I wonder about Secret Aardvark Sauce.

Hmmm, how so? My impression is that it is so that they can write it off on their taxes, but still how control over how the money is spent.

Estate taxes are the way to deal with that. Otherwise you potentially get massive distortionary effects from people trying to dump all their ownership into liquid assets right before they die, assuming that’s what you meant by wealth. It also gets odder when you no longer have a single owner. Jeff Bezos is fabulously wealthy and holds lots of stock in Amazon, but he does not own Amazon outright. You could say that when he dies, his stock goes to the workers. Okay, what about stock held by funds like Vanguard or pension funds? What does death even mean then? It’s a whole mess, or you could go with the simpler estate tax.

That’s too bad. I had moved away from Milwaukie by then so it wasn’t really practical for me to make my way down there. I still eat a lot of their grains and other products, though.

I’m pretty sure the motorcycle, stoplight, and bicycle ones all are deeply flawed. I regularly select all of them to the best of my judgement and it’s like NOPE!

There’s always extra electricity. Eg. Solar generates power during the day, charges this “battery” and then powers lighting at night when demand is higher and people need to be able to see.

And this is only set to become more of an issue. Solar and wind are going to be a larger share of the energy mix, but they will still be unreliable. Energy storage, whether physical or chemical, will need to be part of the solution.

Oh, I don’t have fond memories of them. Rewinding, lack of metadata, tape getting snarled, no seeking, limited capacity, and limited sound quality. But hey, I certainly have my silly areas so who am I to criticize?

Some people like to enjoy their media without having to use a smartphone, they prefer to keep their smartphones as strictly communication devices.

Okay, I guess that’s fair. I can see this useful for being out for a run or whatnot. I’m not sure I find it quite comparable to an e-reader, since the screen on an e-reader provides a decidedly different experience from a smartphone both in size and readability.

Yup, this just feels like someone trying to make the cassette cool again. There’s a reason it fell out of fashion. If someone wants it, so be it, in the end that’s their business. I just think it’s a little silly to be sprouting more devices (and associated e-waste) when people can stay consolidated in one compact package.

There are $10 adapters that convert USB-C to a 3.5 mm port, if that is critical. Or just get any of the wide variety of Bluetooth devices on the market.

Cute, but what problem does this solve? Regardless of what you feel about any particular platform, consolidating multiple pieces of functionality into the highly integrated smartphone platform was a major step forward in mobility. This just feels like a regression.

Though some of the phone makers are finally getting the message that some of us want to keep a hold of our expensive phones for a long while. My new Pixel 8 has 7 years of security updates, which should work fine for my purposes. I’ll probably replace the battery somewhere in there, though.

It is not, but only because I read quite a bit of ridiculous bullshit. I’m looking at you, Congressional Republicans.

I suppose then you have the opposite problem. Death by infinite water pressure.

Okay, first things first, this talk of making it my living space? Nix that. That works well enough for a single person eating microwave dinners, but I like cooking and having people over. But travel? Yeah, that would be awesome. I’m thinking:

• Bunk beds
• Desk with a computer
• Very efficient use of shelving
• Fridge, hot plate

My only concern then becomes a toilet and shower. I guess you could move water in, but the water pressure is going to be crap.

My friend put this one together a while ago.

Or its alias, todo!()

The way I’ve had it explained to me, plants as a general rule have a much, much larger genome than animals. The reason is simple. When an animal runs into a problem like not enough water, it can just get up and move. Plants are rooted where they are, prey to whatever comes along. They have to develop an arsenal of genes to deal with different situations, whether that’s drought resistance or producing various toxins so that animals don’t make a meal of them. It’s not like animals don’t do this to some degree - the immune system is incredibly elaborate - but not as much.

At the same time, privileged people will still sometimes feel a loss of something when you’re portioning out a finite resource. So if a particular group is 25% of the population and they were getting 75% of the pie before and now they’re getting 25% of the pie, that’s a loss. It’s a justified loss, but it’s still a loss.

That said, there are other things like rights that are not finite in any meaningful sense of the word. When someone is feeling a loss because an oppressed group gained rights, it’s usually because they’re an oppressive asshole.

And to think, it’s still funny all these millions of years later.