Similar experience. I liken it to merging onto a freeway: you want to get up to speed first, then change lanes. If you don't, it feels like you're always fighing the pressure. If you equalize the pressure correctly breathing is as easy (easier) than without the mask.
As a Canadian I don't really think Americans have really understood how upset we are. Most US-facing talk is about tariffs, but the repeated threats of annexation and taunting (Governor, 51st state, Noem's despicable actions at Haskell Library) are both enraging and terrifying. I have no intention of returning to the US for any type of tourism or business travel indefinitely. People are ensuring their flight paths to other countries do not even cross US airspace.
This audience will likely call me paranoid, or try to downplay/deflect, but we can see clearly what's going on and the gaslighting does not help.
I think it's a very sane behavior. I used to travel regularly to the US for both work and leisure, but I'll think twice before doing it again. On the one hand, I do know lots of Americans didn't vote from Trump. A lot of those who did probably aren't necessarily bad people. But still, this country has become hostile, it's pretty hard to pretend that everything's normal.
> A lot of those who did probably aren't necessarily bad people.
A lot who did are now surprised (for the second time) that Trump is bein' a total ass-hat. Learned nothing from the first time around except that he's an infallible "stable genius" what can never be wrong about anything. They're literal cult-members.
Anecdote: I'm helping a family member set up a personal brand website. He has a brand/marketing person for the content/design, but wanted me to manage the tech side of email, domains, providers, etc. I've used Wordpress a handful of times in my life, but it's an easy recommendation to make. We've spent maybe 30 mins a week for the past few weeks chipping away at it. We chose https://getflywheel.com/ as the managed WP provider[1]. They are owned by WP Engine.
Today, we got to installing the WP Mail SMTP plugin[2]. Oops, can't search for plugins. Maybe this has something to do with what I read on Hacker News yesterday, I think out loud. The Flywheel status page tells us to download the plugin zip and upload it, and we do. Crisis averted. But now... the plugin itself depends on talking back to the wordpress.org plugin registry. And it's blocked. The setup wizard fails with an unrecoverable javascript error. And we give up for another week.
I showed him the TechCrunch article. We agree that this is petty. Does he care about who is at fault, or the intricacies of trademark infringement, or the stewardship of public APIs? Nope. He just knows his first impression of Wordpress is that it's unreliable, both technically and organizationally.
[1] Could I have hosted it for him on DigitalOcean for cheaper? Yes. But I want him owning everything and pay someone to support it who isn't me.
Google Domains was sold to squarespace. Your domain will be migrated soon/already has been. Check your inbox.
> Your Google domain has been migrated to your Squarespace Domains account.
You can now log in at Squarespace Domains with your Google account to manage your domain, example.org. This is part of Squarespace's acquisition of all domain registrations and customer accounts from Google Domains.
Just about all of Apple's alternates to Google services are fine in my experience. I recently switched from Proton Mail to Apple Mail and have been satisfied saving a few bucks a month there. I don't know how to evaluate Apple's claims to privacy though.
I guess that's fine for diversifying the big corporate overlords you rely on, which I'll agree is an improvement over relying on Google for everything. But still, I wish there were open alternatives.
When US (NTSC) shows are aired in Europe (PAL), the framerate difference necessitates a small speed-up. It's barely noticeable, except when music is playing, at which point it is very, very noticeable. Yes, it's a little higher pitched, but it just feels wrong and is immediately noticeable. I think it's about 3% speed up, which is exactly what's being described here.
They may have been referring to film (24 FPS) or its broadcast equivalent (23.976 FPS) being shifted to PAL, which is quite a bit smaller of a jump.
NTSC —> PAL can either be annoying, or difficult to manage without artifacts. If the NTSC source is telecined from a 23.976 source, you can invert that process to get the original back, and then deal with the minor time shift to PAL. If it’s pure NTSC, there’s a lot of filtering to be done to get an acceptable result. At least, last I played with it.
A family member owns a Jeep (2016). It's been nothing but problems for them. They were brand loyal. But they've really gone off the rails lately. Jeep ranked 34/34 (dead last) in consumer satisfaction in Consumer Reports' 2024 rankings.[1]
Jeep has never been top o' Consumer Reports. If you want to increase the odds in your favor:
- Wrangler or possibly Gladiator only [high volume production]
- Lower tier trims to reduce electronic malfunctions
- No diesel
- No first 2 years of new model
- No Covid years
I've mainly driven Wranglers my entire driving career and had very few problems
Except cupcake shops and craft breweries are allowed to differentiate (gluten free, superhero themed, we only sell wild fermented German beers...) while the legal cannabis retailers in Canada are more akin to owning a Subway franchise.
You must purchase your cannabis from a select set of suppliers chosen by the government (yes, the very same ones your competition must purchase from), you are not allowed to offer discounts/freebies on cannabis products (only rolling papers or similar non-psychoactive products). It is still illegal to operate any kind of venue that allows consumption, so while you can decorate your retail space like an Apple store or a Pier 1, you can't run trivia nights or do movie screenings or anything that might result in people patronizing your business over the one next door offering the same product for $0.05 cheaper.
Pre-legalization, I could go to a store (not legally operated) and look at the bud in the jar, smell it, and make decisions based on something other than a sealed package with no artwork or description on it. Some stores even offered consumption of "dabs" which is a great model: those things cost a lot of money and aren't really fun to have in your home and maintain, and it was very competitive with "a pint after work". All of this went away after 2017.
I'm referring more to the "several times as many as the market can sustain get opened" phenomenon. Around here, every just-out-of-college set of buddies decided they'd get into brewing a few years ago. Probably 75% of them were gone in a year or two.
> Altria Group (formerly Philip Morris Companies), acquired a 35% stake in Juul Labs for $12.8 billion on December 20, 2018. Altria is the largest tobacco company in the United States.
