Some of it comes down to the way so many of us are underpaid.

I’d get a hell of a lot of use out of a pickup truck if I had one. Not enough to want to daily drive it, but enough that it would be worth having.

But for most of my daily driving, I could just about get away with an electric golf cart (the way laws are in some states I probably could use something like a golf cart, but my own states implementation of NEVs and such are a little stricter)

In an ideal world I’d have some little electric sedan for most of my daily commuting and errands, and then a truck (though probably a small one) for when I need one.

But I don’t have the budget for 2 vehicles, nor the parking space for them.

Personally my compromise is a mid-sized SUV that fits most of my needs well enough. Others may decide that the best compromise for them is to daily drive the truck. I don’t think most of those people have actually thought too deeply about whether that’s actually a good choice, but I’m sure that for some people it does actually make sense.

I think it might be worth re-reading this comment through the lens of the other comment where you dug up the details of the (alleged) actual story. Not too sure which came first due to the edit in the other comment.

The guy pulled his car over to grab her and lecture her after the incident happened. That’s not ok and shouldn’t be covered under good Samaritan laws. Really that could be grounds for something like assault charges in some jurisdiction. Potentially if she wasn’t a minor she could have even had a decent shot at a self-defense claim if she’d shot him when he grabbed her (this is 'murica after all) he continued to escalate a situation that was already resolved and introduced physical force into circumstances where it wasn’t warranted.

What you probably pictured (I know it’s what I had in mind) was probably more like someone grabbing a girl to keep her from walking into traffic. That would probably be covered under good Samaritan laws.

But holding onto her after that to yell at her probably wouldn’t/shouldn’t, that’s uncalled for, though there may be a little more leeway there since it would still sort of been in the heat of the moment. Odds are probably pretty good that she wouldn’t have even pressed the issue since he just potentially saved her life if that were the case.

As for it being considered a sex offense, I think that’s a case of the laws being poorly-crafted, the insane way we craft laws to “protect the children” (except when the rich and powerful are involved apparently) and the justice system being broken because that aspect of it is kind of bullshit and probably should have been thrown out on appeal. What he did was wrong and I think there should be consequences for that, but I don’t think there’s any reason to think it was wrong in a sexual way unless there are other details to the story that have been glossed over.

I love small trucks. My parents have a '93 ranger, it gets pretty good mileage with that little 4 cylinder engine, and has a 7ft bed, and it’s hauled all of the lumber and furniture we’ve ever needed it to.

It’s only rwd, so it’s kind of shit in any kind of weather, and it’s 0-60 time is probably best stated as “eventually” but that’s realistically all I need from a truck.

I like the maverick, but I’m not a fan of the short bed. I’m crossing my fingers that maybe they manage to finagle a midgate into it somewhere down the line.

Otherwise I’d really love for them to bring back something like the 90s style rangers (or Tacoma, S10, Dakota, etc.) as a hybrid or electric, or hell even a decent modern 4 cylinder turbo could probably give a nice mpg and performance boost. The modern versions of those small trucks are significantly bigger than I need them to be, and in at least some cases you can’t even get them in a long bed configuration anymore.

You can and I’ve looked into them

Fact of the matter is still that I live in a townhome with no parking besides my 2 assigned parking spaces, an HOA that definitely wouldn’t like me leaving it on the front lawn, and to put in in the back of my home I’d have to get it over a curb and drag it through about 5 neighbors’ back yards to get it under my deck (and the HOA might still have something to say about that)

So to have a trailer of my own, I’d have to find somewhere to store it, and since I don’t have any friends with extra space in their driveways who will let me leave it there, that would mean more ongoing expenses.

Parking is an issue in a lot of places. I have 2 parking spaces I can use, and they’re needed for my car and my wife’s. I don’t have anywhere convenient that I could park a trailer.

And I could rent a trailer, but that can be a pain, the handful of times I’ve done it the places nearest me didn’t have the trailer needed in stock on the days I needed it, and if you need it frequently enough it can get pricey

And, frankly, towing a trailer is a skill that some people just don’t have. They might do just fine in truck, but throw a trailer into the mix and things can get weird quick.

If I were the type of person who was willing to give AI the benefit of the doubt and not assume that it was just picking basically random numbers

There’s a lot of cases where it can be a shorter (by distance) walk than drive, where cars generally have to stick to streets while someone on foot may be able to take some footpaths and cut across lawns and such, or where the road may be one-way for vehicles, or where certain turns may not be allowed, etc.

