At Microsoft TechEd in 1997 in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft bought out SeaWorld for the attendee party. I wound up getting really wet from the orca that they used to have there splashing people and met 3 other guys on the bench in same state. We went wandering around laughing and drinking. There was an Australian from NSW, New Zealander from Auckland, a French Canadian out of Ontario, and me, a fresh off the boat immigrant from Russia. I couldn't understand half of what was said! Aussie and kiwi were giving each other lots of good natured ribbing. The canuck was having fun and so was I as we got progressively more silly. One of the best parties at an industry conference I've had. Ahh the joy of dialects!
Not exactly on the same topic, but I think it's a good story. When my children were little we'd put them into summer camp. I would send an appointment with "something rather summer camp" from my @live account to my wife on her @hotmail account (you can tell the vintage of us by those, but anyhow). By then both of those were running on Exchange infra. I also had a b-dash@microsoft account at Microsoft which was was sure on Exchange, I wanted to block that time on that email. Well, I'd get these bizarre failures to deliver those calendar that were incomprehensible. I eventually tracked it to not liking "summer camp" in subject line. I changed it to "summer lamp" and they went through. !!! Because I was quite connected to Microsoft ecosystem, I was able to file this in proper raid/product studio repo and get it fixed (never sure of the exact reason though), but for years after that my children always went to "summer lamp" because it was funny that way.
My wife was talking to someone in her early 20ies and mentioned DVD player and apparently that's considered ancient now. Ahh to be young and blithe about it.
We have a 4K Blu-Ray that gets used every once in a while and the 4K Dune and few other titles looks absolutely stupendous. Local 4k streamed from Plex is pertty close. but nothing supposedly 4k streamed from Youtube or Netflix really compares, the blacks show artifacts and stuttering, even through gigabit fiber. can't beat local playback!
I was about to post the same thing. Except here someone wants that minus brain? good luck. I recently saw someone watching The Island on the airplane recently and remembered being reasonably well entertained by that movie. Obi-wan was sure having fun riding a motorcycle in it.
Sedentary patients have tons of health trouble from lying in bed constantly, I'm not sure if its possible to grow a healthy human that doesn't move about.
I had a Mazda 3 hatchback, fun little car with stick shift, when our second child arrived. It was not possible to fit in a second rear-facing car seat behind driver AND have the driver seat be in any acceptable position for me or my wife, there was just no space left in front. We researched the seats and ultimately it was easier to get a bigger car than mess with it, so we got a Volvo XC70 that had plenty of space. Once the kids could face forward, the typical Graco style seats were too wide and the middle rear passenger seat was not usable, so we invested into 2 narrow-profile seats that left the middle seat more useful. I can't remember the brand anymore, but it took a lot of research to find the narrow ones and they weren't cheap.
And none of this have contributed to us not wanting more than 2 children. That wasn't going to happen regardless of any car seats. People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.
You're not really arguing against the paper; the study showed a lower birth probability of only 0.73% in places with car seat laws. That suggests that yes, sometimes it does deter parents from having a third kid, but most of the time it does not. And the paper doesn't say that the third car seat issue is the only consideration parents might use to dissuade them from a third child.
> People not wanting to have more than a 1 or 2 kids has so many other, more important reasons, I very much doubt that car seat size has much to do with it.
Yes and no. It is a bunch of little and big things that add up to that decision.
It is interesting to see how much the car seat issue adds to the decision making.
I am from that side of the world originally and been paying attention to this conflict daily for last 5 years. It is infuriating to see the terrible arrogance of the weapon makers towards hard-won cleverness and ingenuity of Ukranians and even Russians. The era of high cost high tech things like helicopters, tanks and airplanes is clearly in transition to cheap swarms of drones. The famous operation last year where the Ukranians drove trucks to airports, launched drones from them and destroyed a bunch of irreplaceable Russian strategic aviation can be trivially done here at Lewis McChord base and I am sure nobody would be able detect it. The current war in Iran shooting down cheap Shaheds with multimillion dollar Patriots is also insane. This is yet another example of established companies just milking the budgets and not focusing on next conflict.
The sci-fi authors have been writing about this for a while. Artur C. Clarke's "Superiority" comes to mind as exactly that situation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story) and I remember reading somewhere it used to be mandatory reading in Army education. But of course none of our leaders here read anymore.
