jmp242

I don't know how I feel about this. I think to some extent, it's again trying to do the wrong thing. Instead of banning phones, like for years they banned calculators, perhaps they should be teaching skills around time management, how to configure the phones to be less disruptive for set periods or all the time, and the like. It's not like people at work don't have phones in most work environments. It's not like most people lock up their phones when they're at home.

Instead of pretending that we can "go back in time" to teach kids, we should look to teaching skills kids will obviously need. I remember being taught to balance a check book in 1997 or so, roughly a year or two before I never used a check in daily life, and the less than one time a year I needed one, I didn't really have to do any "balancing" cause I can do a single subtraction for the day or 3 till it was updated in my online bank account anyway.

Teaching kids stuff sans smartphones is like teaching kids sans books, the schools just haven't accepted it yet. And to all those who are like - well, what if your smartphone dies, or is lost, etc. Well, what if your car dies? You do the same thing, you have a backup plan, but that plan isn't to go back to walking or horses.

The other argument I can foresee is "kids won't learn anything". This has always been a problem for some kids, and phones aren't the cause. For everyone else, you get out of school what you put into it. Maybe some kids can be shown by teachers why learning is important and they'll be self motivated - in which case phones are a net good. The solution to learning isn't to torture kids who don't see any point in it. It's like you never screwed around or just slept in class... You don't need a phone to not learn stuff is all I'm saying.

The important thing is to teach people how to teach themselves. At work I'm always asked to figure stuff out. Nothing I do today has much if anything to do with what I learned in high school or college. No one asks me to do calculus, or the details of the war of 1812. I'm solving problems using my phone or computer and the internet. As soon as you're in a job, all these sorts of restrictions tend to go away in the vast majority of cases.

I don't know about that. Only one person I know wants a small car (my mother, who's retired.). Mostly because they're not just driving one person to work and back with their car. And if we're worried about only being available for the super rich, I think owning 2 or 3 vehicles targeted to each different task is even more unlikely.

Part of this is surely regulations / design, but my cousin has 2 kids, and those car seats are bigger than I am, which means he needs large SUV or Minivan to actually fit the car seats in the back seat. Then he says he needs lots of room in the cargo area for "kid stuff" (I kind of doubt that, but it is filled every time I visit with something). Finally, he needs enough space and legroom to comfortable drive and have a passenger ride up front and he's not a small person.

For me, it's 2 things, cargo space for shopping, and cargo and passenger space for road trips. I've outgrown my Outback for road trips, so I'm seriously considering a second vehicle in a minivan to hold 3-5 adults and their suitcases for a couple week trip plus my camera gear. Last time I had myself and 2 other adults and we couldn't fit anything else in the cargo space or back seat, and the person in the back was kind of squished.

For others it's even more cargo space - want to move a large filing cabinet or bookcase? Want to go buy lumber? Want to tow a trailer with a car or tractor or several 4 wheelers on it? Yea, we have pick up trucks for that.

The problem with all of this is I'm paying on 3 vehicles in maintenance and insurance, forget about buying them. For the secondary vehicles I often buy used to save money, but that's still $16k + recently for something 10 years old!

So a lower priced option is badly needed, but a cheap car that doesn't do what people want is simply a waste of money for them. If there really was a market for tiny cars that only moved one person around - we've had those available for decades and they're more of a curiosity than a market segment.

I fully expect that the rest of the US, assuming they still acted in concert, could occupy Texas indefinitely, but it would be like Iraq and would be a huge cost in all sorts of ways. They bigger thing is I kind of doubt the rest of the red states would want to support that effort, and many of the blue states frankly would be happy to see Texas go and stop screwing up so much stuff while costing federal dollars.

I would bet this leads to BoA having higher costs than you - paying for additional unneeded office space and ALL that entails, plus at least for me, I'd insist on a premium in wages to be in an office regularly vs WFH most of the time to all of the time.

Well, there's the contribution to climate change. There's the added danger of driving at all - look at traffic fatalities. I'd argue that a business forcing unnecessary hazards on employees is morally wrong, as is causing unnecessary pollution.

I mean, are we talking about bank tellers here? If you're not a customer service person in a bank branch specifically there for face to face interactions, I struggle to think what you'd need to go to an office for at BoA.

If he hasn't been scared by Xerox, Brother, and Epson, he won't be scared by a FLOSS printer. At this point, the only people who buy HP printers are those who don't even google it and remember hearing the laserjets were good circa 1995.

Mostly crafts - making custom t-shirts, or bags, and patterns for stuff like crocheting and knitting. But Ink is cheap if you get one of the Ecotanks from Epson - no way to prevent 3rd party ink, and it's a big tank so doesn't seem to dry out anywhere near like tiny cartridges. And 70-100ml of ink per color lasts a while IMO.

But laser makes a lot of sense for documents.

I still wouldn't take it on a subscription basis. My last home Laser lasted me ~15 years till the drivers just weren't there anymore and I was mostly using it as a stand to hold other crap on top of it.

Well, crafts is why I just bought my first 2 inkjets in probably 20 years. Epson Ecotanks - actually make inkjet reasonable. I use it to do prints for heat transfer and for dye sublimation.

Then there's the patterns for people who crochet or knit.

And occasionally forms - like passport renewal forms you have to mail in still for some reason, and you live a 30 minute drive from a printshop so having a B&W laser helps.

That said, I haven't recommended an HP since the 1990s. There's nothing I'm aware of they do better than brother in laser or epson in inkjet for home use (or Xerox in the business market).

You don’t have to. Thousand of people who know what they’re doing does. But why would I trust any of them? I'm pointing out you have to choose who you trust, and from the history with the makers of Vivaldi, I trust them. Same as I don't trust Google given their history.

Of course, I'm screwed anyway because there's not reasonable competition in the phone space, and I have to use Microsoft products for work, and... {insert a dozen more things here}. Given all that, I'd like the browser that works better for me.

I imagine it's because they have a Union, so collective action does get results, and that's why it's reported - because for some reason most of the US thinks it doesn't.

After I freaked out during the last couple elections, I basically stopped most news. It's pretty unclear what I could do with it anyway. The theoretical benefit was mostly around politics, but the vast masses just do it as a team sport, so my being "informed" by the news isn't helping hold politicians accountable or affecting elections. Outside of politics, except for the information about COVID during the pandemic, most specifically the vaccines, I have a hard time thinking of any useful information.

Even local news usually isn't too relevant. I guess the "avoid this intersection because of power out to lights, flooding, icing or whatever" could be helpful, but usually I don't get it till it's later on anyway.