I saw a mediocre movie about Walt Disney once (not authorized by the Disney company or I think even the family). It was fairly low budget and one of their selling points was having the star of Napoleon Dynamite in a minor role. Anyway, at one point in the movie a character answers a call on one of those really old crank phones where the user lifts the earpiece but the microphone stays on the wall. The caller is asking for someone else, so the character puts her hand over the phone to shout for the intended recipient in the busy building, except the actress put her hand over the earpiece in her hand instead of the microphone on the wall. I’m sure she’d never used that type of phone before, but I chalked it up to the inexperience of the production team that no one caught that goof.

Does she have some public-facing social account we should credit when we steal it?

I haven’t spent extensive time in Europe but I’ve seen that setup three times in Czechia, Austria, and France, which made me think it has some level of commonality

The problem is the delivery companies are abusing the definition of “tip” and how they pay their drivers. I used to drive deliveries for DoorDash and they typically only pay $1.50-2.50 per delivery, despite charging $6-8 for a delivery fee, on top of prices typically being 30% higher than the menu in the restaurant. As a driver, the rule of thumb is typically that you shouldn’t take a job paying less than $1/mile. So the rest of the money for the driver comes from the “tip”. A tip is supposed to be a bonus reward for good service, but the reality of the situation on these delivery services is that it’s just the rest of the delivery fee to the driver. The delivery companies know if they list it as an actual delivery fee they’ll lose customers because some customers will feel like the fees become too excessive. So instead they exploit inexperienced drivers into taking orders thinking they’ll get a tip later, but often end up with nothing. And customers who think the tip is actually a tip according to the original definition and voluntary often end up with bad service because experienced drivers will pass on the deliveries, meaning they sit and sit, with food getting cold while the delivery service eventually starts offering to increase the pay in 25¢ increments after a certain number of rejections. Sometimes orders will sit for a couple hours before someone will finally take the order. This is still bad for the drivers, because the customers will often leave them a bad review, blaming the driver for the order taking so long to arrive. The driver doesn’t know what part is “tip” until the delivery is complete.

The reviews are another bad system. Historically people think of a 5-star rating system goes from 1 star being terrible, two being below average, three being average, four being above average, and five being excellent. However, rating systems often rank anything below five stars as bad. So people will leave a four star review thinking that’s good but as far as the company is concerned is bad. IIRC DoorDash drops any driver with a rating below 4.7. And we see this problem a lot of places online: product reviews on shops, online business reviews, even hotels where 3 stars was traditionally decent now see that as bad.

This seems more common in Europe, where the toilet is in its own room down the hall. What I don’t like about that is often that means people walking around the house with unwashed hands as they make their way to a sink. In the US you will find something like that most often where the master/owner’s/primary bathroom has a water closet with the toilet in its own little room in the bathroom. That can be handy for couples and feels like it contains the toilet germs more.

They just start the fight that way, but if they’re losing then they’ll switch to the right hand

I didn’t know King was a Microsoft subsidiary. Kinda weird for Microsoft to own Candy Crush

Funny enough N.E.R.D. also has a song called “Happy” but it’s definitely a different vibe than his more famous song of the same name. This one’s happy because an ex-lover is finally out of the singer’s life and their life is now so much better for it.

They already have authorized resellers, who they link to on their website. This problem would only come from unauthorized resellers, who would not qualify for warranty service. It might not help software support requests, but I don’t know how much support they offer for software since I don’t think they’re supplied with any. Anything hardware they should be asking for a receipt from an authorized reseller, and if the customer can’t provide it then it’s not covered by the warranty. And even if the customer can provide a receipt from an authorized reseller in their name, if it comes in for repair and has the wrong RAM then it’s not a warranty repair anyway (although I’m guessing for something this inexpensive they don’t repair individual units, they probably just send a replacement, so the counterfeit parts might not get noticed).

Dude’s never even heard of leg day

Didn’t know about that, although it makes sense. That does complicate things!

That’s a good point, there are still a lot of those information/alert radios around and they’re basically all a low powered AM station. That could be important for people driving by and not having that option reduces safety. I have a hard time believing that AM receivers are that expensive for cars that it’s really worth the trade-off. It’s probably not something that gets used often, but when it’s needed you want people to have it.

I don’t remember for certain and I’m not taking the time to look it up, but I think there are some legal restrictions as well? I’m guessing that is included in your Impetus paragraphs, since it would require congressional direction to change things.

The Treasury or whoever has actually redesigned the bills quite a bit in my lifetime and they’re more colorful than they used to be, but I think they’ve done what they can while sticking within legal parameters. Given how much some people refer to other nations’ currencies as “Monopoly Money” despite some obvious benefits I’m not holding my breath for significant changes for a while yet.

I’m glad we’re finally getting rid of the penny at least. I used to be a proponent of the $1 coin, but having spent some time in Canada and Europe I actually find $/€/£ coins annoying and heavy in actual practice.

Drives us crazy when we go visit my wife’s family in France

Do you not have screens on your windows?

It has also previously told us that it uses sophisticated AI systems to detect and combat fraud. So why did its AI not notice that the image on our listing was one of the world’s most famous buildings and appears in thousands of photos across the web?

The “sophisticated AI” failed at its job? I’m shocked. Shocked! Well, not that shocked.

Weird, it doesn’t show if I click the image and maximize it

I was thinking more about things that are written for Linux and not necessarily ported to macOS. When I’ve tried things in an ARM VM there seems to be a lot less software compiled for ARM.

I’d be interested in buying one as a headless server, but a lot of the FLOSS software I’d like to run seem to prefer x86 processors.