MystikIncarnate

If I can quote someone here...

Ahem

YOUR GOD IS DEAD AND NO ONE CARES IF THERE IS A HELL I'LL SEE YOU THERE

It is and you can buy them, but you pay a significant premium for them.

IIRC Cavendish is supposed to be more resilient to the fungi than Gros Michael is, but it's not immune. The fungi mostly exists underground so it's difficult, if not impossible to remove from the land once it's "infected".... And it takes decades to clear naturally once the trees are removed.

The good thing here is that we already have Gros Michael and AFAIK, Cavendish seeds in the global seed vault, so we're not at risk of losing the ability to bring the trees back at some point in the future. We still haven't lost them, as you mentioned, there's still small batches being grown.

IMO, it's all a bit sad, since apparently Gros Michael is so much tastier, and there's a shrinking number of people alive who are old enough to remember what they tasted like at all.... So without investing in buying some from one of the small batch plantations still growing them, very soon, all but those that specifically went out of their way to try them, will have no idea what they taste like.

I'm not old enough to remember what they taste like (if they even existed as an option in the grocery when I was born at all, which I'm not sure about). I'll probably never know.

... Which is probably why I had no idea they exist.

My dad literally went to the city and argued against them raising the book value of his home, which would cause him to have to pay more in property tax.

He won too.

That loon.

We switched to Cavendish because all the gros Michael trees were dying from the fungi.

Clearly you're unqualified, you know about stuff, they're looking for someone with experience in anything and knowledge of something. Your knowledge of stuff isn't needed here.

With Tesla burning right now (sometimes literally), I'm concerned for the future of EVs.

There are other EV-only makers, most notably in my mind, rivian, but not many others come to mind.

Most other manufacturers have either stopped making EVs entirely, or switched to hybrid, or hybrid adjacent technologies. Honda is a good example of this backpedaling. They dipped their collective toes into EVs with proper hybrid vehicles during the pre-pandemic years. Between 2015 and 2020 (ish) they had a PHEV, the clarity. It was discontinued in 2020. I forget if the last model year was 2019 or 2020. Either way, I still kind of want one.... Regardless, they took everything they learned and put it into their fancy new e-CVT, which essentially, at most speeds, turns the gasoline motor of the vehicle into a generator, powering an electric motor that drives the wheels.

Don't get me wrong, that's still more efficient than burning the Jurassic forests to drive motion, but it's not as efficient as running the drive motor from batteries that were charged from green sources.

Most other manufacturers have done something similar in abandoning BEVs for HEVs or whatever Honda is doing. There's a few stand out exceptions, like the F150 lightening. Good on you Ford... But the list is pretty short, especially compared to the fuel based alternatives.

It's a good time for other companies to pick up the ball that Tesla dropped here, and I'm hoping they do. .... I mean, they won't because they're too busy buying yachts with all that fossil fuel bribe money they get, but I can dream.

I know a lot of people who use and like brother printers. Years ago the go to was HP, then it was Xerox for a while when they had decent small format printers, but they seem to have gone back to their roots of large multi function printers for the most part and priced themselves out of most markets. They're still good, but you pay for the name.

Toshiba's printing division was absorbed by Xerox, no help there. Dell..... Has printers? I guess?

Brother is kind of the stand out. Everything else you can buy as a consumer is either HP, which went completely nuts on the whole "genuine" printer ink/toner, which is why a lot of people ran away screaming. The quality of the printers declined as they tried to force people into, what is basically printer ink as a service. Stupid.

But yeah. Bother is a decent mix of functional, affordable, and being low on the bullshit of using a printer. .... That is, as long as the article isn't a sign of things to come....

I'm hoping that by the time I need a replacement for what I have right now, there will be something open source.... Cries for an open alternative to the current printer market have been ongoing pretty much anytime printers are mentioned. I expect someone is, or will be developing something to the effect of an open source hardware printer.

To be fair, this is also me when I look at a network setup years later. (I do IT with a specialty in networks)

It's a bold assumption.

I work almost entirely on things that use/need the Internet, and I know enough about how it all works that..... The Internet existing in the future, is not guaranteed. At all.

Quick story, I bought a bubble jet printer for college in the mid 2000s, with all the fixings.

I set it up and got it working and promptly never used it. Almost all of my courses allowed either digital submissions or provided the printouts you actually needed, like course work that you would fill out. So I basically wasted my money, especially considering I could always use the large format printers at the school for like 5 cents per page.

Anyways. I did a few test prints and everything was fine and I got to work in college. Almost every time I needed the printer in order to actually print something, I more or less had to go and buy new ink. At first I was like "I guess I printed more than I thought?" But it kept happening. I would print maybe twice a year. Eventually I stopped using it as a printer (it was a multifunction, so I kept it as a scanner), and just used the printers at school. It was cheaper, considering the fact that printer ink is worth more by volume than basically any other substance; and while I was only buying a small amount, maybe $20 or so (adjusted for inflation, this is probably like $50 today) each time, it was a lot for a broke college student.

After college, I picked up a random laser printer, the printer cost more up front (I got another multifunction, but this time with a network port because I'm a nerd). I basically never bought any toner for it, given how little I had to print year over year, and it always was ready to go. I had it for years until a new windows version (maybe the OG Windows 10? Maybe Windows 8/8.1) made the drivers stop working and the manufacturer wouldn't make drivers for that model that worked with the new requirements from Windows.... I did a little print server for a bit to give it some more longevity, but ultimately it had to go to the IT storage in the sky.

CONSUME