My grandmother used to have one. I never realized how it worked before that video, but I was always fascinated by the fact that the bread would lower itself

I think you’re confusing the PS1 in the ad with the PSOne which came out later and had rounded edges.

I’ve always wondered if vegetables from a farm that uses horse-drawn tills instead of tractors would be vegan… It’s a real question, but everyone I ask thinks that I’m trolling.

You might be right, but our southern neighbours also have a Senate and it doesn’t seem to help…

I am one. I’m a pretty weak monarchist, though, it’s just that I look south and I’m glad that there’s a “higher level” looking over our politicians. Even if the GG nominations aren’t always ideal, at least in theory they aren’t beholden to popular opinion. The fact that they’re nominated and not elected ensures that they don’t have the legitimacy to push their own agenda either. So it’s a powerful position, but mostly symbolically and there would be a lot of backlash if some ambitious GG tried to use this power for anything other than extreme cases.

In my opinion, this is partly why our politics haven’t yet devolved to the point of getting a Donald Trump. You can say what you want about Trudeau, but at least the government doesn’t shut down every so often just because they can’t agree on a budget.

Enel is currently doing exactly that with their electric car chargers (the Juicebox), they’ve decided to pull out from the North American market and just shut down the servers. Like WTF, at least open-source the thing…

It’s as if they don’t remember playing telephone when they were kids.

Meanwhile, I’m a dev who can actually talk to people, but I still have to go through 5-6 layers of business people mangling what the user said…

In theory, the government is elected by the public. Not a given these days, I know.

That’s a house hippo!

I’d be okay with the govt owning shares, honestly. That way the public would get a voice in how these megacorps operate, and that voice would get bigger the larger the company becomes.

They always force me to get the 80$ lenses… Still pretty cheap, but it ends up more around 100$ so I only change every couple years.

The store nearest me will deliver whatever you want for a $30 flat rate. I have a minivan so I can still carry a lot of stuff myself but for that price it lets me avoid messing with removing my seats so it’s worth it

Funnily enough, in my town there used to be a Future Shop, and then a Best Buy sprung up in the new commercial district, but apparently couldn’t compete because it closed 2 years later. Then about a year later Best Buy bought Future Shop and they re-branded the existing Future Shop to Best Buy.

Yeah, ToysRUs is alive and well in Canada. I have no idea that the bottom-right one is.

My firefighter neighbour told me that the procedure now is just to let them burn, like they do with gasoline fires. They make sure it doesn’t spread, but they won’t try to extinguish it because it’d take 10-12 hours and thousands of gallons. By just letting it burn they’re done in an hour with a few hundred gallons.

Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.

Hay is basically cut grass, straw is the part leftover from harvesting wheat and taking the seeds. Both are baled, but they’re used for different things. Hay is food for any animals that eat grass like horses and cows, buy straw is not edible so it’s used as bedding.

I’ve personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that’s only about twice what I currently pay now that I’m back home (people complaining about Starlink’s price don’t know what they’re talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we’re talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).

It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power (“but what about the birds”), electric cars (“but cobalt = slave labour”, “akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it’s less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car”), space exploration (“the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here’s a fine”). There’s some stuff that’s been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it’s infuriating.

“Just asking questions”… It’s just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.

But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don’t really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.

What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.

Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it’d only amount to less than 2% of this years’ “stuff” that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don’t think that’s significant, but I’ll concede that we don’t really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches