OK, replacing utterly-ass touchscreens with buttons. Good move.

Now, let's think about why. Used to be I could drive along and think "huh, I'm a little warm, let me turn up that fan a tick or two" and WITHOUT LOOKING reach over and easily find the knob, clicking it rightwards once or twice* I'm feeling more refreshed.

Now with your new "buttons" can I do that?
Not really. At least from the image, I see what, 24 nearly identical buttons on the steering wheel, another 9? identical buttons on where I'd expect the a/c controls to be.
In the olden times, there was a REASON the radio knobs FELT DIFFERENT than the climate control knobs, which felt different than (in even older cars) the heat/cool sliders. All of that could be done without looking or in the dark (not everything on your dashboard glowed back then, which I also sort of don't like today).

In short, good progress, keep going. (Faster)

*curiously as I wrote this I realized...it's AFAIK always 'clockwise = increase'. There's probably a long interesting YT video deepdive on that

I hope they're successful with this. Great move.

Is "hot desking" just a sort of variation on the open office theme that (afaik) basically everyone HATED?

I recognize that my case is not necessarily universal, but I'm genuinely curious if anyone has this at their workplace and likes it, or at least finds it useful.

Our corporate HQ in EU did the whole open office thing just before covid and frankly people were pretty angry. No personal desks (in reality, people self-organized informally where they could expect to sit) and if you were going to have an extended phone call you were supposed to use one of the "privacy cubicles" - essentially glassed-in phone booths - or meeting rooms.
Not just that, but essentially no partitions so if you ended up sitting opposite a coworker, you're about 1.5m apart all day.

For something "all about collaboration!" frankly it felt pretty massively dehumanizing.
Does this work for anyone?

I wish I could still upvote you.

What if they find Charlie Kirk persuasive? What if they like the Art of the Deal?

Does that change your opinion?

Katherine Maher - the head of NPR.
Shall we recall her Ted talk?
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/...
"Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground & getting things done"
Think about that statement.

It doesn't hurt when an ideologically captured judiciary refuses to punish people they agree with politically. Suddenly a spiteful little act is not only normalized, but protected - as long as it's directed the right way.

https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top...

$20k in damage GOVERNMENT employee - no charges at all.
https://www.fox9.com/news/tesl...

Funny that my above comment about thinking that it's envy not actual poverty was downvoted to troll.

They should have thought that whole "we will become the propaganda arm of the left" through more carefully?

Katherine Maher - the head of NPR - is an example of the privileged leftist elite.

Shall we recall her Ted talk?
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/...
âoeOur reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground & getting things done.â

Think about that statement.

Or from her own wiki bio:
"In April 2024, Uri Berliner, NPR senior business editor, published an essay in The Free Press[33] critiquing, among other things, alleged liberal bias at NPR both in management and content, leading to an erosion of trust with the public and with internal staff. Following Berliner's critique, conservative journalists and activists, including Christopher Rufo, criticized Maher for tweets she had made supporting progressive policies and about Donald Trump in 2018,[33] as well as comments Maher made about the First Amendment as "the number one challenge" in the fight against disinformation in a 2021 interview.[34] Berliner was suspended without pay for five days, ostensibly for failing to secure approval for "outside work".[35] On April 17, he resigned after 25 years at NPR and criticized Maher's appointment as CEO. In response to the criticisms, Maher defended NPR's record, stating that her comments regarding the First Amendment had been misrepresented and that she has a "robust belief in the First Amendment".[36]"

Or the trans'ing of Sesame Street? https://www.toughpigs.com/sesa...

I know a lot of leftist "progressives" are angry. They thought they'd won the fight. The first Trump was neutralized by (what turned out to be entirely nothingburger Russiagate). Then they had a dessicated marionette that happily auto-penned whatever came along.

You know what? HALF the country disagrees with you. (Given the last election, thanks to your overreach, more than half, but I'll concede it's basically even-up)

In a SANE society we could talk about things and find compromise. But "the resistance" doesn't want compromise, it never has.
So finally, you got Trump, a conservative (he's still basically a NY liberal, but opportunistically put on an elephant suit) willing to actually fight over this shit rather than allow the left's agenda to progress unchallenged. I know it's uncomfortable.

"no local weather alerts"

Right, because there's literally no other radio, tv, internet, or other source of information where, precisely again?

Poverty by itself doesn't make you sad.
That's abundantly true. There are plenty of people that are poor and happy.

ENVY is what makes you sad.
Your neighbor having more wealth than you think they deserve, makes you angry.
We also have reasonably abundant historical examples of people of wealth, power, even kings driven to irrational acts over their envy about someone with more than they have.

So no, I don't think the money itself (or lack) makes a person unhappy, it's about their judgement of the people around them & their worth that fuels unhappiness, justified or not.

"Kirsch says to stop treating reading as civic medicine. "It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice,""
Well, I guess I'd start with telling him to stop trying to "trick" people - even kids - into doing what he wants?

It's a routine fault of progressives AND evangelical conservatives: this inherent sense of moral certainty, and the instinctive justification that "pretty much anything goes because I'm doing it to HELP you".

