This is the exact same argument that I see used against EVs almost daily, while the people making these calls for “better analysis” ignore the dodgy mining practices and literal wars that are the result of oil extraction. But let’s go back to fireworks. I spent all of 30 seconds Googling and found this. I’m sure it’s far from an exhaustive list of firework ingredients but it’s a decent start. Highlights include:

Sulfur - extracted from oil and natural gas.

Aluminum - 28% of US aluminum comes from recycled sources, which is great, but any that goes into fireworks is then lost forever. The rest of it comes from mines in Canada and Jamaica.

Iron and copper - Mined domestically and both are recyclable but gone forever once they’re exploded.

Strontium - Mined in Mexico.

Barium - Mined in China.

Sodium - Mined in Chile and Peru.

How come you’re not asking for a better analysis of the mining practices for the ores extracted in Jamaica, Mexico, China, Chile, and Peru? How much of anything that makes up your average firework, including cardboard and plastic, is recycled at the end of that firework’s life? How many fireworks are reusable even once let alone tens or even hundreds of times? Much like with oil burning cars, these things are ignored because they’ve been around for a long time and it’s normalised. Meanwhile emerging technologies, while demonstrably cleaner/better in pretty much every metric, are held to impossible standards that the old tech gets a free pass on.

No, we don’t recycle much lithium yet but it’s a new technology and battery recycling plants are springing up all over the place all the time, and these same plants often deal in the various other electronic materials that you cited. How much used petroleum is recycled each year? How many fireworks?

I don’t want to argue and I should probably just delete this rather than posting it, having said my piece to myself, but perhaps I’m my own worst enemy…

7,500 reusable/repairable drones in this show vs more than 12,000 single use fireworks in London’s last New Year’s show alone.

I fully agree that fireworks still have their place, but I think the suggestion that they’re in any way comparable to drones from an environmental standpoint is way off base.

Yeah, minus the animation it took me a couple hours. Well worth the time spent!

Nice! I’m learning Python right now so I’m going to take this and make a script out of it.

Back in the 2000s I used to have an app on my PC where I could enter my salary or hourly wage, hit a button when I went for a poop, hit it again when I got back and it would tell me how much I’d earned on the can.

Wonder if there’s anything like that for phones these days?

Kudos to you for doing this, but for all that free press they got and the exec’s trip on the company dime, you’d have thought they’d let you keep the £500!

Never named any of my cars until we got an ID4. It is called Heidi.

Neither does the BBC’s couch to 5k app, for who knows what reason.

ohnoanyway.jpg

Some of the very first ones were great; Trevor the vampire, and the one that birthed Homsar (possibly the very first one?). Stuck with it for all the classics; lightswitch rave, Trogdor, teen girl squad, 20X6, Sweet Cuppin’ Cakes (I still bring up Eh, Steve! to this day).

Eventually they started getting longer and longer and lost a lot of the punchiness and I stopped watching.

I think my favourite is probably Trogdor. The way Strong Mad has just carved ‘DAGRON’ into the table always makes me chuckle for some reason.

It’s the same in the UK but “legal tender” doesn’t mean what most people think it means.

When you buy something from a shop you’re technically offering to enter a contractual relationship for the purchase of said goods. If the shop agrees to your terms, including how you’d like to pay, then the contract is ratified. If they don’t accept your preferred method of payment then there is no contract of sale and there is no debt to be paid.

This is also why shops don’t have to honour pricing errors; when you bring the item to the checkout you’re technically just offering to buy it for the listed price and they can choose to reject your offer.

Ah, the sex toilet https://youtu.be/dR1m29cNVsc

I can’t stop chuckling. Needed that, thanks!

This is the correct answer. Due to wear levelling, a traditional drive wipe program isn’t going to work reliably, whereas most (all?) SSDs have some sort of secure erase function.

It’s been a while since I read up on it but I think it works due to the drive encrypting everything that’s written to it, though you wouldn’t know it’s happening. When you call the secure erase function it just forgets the key and cycles in a new one, rendering everything previously written to it irrecoverable. The bonus is that it’s an incredibly quick operation.

Failing that, smash it to bits.

Gotta hold my hands up and admit that in my initial haste to confirm the price I fell victim to the Play Store putting sponsored results ahead of what you actually searched for and I installed some crap called minimalist launcher, which charges £70 for a lifetime license. That’s what my “insane” comment was based on.

In comparison it’s nowhere near that bad for Niagara, but it is still pricey compared to most apps, and I balk at paying a subscription for software in general so that still stands.

Might give it another go after all…

Reading the article and justification given I do actually get the idea of it. They want to levarage the parent company’s clout and connections in order to convince other app makers into implementing a way for Sesame, the universal search app/plugin, to pull results directly from those apps. For the parent company it would give them a USP in the analytics market.

In short: Think of searching for a product from the launcher and rather than it opening Google, it returns results directly from the Amazon app, or eBay, or any other app that supports the functionality. Obviously there’ll be an affiliate kickback for any click-through and you’ve got a decent revenue source.

It’s a good idea, I get it. Would I feel comfortable using it? I don’t know. On the one hand it just cuts out the middle-man of searching for and clicking through to products via Google etc. On the other hand, all of the concerns already raised in this thread!

I like Niagara but it’s insanely expensive, especially as a subscription. I don’t know how people justify it.

Edit: The above was based on me getting duped by a Play Store sponsored search result and installing some crap that charges £70 for a lifetime licence. In comparison Niagara feels like much better value, but it’s still expensive compared to most apps and I still don’t like subscribing to software in general.

So many Google products are either crippled or completely unavailable outside the US, it’s honestly quite ridiculous. I’m still waiting for call recording to be made available in the UK.

Aw man, yeah, the ending of AC1 where Desmond uses the eagle vision and discovers the code on the wall, it gave me chills at the time. I was so hyped for where they were going to go with the story and for a modern day assassin arc.

But I guess they realised they had near infinite points of history they could stretch the franchise out to, and keeping the Desmond story going was only going to limit their cash cow’s potential.

I checked out half way through the Ezio arc that seemed to go on forever and only went back because everyone was raving about Black Flag. By then the modern day story made zero sense to me and was just a slog.

My kids are of the age where they’re starting to think critically about it. We’ve never directly lied and said that he’s real and have instead answered their questions with a “do you think he’s real?”, and then they have a think and conclude that he is.

When they come to us with more of a statement than a question, for example “Santa isn’t real, is he?”, then we will let them in on the ruse.