dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Zoomer Parker will not lug around an SLR camera in the next reboot; he’ll simply be a drone operator.

I’ll bet you it does, but you’ll need to put a new battery in it.

Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.

If we’re doing watches today, here’s what I’m rocking lately.

I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That’s a big old nope from me, dawg.

Yeah, I don’t trust the feds with any of my account details for anything. They can fuck right off with that.

It’s not like Elon Musk already illegally withdrew $5000 from some guy’s bank account on a whim, or anything.

Yeah, that turned into a Laurel and Hardy skit in short order. “But it’s ‘lifetime!’”

Uh-huh. You want to bet?

I had their credit card, too, for the simple expedient that you could take the rewards points and cash them out. You can’t do that anymore, because you can’t cash out membership rewards at all anymore. Which to be frank was the only reason to shop there since the pathologically sell everything at 100% full list price all the time. The dodge was you could get your discount in a roundabout way later by combining your normal membership points with the extra from the card, and then cash it out. Now that the membership points are just more company scrip, this is pointless. You may as well just buy the same stuff from somebody else for less, since there’s certainly no longer any ethical benefit to purchasing from REI to make up for paying extra.

Meanwhile, US Bank (the bank which used to issue their credit card before the transition) offers a Visa with precisely the same rewards structure as the old REI card, sans the extra couple of points on specifically REI purchases, which you can likewise cash out. So I just got one of those instead. It seems I wasn’t the only one who figured this out, because the CSR I spoke to in the process told me a lot of people were doing the same thing at that time.

Yeah, just wait until you get a load of the number of things called “One.” Here’s a hint: It’s a lot more than one.

I’d argue it already has. I no longer shop there and haven’t done so for years, nor does anyone else I know in any of my hiking/backpacking/rock climbing/riding circles.

Knowing full well that they measure their “success” via their membership count, I also bullied them into cancelling my membership several years ago. That was an interesting experience.

Not a case of “even REI.” REI revealed themselves into just another boardroom full of bad guys in 2022 and have not improved since.

REI turned corporate or at least pro-corporate shortly after the pandemic. This all went down probably not coincidentally right after they hired an ex-Amazon exec, Cameron Janes, to be their “Chief Commercial Officer.”

They’re turning into another profit motivated shitshow and have become explicitly anti-union, hostile to their own labor, and also hostile to their own customers. They did this in the name of making more money, but given that it pissed off swath of their core customer base who are probably more vocal, left leaning, and activist than the average bunch of consumers who all quit buying from them, I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a net gain.

I see. Perhaps I misunderstood the format.

I’m not sure I’d use Bill Nye as the example of the asshole atheist, unless that’s the joke. Maybe Christopher Hitchens.

Sure. You could do a cylinder of three quarters of a meter across which seems like a reasonable footprint for someone to stand in. That’d only have to be, uh, 325.5 meters tall to have the same volume.

Absolutely, but the scale of the balloons is a bit off. Nobody would be walking shoulder to shoulder like this. For a normal-ish 170lb/77kg individual your personal balloon would have to be a little under 6.5 meters across assuming it were filled with helium.

Yes, I did the math.

Just pick that fucker up and stick it on the other side of the Toblerone block.

And then revel in the inevitable fistfight with its owner that ensues. (Pro tip: Be sure to win.)

Yes, you and I know that. But I predict that all of the soon-to-be conservative legal eagles will studiously avoid that particular truth.

It absolutely is, so you and me both INB4 fuckheads suddenly all become Very Concerned about the 1st amendment all of the sudden (butonlywhenitbenefitsthemandscreweveryoneelse).

You rang?

I already own that exact same Kuru Toga, so this one’s a no-brainer.

Anyone who deliberately picks the Sharpwriter or the Bic needs keeping an eye on; we need to keep those kinds of people on a list.

Well, one source I found with a cursory search indicates that California spent about $15.1 billion, with a B, on its police in 2023. So I can think of a good place to start.

Anyway, I was following on to the above poster’s observation that electricity is already heavily taxed in CA. Just, none of that cash is allocated towards transportation (or at least in any significant manner insofar as I’m aware) I imagine because historically transportation and power consumption have not been intrinsically linked as they would become if electric vehicles become ubiquitous.

California already has the highest electricity rates in the country by a significant margin, and now they’re also doing stuff like this, which makes you wonder just what the hell they expect to be doing with all that surcharge money if it’s not modernizing their power distribution and soon-to-be electrically driven transportation infrastructure. In fact, incentivizing a switch to electric infrastructure including vehicles was supposed to be one of the stated intentions of that scheme, although it’s dubious if things will actually shake out that way in reality.

One thing’s for sure, the more they can structure their scheme so that it works via even collective contribution rather than making it appear to specifically punish individual drivers/owners, the much less pushback they’re going to get on it.