Politely disagree. M-disc for BD-Rs are still absolutely worth the money if you want to properly archive something. NIST has agreed that the archival lifetime of a M-Disc BD-R is 100+ years.

You have to be careful with normal BD-Rs because there are two different types of recording material on the market: High to Low and Low to High (LTH). You want to stay away from BD-R LTH discs as their longevity isn’t as good as the High to Low discs.

There is a ton of HD-DVD disc rot today. For a format, it definitely did not hold up to age.

Thank your deity that M-Disc exists.

For me, ChargePoint chargers are the easiest to use and consistently work best, but usually the most expensive.

Blink chargers are the worst. The app is clunky, slow, and the experience just never feels like they actually vetted the process. Also, it feels like they have a hard time keeping their chargers maintained.

What used to be Volta, now Shell (yeah the oil company) is a hit or miss depending on their charger actually working. Nice thing about Volta is that free is free (for now).

For actually finding working chargers, I use PlugShare.

Ubisoft has released many games that require constant Internet access the past decade and then just shutting off the servers making the game completely unplayable. This just happened to The Crew last month. This will happen to:

1. The Crew 2
2. The Crew Motorfest
3. Steep
4. Riders Republic
5. Star Trek Bridge Crew
6. Skull & Bones (A AAAA game)
7. Newer versions of Just Dance
8. Newer versions of Rocksmith

And more…

Pirating doesn’t solve the game being completely unplayable when UbiSoft decides to shut down the servers.

The Crew could be played all the way through as a single player game. It made no sense for a constant Internet connection. The Crew’s credit screen for the final version of the game lasts over 45 minutes. Thousands of employees across the entire world worked on that game and now it is just gone with only gameplay videos being the only record of existence.

I’m assuming US?

One thing to note is that the US started requiring back up cameras in all cars manufactured after May 1, 2018. Your best bet to find a dumb car would be to look at base trims of some cheap 2015, 2016, and 2017 cars. Cars like the Elantra, Forte, Sonata, Altima, Versa, and Sentra did not have touchscreen displays in their base trim. I know because I basically lived in rental cars during those years and am very familiar with all of them.

Now, definitely watch out on the Korean ones though due their cheapening out of security equipment…but the Kia Boyz have probably salvaged titled all of them by now. I would also be hesitant on buying a used car with a CVT because it’s a crapshoot if the previous owners actually kept up with the mandatory maintenance on them.

I think the Mazda 3 or Toyota iA are good used car choices to keep on your radar. There is a “screen” in both cars, but they are dialed controlled when the car is in motion. They both have a REAL automatic transmission too. No CVT stuff to worry about.

Wow, I didn’t know that some states allow fast food to be purchased by a EBT card. Can’t get away doing that in the south.

M-Disc exists?

Not much complaint about the Meta Ray-bans and those have been on sale for years now. Hell, Snapchat had three separate releases of their spectacles product and I really didn’t hear much complaints. All of these products still look goofy.

When Interplay decided that Sim City needed goofy, over-the-top FMVs on a CD-ROM…I think that was peak Sim City. As a kid, I was disappointed 2k and 3k didn’t have professional, career-oriented adults yelling at you for your incompetence in FMV.

I mean…Microsoft is paying people to use Edge with Microsoft Rewards. It’s not a lot, but you can net a few cents each day with their Edge exclusive tasks.

Such bullshit since most of the recordings sound like shit. That’s the idea though. These 78 records are made of lac bug crap called shellac. The shellac degrades over time so the purpose is to retain the sound off of the recording of a format that is physically deteriorating and will not be around in the future. The project is to capture a unique sound experience that will not be available for future generations.

No streaming platform offers this. No streaming platform offers the ability to hear music ripped from vinyl, cassette, 4-track, or 8-track. Sony and Universal will never offer this. The user is only given one option usually for a song and who knows what master was used and how the audio engineer felt that day to master the track.

Also, we all know how Universal treats their masters…pathetic. So many of them are gone now thanks to their careless warehouse fire. If people don’t create offsite archives, who will? We can’t trust the record companies to do it!

As a counterpoint to your landfill comment, if a movie is played 5 times off of the same blu ray disc or streamed 5 times from the Disney+ servers which is more environmentally harmful?

It doesn’t take much energy to press a disc and once the disc is pressed, it could theoretically be viewed for at least several decades to hundred of years if stored correctly.

The threshold for one blu ray disc to be more environmentally friendly than a streaming movie is 4 views. Source: Ars Technica

Definitely an unusual intersection where one street looks like a diagonal merge into another, but the stoplight placement is bizarre as the driver can see two different light directions at the same time coming up on the approach.

Should be a variable charge like a gas tax placed on public EV chargers and not a one time yearly fee. There is a big consumption difference between a Hummer EV and a Smart EV.

EDIT: Not every state has thought clearly about additional EV fees. Starting later this year, Texans who drive electric cars will pay significantly more in registration fees than an average gas car driver pays in gas taxes each year…because it’s fucking Texas.