(looks over comments pointing out shortsighted stupidity of article) ...never mind, I see my work is done.

Where I live (Kamloops, BC, Canada) the all-time high temperature record for a long time was 42C, set in July 1941. Most of southern B.C. set records that month. No air conditioning. Ugh! We demolished that record when it hit 47C in June 2021. I've never been so hot in my life...

The hottest we've been so far this summer was 36C. I expect to hit the Big Four Oh at least once, but the long-term forecast isn't promising.

...laura

If we would quit shaming people for practicing how to make babies and start offering flexible work places that allow parent(s) to work and be close by for emotional childcare then I bet "society" will be less prone to collapse.

"Weather alerts, flood, tornado, etc. should be able to wake people up."

They're already *able* to wake people up. What do you do about people not wanting to be woken up who silence their phones? Do you pass legislation making it illegal for phones to be able to silence certain alerts? Okay, some people will put their phones somewhere other than their bedside so they can't be woken up. Do you make that illegal, or at some point do you just say "Okay, you know what, this is on you"?

Okay, all those alerts saved one life.

And all those alerts convinced a bunch of people to silence their alerts, and resulted in lives lost.

Have you bothered to compare the two numbers to see whether the alerts are, in fact, justified? Or do you always only look at a benefit and ignore any associated costs?

Mazda's legacy button layouts plus the dial are really great. I have a 3rd Gen Mazda3 and it's nearly perfect. There is a touch screen but it's never used. The dial turns and also pushes for select, and there are some other buttons around it for getting back out of menus and a home button, and some shortcuts for various things. All within comfortable reach just between the gear selector and parking brake (real mechanical parking brake handle!) without having to raise your arm and glance away from the road to make sure you're finding a button. It's all done by feel.

On the steering wheel is volume, track skip (which works in Spotify for it's normal 15 second skip function forward or backward to skip through commercials) and cruise control. Also a phone answer and hang up button.

About the only complaint I have is the A/C fan speed is two buttons rather than a knob, but at least the temp adjust is a big fat knob. They gave up room for a fan knob in exchange for dual temperature knobs for passenger and driver.

The Gen 4 Mazdas are similar, with better Android Auto / Car Play integration and a nicer screen, and are still fairly new, a lot of low mileage cars still available through CarMax, etc.

If they are going to rely on voice commands I'm done. I don't talk to machines. If it's still usable via buttons, fine.

My wife has a Tesla and the UI experience is awful. Absolutely awful. The only good thing about it is the drivetrain. It's like owning a supercar in terms of acceleration. Other than that, I would consider Teslas to be actively driver-hostile. I avoid driving it as much as possible. I hope they will eventually be considered a quirky novelty relegated to the dustbin of history, while more traditional button interfaces make a comeback.

First of all, the amount of money that gets back to the creator is vanishingly small compared to what's kept by the cartel. While you think you're supporting the creators when you pay your license, you're really just supporting a vast army of middlemen leaching the money out. I'll say that to the apologists in this thread.

Secondly, they'll hit you up for a license even if you're just playing over the air radio. A radio station that's already paid a license and is playing advertising to pay for it. They will blatantly double dip. This happened to me when I owned a cafe / art gallery a long time ago.

I'm all for supporting the aritsts, but the system as it exists is seriously broken.

I started using vim over 3 decades ago. I am still using vim today, mostly because I can't figure out how to quit.

A hybrid is the answer for many people. They work well. Electric continues to improve but is still too much of a niche product.

I recently bought a new car. If I could lay my hands on something like a RAV4 Hybrid I'd be all over it. Good luck. I bought a VW Taos instead.

...laura

I'll add my voice to the chorus of "who cares about pocket, firefox works great" and it's the best platform to load up on anti-tracking, anti-adware, anti-spyware plugins and go surfing.

If firefox as a product degrades enough, someone most likely will come up with a viable replacement. The fact that there hasn't been a huge effort put into one shows that Firefox is still a very viable platform. You can change / disable just about anything that bothers you, and it has robust extension support. Those are the two most important things. Performance is just fine. I'm not exactly looking for top speed when running AdBlockPlus, Ublock, Social Fixer for Facebook, etc. Those are going to slow things down a bit and that's just fine. I mean c'mon, my first experience getting online was with a 300 baud modem, I can't really complain. I have synchronous gigabit fiber at home now, which is astonishing. A little rendering lag from FF is not going to bother me.

The Mazda3 is available as a 6 speed manual if you are still looking for a fun manual car in general.

Funny thing though, now manuals are typically only available with premium trim levels aimed at enthusiasts, whereas before the cheapest version of a car was the version with the manual transmission.

Would a plugin that blocks tracking pixels fix the problem? I use firefox for android with Ublock Origin installed when I browse on the phone. I do use the facebook app when I access it on the phone, as they have made the mobile browser experience fairly terrible in comparison (on purpose.)

Thanks I'll check that out.

Uh, no, not even close. CS6 master suite (with everything you get now) was $7,988 circa 2007. Photoshop alone was $700. Illustrator similar when it was a standalone product.

Now, if you have a CS subscription long enough, year after year, yes you'll pay that much eventually. But not for one year's subscription cost, even under the new price. But unlike the old days, you're getting all the updates continually without paying $150 - $200 for upgrading one standalone piece of software like PS.

I would say that for people who use a lot of the apps and on a continual basis year after year and want the latest updates, they are probably saving money overall and spreading out the cost evenly. (i.e. a design agency.) But for us little guys buying it personally as an independent artist, people who used to skip four or five versions before upgrading (that would be me) or only need a few pieces of software and not the whole suite, yea it's a raw deal over time.

When Adobe came up with the perpetual license, I'm sure they put in a lot of thought to the pricing model to make sure they overall weren't going to lose money and that they would make more money and make it more consistently in the long run. But it creates new winners and losers in their customer base in terms of what they are paying and depending on their needs. They definitely lost a lot of good will from regular starving artists who don't need another monthly bill, but can afford to occasionally buy something that they'll use for the next five years without dropping another dime. Paying $800 up front for 5 years of use rather than $800 every year is a big difference, even if you get access to everything else. Frankly, most of the new features year to year are just fluff and cosmetics, the only truly groundbreaking new feature has been gen AI.

As an existing subscriber, I will likely go with the 'reduced AI' option because I don't really use AI except for light object removal with generative fill now and then.

I could actually live with the photographer plan but I actually use Illustrator a fair amount, and Acrobat to assemble, edit and otherwise convert and modify PDFs. I don't use much of anything else anymore.

I'd have to check to see if there's an alternative for Illustrator that will actually work for me. (usually the 'alternatives' are missing some key functionality...like CMYK support...or that one amazing vector graphics tool I desperately need that does not exist outside of illustrator.) Illustrator is a fairly terrible piece of software overall, but there is a lot of power buried inside of it if you need to do something esoteric.

Adobe CC is one of the very few 'subscriptions' I'll tolerate, simply because I've been a PS user since 1995 and I know it inside, out, backwards and forwards, and I like Lightroom for processing images. I even give classes on it at photography workshops.

Looking at it now though, the full suite price is starting to not be worth it at all given how little I use. They need a pick-your-own plan, but of course it's more money if they force everyone into the big one if you need to go outside PS and LR.