....people didn't just... stop researching fluoride after the 40s/50s. Newer studies have found less of a dramatic benefit, likely because brushing with fluoridated toothpaste is more common, but there is still a significant benefit. The countries that reduced water fluoridation and saw little to no change have universal free dental care for children.
A lot of the pushback relies on pointing out that there are diminishing returns. Multiple sources of fluoride don't seem to have compounding benefits. But that completely ignores that the goal is to raise the baseline.
Not all kids are good at brushing their teeth, not all parents care or know to put it as a priority if they're struggling. It's not going to impact virtually anyone above the poverty line, but for the people who need it most it absolutely helps.
Fluoridating water is ridiculously cheap way to add a layer of safety. A ~15-25% reduction in cavities is absolutely worth pursuing.
One person hired a metal detector to hunt down the wedding ring they lost when camping in Sussex and found it within 20 minutes. Another rented a planer at £11 a day to fix two doors in her flat
A handheld pressure washer is £12 a day, while garden shears are £3.50
Renting is the "subscription" you're complaining about. You're right that rent-to-own is a scam at best, but unlike most digital subscriptions you're using the thing to do something. Like with all rentals there's a break even line where you would've been better buying the thing if you use it often/long enough. But the service existing is not itself a bad thing.
We rented a trench digger for the day from Home Depot in the 90s instead of buying one for thousands of dollars. That trench didn't magically go away when we returned the tool. That we didn't have access to the tool anymore was the plan.
Renting a U-haul for a move is incredibly more efficient than daily driving a giant box truck. Somehow, the things stay moved once the truck is returned.
Is it cannibalism? It feels more like a (talking) bear eating a human.
I do feel like the Stormtooper point got lost on Lucas too by RotJ honestly. In Empire they do pretty good except when they're, again, explicitly trying to lure the hero into a trap. RotJ has the most weirdness of the originals and probably the most EU 'redemptions'/revisions. With stuff like "here's what was really up with the Ewoks", Boba not dying, etc.
It bugs me that everyone harps on the controller. It's far and away the least suspect part of this.
Multiple generations of hardware iterations by many competing companies, well defined and understood software interface options, literally billions of hours of testing, easily replaceable, several axes of control, and a huge portion of the population has at least some experience with one.
There's a reason the military uses them when they can.
Anything post-2022, and probably post-2020, is suspect on Reddit because it became abundantly clear how steerable it was and how easy to generate sales as long as you didn't do anything too "suspicious". Current 'ad guides' tell advertisers not to link things because just saying the name reads as more authentic.
Before that it was legitimately people discussing, e.g., the best flashlight for x-y-z purposes. But a decent amount of old stuff has been gutted by people deleting their posts/accounts.
The trash-guides they posted are for a majority of the "arr" stack (Sonarr, Radarr, etc) that monitor stuff you ask for and automate a lot of the download handling.
Jellyfin is a FOSS media server alternative to Plex. They each have their minor pluses and minuses. Personally plex has been easier to get non-techie friends/family to use.
Docker is a containerization system. Basically instead of setting up a physical computer, or one or more virtual machines, you have a self contained bundle of everything a program needs to run that is linked to storage/network stuff on your actual system. Then they talk to each other.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is all immensely scalable. Especially if you don't care about long term storage of a bunch of shows/movies. You can set it up on your personal PC and it'll work fine. Set it up on a dedicated machineand it'll be a bit more reliable. Moving stuff around is generally pretty painless. ( as long as the trash-guides or some similar standardization is followed )
I've tried bookwyrm and hardcover and a few others. In general I think they're getting there, but there's weird edge cases where it's not as smooth an experience. Partly because they don't have a critical mass of users, partly because Goodreads really was in a pretty decent place when it effectively froze.
All that's going to improve over time, but atm, for me, switching costs from the old platform aren't worth it.
I wonder if they miscalculated the install + maintenance cost vs the charging fee they're giving customers. Like if it's not balanced correctly they could be losing money on each charging station. Maybe the stations require more maintenance than they anticipated?
That seems like a super basic thing to do if you're running the business, but so much of the initial rollout was about availability and low cost and do-it-now that maybe that was a secondary concern or they thought there'd be higher adoption by now. It also seems like a simple fix, raise charging prices and say why. But maybe either the discrepancy is too big or they're worried about customer/media backlash.
Or maybe it's another example of "move fast and break things" running into the real world and not being viable.
It's definitely at least "Internet Lore" at this point? I mean the car company isn't a namesake for no reason. I don't want to give The Oatmeal too much credit but it seems to have been the meme generator for a lot of 'the legend' on the web, though it's been kind of a counter-culture staple basically since he died.
IDK, just one of those things that I got interested enough to read actual books about awhile ago and it's kind of scary how much "common knowledge" is more "common mythology".
The War of the Currents was Edison and Westinghouse. The elephant was executed by the ASPCA and filmed by the Edison Studios years after, that company had been sold by Edison years before. The payment argument was Tesla and a manager.
Tesla and Edison wrote each other personal letters and spoke well of each other in public years later.
What execs? The Prequels are basically the highest budget indie film project ever. Lucas had total financial and creative control.