I guess it depends on what you consider passable.
It’s loud enough on 25% to disturb my neighbors, it’s clear and defined enough for me to watch normally and hear everything at 7%. There’s no observable delay, and the installation is clean enough to make my wife happy. It wasn’t cheap, but I wouldn’t consider it expensive.
Some films are meant to be watched in large formats with insane audio that just can’t be replicated at home. The Dune movies and Oppenheimer are a few recent examples I can think of that looked incredible in 70mm IMAX. I live in a major metro area and there are only 3 screens within 50 miles capable of showing 70mm properly. I choose to go out of my way to these theaters once or twice a year, if a great film is showing.
Short of films shot and shown in a true large format there’s no way you’ll find me in a theater.
I’ll watch content on small screens if I’m on a plane. Otherwise it’s my 80" living room TV with passable surround sound.
This is our time to shine Hydro Homies!
Why would right wing people come out to protest ICE? They all voted for exactly what is happening.
Maybe this question should also request the responder’s general location, because I imagine the situations vary substantially.
I’ve lived in California for most of my life, and we go on frequent drives between LA and SF, usually a few times a year.
In the 80’s and 90’s bugs would cover the front of our vehicles and the windshield would be difficult to see through even with wipers and washer fluid. We’d actually have to stop to manually scrape them off.
In the 00’s and 10’s we noticed that we’d get basically zero bugs on a long drive, and that sparked many conversations about California environmental law.
I just got back from a drive up the coast and I can happily say that we’re back to insane numbers of bug strikes on the highway. Just north of Ventura I drove through a cloud of large bugs that hit like rocks and instantly covered almost my entire windshield. This situation has been noticably turning around since COVID, which I think is a good thing
I don’t know if this is common, but in my family Legos are a common gift for children, and they never get thrown away. When kids age out (usually because they move out or go to uni) the bricks get tossed in a big mixed bag and handed down to the next round of youngsters. After at least 3 generations of this, the kids now inherit literal full sized trash barrels of mixed Lego. It’s awesome!
When it was my turn I got a big bucket, but two of my cousins got all of the Technic stuff, I was very jealous.
It’s a mixed bag.
Growing up was made difficult because school is so slow that I’d rather be getting into trouble than sitting in class. By the start of middle school I’d already read the entire high school honors reading list, I had to walk to the high school from my middle school in 7th grade to take math classes. I rarely had regular school work in high school, nearly all of my academic teachers designed a different curriculum for me, which was nice but probably mostly to keep me from acting up in class. I never studied or did a shred of homework, but got good grades.
Social interactions were tough, I’m not much of an empath, not that I don’t experience empathy but emotions just aren’t intuitive, actually they often are the opposite of what you’d expect to be helpful, especially among young people. I had to concentrate to read people’s faces and mannerisms to understand the emotional and social subtexts of most interactions. I self medicated with alcohol a lot in high school.
All of my academic classes in high school were honors, and my final 2 years were all AP, while lettering in 3 varsity sports (4 total, but you can only play 3 each academic year). It wasn’t until my second year in uni that I ran into a class for which I actually had to study (nuclear chemistry), and boy was that an awful surprise. A handful of classes were like this for me, most I just showed up 3 times and got a good grade: the first day of class so I wouldn’t get dropped, the midterm, and the final.
I read quickly, think systematically, and information just sticks in my head. It was very difficult to understand why this wasn’t how most people were. Everything I do I analyze for improvement, and remember to do it better the next time. My wife calls me a skill collector because people seem to think I’m super good at everything, but to me it’s just logical that if you’re going to take time do something you might as well do it as well as possible.
After uni things started getting easier. Being forced to closely analyze social interactions and systematically give the “right” reactions is extremely useful in professional life. I wear this mask in all my interactions with all but my closest friends. It’s a bit psychopathic, but I don’t do it to anyone’s detriment, it’s mostly to get along and fit in.
I’ve self selected for highly intelligent friends, and I’m exhilarated to meet new people who can communicate with the kind of bandwidth that our brains run at, if that makes sense. I’m still close with most of my friends from high school, who have had varying levels of success, but I still have to be guarded when it comes to activities or conversation to make sure I don’t stick out too much.
In general I have a very pessimistic view of people and the world. The average person isn’t very sharp, and half of all people are dumber than that. However many smart people do evil things, most of the time for no reason at all. It’s exhausting to keep up with it all, so I just focus on my path and my family, and do what I can to directly improve my community.
It would be nice to fit in a little easier, but I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything else.
Gas is expensive in California too though.
I’m not sure if natural gas in California is expensive compared to other areas, but I have natural gas in my heater, water heater, laundry, stove, and oven and I pay less than $30/month. My electricity bill is an order of magnitude higher each month and there’s only two people in my household and we don’t even have an AC or electric vehicle.
I’m not aware of any modern residential gas stoves which use a pilot, they use a spark to ignite on demand. Commercial ranges sometimes have a pilot though.
It’s still relatively common to have a pilot in a gas water heater or furnace though.
I was influenced greatly by Robert Axelrod’s short essay about the Prisoner’s Dilemma titled “The Prisoner’s Dilemma Computer Tournaments and the Evolution of Cooperation” (link PDF warning)
tl;dr The essay explores an iterative game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, and demonstrates how cooperation can emerge from a group of self interested participants. It has implications for the statistical emergence of morality, and even remarks on politics.
You’re not wrong, but in this specific case he was in ICE custody for less than 12 hours.
I agree this is total fuckery, but at least the dude was released hours later.
All of the wine being discussed in this thread comes from the blue counties just north of San Francisco.
Harris won Sonoma county 72% to 25% Trump
Harris won Napa county 64% to 33% Trump
California as a whole voted for Harris 58% to 38% Trump. The wine producing counties actually voted more blue than the average in a DEEP blue state.
Luddites.
AI might not be producing the best content, and it will change the nature of how humans work (or don’t), in good and (many) bad ways. But every culture which has resisted the inexorable march of technology has lost in convincing fashion.
I may not like it, but the current gen of AI is one tiny fraction of a step in a direction which cannot be stopped. Instead of fearing the machines we need to figure out how to best use them.
Reduce the natural resource consumption, and put the thinking rocks to work so humans can focus on what’s valuable and important to us. If people are freaking out that their memes aren’t drawn by hand, they’d probably be better served by not wasting their time on memes at all.
In the US we call that style of grill a Santa Maria, a style popularized in central California, I believe by the Spanish colonists.