Goddamn.
You’re not wrong and Nintendo could go bankrupt tomorrow for all I care, but if this isn’t the precise thing people have been harping on about for a decade now, and here we are with someone doing the thing and there’s a immediate complaint.
Dammed if they do, dammed if they don’t. We should have stopped at arcades. Maybe paying per character life and without save states was the peak.
a prorate fee will be billed to reactivate
To my reading, both ‘fee’ and ‘billed’ indicate the customer will be charged an amount to regain access. If it were as you suggest, I think it would have been worded differently, to provide more benefit to the customer. Maybe something along the lines of:
‘When you are ready to come back, your membership reactivation will be prorated to reflect freeze term payments.’
As it is, I can see both interpretations. Which might be on purpose to surprise people who turn up at the gym after a few months break, banking on an eye roll and the fee to be paid so they can get on with their workout.
Am I reading this right that to reactivate they’d be charging the difference they ‘lost’ during the freeze term? Wild.
Oh I agree, the ‘Saudi Arabia of natural gas’ I was referring to is the United States.
This graph of LNG infrastructure in the “Saudi Arabia of natural gas” current, planned, and proposed is sad to look at.
Most of that isn’t too important. The real failure you neglected to mention is the loss of the negative reinforcement that comes with coal based energy generation. If we keep burning the stuff, the big man can’t give out as many lumps to the bad children, and so they grow up to be criminals running big companies.
“Privacy-centric” my elbow.
I will be adding this turn of phrase to my vocabulary, thank you.
The priciest bit of rail per mile is in cities because of the stations and land use, but even those are one time costs. If we magically moved two cities in Japan 5x further apart, it wouldn’t cost 5x the amount to install the rail to connect them. When considering maintenance costs, a comparison to highways wouldn’t be close.
Rail infrastructure across America is mostly dedicated to freight, with passenger travel taking a literal back seat. Comparing rail to air isn’t exactly apples to apples considering how artificially cheap domestic air travel is permitted to be.
California’s rail situation is an entire can of worms on its own. My underlying point is that the type of cities shown in this post are possible everywhere. All it really takes is willpower.
Given several more developed nations have solved the distance problem using trains, I don’t think space between cities is much more than a talking point. Need somewhere to put the farmlands anyhow.
For what it’s worth, dense infrastructure is possible everywhere, even in large spaces like the United States. It just doesn’t get built because the people tasked with making such decisions choose not to for various reasons.
I’m sorry you were exposed to that at a time when you should have been insulated from the cruel indifference of technology. For a profession that once took pride in the personal touch, providing such an impersonal experience is appalling.
It seems especially horrid seeing as an obituary specifically is sort of the most formulaic aspect of funerals. Anyone that’s read them in the paper could tell you they tend to follow a pretty similar structure. It’s so lazy to use these machines to do something so rudimentary.
You and your father have my sympathies for your mother’s passing. I hope you’re both finding ways to continue onward. Undoubtedly she would hope the same.
Unsurprisingly, the machines are already being used in the funeral business. The last couple years I’ve seen obituaries, service cards, even images created through a variety of tools.
Trying to live a life free of this technology is becoming as hard as trying to live without oil, and now even our deaths are tainted by it.
That’s a cool service the restaurants provide, I wouldn’t have thought of that. Wish something like that was available everywhere, even seeing a show would be nice to be picked up and have a table waiting.
Presumably such a site would be visually obvious as parody. Having it give jokey answers in as a caricature would be one thing. If you dressed it up as a professional legal advice service for opinions on criminal law from Alan Shore, that could be problematic.
At a certain point of information sharing, we should want a high bar for the ones providing the answers. When asking nuanced questions, we should want for the answer to come from knowledge, not memory. I made an example in this other comment.
I’m not sure I agree with your ‘right answer’ bit. Personally, I’d prefer dumb people to be protected in a similar way that I want the elderly protected from losing their savings from an email scam.
I wonder at what point it’s worthwhile to have a group to park at some mall and rent a van to drive to the stadium parking.
If any positive outcome is possible here, I’d be nice if this gets people accustomed to carpooling to such events. Sure would be nice though if these stadiums would be serviced by more effective transportation.
‘Should I use one teaspoon of salt in this recipe, or two?’
Two is ideal.
‘Do dogs like chicken wings?’
Wild dogs regularly hunt small animals like hare or chicken for food.
One of these answers results in a bad cake, the other results in a hurt dog. Potentially inaccurate answers aren’t much of a problem when the stakes are low, but even a simple question about what to feed a pet could end with a negative outcome.
I could see the argument for things that aren’t particularly important, but to continue with the legal example, it seems akin to asking a practicing lawyer a question and asking someone that watched Boston Legal when it aired and can quote James Spader.
Unfortunately, with the potential for a hallucinatory response, anything beyond quite simplistic queries shouldn’t be relied on with more weight than a crutch of toothpicks.
What was it that initially sent you down that path?
Glad to see private lands becoming publicly owned. Looks like a nice place to take a picnic. It’s funny that the waterfall itself is only half a million.
Unrelated, but this outlet really doesn’t like paragraphs. The longest in this article are two sentences long. I checked a few other articles, even the about page, and the best I found were some three sentence paragraphs. Imagine a book with this kind of formatting, it would take an entire tree to print Lord of the Rings.
Not to them it’s not. Proportionally, it’s more than what many can afford. Just like how your fuel prices are dirt cheap to someone living in Hong Kong.