A lord/servant relationship is still a relationship.

I don’t want a relationship with my tools.

If my PC starts running slow I’ll tear the fucker item and start replacing shit. If the OS displeases me I’ll start disabling parts. If software starts interrupting me when I’m not actively using it I change its permissions so it can only do what I tell it.

I’m not gonna give my butler a lobotomy to make him more obedient, swap the Footmen’s hands out for serving platters, or kneecap the scullery maid so she can’t leave the kitchen.

If my phone dies, it gets scrapped and I replace it without shedding a tear. I can’t say the same for a loyal Valet.

They tried to nickel and dime me on a $4000/yr product, but I’m just giving them the nickel.

I will give ESRI credit for their online stuff. It’s expensive, but it’s also pretty great. We’re actually thinking about getting an online subscription but no software licenses.

I didn’t discover it this uear, but I started using QGIS professionally when the small city that hired me to, among a lot of other duties, be the new GIS department.

Turns out they thought ArcGIS cost the same as like Office or Acrobat, and they didn’t budget for it for the fiscal year that started 2 weeks before I started working.

Anyway, I’ve gotten pretty good with QGIS, and we’re sticking with it. It does everything I need it to do, and I can still pull stuff from most REST servers.

If you have reason to believe someone is in mortal danger, your response shouldn’t be to mail a letter giving them 30 days to respond.

You send police to the scene where they secure the potential suspect and make sure there’s nothing going on.

Most states charge a regressive sales tax. By your logic, the fact that people don’t refuse to pay sales tax at the register proves that people enjoy it!

That’s why it’s dangerous. If it were wrong 99% of the time people wouldn’t trust it. But being right most of the time risks people depending on it and acting on bad information which can have severe consequences.

Except AI is famously unreliable with the accuracy of its answers.

I’ve run across a few sites that allow me to check out entirely through Google Pay or PayPal, but not many. I still don’t love the info going through Google, but at this point they already have all my information, so it doesn’t really make much of a difference at this point.

And of course for anything that needs to be shipped they are going to need a name and shipping address.

I would like to seeegally mandatory “guest checkout” options with protections on data use. They’ll need to keep some kind of invoice/receipt of the transaction, but it should be illegal to use it for any other purposes than order/purchase tracking for guest accounts.

Aren’t cellphone NFC payment essentially a long-form version of this? As far as the machine is concerned they’re getting your CC info, but Google/Samsung/Apple Pay are acting as a middleman and your actual credit card information is never actually shared.

Fun fact, you can’t get a Quran unless it’s in Quoranic Arabic. Translations aren’t considered to be the Quoran, but are instead called things like “Interpretations of the Meaning of the Holy Quran in the English Language”

They actually recently had a video about their thumbnails, and how different people see different thumbnails for the same video as they experiment to see what works.

At least they’re honest about it I guess.

I’m really, truly not trying to be flippant. But welcome to the first taste of adulthood. What you plan for your life and what your life becomes are very different things. I am not who I expected to be. I am not in the career I expected. I don’t have the same interests I expected, and I only have like 2 friendships from my high school days that I’ve really maintained.

But the thing is, none of that is necessarily bad. I enjoy my job, but as a high schooler “municipal development” wasn’t a career to dream about, even though it can be very satisfying.

I have different friends and interests, but they’re not worse. It’s just that the world broadens as you age.

You can’t really know who you are until the training wheels come off. That’s where you’re headed by the sound of it. Is it scary and stressful? Absolutely. But when you come out of it you’ll be the person you are, not the person somebody expects you to be.

The 20s were an amazing time where everything in my life got flipped around more than once. Now that I’m a few decades past it, I can better appreciate how much I grew in that time.

I also miss having a more cooperative body.

Bioshock.

I don’t think there will every be a more satisfying twist for me. The twist was about me, the human playing the game, and only works because of the nature of the format.

It was perfection.

Correct. And I appreciate that. A couple wanting a religous wedding should know that the pastor that’s blessing the union supports them.

In this case it is. All 50 states are required to perform gay marriages as of June 26th, 2015. The ruling took immediate effect nationwide. Clerks were having to hand-edit marriage licenses to allow for same-sex certificates because within an hour of the ruling people were showing up at courthouses to get married in states where it had been illegal.

Churches aren’t required to perform same-sex marriages nationwide, however.

All 50 states are recognize gay marriage since Obgerfel v Hodges in June 2015.

According to the GSS, only 10% of Americans reaponded “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” to the statement “Homosexuals should have the right to marry” in 1988 (first year the question was asked).

In 2004, it was 30%.

In 2022 it was 67%.

Also according to the GSS, 40 years ago a third of Americans thought homosexuals shouldn’t have the right to speak.

We’ve made remarkable progress in a very short period.

Corporate Average Fuel Economy. It’s the US Federal Regulation that establishes required fuel economy standards for vehicle fleets in the US. For instance, by 2026 the average fuel economy for a vehicle fleet, based on number of vehicles sold, must be 49 miles per gallon.

For manufacturers that sell a lot of trucks, that’s a problem. The #1 selling vehicle in the US for 50+ years has been the Ford F-150. So they split consumer vehicles into 2 major categories: passenger vehicles and light trucks, which had less-strict standards and an adjusted mpg-rating. After all, a truck designed for low-end torque for hauling gear and pulling trailers isn’t gonna be able to compete with a Civic for fuel economy.

To game the system, the manufacturers started pushing vehicles they could classify as light trucks. The classification was supposed to be reserved for cargo vehicles, vehicles rated for 12 or more passengers, or off-road vehicles. So the manufacturers started making everything “off-road.” Remember how the minivan disappeared and suddenly all the manufacturers had SUVs instead? Light Truck classification is the reason.

The final straw was the Chrysler PT Cruiser being classified as a light truck.

So in 2008 the feds announced that, starting in 2012, more weight would be given to a vehicle’s footprint in calculating an adjusted mpg to discourage the manufacturers simply raising a car a few inches and calling it an off-road vehicle to game the numbers. But the unintended consequence was a system where they just have to make trucks a little bigger every few years to stay ahead of the increasingly-strict mileage standards.

It’s about to get worse, too. Starting soon, manufacturers won’t be able to use the improved mileage of Hybrids to improve their CAFE numbers (it’ll only use traditional ICE for calculations), so I expect a lot of hybrids and plug-in hybrid models to be discontinued, including the Maverick.

The Maverick is the cheapest truck on the market AND it comes standard with a hybrid. That’s not because Ford is generous.

It exists almost exclusively to sell enough fuel-efficient vehicles to improve the CAFE numbers for the rest of the truck fleet to avoid fines, and when the hybrid engine no longer gives Ford a bonus in the numbers I doubt they’ll keep making it, or at least not as cheaply with the hybrid engine as the standard.

Screenshot from Ford showing it’s relative size to other trucks on the market. It’s significantly smaller, and making it any smaller would get it killed by CAFE. This is the rare case where regulation really, truly is the enemy of progress.

The automakers fucked around classifying everything as trucks to get around CAFE, and the well-meaning regulation designed to fix that loophole accidentally outlawed small cargo-haulers and encouraged automakers to just keep making things bigger instead of improving efficiency.