FTA:

Many of the passages are longer than 600 yards (550 meters) and tall enough for an adult to walk through without bending.

Checks out.

Not that I disagree, or even have the data to see what’s really going on here, but… okay, look. Men have a place in porn. That said, IMO, nothing kills the vibe faster than some dude with the build and charisma of a wet potato sack. Aesthetics reign supreme here and yeah, pretty guys are out there crushing it.

Honestly, this is a golden teachable moment in critical thinking. Jr here is starting to ponder the implausibility of a myth. Encourage more thought, guide away from magical thinking, answer their questions honestly, and reward them for arriving at better answers. Then follow up with a big reward as they’ll probably feel a tad disillusioned when it’s all over.

This one: https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustBikes

They’re selling billionaires a bridge to nowhere; and it’s working.

Look, I’m not saying it’s a good thing. In fact, it would be an insanely wasteful use of resources, labor, energy, etc.

That said, folks are all about “eat the rich” and this may very well be the closest thing to that.

PhD level intelligence

Which PhD’s, exactly?

Yes, that matters quite a lot, actually.

What in the actual three-ring-fuck is going on in this picture?

I know that church doesn’t have to be as solemn as a funeral, but still… unless these production levels are generating millions for charity, I can’t imagine how people are just okay with this.

I really don’t understand why.

Anti-Microsoft ideologues, mostly. Giving MS any quarter is antithetical to their chosen axe to grind. Pay them no mind.

I’m waaaaayyyyy too orange-pilled for this. Both images are wrong.

It helps to live in a place where most people do work like this. It’s more culturally acceptable to simply not ask in the first place.

I’d go as far as to say that it’s so ingrained in some folks, that it’s a dead giveaway what they’re up to based on whether or not they ask you what you do for a living.

Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?

Real answer: yes, but also no. Depends on context.

Professionally, proper hard-disks go back before 8" floppies, let alone the 5.25" and their stiffer 3.5" counterparts. But those drives were comically oversized appliances (like rack-mount and even mini-fridge sized) compared to the stuff we have now.

For home-gamers, PCS have shipped with all three floppy formats shown above, at different times. Hard Drives start showing up for IBM PCs after they miniaturize to fit in the 5.25" drive bay form-factor. But all that’s just before the invention of the 3.5" floppy, and well ahead of it’s popularity as something that comes standard.

I was thinking the same thing. It should have at least morphed into an SD card by now.

¹Yes I did that

… and I hope you learned your lesson. :p

But we do have a QA department. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that’s humane or not.

Exactly. Once you know about “white box” goods and the robust Chinese manufacturing chains that support it, you can’t unsee it.

What blows my mind is that Amazon is just accelerating this, and at times, embracing it with their own brand. They’ve gone from being a whole-ass shopping mall to end-of-days-K-Mart in just a few years.

“A therapy” of goths, then?

Honestly, a Japanese-style capsule hotel and net cafe would probably do very well in a university environment.

Granted, that’s still charging people for homelessness, which doesn’t help any of the underlying problems. It’s just slightly less dystopian since it’s cheap.

I once had a 25" TV kind of… “un-skin” itself. It slid off of a hand-truck by accident, and while falling a whole five inches to the ground, the sheer weight and mass of the tube pushed itself through the brittle plastic housing of the set. What was left was a pile of plastic shrapnel and circuit boards, with a fully intact tube sitting atop it. It was only ten years old at the time, and I think it was either bad plastic or it lived its life in a sunny spot, letting UV destroy the material.

TV tube glass is actually surprisingly robust along the front and sides, despite containing a vacuum. It’s the neck that you have to be careful with. One false move and it’ll snap, destroying the whole thing.

Wow. I didn’t realize this until you pointed it out. Thanks. TIL.