engineers using the stock as reasoning for why it’s worth accepting. FWIW historically that has been the case, and many engineers there do effectively have golden handcuffs. But expecting infinite golden handcuff level growth forever is unrealistic.

Before you can start to change public perception it needs to be legal to build densely. Parking minimums and a variety of other commercial building code regulations make this much more expensive in the US, all while the people nearby in single family homes fight any new builds due to their poor perception of condos and apartments. Just removing the stigma is only one part of the equation.

If they really wanted to change regulations they’d push changing zoning regulations in cities to allow building anything other than detached single family housing. That would be totally reasonable and help alongside tax incentives. But I have a feeling that’s not what’s meant by changing regulations…

Web browsers don’t integrate to a single account and payment system, nor do they preemptively load entire websites before you start browsing. So you’re always waiting for actions to complete or for images to load which feels slower. Mobile websites also tend to be very bloated slowing things down further than if the same functions were done natively in an app. There’s also no consistency between websites so you never know when something will/won’t work nor how far away you are from checkout. And then to top it all off there’s browser compatibility, which is typically pretty poor for anything that isn’t Chrome/Safari.

If a web browsers could really do the same thing all these companies wouldn’t feel the need to make their own device specific apps.

This is why everything apps are so popular in many parts of the world. Using a mini-app from the internet running within another app is far preferable to downloading a whole app you may never need to use again. The way they do it in China is so seamless even if you’ve never visited the business before. There’s never any special account creation or entering of payment information.

Obviously it’s pretty terrible in terms of user privacy since the everything app has basically unchecked access to all of your personal information and habits, but the convenience is incredible and feels decades ahead of how apps work in the US.

The ads on over the air programming are so so terrible. And even with a great antenna the many channels aren’t exactly the highest quality content even if they didn’t have ads.

YouTube has taken the place of over the air TV and for good reason.

Not sure, this was 2 weeks ago. Apparently the season was somewhat earlier than normal this year. The C&O Canal trail is the place to go though.

This goes a bit deeper than their connection to America. The whole reason they were aligned with America in the first place was their mutual hatred of Iran. The Saudis HATE Iran. Coincidentally Hamas’s biggest supporter is Iran. Israel surely knows this and for similar reasons why most of the Arabian peninsula states are keeping their distance from this war.

I finally managed to try pawpaws this year. It was quite nice in Maryland and they’re all over along riverbanks. They had nearly identical taste and texture to the sweetsops available throughout Asia, just with larger seeds. I have no idea why they’re not widely available, the flavor is sweet and mild like most fruits that are popular in the US.