In theory, Sponsorblock could evolve to download a new video multiple times, check what frames match each copy, and use that data to skip to the next matching frame when users watch something.
This would overcome video stream ad injection even if every ad was a different length and in a different location each time someone watched the video.
The saxophone battle that unfurled on the New York City subway ten years ago comes to mind.
Does your name happen to be David?
Last I heard, there were proposals already put forward that would quintuple the current natural gas supply. Even though it’s more expensive than renewables.
The companies that got natural gas off the ground in the first place might not see a return on that investment for another decade or two. There’s a reason every year demand for natural gas has been going up.
Back around the housing collapse, natural gas was being touted as a “bridge fuel” that could get us away from filthy coal and serve as a temporary energy source until we got renewables up to speed. Funnily enough, what’s been built doesn’t seem like much of a bridge because there’s no plan for ramping down natural gas.
Colour me shocked.
A 300 Mi charge would mean if you can’t charge daily, you would be able to go a couple of days without having to do so.
Given most trips are less than 3 miles, if you had a 300 mile range vehicle, that’s about three months of average driving, not a couple of days. My point was that people don’t go on long drives the vast majority of time and don’t more than fifty or so miles of range.
I’ll use Tesla as the example here only because it’s the prominent electric car brand. Directly from them:
A 120 volt outlet will supply 2 to 3 miles of range per hour of charge. If you charge overnight and drive less than 30 to 40 miles per day, this option should meet your typical charging needs.
They go one to say you can get a 10x improvement on the miles per hour when charging from a 240v outlet. Even accounting for installation of a new outlet to the garage or side of the house, this would be far cheaper than buying a vehicle with hundreds of miles of range and using a supercharger every other week.
Sodium could easily replace lithium in EV applications if people would acknowledge that only 2% of trips are more than 50 miles. Though it’s probably moreso the auto industry’s fault that people have this assumption they need to prepare for a three hundred mile journey on a moments notice.
If manufacturers were putting out cars that had four figure price tags with double digit ranges, they would become the best selling vehicles within a decade and no one would care if it was sodium, lithium, or sawdust. Of course, there is less profit to be made from smaller vehicles and so the corporations won’t bother.
Agreed. The whole idea of these huge payouts could be eliminated and replaced with what exists for everyone else - severance pay. Calculated off a regulated minimum formula, based primarily on how long the person served the company.
I also agree with you that the top and bottom salaries should have a correlation. The C suite making the salary of a shelf stocker in one day should not happen. I think I could accept that the top gets somewhere around 10 or 20 times higher salary. Even 100x would be an improvement to the way it is now.
Like you point out, between stock options and whatever else, an executive salary could be a few hundred thousand, even if their total compensation is tens of millions. In fantasy land it would be nice if, once a company grows to a certain point, say a billion dollars in value, if it were required to convert to an employee owned cooperative entity.
It’s a shame things are the way they are. Maybe one day we won’t have politicians that can be bought. That’s a different discussion altogether.
In an ideal world, the penalties you describe are suitable. Though, gaming industry aside, for the executive level of most any corporation, being a scapegoat and handed a golden parachute is the worst case scenario for them leaving. In many cases floating across the street right into another executive position.
Jail time isn’t a likely outcome. It just isn’t the world we live in, unfortunately.
I see what you’re getting at but this would be difficult for a publisher to stick with in the event the game does horribly. Requiring them to keep their word to the date advertised would end up with them only guaranteeing a week, or send ramifications through all industries requiring truth in advertising.
A middle ground would be simply to legislate that when games require online connectivity for any reason, the appropriate software is released to allow a locally run server to enable online function at the time the company decides to decommission their servers. Then require them to hold these files in an accessible manner for at least as long as the servers had been active for.
That would be difficult in the event the company goes out of business, but I’m sure this would be a difficult thing to explain to most politicians so maybe not so simple after all.
Do you live in a city or an are with a lower population? I strap the helmet on in the city or doing some speed, but when we’re out visiting with family in the country or a small town, we usually go without it.
I’ve been using Shokz for a decade now. They’ve replaced a couple sets at no cost. I wear mine every day. Even for the occasional swim.
Listening to podcasts definitely gives longer battery life than listening to music. Though even the odd time I’ve drained the battery in a day, I charge it with a battery pack for fifteen minutes and it’s charged again.
Not many products I’d say are worth every cent, but from the quality to the customer service, Shokz are great.
Seems like you’re describing renting in an apartment complex or similar. Not exactly an apples to apples comparison to owning a single family home.
Not that you’ve raised bad points. Renting does have the benefits you’ve described, though lawn care in my experience is hit and miss. The issue is getting these benefits must cost something. So long as having them doesn’t mean the rent is double the mortgage, then it’s worthwhile.
Otherwise, renting is just another more expensive option for all the people that can’t afford the upfront cost of getting into the housing market.
I see what you’re getting at, but there will always be the higher and lower end of any type of product. Many companies charge orders of magnitude more for goods or services that most people get elsewhere for cheaper.
As with most any issue of a company damaging the environment or abusing their workforce, the answer could lie with stronger regulation, but that’s getting a different subject altogether.