I have a few intersections near my father in laws house in NJ in mind, where you can just cross the street on foot, but making the same trip in a car might mean driving half a mile down the road, turning around at a jug handle and driving back to where you started on the other side of the street.

And I wouldn’t be totally surprised if that’s the case for enough situations in the training data where someone debated walking or driving that the AI assumed that it’s a rule that it will always be further by car than on foot.

That’s still a dumbass assumption, but I’d at least get it.

And I’m pretty sure it’s much more likely that it’s just making up numbers out of nothing.

I’m still looking for what to do if I’m alone and something happens.

You can do abdominal thrusts on yourself, or you can use something like the back of a chair or a railing to rest your fists on and use your body weight to basically perform the same action

So I’ve been running Linux for a few months now. Making the switch was pretty intimidating at first but I have a couple thoughts now.

1. Back up any important documents you really don’t want to lose, you should be doing that anyway. Everyone is different on this of course, but personally when I went to do that I realized that I didn’t actually have anything I needed to back up. Most of my stuff personally is already saved somewhere in the cloud, and we can nitpick about whether that’s really a robust enough solution, and the ethics of the big tech companies holding onto my data and such, but that’s where everything was for me. And pretty everything that wasn’t is all stuff that I can easily get from the source I originally got it from anyway.

If you have important work documents, or big collections of music movies, pictures, etc. yeah, that’s a bit of a chore, but again if it’s anything that can’t be easily replaced you should make backups anyway.

2. Once you’ve done that, you’ve got nothing left to lose. You have your backups, and while it’s intimidating to hit install that first time, trust me, it is really hard to totally brick your computer to the point that you can’t just wipe everything and either try again or even reinstall windows if you really need to. You may need to spend a couple hours googling on your phone and borrow some time on a friend’s computer to create a new bootable flash drive or something but unless you really try to you’re not going to totally fuck up anything.

3. Like I said, my parents have been running off of a flash drive for about a week now, you can do that too, test things out in that safe little sandbox, you basically can’t break anything from that live USB.

4. If you know enough to get yourself in trouble, you know enough to get yourself back out of it again, and you’ll have learned something from the experience. I’m actually at the point now where I’m kind of excited to eventually really break something to give me an excuse to try out another distro as a daily driver. I’m not trying to break something, but if it happens, it’s an opportunity to try new stuff.

5. Maybe I’m weird, but setting up a new computer, figuring out the settings, and personalizing it the way I want may actually be one of my favorite things. When I do that I always seem to find a fun new thing that I didn’t know was there before.

Yeah, it’s absolutely a weird curve like that

I’m kind of in the second batch where things get hard, I’ve managed to keep myself from diving headfirst into some crazy hard to maintain distro and biting off more than I can chew, but it’s really weird not knowing how things the way I did on windows.

My parents are older, in their late 60s and 70s, neither of them are particularly tech-savvy. They’re not totally helpless, they’ll usually do an alright job of basic troubleshooting like making sure things are plugged in, turning it off and on again, even look around a bit for settings and try to Google their problems before calling me.

They’d been using a copy of office 2003 or something like that age since that was new, they had the disk and didn’t feel any need to upgrade to a newer version. At some point they “upgraded” their computer to windows 11 which finally seemed to break compatibility with that old version of office.

Of the two of them, my mom is slightly more technically savvy. They had started using Google docs at her job before she retired, so she was able to switch to that with no major issues.

My dad couldn’t quite get the hang of that. I put libre office on their computer and told him it was just like Microsoft but free, and he’s been using that just fine since then.

Their computer, while technically compatible with Windows 11, seems to really struggle with it. They’re old retired people, they watch YouTube, do basic word processing and spreadsheets, check their emails, and go on Facebook. It’s not a beefy computer and they don’t need one, I’m pretty sure there are smart toasters or something these days that can do everything they need.

On a whim I stuck a bootable USB flash drive with Linux Mint on it in their computer about a week ago, and have had them test drive that. It does everything they need, they’ve had no issues with it so far, and even running off a flash drive it’s been running smoother than windows 11.

So when I go visit them tomorrow I’m gonna be making some backups and installing Linux on their computer.

Pretty much the one program they use that’s not a web browser or office software they use is Hallmark card studio (2007 I think) to print their own cards. Not gonna be the end of the world if they can’t use that anymore, but fingers crossed I’ll be able to get that running in wine. Wine HQ lists its compatibility as garbage but I don’t think anyone has tried to do it in a few years and wine has come a long way recently, so I’m cautiously optimistic.

