Exactly.

My thought when opening the post was basically, “Can you imagine the depths that American corporations would sink to in a market where they can totally conceal the flavor, size, quality, etc. of their products until after the sale, and not have anyone from the company present, making them totally immune to any negative feedback?”

Presumably the companies behind these things in Japan are at least delivering a somewhat acceptable food item. I wouldn’t be surprised in any way to find an American version of this thing dispensing literal dead rats.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Marjorie Taylor Greene looks like the second or third pic from an Animorphs cover.

Share your art, not your fart!

Well…fuck em, I guess!

If they’re charging so much that the local govt needs to pass that on in the form of a $5 fee on a $9 payment, they’re either gouging, or have an unsustainable business model.

Either way, fuck 'em.

There’s no justification from a pure convenience standpoint, but I could respect the pettiness if the electric company ran their shit like one local government office in my hometown, where there was this small annual fee they charged like $9 for…but then to pay it, you could either mail in a check, hand deliver cash or check or card…or pay online…where they added a $5 “convenience fee” to a sub-$10 payment.

You bet your ass that I paid that shit in person every year, in loose change, and requested a receipt (which they had to write up manually because they didn’t have a system to process and print one).

Would the victim be officially dead?

Which is why there should be legal mechanisms to place legal responsibility for decisions like this personally on those in leadership positions when they’re being made, even if those people no longer hold those positions.

You bet your ass the chucklefucks who came up with this little stunt would’ve thought twice about it if they knew that there was a decent chance they’d go to prison for it.

Also gotta make this shit sting the shareholders too: make the company pay the victims not only the estimated value of their data but also a portion of all profits made while a policy like this is in effect. Since there’s no easy way to tell how much money was made off their data, unless the company has the numbers, let’s say half.

Suddenly the quarterly report’s got a nice repayment shaped dent in its side and all the sudden the shareholders care about following the law and respecting the rights of customers.

Chocolate with raisins is super common though…

Not that we need to open this can of worms here, but it’s a pet peeve of mine that “vanilla” has become a term used to mean plain, boring, sheltered, standard, mediocre, underwhelming, basic, and uninteresting.

Vanilla is an amazing flavor that comes from orchids that must be hand pollinated to cultivate at scale, and has a long and interesting history. It’s the second most valuable spice after saffron.

Just feels wrong to use that as a synonym for bland and blah.

LotRers.

Fans of Lord of the Rings.

Maybe not the best parallel but a good point nonetheless.

A more apt comparison might be:

“What’s the best all-beef hot dog I can buy at my local supermarket?”

“Ugh! OMG! Don’t do that to yourself! Why would you even want to bother with eating beef if that’s the shit you’re going to put in your body?! Just get some Japanese A5 Wagyu ribeye and thank me later!”

Fucking cormorants…they kill lots of fish that they can’t even eat, plus a ton of fish that they do eat…and they’re federally protected.

I don’t care about that so much as the hyper specificity of not only “you have to be on the political left here” but “being to the left isn’t enough, you need to be this far left, and hold these specific views on politics, technology, etc.”.

And the community that is here is, amazingly, somehow even worse than Reddit, on average, when it comes to being a hive mind that is wildly intolerant of any disagreement.

Not only that, but there’s a 100% chance they sell this shit to you as a forever mouse, then in a few years if it’s not making them money hand over fist, they’ll discontinue it and keep your money.

legions of career bureaucrats who run federal departments get replaced with Trump loyalists.

For many of those bureaucracies, this is absolutely foreseen and intentional.

See…while bureaucracies often get a bad rap for being slow and inefficient, there’s often simply no (superior) alternative. It’s like how everyone bitches that it takes so long to get from point A to point B on the interstate, but taking an alternate route that avoids it takes even longer.

And while they may be frustrating, they’re usually run by capable people in the federal government. The lazy federal workers that the civil service is known for do exist, but they don’t typically rise to the level of making their bureaucracy work or not work, they’re low to mid level functionaries who’ve found a niche where their team will carry them and pick up their slack without creating a department-sized blip on the radar of any high level official.

These P2025 people…and MAGA Republicans in general…are trying to set up a win-win for themselves with this tactic: either they replace bureaucrats with loyalists and turn it into a reward system they can use to shore up support…or they remove enough pieces of the Jenga tower that it collapses under its own weight, proving their accusations that these agencies are dysfunctional, and using it as a flashpoint to push to eliminate these agencies and privatize the functions they performed…both allowing them to turn that service into a profit source for friends while also freeing up those tax dollars for their own purposes. And in the process, the American taxpayer gets sold down river to an organization looking to charge as much as the market will bear for the services that were once funded through taxes. The people will still pay the taxes, of course… they’ll just get less in return for them and have to pay more of their wages to get the same or worse services.

It also wouldn’t cover a meal from Uber Eats.

Definitely worse than nothing.

Philips doesn’t cam out that easily either.

I mean…that’s an inherently subjective statement.

But more objectively, regardless of how easily, it’s still the worst of the available options.

Well said.

And with the hex/Allen, it’s the small contact points as well as the smaller volume of material that needs to be deformed or removed before slippage can occur, as well as the angle of force on the contact point.

With a hex, the contact point and direction are such that the tool is effectively trying to scrape off material at an angle, and if/when it succeeds even a little bit, it’s now much more prone to fail.

With a Torx, the contact area might still be small, but it’s being applied to the lobe in a more perpendicular direction, so rather than a scraping failure, it’s more of a force that is pushing directly against steel instead of scraping. Not that it can’t fail, but the route to failure is significantly less likely.

For some reason, Ford decided to use Security Torx to hold together their hybrid battery packs. Couldn’t tell you why that was better then regular Torx.

I’d guess that was some sort of safety standard designed to protect vehicle owners from themselves.

As Torx gets more and more common, it’s presence is less and less likely to be a serious hurdle, so the security screws are a simple way for them to sort of say to the owner “don’t mess with the stuff below this”. If they want to, they still can, but it’s a specific effort at that point…so Ford can say they’ve implemented a safety measure. Might even be some sort of government standard too, where using a less common fastener style brings them into compliance without needing some sort of even less accessible design, like a sealed off system.