> Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words.
> As I write, I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.
- Murakami, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"
We're obviously long past the days when people's politics could be mapped on a nice normal distribution, with some outliers at either end and a big group of moderates in the middle who vote differently depending on the election. Today the distribution is not only bimodal: there's almost no overlap at all.
Your politics are part of your identity now. It's part of how you define who you are, and according to the research, over 95% of people are completely entrenched and will never vote for any candidate from the "other" party. (This the highest since right before the Civil War.)
That said, while nobody's changing sides any time soon, people _do_ stay home on election day, and we're going to see that next election.
The races for the next couple decades will be won by the candidates and the parties who can drill up enough enthusiasm from their base. Preach to the choir so the choir sings, etc.
If you have a mesh system with more than one access point, your network benefits greatly by using WiFi 7 (or 8, now) as a dedicated wireless backhaul that connects the access points to each other.
Ancient Egyptian women, above a certain socioeconomic threshold, also removed their body hair. (So did the men.)
Hair traps odors (ever smell your hair after a campfire, or going to a Korean BBQ?), but it's kind of a bitch to constantly remove. People with the means and the time to remove their body hair have done it at various periods throughout history.
Women in ancient Egypt also wore makeup, could own property, could divorce men without social repercussions, etc.
Many aspects of society that we think are new are actually things that just kind of arise given a couple hundred years of peacetime and abundance, and/or things that wealthy people have been doing on and off at various periods throughout history.
I'm similar to you in that encouragement and external valuation goes a long way for me, but I've found that all successful business-minded entrepreneurial types really love playing the game where they bounce ideas off each other and try to shoot each other's ideas down.
When they pitch a new idea to family and friends they get pats on the head and it doesn't materially help them at all, but when someone says "that'll never work" they get excited and their ears perk up, because that new perspective could save them a ton of money going down a wrong path.
Proximity is the issue. If the watch or bracelet wrist is very physically close to the detector, it will set it off.
You're supposed to the watch/bracelet, but you do have to hold your wrist close to your body. You kind of want to hold your hands in front of your body as if you're about to grab one of your wrists with your other hand.
Watches and other jewelry are basically right at the cutoff of detection. They want to detect small knives but not earrings.
This is all absolutely tribal airport knowledge. I had been traveling for work for years, taken hundreds of flights, but I only found this out when my partner tried to go through a metal detector with a semi-permanent bracelet that requires a small screwdriver to take off, and the TSA person mercifully told her exactly how to pose as she walked through the detector.
Also windows that go down to the floor has been considered bad architecture for decades.
Wall-to-wall windows are great.
Floor-to-ceiling windows are stunning when you walk into an empty place that you're thinking about buying or renting, but when you're actually living there, windows that go down to the floor create a few feet of dead space. You can't really put any furniture there without feeling guilty about blocking the view you're paying for, and it's uncomfortable to walk up to the edge and look down - it makes you feel uneasy like you're standing on a cliff with your toes at the edge. It's much better for the window to end around waist high.
They're psychologically fine if both the floor and the ceiling extend beyond the window (e.g. it's on the ground floor, and the roof overhangs), but when they're used on every floor in a high rise apartment building, killing limited square footage and driving up energy bills, it's absolute madness.
Tangentially related anecdote: I used to break tons of stuff all the time (my whole family growing up did), and I just assumed that all things just have finite lifespans, until I started dating someone who's tremendously careful and called me out on it. Then for a long time I just assumed I was a clumsier than average person.
Then eventually I finally was forced to admit that I'd just been choosing to move about the world as a bit of a careless brute who treats my things with disrespect, and by being more intentional with the way I move about the world, all my stuff suddenly lasts 10x longer.
Interestingly, I'm not sure it's worth the trade-off, but it's been kind of wild to experience.
More often than not these are usually cheap Chinese devices that are expecting a USB-C to USB-A (power-only) cable, because they're actually USB-A devices, with USB-A circuitry, modified slightly to appear as if they're USB-C.
Basically they skipped out on building power negotiation smarts that are required to support real USB-C charging, and instead just swapped out the physical connector.
Yep. The two fucking resistors. All it takes 2 x 5.1K, and yet, somehow, people keep fucking it up.
It's not expensive or complex. It's just that somehow, no one thought to look up "how to add type c to your device" online, or ask an LLM, or put literally any effort into making sure the device works as it should.
You're saving a fraction of a cent per device, while banking on customers not sending it back as defective because it didn't charge when they tried it with a random cable.
If it is a deliberate choice, it's a really, really dumb one.
Advertising is primarily about convincing is to buy things we don't need, don't want, or which are 'stupid' in some way.
Half empty plastic packaging, especially the sort where the company spent money to [re-]design it to deceive people - stupid. It should be illegal. Near ubiquitous.
One of my theories is that there is a deliberate choice happening by people who don't realize it is as simple as a couple of resistors and think they need some fancy PD negotiation chip.
Even over on r/usbchardware it is super common for people to conflate "PD" with this missing resistor issue. Part of the confusion is that the devices that people want to charge with are very likely to be PD power supplies.
Eh it's partially true - the browsers on phones needed to get better as well.
Zuckerberg famously made the Facebook apps basically just a responsive webpage under the belief that maintaining one codebase for all platforms would be best.
The performance on mobile was so terrible that Instagram started eating his lunch simply by maintaining native mobile apps that are actually performant, and Zuckerberg was forced to panic purchase Instagram (made by a team of 13 people) for a billion dollars.
Eventually phones got more powerful and mobile web browsers got good enough that PWAs could perform comparably to native apps, but it was too late, and Apple and Google had absolutely zero interest in promoting something that would damage their app store / play store revenue.
> As I write, I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.
- Murakami, "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running"
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