I’m not entirely sure either Tony’s Chocolonely or Castronova would see Toblerone or Hershey’s as direct competition. Maybe Tony’s would, given their lower price point. But if the main allure to a brand is the ethically sourced nature of the product, you’ve already lost most chocolate consumers.
At that point, you can afford to price higher as you’re in a market where people that care more about the societal, humanitarian, ecological, etcetera impact than the impact on their own wallet.
Look, I’ve no interest in arguing the percentage of people that eat a full chocolate bar in one sitting vs not.
What I will point out is that according to a couple headlines I skimmed just now, Snickers appears to be America’s chocolate bar of choice, weighing in at 50g. In the comment you replied to, I was talking about a 180 gram bar of of chocolate.
You won’t catch me eating three and a half Snickers.
Moving on.
I like Consumer Reports. The samples of bars they chose across the chocolate industry seem fine to me. Where I take issue is in the way the data is presented. The article represents neither the manufacturers portion sizing on the nutrition label nor the FDA daily consumption figure.
Also, I’m sure it’s only a fraction of people that bother to read the nutrition labels before purchase. If lead content was written there, then that small group of people would see that information.
I only meant that even these people wouldn’t bother with this type of due diligence - that it would necessitate an organization like Consumer Reports. While it’s an important thing to check, and I am glad they did the checking, my overall point was that the results tell me that lead and cadmium levels in chocolate are not something anyone needs to be particularly concerned about.
I read the Consumer Reports article you linked, but honestly I can’t imagine lead levels in chocolate is something anyone would need to be concerned about.
The testing methodology CR used boils down to ‘we sent the chocolate to a laboratory for testing and turns out there’s lead above the safe limit in each bar.’ Consumers aren’t going to do this.
Also, the list on the article is flawed in my opinion. It shows the amount of lead and cadmium found in each chocolate bar, but doesn’t scale it to the size of the bar. CR estimates in their risk assessment the daily consumption of chocolate by looking at the portioning of the bars on the nutrition label, and the average by the FDA of 30g.
In Tony Chocolonely’s case, these figures are the same. As their regular bar size is 180g and the portioning is 1/6 a bar - 30g. This means that the CR listing a Tony’s bar at 134% of the daily limit of lead, it would also mean eating 500% the amount of chocolate the FDA expects.
If you adhere to the average of 30g, Tony’s is only 22% your daily lead limit.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve eaten a full bar in a day. But it’s far from a daily occurrence, and I’m certainly not thinking of the health ramifications when I indulge.
Even at 265% the lead limit, the Hershey’s bar is 120g, so a portion is 66%. The most frightening thing about that bar is that it’s Hershey’s.
Really goes to show what economies of scale can do. Castronova chocolate appears to have 65 gram bars at a price of $12. That’s only 5g/$.
Tony’s Chocolonely, a commonly touted ethical chocolate company, sells 180 gram bars for $6. 30g/$. Half the price for triple the chocolate comparatively.
That said, there’s not much to really compare. Castronova seems to be going after a different market with most of the bars being titled as their place of origin and composition, not what taste to expect. A smart move for a business with a smaller footprint.
The few bars I saw mentioning flavours were the lavender dark milk, lemon and lemon salt, and Fleur de sel - an apparently high end French sea salt. Quite different than Tony’s milk honey almond nougat or white raspberry popping candy.
They won’t be replacing our orders from Tony’s, but Castronova has a 12 pack I think we’ll get to see what they are like. Thanks for recommendation.
Sounds like my usage is just different to yours. I can’t remember why but I got accustomed to listening to audio at increased speed around a decade ago and slowly cranked it up to the point that now I can follow certain people’s conversations slightly higher than 2x. Only with voices and cadence I’m familiar with though. Any guests on a show can really throw me off.
The silence trimming aspect is a bit absurd honestly. It makes laughter sound almost all the same and robotic; you have to infer where comedic, dramatic, or thoughtful pauses in the speech are; and if there’s a more rapid fire back and forth in the conversation it can be tricky to follow. Although that last point doesn’t happen with podcasts where all the speakers record separately and it’s edited together to be coherent.
If you listen to a lot of shows, with hundreds of hours of episodes, it’s worth dialing up as much as you can stand. Then again, if I didn’t have two dozen podcasts with decades of backlog, I sure wouldn’t be listening at auctioneer pace.
After reading your comment, I checked my Pocket Casts stats page and it looks like between the skipping, variable speed (1.5-2x), and trimmed silence (mad max), I save nearly 20% of listening time with the majority of that being the silence trimming.
Might be an outlier, but with daily podcast listening, trimming is important enough to keep me on Pocket Casts, even though AntennaPod is attractive given it’s open source nature.
Not sure why people are beating up on @nxn@biglemmowski.win for saying his opinion. Different people value different things.
I think I can answer your question though. Buying a console is a plug and play experience. Building a PC is not. Not everyone has the time, the patience, or the technical experience required to purchase compatible components, assemble the machine, and install the various software.
Anyone that’s ever bought a prepared meal has overpaid in comparison to acquiring the ingredients, prepping them, and cooking the dish. It’s worth the price to do so because I sure as hell don’t want to spend time making a bowl of French onion soup.