You’re like the gym bro reincarnation of Haruhi Suzumiya.

I learned the cop knock early on in my delivery career. People ask why I didn’t use the bell. Because more than half the time the bell doesn’t work, that’s why. I don’t have all night to stand out here looking stupid. Hitting your door with my baton did, though, didn’t it? Plus if you’re going to bust out of here running your mouth with some dumb shit, I’m already holding my baton.

I wouldn’t do it hard enough to leave a dent in the door except with people I really disliked.

I never had the occasion to whack a customer, regardless of how richly some of them may have deserved it. But people lurking around the vicinity who were stupid enough to believe they were the first person to think of jumping the pizza man from behind at the door were a different story.

That’s fine if you have a mouse that isn’t shite. I have a coworker who also does this, in his case via having the cursor speed jacked up as far as it’ll go in Control Panel. But the crap mouse he has on his PC means that the cursor now moves several pixels per sample. It’s impossible to move it one pixel at a time, which means some very small UI elements in inexpertly coded programs (like, just to name one example, our inventory control software) are smaller than the minimum movement distance and you can’t place the cursor on them to click them.

He seems to spend most of his day on reddit, though, so this apparently has not impacted his productivity much. Meanwhile, if I use his machine I just become Captain Keyboard Shortcut in self-defense.

Or constructive dismissal.

“We’ll make all those expensive whiners quit, and then they won’t get unemployment benefits. Don’t worry, we’ll replace their positions with AI. It’ll totally work. Honk honk.”

535nm for most/all of my greens.

I do have one of the old 1000mw Wicked Laser blues as well, however, which I think is 445nm.

Oh yeah. And my engraver is 100 watts of infrared (1084nm?), not milliwatts, although the range is probably a bit crap for this sort of thing and it’s not exactly concealable. You’d also want to pack rather a long extension cord.

And the Power Base Converter. I don’t think that will pass through the 32x, though. I’ll have to dig mine out and try it some time.

That’s only the rear wheel drive ones. There are still plenty of other idiots who were dumb enough to put down even more money for the prior more expensive variants.

Rampant incompetence?

You probably don’t even have to go that far. You can rake-pick most consumer locks in a handful of seconds and with zero talent required. I theoretically know how to pick locks in the traditional “little click from pin 1, pin 2 is set, pin 3 is loose” kind of way but in reality I never have to on any consumer grade lock. Just tension it with a little screwdriver and fuck it at random with a bent paperclip and you’ll probably get it open. I’d be immensely surprised if these things are secured with anything more than a dinky 4 or if we’re feeling especially generous 5 pin through-hole cam lock.

They should, yes, but they don’t. In fact, they’ll ding you for having too many failed transactions and claim that it’s your responsibility to do something about it.

I know: Zeppelins.

This is one of the single most accurate and succinct analogies of a tech space I have ever read, save possibly for the one that Neal Stephenson wrote about operating systems being car dealerships.

The author not only uses ASCII bricks ( ▓ ) as bullets, and not only uses silly CSS tricks to mark down animated rainbow text rather than using the four megabyte or whatever jquery library which would inevitably tempt everyone else, but also goes as far as to literally name the aforementioned CSS class “funky.”

I think I like this cat already.

Done. I’ve been boycotting REI since… 2019, I think? When all this crap first came to light, or at least when I became aware of it. When their ex-Amazon management was trumpeting how their membership numbers were such a metric of success, I also managed to cancel my “lifetime” REI membership. This made their customer support people very confused. So confused that they actually gave my membership fee back, despite the fact that I’d paid for it like 15 years beforehand.

I had an REI credit card. I cancelled that, too.

I stood up for REI for a long time. I held my nose and bought my camping and climbing stuff from them for ages despite the fact that they were and are consistently the most expensive place on Earth to buy outdoors stuff. Because they were supposed to be a “co-op” they were “not corporate.”

Yeah, so, about that.

Fuck 'em. If you’re going to be dealing with corporate asshats anyway you may as well shop at the ones that have the decency to be cheaper.

Marylin Manson did a song about that once, in fact. He used… slightly different terminology.

And it already is with other products, e.g. Tilex, which has a pickup tube moulded into the side wall of the bottle itself and runs from the very lowermost front corner up to the spray nozzle. Surely this is a commodity package that any manufacturer could buy, but they mostly don’t because I’m sure it costs two cents more per unit.

Even that don’t make no sense, boss. If that were the case not only should consoles and arcades be swapped, as you say, but also the VR line should be slipped in between handhelds and mobile. Dactyl Nightmare came out in 1991 and certainly wasn’t even the first VR experience, but it was the first commercialized one I can think of — and played myself, believe it or not. I can’t imagine VR as a whole made anything other than chump change until 2018+, but it was indeed there and chugging along quietly.

Because a wide swath of speed limits are not credible, and are deliberately set unrealistically low in contravention of traffic studies, civil engineers’ best practices and experience, and common sense simply as a revenue grab via fines and to have a convenient legal justification to pull over and harass undesirable people, i.e. minorities.

You ever drive through an all-white beach down in Nowhere, Florida or someplace and wonder why all of the sudden the speed limit on their major six lane thoroughfare is suddenly 20 MPH? You’d better believe the people who live there aren’t the targets of getting pulled over constantly.

Edit to add: This is before getting into the possibility of emergencies, fleeing disasters, getting someone to the hospital, etc.

Cowboy Troy - I Play Chicken With the Train

I’m also not sure we can leave out the Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones.

No. Lincoln and his supreme court (he appointed no less than five justices) wrecked that and set the dangerous precedent that no part of the US can unilaterally secede. The south attempted to secede for a bad reason, but this also preempts any part of the US doing it for a good reason in the future.

So as much as we might like to, say, get a huge saw and just chop Florida off and leave it to float away, the other states as well as congress must agree in order to do so.