Hair traps odors (ever smell your hair after a campfire, or going to a Korean BBQ?), but it's kind of a bitch to constantly remove. People with the means and the time to remove their body hair have done it at various periods throughout history.

Women in ancient Egypt also wore makeup, could own property, could divorce men without social repercussions, etc.

Many aspects of society that we think are new are actually things that just kind of arise given a couple hundred years of peacetime and abundance, and/or things that wealthy people have been doing on and off at various periods throughout history.

When they pitch a new idea to family and friends they get pats on the head and it doesn't materially help them at all, but when someone says "that'll never work" they get excited and their ears perk up, because that new perspective could save them a ton of money going down a wrong path.

You're supposed to the watch/bracelet, but you do have to hold your wrist close to your body. You kind of want to hold your hands in front of your body as if you're about to grab one of your wrists with your other hand.

Watches and other jewelry are basically right at the cutoff of detection. They want to detect small knives but not earrings.

This is all absolutely tribal airport knowledge. I had been traveling for work for years, taken hundreds of flights, but I only found this out when my partner tried to go through a metal detector with a semi-permanent bracelet that requires a small screwdriver to take off, and the TSA person mercifully told her exactly how to pose as she walked through the detector.

Wall-to-wall windows are great.

Floor-to-ceiling windows are stunning when you walk into an empty place that you're thinking about buying or renting, but when you're actually living there, windows that go down to the floor create a few feet of dead space. You can't really put any furniture there without feeling guilty about blocking the view you're paying for, and it's uncomfortable to walk up to the edge and look down - it makes you feel uneasy like you're standing on a cliff with your toes at the edge. It's much better for the window to end around waist high.

They're psychologically fine if both the floor and the ceiling extend beyond the window (e.g. it's on the ground floor, and the roof overhangs), but when they're used on every floor in a high rise apartment building, killing limited square footage and driving up energy bills, it's absolute madness.

Then eventually I finally was forced to admit that I'd just been choosing to move about the world as a bit of a careless brute who treats my things with disrespect, and by being more intentional with the way I move about the world, all my stuff suddenly lasts 10x longer.

Interestingly, I'm not sure it's worth the trade-off, but it's been kind of wild to experience.

Basically they skipped out on building power negotiation smarts that are required to support real USB-C charging, and instead just swapped out the physical connector.

Zuckerberg famously made the Facebook apps basically just a responsive webpage under the belief that maintaining one codebase for all platforms would be best.

The performance on mobile was so terrible that Instagram started eating his lunch simply by maintaining native mobile apps that are actually performant, and Zuckerberg was forced to panic purchase Instagram (made by a team of 13 people) for a billion dollars.

Eventually phones got more powerful and mobile web browsers got good enough that PWAs could perform comparably to native apps, but it was too late, and Apple and Google had absolutely zero interest in promoting something that would damage their app store / play store revenue.

If there's a market-dominating company, and execs are allowed to leave said company, start a competitor, get some investor dollars behind them, then start poaching employees from the old company, the market can have a really viable competitor quite quickly.

Without that ability, little monopolies spring up throughout the economy and use their size to crush upstarts, under-compensate their employees, overcharge their customers, and squeeze their suppliers.

Banning non-competes is an absolute requirement for free-market capitalism to function properly.

Or perhaps some big IT departments are switching the employee base from Chrome to Firefox because it now has better ad blockers?

A mass of end-users switching browsers on their phones or home computers doesn't seem to line up with the reality that I'm living in though, though.

Spend enough time out late in Japan, and you'll see hour 24, 25, even 26.

He didn't live long enough to become the bad guy, but if he were alive today, I think there's a near-zero percent chance he'd support Clinton or Biden over Trump in either of those elections.

It'll be virtually impossible to short sell the stock within the first month due to lockups, and it'll take 180 days for all the pools to be available: then, we'll have a more-or-less "accurate" price, as you put it.

The landed gentry want you to believe that they can't be touched unless you're willing to kick your grandmother to the street, but we can absolutely write taxes that apply more narrowly, and sensible tax policy leads to better outcomes and fewer market distortions than hamfisted regulation.

It'll absolutely be interesting to see if "Google" or "Gemini" appear anywhere in the new Siri UI.

Nobody is talking about this because it's not a thing.

People here will shit on LLMs all day for being confidently incorrect, then upvote aggressively financially illiterate comments like this.

Many years ago, I had a couple drinks with a guy from Netflix who worked on their video compression processes, and he fully convinced me they're squeezing every last drop out of every bit they send down the pipes. The quality is not great compared to some other streaming services, but it's actually kind of amazing how they're able to get away with serving such tiny files.

Anyway, I think we can expect these companies to mostly max out the resultant video quality of their bitstreams, and showing the average bitrate of their pricing tiers would be a great yardstick for consumers.