I have an unorthodox one. I’m a sucker for a gadget so I got a Kitchen Mama Can Opener and it works great. There was a short learning curve but now I just put it on the can and let it roll. Cuts with no sharp edge and, an unexpected benefit, it’s stupid looking so I can always find it. I was making a roux last night, in fact, and set it to open a can with one hand while I stirred.

Utilities, in particular, can and often should be owned by municipalities or states. For every example of an inefficiently-run state-owned enterprise, there’s a dozen boring, local, publicly-owned utilities that are run as well or better than private companies.

The clusterfucks tend to be at the national level where there’s no real oversight. A corrupt president might be able to treat a utility as a slush fund or jobs program and get away with it but a mayor or county executive just doesn’t have the juice to be flagrantly corrupt without someone investigating.

I’m a die-hard Firefox user (in part because I’m a web developer and prefer the dev tools). But I have seen a couple of sites that only work with Chromium-based browsers. Both are owned by Microsoft, though, so I assume they’re breaking things on purpose to push Edge or something. There’s no significant features Firefox is missing. (Safari is the problem child for web developers now. They tend to be last to support new CSS/JS features.)

I think you’re making the same mistake as people who thought self-driving cars would be here 5 years ago. You can’t just extrapolate out technological progress. The relatively easy things get solved first and relatively quickly but we may need a decade to solve some of the most challenging scenarios.

You’re right. We all love our fully self-driving cars and by 2026, chatbots will write longform narratives so beautifully, we won’t even need cars because we’ll all be transported anywhere we want to go by the magic of books.

There’s plenty of oppression and violence smack dab in the center of the left right spectrum too. I’m not sure why horseshoe theory is so keen to equate Stalin, Mao, etc. with the violence of Hitler, Pinochet, etc. while ignoring the genocides of the Dutch East India Co. (and competitors), imperialism, the slave trade, settler colonialism, etc.

The new brand is alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters. Elon bought that too so he could fold it into “X,” the app for barking lunatics.

One possibility is that he’s good at taking credit for the achievements of engineers and scientists. But a more charitable possibility is just that domain expertise/ignorance are real. Musk might be really good at running manufacturing companies and just not have any clue about software or politics or condoms.

A ton of hardware guys think software is trivially easy. Some of the worst people at personal finance are doctors. I’ve met a ton of other engineers who will proudly and ignorantly tell actual economists what they think causes inflation or recessions or whatever.

It might as well be a hatchback towing a box of dildos for all the times that tiny truck bed will be used for anything that looks like work.

You should also definitely consider battery life and how important each “upgrade” is. Windows supports a few extra games but isn’t optimized for a handheld like SteamOS. A better screen or more performance would be cool but not if it costs an hour of battery life.

One thing that ended up surprising me is how little I’ve cared about performance on the Deck. It’s kind of the nature of a handheld that you play games like Hades and not RDR2 or whatever. So, it ends up being less of a problem. Big, beautiful games tend to call for a big screen and a few hours whereas a portable is like, “I have 30 minutes to kill. I’ll play Tetris Effect.”