British coins really seem absurdly overly-beefy for the monetary value they represent. I think it’s a way of saving up metal for the next time the Germans need sorting out.

I (white boy) visited India in the early '90s and brought back a bunch of rolls of half-Rupee coins as souvenirs. Turns out they were the exact same weight and diameter as US quarters (even down to the number of ridges, which makes me suspect India bought a bunch of used US minting machines to make them), so I started using them at laundromats. The exchange rate at the time was 35 Rs to the dollar, so a load in the US that normally cost $1 was costing me less than 6 cents. I do feel bad for the harassment that actual Indian customers probably ended up receiving, although possibly the owners never noticed or cared.

go to live shows

Live shows not put on by Ticketmaster! Shit …

My small tech company (which I really liked working for) had < 100 employees. We struggled through a few near-death experiences because of slow sales and panic from our original investors, then we got saved for a few years after being purchased by a larger company (with around 1000 employees). Then that larger company (a small player in the networking equipment genre) got bought by probably the largest player in that space, and within six months everybody from the 1000-person company (excepting a few c-suite types) were laid off - the company had only been acquired in order to eliminate a very minor competitor. There is no safety in small.

I love when owners show off how “practical” that truck bed is - when it has about the same carrying capacity as my roadster’s trunk.

I saw my first cybertruck in person the other day. It looks incredibly dumb in promotional photos, but it’s astonishing how much stupider it looks in traffic surrounded by normal vehicles.

earnest reviews of their employers (which is literally the core of their business

I don’t understand the need for a site like this. I just assume that my employer is going to suck in standard corporate suck fashion.

Tesla people seem to be on their phone more often than other people in the road.

I don’t know, I see people in all different makes of cars talking on their phones while driving - usually that weird shit where they’re holding it flat in front of their face and yelling into the mic. I’m a school bus driver and whenever somebody blows past my flashing lights (which happens a lot), 99% of the time they’re on their phone and not paying attention. One time I even had a cop do this.

whenever people see Teslas, they automatically start laughing

I dunno, I’m a school bus driver and little boys (like, grades 1-8) always go apeshit when they see a Tesla (or a Ferrari or Lamborghini as well). And a lot of adults still seem to be buying them.

AI ain’t gonna give two shits about climate change.

Oil money. They even mention the UAE.

Open sesame

I’ve been feeding my local crow family, unsalted roasted peanuts almost every day for two years now. They know me and come flying over whenever they see me walk outside my house, sometimes they even follow me home in my car or on my bike. They’ve never brought me shit, ungrateful little bastards.

I was just kidding - I haven’t touched Visual Basic in almost 20 years now. I’m not sure I could still code in it even if I wanted to.

because they can provide

Most of them can only provide a room in their mom’s basement.

I wrote a Classic ASP app in 1999 that placed a web UI atop a mainframe application that dated to the late '70s and allowed easy navigation of really enormous data structures. I learned last year that it’s still in use at that company; amazing not just because my code is still around but because that fucking mainframe code is still running.

both we and our customers need Cobol, Fortran, and other half-dead languages coders

Visual Basic? (fingers crossed)

Their spell check sucks too. “I’m the capstan now!”

I’m sure even fewer people want the thing I want back: a scroll wheel a la Blackberrys from the '00s. Those things were incredibly accurate and allowed pixel-specific pointing, something that you just don’t get from a touchscreen.

My personal favorite was the early-90s Macs that didn’t have an eject button for the floppy drive, but did have a pushbutton power switch … directly above the floppy drive. It took me weeks to stop powering off the computer every time I wanted to eject the floppy. Silly me, not picking up on the oh-so-very-intuitive practice of dragging the floppy icon over to the trash can in order to eject it.