Reading (or more specifically, the desire to read, as there are tons of people with impairments that get in the way of literally reading a book) I'd say is symptomatic of intelligence. So what we really want are people who value intelligence, who value reason. Reading will more or less automatically follow.

I'll be honest, I don't think 'reading' alone is inherently magical. Reading the sports page, or some fantasy smut about milking male minotaurs - they may both be enjoyable, but neither is going to make someone the kind of constructive, reasoning citizen we NEED in our Republic.
Well, that any democracy needs, not just ours.

Of course, then we get back to the 'certainty'. Reasoning adults need to be able to hold in their heads a fundamental RESPECT for the other person's ideas. Even if they don't agree.

So here's the funny bit for me. Kirsch suggests that we trick kids into thinking reading is scandalous, a vice. Is that really what he wants? What if they read actually-scandalous texts (according to Kirsch's orthodoxy) like something by Charlie Kirk? The Art of the Deal? Would he be as intrinsically delighted with "people reading" then?

That makes apparently 1 person in earth that believes the BBC is "too slanted to the right" lol .
Then again, as we've seen over the past 5 years, to the new rage-addled Left Marx himself would have come off as far too right wing.

Or, crazy idea I know, maybe wealthy people aren't universally - or even mostly - stuck up self obsessed narcissists, and that's just your own seething envy and sense of self justification?

If I had to choose between Walmart vs a store that literally filters out the poorest at the door, I know where I'd rather work or shop.

I'd put it another way: the "you have to pay to even GET IN THE DOOR" keeps out the rifraff.

"...describes the stores as spaces of "cooperation, courtesy, and grown-ups mostly acting like grown-ups." Shoppers follow unwritten rules: move along, don't block the way, step aside to check your phone. Checkout lines form orderly queues. ..."

Note the entire article is about how civilized an experience it is, and how "weird" that is; that Atlantic tries to paint it as "cult like" shows how utterly fucked up our Intelligentsia has become.

I'm sorry that Sad Oregonian Cunt is bad at the google. I understand. It's hard to fight deep-seated quasi-religious beliefs.

I apologize that my use of the word 'healthier' confused you. I know that enraged leftists routinely forget concepts like vernacular and idiom, retreating to semantic hairsplitting but I'm assuming here in good faith that you're LEGITIMATELY confused by my broadly using the term 'health' to include 'reproductive success'. I am, of course, talking more precisely about eggshell thinning and impact on bird reproductive health, which was flogged around by Silent Spring, the just-born EPA, and used as a reason for the global ban on DDT despite the ruling of a judge to the contrary.

Here's a much-footnoted paper that maybe helps you understand what you're trying to talk about.
https://nationalcenter.org/ncp...

To your specific accusation "This is a lie. It is not supported by your link or any literature." Well, it's literally what happened, something you could find if you bothered to, y'know, check something other than your back-library of Mother Jones magazines.

When carefully reviewed, Dr. Bitmanâ(TM)s study revealed that the quail in the study were fed a diet with a calcium content of only 0.56 percent (a normal quail diet consists of 2.7 percent calcium). Calcium deficiency is a known cause of thin eggshells.21-23 After much criticism, Bitman repeated the test, this time with sufficient calcium levels. The birds produced eggs without thinned shells.24
After many years of carefully controlled feeding experiments, Dr. M. L. Scott and associates of the Department of Poultry Science at Cornell University âoefound no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where âcatastrophicâ(TM) decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed.â23 In fact, thinning eggshells can have many causes, including season of the year, nutrition (in particular insufficient calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D, and manganese), temperature rise, type of soil, and breeding conditions (e.g., sunlight and crowding).25

And in case that's still too hard for stupid fucks to follow, let me help you:
21 Greely F. Effects of Calcium Deficiency. J Wildlife Management. 1960; 70:149-153.
22 Romanoff AL, Romanoff AJ. The Avian Egg. New York: Wiley & Sons; 1949:154.
23 Scott ML, Zimmermann JR, Marinsky S, Mullenhoff PA. Effects of PCBs, DDT, and Mercury Compounds Upon Egg Production, Hatchability and Shell Quality in Chickens and Japanese Quail. Poultry Science. 1975; 54:350-368.
24 Cecil HC, Bitman J, Harris SJ. No Effects on Eggshells, If Adequate Calcium is in DDT Diet. Poultry Science. 1971; 50:656-659.
25 The Avian Egg:152-156, 266.

My actual point, against which a very narrow facet made you so incensed, was that if malaria is an issue, we should go back to using DDT, which was banned based on lies. The fact is that Carson was a deep, deep liar, misrepresenting and mispresenting facts throughout her moronic screed. (Since you love sources and details, here's a nearly page-by-page refutation (up to around p125) of the tidal wave of bullshit in Silent Spring: https://21sci-tech.com/article...)

So, please: go fuck yourself and have a great New Year while you're at it!

Somehow this is still Trump's fault.

Slashdot: +1, insightful, obviously.