I took a folding bike on a visit to Toronto and used GM in cycling mode. I guess it wasn’t too bad in the downtown area? But then I forgot to set it back to driving mode on the way home and it picked a rather whimsical route for a car. I thought it was just trying to stay off highways to avoid the notorious Toronto rush hour at first, but eventually, it wanted me drive through the woods on a “trail” that was barely discernible as such.
Now that you mention it, I have family in the Bay Area and had an incident with them too!
I was visiting and had a small econobox rental (I forget the exact model). I said hey, we should take this thing up to someplace with a lot of giant redwoods. I’ve never seen huge trees! And so I looked around on the map and saw a Big Basin Redwoods State Park that sounded promising.
The first leg turned out just great. But after touring the park, it was still early afternoon and I thought maybe we can go to Santa Cruz and have dinner before swinging back? The GPS at that point said I basically needed to backtrack down the same road for a ways, but that sounded boring. I was a tourist. I wanted to see new sights! So I had it choose an alternate route down China Grade Road. I still remember that name. Omg. It was a logging road with aggressive dips and switchbacks with huge drops if you missed one.
As a bit of a epilogue, a couple of years later, I was reading “The Never Game” by Jeffery Deaver, and at one point, the protagonist is hunting for someone at Big Basin. After not finding them, he decides to check along a nearby logging road. Hey I’ve been there man! Don’t do it!!
TIL MapQuest is still around.
Years ago, I had one of those standalone GPS mappers that used it for its database. It always gave you the option to choose between shortest time and shortest distance. Generally, I went with the former, but this one time we were heading home and not in any special hurry, so I said let’s try shortest distance just for kicks.
Next thing you know, we’re on a hunting trail in the Adirondacks in a Geo Metro that was definitely NOT rated for it and my wife was absolutely freaking out while the kids were getting tossed around in the back. Good times.
Oh ok. Well, steel is also 50% tariffed with a lot of it produced in Canada, so the end result is basically the same.
It’s been an education.
On the positive side, I never realized how many products are actually manufactured in Canada. There’s a Canadian option for nearly everything I see at the supermarket. Toothpaste is an odd exception. Some items read “Made in Canada using domestic and imported ingredients”. They don’t specify beyond that where they were imported from, which is a bit annoying.
One thing that really pisses me off is canned soup. Apparently, Campbells went around at some point and bought up nearly all the independent canneries, replacing them with a few giant ones in the US. Even Habitant, which I had always thought of as a Canadian brand, is under the Campbells umbrella at this point. But Canada (specifically Quebec) is the primary aluminum producer for North America by a good margin, which means a 50% tariff ding for every can produced. This affects American and Canadian consumers alike. Canned soup is supposed to be affordable, dammit!
Well, it turns out there is one cannery left in my area: Sprague. They’re a bit of a boutique brand, so not necessarily cheaper, but at least they’re not tariff-inflated and they make a good product. Their soups generally don’t contain outrageous amounts of sodium like most of Campbells offerings, and all their cans have pull tops which is a nice touch. I’m giving them a lot of business now and hope they can expand to fill the void of Canadian producers.
RAM prices are just going to keep rising and rising, aren’t they?
My wife actually won about 40 bucks in Door Dash credit for going with Spain!
55-zip. Now that’s a high scoring game!
Seriously though, I only watched the WC for the first time this year, and I don’t know the history behind FIFA corruption. What I observed over the past month was:
And now, of course, selling the whole organization out at the highest levels. So how did we get here? Or do I not want to know…
It’s hard to think of an industry that is more optimized towards the discomfort of its clientele than the airline industry. In terms of the evangelist sitting next to you, that’s a symptom of a problem exacerbated by the ought-to-be-illegal practice of overbooking flights to ensure every seat is filled, thereby leaving no recourse for a flight attendant who may want to have the aircraft equivalent of having an elementary school student stand in the corner.
There needs to be some maneuvering room to separate belligerent passengers, though you wouldn’t want to “reward” them by giving them extra space as a buffer zone. Or if this is inevitable, something would need to be done to make the time-out corner more uncomfortable than regular seating. But I have confidence they could come up with something? This is an area of expertise for airlines.
This is when it becomes painfully evident all your food, regardless of brand, comes from one ginormous central processing plant because economies of scale and wealth concentration produced that optimization.
That’s kind of an insane distance. The article mentions it’s the first refinery they’ve hit east of the Urals. No shit. So is China, and Omsk is about that far away from Ukraine.
Ironically, the only solution may be to drain the swamp and start over?
It’s chilling looking at the animations in the article. The left turn one shows how a pedestrian can be killed in even what should be a pretty low-speed collision. This is exactly what happened about a year ago to a cyclist at a busy intersection where I live, and I had always wondered how such an accident could prove so deadly?
I used to be into aquariums, and now I’m wondering how big a plecostomus could grow if released into a tank of that size?
I worry for Moldova, that Russia would take them as some sort of consolation prize for not getting what they want in Ukraine.
The article suggests visual scans—presumably of Pokéstops and what not—could be used in drone navigation when GPS is jammed. Wouldn’t Street View be far more appropriate for that?
Hmm…does this mean the Mexican and Canadian host cities are going to get swamped instead?
I have zero interest in attending a game, but I do have to make trips to Toronto and the traffic, even at the best of times…
This of course hinges on my parents and uncle staying reasonably healthy and financially secure, if they end up as vegetables with a nursing home draining all of their assets or decide to blow all of their wealth in Vegas or something the whole plan could kind of fall apart.
I’m a Gen X with Gen Z kids and this is literally the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I don’t want to go through a long and costly retirement. My mom got dementia. My dad lived to be a hundred. Either of those outcomes fills me with dread that there is no way I have saved anywhere near enough to make that work. At least I don’t see myself doing the Vegas thing, unless it’s a side-effect of the dementia?
Wait, they’re not all made in China? Last time we were ordering some for a development board at work, we had to source them from China, though that was admittedly a few years back.
I mean you might be right, but don’t they have to overcome an enormous bureaucratic inertia to get there?