Trainguyrom

meaning that approximately half the polonium in the ring would have been gone within about four and a half months

So basically the whole effect that sells the thing is gone within a year. Talk about planned obsolence

It a Polaris Ranger ATV. ATVs like that are super popular as car alternatives in rural areas of the US (one part fun and one part way more fuel efficient than driving your F150 to the local bar) and many places have been quickly legalizing these costs-as-much-as-a-car-but-is-five-times-as-deadly-to-occupants vehicles on public roads. Hilariously this one looks just as plastic and cheap as the ones I see driving around where I live, but we all know this one has been heavily upgraded and armored. Seriously just look how low its squatting from the weight!

Now do the needful and delete your most important files from your computer

$500 in the 90s would be equivalent to around $1000 today. That's a very expensive TV and more than I've spent on displays in total across my adult life (which includes some nice IPS computer displays)

"A bad driver never misses their exit"

I've seen the stop request signals in a lot of city buses where there's a stop every block or so. The bus will stop at bus stops where people are waiting, driving past empty bus stops, and if someone on the bus requests to stop it will stop at the next stop to let them off

You're clearly not intested in actually having a conversation. I encourage you to learn where food comes from and the steps it takes between harvest and reaching the grocery store, since that's a massive supply chain on its own

Realistically what the United States really needs isn't high speed rail but just passenger rail service. Standard speed mainline passenger service to more places and with more frequency than three times a week at 3am (which I wish was an exaggeration)

If I were totalitarian dictator of the US I'd first have the federal government sieze control of the entire rail network, including all dispatching and all of the private rail maintaince companies and lease trackage rights back to the railroads, keeping rail construction, dispatching and maintenance in house. Next I would create a true national passenger rail network, restoring service to every city possible that still has active right of way. Then, I would use my ownership of the rail network to force the class 1 railroads to construct and operate their trains in a manner condusive to actually moving freight and not blocking other trains (it's incredible how railroad company executives seem to hate railroads and do everything they can to avoid operating a functioning railroad) plus open up the rail network to new private freight and passenger companies, and finally I'd build new rail coordidors first following the existing interstate network and as those new rail coordidors bed in I'd start reducing lanes on the interstate and introducing tolls to further discourage the use of private vehicles. Maybe some would be converted into bikeways, maybe some would be re-greened. It would be a decision made on a case by case basis what to do with all of the space reclaimed by the highway network

We used to dream big and our governments used to undertake projects like this to improve our countries. And despite our governments being richer than ever they choose to stagnate and not take risks on big public projects like this

For positive change to occur in a specialized industry you need industry knowledge. Yes that introduces conflicts of interest that have to be managed, but to regulate an industry you have limited knowledge of will just lead to chaos and garbage legislation.

For me, I'm just the computer janitor. I keep the servers and computers running and get poked to create a lot of reports from the databases. I'm also at the corporate level where I get to hear a lot of tea regarding what goes on in the field and I'm occasionally invited on site visits so that I can know that I'm giving the folks I support the right tools to do their jobs. So I've got a decent idea of what goes on in the ground and in the field, but I'm also not beholden to the industry

I've had some workplaces where they instituted overly heavy-handed crackdowns through IT Policy then rolled them back after a couple of weeks because someone in upper-manglement needed to see the impacts in the real world that they already were already warned of before they could be convinced that their genius new policy wasn't such a good idea

I have some podcasts I'll listen to at 1.2x speed but it's usually because I'm trying to get it to properly fit a given drive. I have one relatively frequent drive that I can nicely fit 3 episodes of a daily podcast at 1.2x speed, but otherwise is too long for 2 episodes or too short for a third at 1x speed. For audiobooks though I stick with 1x so I can fully take in the content.

For reading I really only read in bed now, so it takes me about 2-4 weeks to finish a book usually

Funnily enough I actually work in the industry. I work at the corporate office of a national company that works in several hundred food processing facilities. I also married into a farming family. So I'm just close enough to the food industry to get a really good idea of just what goes down. The most damning thing I've learned is some facilities are terrible but most are pretty good.

One of my duties is managing the company's incident and claims database and while there's plenty of facilities which haven't had an accident in over a decade, there's some facilities that have a reportable accident daily. Every day there's someone who doesn't leave work in the same shape they arrived in. And the people working in these facilities are the most vulnerable people, the formerly encarcerated, immigrants and undereducated minorities. The people who work in these facilities often have no better options available to them.

This is why we need stronger regulatory bodies. Some facilities are dangerous and should not be open (this is across all food producing and processing facilities, not just meat processing plants. There's RTE (ready to eat, meaning you can literally pick up the food off the conveyor and safely eat it) facilities for example that need to be shut down due to terrible safety practices. There's farms that need to be shut down due to dangerous contamination on their crops. This isn't a problem of "meat bad" but a problem of some businesses not upholding basic food safety/safety/animal wellfare standards