> era of high cost high tech things like helicopters, tanks and airplanes is clearly in transition
Tanks, yes. Helicopters, possibly. Planes, no. A stealth plane or heavy bomber can do things a drone cannot, and currently evades both air defenses and drones when used properly.
Back in the Longhorn (that is, Vista) days, I was friends with an engineering manager on the core desktop services team. He told me about how the "combine icons" in taskbar feature came to be. I think it came out after XP? mmm. I think yeah it came in Vista right after XP. Or was it one of the XP service packs? Anyhow, it was endlessly introduced by PMs, and endlessly cut after obnoxious reviews. Per this guy he just coded it one day and pushed it into daily build. Got in a lot of trouble but it made it.
Glad they're putting taskbar back into whatever sides. I despise my work Mac's single location at the bottom, wasteful waste of space. I've had icons on the left since Windows 95 and I like them there.
If you take the English, run it to LinkedIn, and then swap the sides, it translates back to English. It is very funny to keep doing over and over, it gets progressively more absurd.
ENG: Amazing -> LI: Game-changing -> ENG: It's the same thing we've always done, just with a different name. -> LI: We’re sunsetting our legacy frameworks to double down on a rebranded, high-impact strategic pivot—same core DNA, but optimized for next-level market alignment. #Innovation #Branding #StrategicGrowth -> ENG: We're killing off our old, broken tech to try a desperate rebrand because the original plan failed. It's the same crap as before, but we're hoping a new name makes people actually want to buy it. -> LI: We are sunsetting our legacy infrastructure to pivot towards a bold, strategic rebranding initiative. By evolving our core identity, we are aligning our vision with current market demands to better serve our community and drive meaningful engagement with our innovative solutions.
My recently deceased mother had a talent for talking to anyone at any time in any language. She's always been incredibly social and could establish connections with strangers very rapidly. One time she brought in a school teacher/sheep farmer from Dagestan selling yarn from his sheep's wool, she met him at the market and bought all yarn and asked if he had somewhere to stay before going back, and he didn't. He stayed in our house for a couple of nights, and then we visited him in that little village in mountains of Dagestan on a summer vacation, talk about going back a few centuries in time, an incredible and unusual experience.
I've had to spend week and a half battling Gmail daily email account limits sending batches of 500 emails just to notify people in her address book, receiving hundreds of responses. Her memorial was attended by hundreds of people.
It served her very well in her chosen career of real estate sales, although I think she'd might have done really well in community organizing or even politics where those skills are also very useful.
On the flip side, it was sometimes difficult to be there as family wanting some attention, since her bright light was always shining in many directions.
I've inherited just some of that talent, and I think it is a talent, but trainable.
> I've had to spend week and a half battling Gmail daily email account limits sending batches of 500 emails just to notify people in her address book, receiving hundreds of responses. Her memorial was attended by hundreds of people.
I love this story, because I had the same experience. When my dad passed, I had the same 500 email limitation, and had to send out multiple waves of emails through Gmail. He was loved by so many people!
It is fascinating to be around such social people. I still remember my great-uncle as a kid. He lived a very simple live as a rural farmer in Germany. He did not have a wife, and he didn‘t have kids, but he had a deep tie to his family and everyone around him. When he passed away during my teens, there were hundreds of people attending his funeral. I was amazed by the impact he must have had on all their lives given they‘ve taken time out of their day to give him a last farewell.
I also notice the generational gap the author of this article highlights. My parents are in their 50s, my brother and I are in our mid 20s.
My parents still have their friends from school, from their apprenticeships and different times of their lives. We can‘t go anywhere in a 100km radius without my dad knowing someone. In school I literally had bus drivers ask me if I am <dad‘s name> son, not because they heard my name, but because we look so much alike.
When looking into my brothers and my life, most of our friends from school left for far away. Things my parents considered normal back in their days, are now considered weird. While my parents still experience an incredibly supportive circle of friends, I would not know who to invite to my hypothetical wedding tomorrow.
Granted, I may be an extreme example. But even when looking more generalized among my peers, most of the friendships we have seem to be significantly more superficial and also fewer than our parents.
As fresh immigrant to USA, watching it on local PBS on the gigantic back projection jumbotron TV someone offloaded on us back in mid-90es, it made a huge impact with its absurdity and silliness.
I sing "Drinking Fresh Mango Juice" every time I get it out of the fridge, and when my wife and I visited Egypt and got room service with fresh mango juices, it was in heavy rotation. And every time I leave and it's cold outside, I tend to sing "It's cold outside!".
RIP
