In a reversal of the birthing process, school buses (representing the outside world) disgorge children, who are promptly reabsorbed by the womb (represented by the parent’s cars). In my subdivision, the side roads become parking lots of stay-at-home parents who drive as far as 600 yards to meet the school bus at the main street. It’s impossible to maneuver around them, and the occupants resent the belief that anyone would want to. Rather than roll the windows down and shut the engines, they idle them for ten to twenty minutes with the AC on. This is entirely alien to my free-range, latch key childhood.
Zenos’s Amazon Delivery Dichotomy Paradox. Emblematic of Amazon’s enshittification, the delivery tracking of my orders, regardless of paying for shipping or opting for whenever-no-charge, keep having their ETA pushed further back. Half-way here; half-way of half-way; etc. but never making progress. Tracking shows them bouncing from one Amazon processing center to another, giving lie to their excuse “Nobody wants to work anymore,” since presumably every island in this archipelago exists because it has staff. The next iteration will be Schrödinger’s Amazon Delivery Paradox, where boxes arrive that may or may not actually contain my item.
In the mornings at 7:20 it is impossible to safely exit our neighborhood. Because the HIGH SCHOOL students are waiting in their parents giant SUVs parked on both sides of the narrow street as it comes out onto a busy road. You daren’t go between the parked cars because you cannot see anyone turning into the neighborhood from the arterial road.
We live at the very back of the neighborhood. The distance to the main road and high school bus stop is 1100 feet. There may be some homes that are 1500 feet away.
These are 14, 15 and 16 year olds. If it was snowing, sub zero temperatures, pouring rain, maybe. But no, this is every day from September to June.
The 17 and 18 year olds are of course driving to school in their new BMWs, Land Rovers, Audis and Ferraris.
More than once I have seen kids walking to the elementary school in our neighborhood, with mom creeping along in the SUV following at 2 mph. I don’t get it. Either drive your kids to school or walk with them!
The government did a lot of harm with it’s “Stranger Danger” programs. Turns out- it’s not strangers at all, but almost always someone you know and trust, or estranged parents. TV certainly hasnt helped with several shows showing students abducted off the streets because “they walked”.
Also, when I was a kid, we lived too far away to be able to walk to school (elementary, jr high, and high). The elementary kids were picked up at the corner which was about a 1/4 block from my house. Junior high and high school kids had to walk maybe a block to catch the bus. It never, ever crossed our minds to ask our parents for a ride to school. They would have said, “take the bus”. I don’t know anyone that was driven to school. But this was back in the magical years of the late 60s through late 70s.
It irritates me when I see a school bus that is practically empty. What a waste.
There’s a copier in a meeting room near my office. It has a handy energy saver function, it goes to sleep after a time. Another cool function is that it will wake up when someone walks up to it, some sort of proximity sensor.
However, when I leave my office, the shortest route to the main corridor is through that meeting room, which is unused 99% of the time, and the chairs in the room force me to walk along the outside, near the copier. So, every time I leave my office, the copier turns on. Even though there are 8,000 lights on, it feels wasteful.
I would guess that’s due to drivers costing more than gas, or some limits on how long the route can be. I live on a town with busing available for some students, and not others (based on distance to the school.) essentially all of the parents whose children are theoretically within “walking distance” (distances set into law in the 60s, when the kids actually walked) drive their children to school. And essentially none of the ones whose kids are eligible for busing do so. Some drive their kids to the bus stop, but not all the way to the school.
Our high school doesn’t bus unless you’re over 2 miles away. Lots of kids, like mine, get driven. We always dropped Kid Cheesesteak off at least a block away from the school, so we’re not trying to drive through the thick of the buses, walkers, and other drivers right in front of the building. He now requests getting dropped off 3 blocks away so he can get a solid 10 minutes listening to music while he walks.
Same. It’s 2 miles for high school, 1.5 miles for middle school, and I’m not sure for elementary school because there are only about 5 kids in a little corner of town who qualify for elementary school busing. (That bus probably drives mostly empty.)
Disney/Hulu offers a bundle that includes Disney+, Hulu, and Max for way less money than what it would cost to subscribe to those services individually. I don’t really care that much about Disney+, but I do want Hulu and Max, and the cost of the bundle is basically the same as basically the same as what it would cost to subscribe to those two services individually, so why not. It basically gets me an additional streaming service for no more money, and there are a few things on Disney+ I might watch.
Except:
Because I signed up for my current Hulu account through Roku and not directly through Hulu, I’m not eligible to just switch to the bundle plan (something to do with my account being billed through Roku rather than Hulu). I have to cancel my current Hulu service and then re-sign up to get the bundle.
So I canceled my current Hulu plan. Except when I originally signed up I chose the yearly plan rather than the monthly one because it was cheaper. So my current Hulu plan won’t actually end until next March when it was scheduled to renew.
Hulu won’t let me sign up for any sort of new plan, the bundle or otherwise, until my current plan ends.
Therefore, I can’t actually sign up for that bundle until March 2026.
I’m not really sure that I should be contributing to this thread, because if something infuriates ME, that confers world-shattering importance upon it. But I’mma give it a shot: YouTube captions.
They are often rife with misspellings. I presume that the captioning is done with automation. I cannot also presume that the captioning feature does not permit quality control on the part of the content provider (i.e., proofreading and manual error correction). If you’re going to put your content on the internet to be available for viewing for years to come, SHOW A LITTLE PRIDE IN YOUR WORK; TAKE SOME TIME TO GET THE CAPTIONING RIGHT!
Yes it is. For YouTube “Shorts” I use software called CapCut that will automatically generate captions from the audio and give you snazzy fonts and animations. It’s pretty darned good, nailing the entire thing most of the time, with occasional issues (like if I’m talking about a “Canon AE-1 Program” film camera, it will stuff that up). …and it provides total control over the final output.
I totally agree with you about laziness on the part of creators. I meticulously proofread every bit of the AI-generated captions, fixing mistakes and, more often, adjusting the pacing.
I’ll add on the basic underlying laziness problem: apparently few amateur content providers watch their own videos. It drives me crazy to see blurrycam, focus hunting, shakycam, scripting issues, and other flaws that would have been caught had they actually watched their videos before posting.
And as I probably posted here earlier, if your channel is all about showing close-ups of old coins, make an effort and set your camera to manual focus on a tripod–stop fussing with focus hunting, or at least edit out the blurry parts.
Darn it, I watch every minute of my videos multiple times to make sure the flow is right and there are no major gaffes. Some slip through, but nothing like those folks who just don’t try.
