bobthepanda

It’s also a bit of a dilemma; if your boss has AI mania, and you buying into it or not is the difference between being promoted, keeping your job, passed up or even fired, the rational course of action for self-preservation is to also buy into the mania.

for events specifically, Partiful seems to be the thing in my area finally displacing the Facebook events model, and it's a lot less bloated.

at least in the US, most people are fine with iMessage/SMS since

* pretty early on the vast majority of phone plans started bundling unlimited text messaging, which IIRC was a big motivator for using messaging apps abroad

* because of the vast scale of the country, domestic coverage results in no roaming for the places Americans spend most of their time, unlike in Europe where there are multitudes of countries you'd be passing in a one to two hour flight. Roaming charges in the EU were only abolished in 2022, late enough that everybody has settled on apps as the best way to manage that now.

* many American plans extend unlimited messaging to Canada and Mexico, the two likeliest places that Americans would go to abroad

even in the best scenarios, a well organized group of people is not using all the features of email "properly" to say nothing of groups that are supposed to have the general public.

When i say multitask I mean that more literally. If you’re driving you can’t read, if you’re a passenger on public transit audio won’t make you motion sick, if you are cooking or cleaning you can have it on in the background, etc.

Reading requires the full use of your eyes, no way around that.

Audio is just easier to multitask with than reading.

admittedly i have not used a vespa myself, only seen. but an e bike is a pretty good mode of motor transport.

also, there are neighborhoods with extended amounts of gun violence and discharges and I can't say that the residents "don't mind it"

It's worth noting that the initial supersonic bans came as a result of sustained sonic boom testing over the same population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklahoma_City_sonic_boom_tests

Japan is a bit of an outlier because of earthquake regulations.

There is a history of substantially updating building regulations every time a new record is set for largest earthquake in the modern era; and so if you are buying historical, you are buying a less safe property that could kill you.

The last major earthquake updates to the code were in 2000, so there isn’t a lot of historical housing stock without this confounding factor.

there is a large, well connected domestic auto industry that wants Americans to keep driving bigger and more gas guzzling cars because that's the only thing they know how to sell to Americans these days.

Though this is not really limited to the legacy automakers; the Hyperloop was a media stunt to try and divert investment away from transit, and in some places, it actually worked.

This is correct.

For context, when the 747 was being developed, simultaneously Boeing was developing the SST, Britain and France were developing Concorde, and the Soviets had their own supersonic Tupolevs in development. Boeing was anticipating that supersonic aircraft would render the subsonic 747 obsolete for passengers overnight, so it was designed to be easily convertible to freight.

I would have to imagine that the newer 747-8 would have the much lower pressurization and other comfort standards of its generation of aircraft in the 2000s; the problem is that it didn't really sell so most people did not get to fly in one.

do they? OCR has gotten pretty good in 2026.

now that e-bikes are so prevalent, I wonder if we will see more regenerative braking.

i live in a place with large hills that have long descents over miles, and it would be nice to not be wearing out my brakes physically while controlling my speed.

If anything, we’re reversing progress on this front, given we just had a UFC match on the front lawn of the White House.

It’s not really a secret that most new auto factories serving the US tend to open in places where those unions are not active, like the South or Mexico

it is worth noting that if you were to measure by degree of subsidy, the planned output for nuclear has not really budged, but wind and solar are exploding in China in comparison.

Even in China, nuclear power is little more than an afterthought. Nuclear’s share of total electricity generation in China fell for the third year in a row in 2024, to 4.5 percent. Nuclear capacity grew by 3.5 GW, while solar capacity grew by 278 GW. Solar and wind together generated about four times more electricity than nuclear reactors.

Since 2010, the output of solar increased by a factor of over 800, wind by a factor of 20, and nuclear by a factor of six. Renewables, including hydro, increased from 18.7 percent of China’s electricity generation in 2010 to 33.7 percent in 2024 (7.5 times higher than nuclear’s share), while coal peaked in 2007 at 81 percent and declined to 57.8 percent in 2024.

https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/Global-report-confirms-an...

Japan operates a kind of hybrid system where the subway (at least in Tokyo) mostly consists of tracks that connect to private operators on either end, and a train will just run through from the private parts of the track to the subway parts with no interruption whatsoever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_through_trains_in_Japa...

it does note that it's satire. a lot of drivers in America have reflexive dislike of roundabouts.

this one probably is not good for a DDI because it is also supposed to be a bus interchange for a BRT project, and the buses will stop at the roundabout level.

Ancient poor Romans did not have kitchens, both for space reasons (Ancient Rome had a million people in it in a fairly tight spot) and for fire risk. https://liisaeyerly.com/2025/10/22/poor-vs-wealthy-dining-in...

Similarly, poor people in Victorian England often ate out or ate cold meals, either because they did not have the means to cook, or because they could not afford to; pots were not really cheap, nor was cooking fuel. https://victorianweb.org/science/health/health8.html

Certain types of implements, like ovens, were not super practical or cheap for a lot of people to have dedicated to their own house. https://food52.com/story/17568-the-centuries-old-form-of-pub...

one thing to note is that while they may have consumed it they probably weren't making it. Particularly for urban dwellers, kitchens were very rudimentary if you even had one.

While I don't have the exact details of transport and whatnot, much of that rice came from the Carolinas https://inlandrice.charlestoncounty.org/economics.html

Generally speaking, rice is a lot higher yield per acre, and also, the east coast doesn't have particularly good wheat growing.

I think what is so interesting is also, if you peel back the curtain, most recipes have standardized at a fairly recent point in their national mythos, depending on how long that is.

Recipes are a snapshot of economic and technological advances of the time, and whole classes of recipe are not available until certain technological watersheds, like

* precise temperature controls for ovens and stoves in the early 20th century

* cheap and health(ier) chemical leaveners in the late 19th century

* discovery of consistent vanilla pollination in the 19th century

* exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)

Also our modern supply chain is very good at magicking away the seasonality and perishability of ingredients, so for example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.

I think rather than redistricting in the narrow sense, we should consider

* repealing the cap on house seats, which has been stuck at 435 arbitrarily * requiring that metropolitan areas consist of multimember districts that get allocated by proportional voting

i do wonder, that in the age where we have image and video creation out of the bag, whether or not this will result in whole classes of evidence becoming completely unreliable.

We tried talking about sea level rise and land area inundation, and more severe storms, and amongst many the collective response was to stick their fingers in their ears.

The real conversation we should have is about money talking; a huge amount of assets are facing being stranded by insurers. Insurance doesn't really care about ideology, they care about making money, and so the fact they are losing money to climate change is pretty irrefutable evidence. Though right now politicians are just reframing this as "greedy insurance", which isn't exactly untrue.

Why not both? The current executive has missed the mark on appointments pretty badly a number of times due to the prizing of loyalty over competency.

There also needs to be, probably, more party diversity.

The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party.

Also, I think the current gerrymandering race to the bottom has pretty clearly demonstrated the need for a better system of voting and district mapping. The House elections are already regulated by congressional act, not by the constitution.

Theoretically speaking, if the standards are broadly aligned, there is something to be said about reducing duplicative efforts to regulate. The EMA has partnerships with other regulatory agencies already. https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/partners-networks/international...

Like, you don't need two agencies to test that the side effect of a medicine is nausea.