Stage 3 smog alerts were year-round when I was a kid in the 1980s.

And I remember what it was like in the '50s, when they banned home incinerators because they were believed to be what was causing smog. It didn't work, but they stayed banned, which was a Good Idea. Things like catalytic converters probably helped, but those expensive "boutique blends" of gas were most likely the key to cleaning up the air.

Part of the reason that CA's gas prices are so high is the various additives that are required there to control air pollution and the other refining requirements that make creating gasolene that can be sold there more expensive. And, for the most part, Californians (or at least the older ones) are OK with that because they remember how bad things used to be. I don't know where you live or what the air quality is like there, but if you had a choice, would you pick higher gas prices or third-stage smog alerts every summer?

Thank you! I have a whole bunch of background images for my desktop that change in random order and I just added this to them.

You are right, I didn't know or didn't remember those.

Da Fuk? First of all, thats not what Allbirds was. It designed. marketed and sold shoes that were very different in material and shape than normal shoes, so they were not just a logistics company, but had some real manufacturing know how aboard as well. But thats neither here nor there. A shoe factory would at least has a building space with power and water supplied. which is ironically the one thing allbirds doesn't have.

Because a shoe company is shifting to A freaking I. That's messed up. A shoe company should not have any similarity to an AI company. Its like a Pizza company shifting to Cutting tool manufacturing.

Because at the time you never had to do that for any other drive type. Floppies, cds, and even hard drives were able to be removed without damage.

My company sold appliances that used zipdrives as part of the update process. Trust me it was significantly higher than 0.5% of drives. It would eventually happen to any drive that was used on a regular basis. Or one that sat in a box unused long enough, Or one that was used on a semiregular basis. That is to say, it happened to any drive, regardless of how it was treated. We're just lucky that we shipped these with hardrives that were surprisingly much much less reliable. So people were too busy complaining about the hard drive failures to complain about the zip drive issues. But if you asked, they'd be like oh yeah the zip drive failed too.

Eh, no it does not. I bought a lifetime subscription to Musicmatch Jukebox. Where the hell is that now, Yahoo? I want a version that works on windows 11, dang it.

Did you ever use it side by side on a computer that also had Netscape or Ie on it? It was worth paying for one, it was painfully slow.

Okkkay..Well now you have. Adjust your memory correctly. Browsers weren't free initially. Yes, people paid for them. That was the whole juice behind the Netscape IPO. It was as you may well know, Microsoft who started giving away the inferior, but free internet explorer which caused Netscape to do so and basically lose their main revenue stream.

Part of the problem with Jaz drives was that the platters were glass, which is why head crashes did so much damage. Not only that, if you dropped one and it landed wrong, the whole platter would shatter into tiny pieces taking all of that data with them.

Right. You are applying legalese word precision assumptions to throwaway online comments. I don't think that's going to work well.

No, the one that answered:

"You know what he means, ahole. If this were truly a problem the jet fuel would be rationed and private aircraft would be at the bottom of the priority list"

The entire point of rationing would be to REMOVE the pure market forces that would deal out the limited commodity to those with the largest wallets and replace it with a scheme that benefits the most people, instead of the most money.

If you actually knew better, you'd have posted it, not just made a vague assertion.