Gemini is one of if not the top model, but I intentionally avoid using it as the other models are within a few percent as good as it, and I'm not at all eager to feed the google machine this time around. Now that google search is irrelevant I have no incentive to "help" google along. Goodbye and good riddance.

No, you can't.

It is nearly impossible to do the things you said unless you don't want to have a job, or eat, or participate in society in any way. I buy food at the farmer's market (when I can, which is to say, in the summer), I buy shampoo bars and get refills of various things in my resealable (plastic) containers. But my medication comes in a plastic pill bottle. I'm a programmer, so my computer has a certain amount of plastic in it. Even my bikes have a certain amount of plastic in them that I have absolutely no control over (or if not plastic, carbon fibre). (I have bikes because I haven't owned a car for 15 years now.)

There is no way out. The problem isn't us. We've been given no choice in so many of these matters. Particularly in North America, where train coverage is abysmal and the cities are built for cars. We KNOW who the 100 biggest polluters in the world are. We KNOW that carbon footprint is a scam concocted by the oil and gas industry to shift the blame from corporations to consumers, so people like you will do their propaganda for them. I want to keep living, so I buy things made out of plastic because I'm simply not offered a single other choice. I'll wager that my 'carbon footprint' is in the bottom quartile, and it doesn't matter, I still have to buy this shit and prop up the 'demand'.

Thanks for being the token doomer in the comments section, somebody had to do it.

There are no good android tablets. As an android user I have an iPad for tablet-y tasks, it doesn't get used much, but the iPad is the superior tablet for the average or power user android user. If there was a better option out there, I'd use it.
 
The fact that the iPad finally uses the USB-C standard has been really helpful, when my wife's iphone finally dropped the "lightning" connector we've been able to drop the number of charging cables in the house/car to 1, and drastically simplifies travel logistics.

The number of times I've needed a waterproof phone is zero and I spend a fair amount of time on boats

the security guard at the door wears a stab proof vest and is 6'5" tall. this is not like your neighborhood grocery store, this is downtown literally across the street from a major train station

This safeway is directly across the street from the main "downtown" caltrain station and also two muni rail lines (n judah and ... 4th st? 3rd st?) it's extremely high traffic and they regularly taze resisting shoplifters ,like, a couple times a day. It's both high revenue (mission bay is 14,000 pop/sq mile) and high "loss"/shoplifting. It doesn't surprise me at all that they've had to resort to this. Also "unhoused" encampments pop up along the southern side of the caltrain station on the regular as well as nearby overpasses which.... there's a lot of correlation between that and shoplifting. This is not a bright sunny suburban grocery store, it is part of the ground floor of a huge urban complex building with 600 condos on the 4th-16th floors a couple blocks from Uber and OpenAI headquarters, major genetech offices etc. Context matters.

Lots of people want full-sized pickups, unfortunately. The F150 has been one of the top selling vehicles in north america for literal decades, and while it used to be smaller, it's been pretty big for at least 10 years.

But the Lightning is SUPER expensive and a lot of the folks buying full-sized trucks are doing it for the optics. They want to appear tough and rugged, and they can't do that without a loud engine, I guess?

The depreciation on EVs is also astronomical. Pay $100k for a Lightning and it'll be worth $60k next year. There's no point in buying a brand new EV right now.

I agree that people SHOULD want smaller trucks, or—get this—CARS, but the big car companies love their margins. Ford's eliminated every passenger car in their lineup except for the Mustang (even the Mustang Mach-e is classified as an SUV for some reason).

It wasn't that subtle or oblique, tbh.

More to the point, red states get more transfers than blue states. It's literally republicans that are bearing the brunt of SNAP being stopped and other government services being shut down.

Anybody could vibe code an online video game store backed by s3 in about 20 minutes, where is the monopoly? Before steam existed people distributed games on floppies and CD/DVD. Nobody is stopping you from selling your video games mail order, or on your own squarespace store or whatever. There's zero economic moat here. I routinely pay a premium to buy my games on steam because I don't trust the developer to keep track of my account or even keep their store up in 90 days.

Scamming and embezzling from rich donors makes it feel even better.

CanCon laws gave us a lot of extremely popular Canadian music and television. The Tragically Hip, Crash Test Dummies, Bryan Adams, Alanis Morisette, the list is actually quite long. Whether or not you enjoy the bands (or television shows or movies), they ended up being an excellent return on investment. Several artists, like the Hip, are considered quintessentially Canadian.

That's just the sort of thing you have to do when one of your neighbours is a huge cultural influence. We should be doing this, and we should've done it a long time ago. Like, I think you could make the case that there should be CanCon requirements for platforms like TikTok.

I have a personal machine and my work machine hooked up to a KVM and a small audio mixer. The mixer is hooked up to my speakers, but I also need a place to plug in my headphones so I can do remote meetings. Headphones are USB, so they can really only plug into one thing at a time, because the mixer is for pure audio input/output only, and they don't have a mic jack.

Like, all this stuff is fixable with money, but these little components look nice and would probably make my life easier. I have a Loupedeck Mini that I configured with keybindings for the various applications that I use (including Visual Studio; I never need to look up the obscure key combinations for various useful things that I've discovered over time), and this seems very much like that, but just for audio.

That said, I'd rather wait for the product to come out and pay full price, even though it looks expensive. I'd rather pay for a not-vaporware unit that's had some manufacturing iteration time than potentially pay for something that I never get, or that has generation 1 problems.

Yes! Yes, there are places where government works. Indeed, there are times in history where our (North American) governments worked!

Honestly, that's basically what DOGE found—the Federal government in America works surprisingly efficiently. Scientific research, conservation, foreign aid—all of it was extremely well run and delivered what they were supposed to. Even if you look at SNAP: for every 1 person a food bank feeds, SNAP feeds *9*.

There are so many good, efficient systems, and those are the ones being squeezed, while the big, bloated, ineffective systems are propped up by big corporations. That's things like the Military and the US Health System. Insurance companies are an insane drag on the whole system. Once you get into a hospital, the care is good, the problem is how much insurance companies are skimming off the top. I don't think we even need to talk about the grift in the military-industrial complex.

Law enforcement is one of those things that's PARTICULARLY lazy in North America, but in the USA in particular. Conservatives love a hard-on-crime platform, and Liberals love a strong union, that's how we got here.