Smelly is, as far as I know, still sober. As is Hefe. I think Melvin is still using occasionally, and Mike does what the winds advise.

Book is fantastic. The audiobook is hard to get through because they narrate it themselves, and it really drives home how much at odds they have been for a while now. There’s what’s not said in the inflection of their voices that makes it hit different than reading it did.

The irony of those lyrics being that the reason NOFX aren’t touring anymore is because Mike can’t do it without being really high and super drunk.

But completely agree with you on music being an avenue for op to explore.

Nah. Let him split the conservatives up.

In this case it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the DNC. New York allows him to continue to run despite losing the primary because he already qualified to be on the ballot.

It’s dumb, because he’s already conceded the primary, and he knows doing so is divisive, but the silver lining is that New York has ranked choice voting, at least.

He’s doing it because he wants to show fealty to his tangerine deity. States can overreach, too, but at least Abbot doesn’t need to falsely claim the presence of an insurrection to trample on his constituents’ rights.

You’re right, and your take is more nuanced. A huge thing about it being a private company is that they aren’t required to disclose who has ownership stakes, performance against revenue targets, etc. Ostensibly, anyone who isn’t on the inside, and even employees who aren’t privy to management decisions, will be met with more or less a black box about the company’s drivers.

There are no shareholders. He took the company private and funds it through advertising and loans. He is the only shareholder.

The bootlickers are the only reason we give a shit about the orange turd.

Many things aren’t important. Life isn’t about strict necessity.

The evidence doesn’t support the outsized FUD. Firearms in general are dangerous. A $500 novelty that very few gun owners will ever purchase or install isn’t a serious safety concern. Seemingly only one instance of one being used in a shooting in Fargo in 2023. That situation was tragic, and the police who responded likely prevented the shooter from committing a larger and more destructive attack. But the fact remains that these things are novelties or gimmicks. They make shooting the gun worse in nearly every way, and have extremely limited practical application.

This alarmist and factually dubious fear mongering is part of what is hurting the Democrats and the left in the US. Binary triggers do not turn a firearm into a “fully automatic machine gun”. What they do is cause the gun to fire on both the trigger pull and the trigger reset. This allows the shooter to fire very quickly, but not as fast as a true automatic weapon. Machine gun, and assault rifle both have specific legal definitions that hinge on the firearm firing multiple rounds with one trigger action. A standard trigger has two actions for every trigger pull - the pull and the reset. This is why these devices are technically legal. It’s also why bump stocks are legal.

It’s splitting hairs and is pedantic, but the tilted and inaccurate narrative only serves to disenfranchise people who lean left but also enjoy firearms.

All that said - restricting access to this vaccine is asinine and needlessly dangerous. To your point, we paid for this medicine with our taxes, our isolation, and unfortunately with many lives. Fuck this administration and the spineless republicans who enable them to trample on our rights.

Yeah, sorry. You don’t speak for me.

Been saying this for decades.

Of course it does. It’s a commodity and not a currency.

The letters look pretty, but he never learned how to read. He’d be pretty upset if he could, though, so probably for the best.

Expert level sounding.

But those inexpensive phones most often don’t deliver a comparable device experience to the flagship devices. Honestly, this is the crux of things. Comparing iPhone to “Android” is a fool’s errand. Apple often only has one more budget conscious model available explicitly. But OS support tends to last longer on Apple devices, so multiple model years are viable at once.

It’s like wearing nothing at all! ….nothing at all! ……nothing at all!

If Ukraine didn’t want to be invaded, it shouldn’t have dressed that way! Stupid sexy Ukraine.

The Switch was just the Wii U refined into something consumers actually wanted, rather than an innovation on its own.

I’d argue that Nintendo has always been pretty similar in terms of the amount of innovation they bring to their segment barring perhaps the quality of the Wii motion controls when launched and compared against similar attempts both by Nintendo and their competitors prior.

The Famicom / NES and the subsequent Super Famicom / SNES / N64 were just iterations on the same home console market for which Nintendo was far from the first to launch. The GameCube and the Wii shared a lot of DNA, with the motion controls really being the innovation. The Wii U, Switch, and Switch 2 seem to be a lineage of refinement as well.

In handhelds, they went from monochrome, to backlit monochrome, to backlit color, to two displays and some touch controls. You could argue that the 3D effect of the 3DS was innovative, but the allure of the feature died as soon as the industry realized the demand wasn’t there to keep developing it. Hardly as revolutionary as other competitors products, but more in touch with what their consumers wanted than their competitors, hence the market lasted longer for Nintendo than Sony with the PSP and Vita.

Ironically, the things Nintendo has done at the base system level that truly attempted to innovate have mostly been failures. The Virtual Boy was way ahead of its time, but the form factor was half baked and the eyestrain was horrendous. The Wii U was a success in that Nintendo learned what about the console was worth iterating on, but otherwise it was an abject failure as well because it didn’t offer enough to differentiate itself from the Wii.

For innovation to occur, there needs to be a predicating breakthrough in technology around which these companies can build a product. We’re in an age of rapid miniaturization and simultaneous increased power of integrated systems. It feels like more power = better, but this trajectory is going to yield new potential applications of technology in form factors that haven’t been fully explored yet. It’s just cyclical, and things take time to develop.

Plus - everything is slower when consumers demonstrate they’re satisfied with what the company is selling them. No need to dramatically change course when the current model is satisfying customers. The confluence of a new technology landscape and a dip in consumer enthusiasm for existing offerings is the typical spot for a hardware developer to innovate.