So if these two old people can learn to use libre office and Linux, no one has an excuse.

In addition to my advice on your bloody Mary abomination chili

Around 10 or 15 years ago, I learned this chili recipe from this comic I probably found on Reddit. It has always served me well, and it is the basis for how I make chili today

To this recipe I also add some chili peppers, usually jalapenos (because otherwise it’s not chili)

A can of chipotles in adobo

I’ve tweaked the ratios spice blend a bit to my taste and added a bit of cocoa powder and cinnamon.

It should probably be noted that I tend to make bigger batch, often working with 2-5lbs of meat (and I prefer coarse ground or something even finely cubed meat as opposed to regular grocery store ground meat)

I usually have 2 or 3 different cans of beans in mine because I like beans

I’ll usually do 2 or 3 bell peppers, usually of different colors

Some bacon, some chorizo

Screw that “a shot of beer” it gets a whole can. Occasionally wine instead if that’s what I’m drinking while I’m cooking.

Often some coffee and/or various liquors (whiskey, rum, tequila, or Brandy)make their way into the mix at some point. Sometimes there’s beef stock involved.

I also pay really fast and loose about what canned tomato products go into my pot, whole, crushed, diced, sauce, doesn’t matter too much, it’s all gonna cook down into unrecognizable red-brown deliciousness by the time I’m done. Just try to get roughly that sort of ratio of tomato products to beef

For bonus points, get your cowboy on and do this in a pot hanging from a tripod over a campfire.

Normally I end up letting this simmer for up to around 6 hours. If it starts looking too thick/dry, add some liquid, usually beer in my case.

Credit for the original recipe: cookingcomically.com

Yeah that’s basically what I’m describing.

I think you just have more of a precise, technical way of describing it probably because you’ve actually professionally worked with color and received some formal training

Whereas I’m a guy with some self-taught Photoshop skills who paints minis, so my color theory is a little rough and ready.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag

By this point my dad was divorced from his first wife, married to my mom (they’re still together) who was pregnant with me. I’m still 7 years into my first and no signs of that going south. No kids on the way, but don’t want them.

Couldn’t afford them if I did though.

They owned a house, I kind of do (sort of a complicated situation of buying my mother in laws house, lots of handshakes and verbal agreements, but she’s kind of dragging her feet on paperwork. Wouldn’t be able to afford it without the family discount, so not a terrible trade off)

I didn’t get drafted during 'nam, so I got that going for me. He never actually left the country though, he ended up stationed in Kentucky, so arguably he just got free room and board and a bit of free job training for a few years.

My mom never had to work a full time job after they got married, my wife and I both work full time and still never seem to be able to save much money.

I remember my dad once talking about how he almost bought a brand new Bronco II (he was somehow talked into a Ford Tempo instead, which was a huge mistake, that car was a piece of shit) when he was probably about my current age. The idea of buying a brand new car is absolutely wild to me. I’ve never been able to afford a car that was less than 10 years old.

Mentally and emotionally I think I’m doing as good or better than they are. I have more and better friends. I’ve managed to do, I think, some much cooler things than my dad has (my mom has some pretty cool stories from a couple times her family visited relatives in Poland and when they managed to get one of them to visit America, not an easy thing to arrange during the cold war, especially when the family in Poland was basically dirt-poor)

I have a dog, they didn’t at this point in their lives.

My dad had a little bit of a fucked up home life growing up, but he turned out mostly alright, and my childhood was pretty stable, and I also turned out mostly alright.

It was really cool growing up with the internet before it enshitified. I’m glad I got to experience that.

By this point in their lives, the cold war was or nearly was over, the US came out on top, and it seemed like things were gonna be all sunshine and rainbows from there on out. By contrast… Well you’ve all seen the news for the last 2 decades or so.

If you absolutely must use bloody mary mix for some reason

Brown up your beef, saute up some diced onions and crushed garlic and the peppers

Add it all to a pot, add the bloody Mary mix

Season with some cumin, and (if needed, some bloody Mary mixes can be pretty heavily seasoned) salt, pepper, garlic & onion powder, chilli powder, maybe some herbs like cilantro, oregano, maybe basil

Maybe a bit of flour to help thicken it, otherwise you’re gonna need to be very judicious about how much mix you use or it’s gonna take forever and risk the flavor getting weird trying to reduce it down and concentrating the seasoning in the mix.

If it’s coming out a bit too tangy and acidic, a bit of sugar or maybe brown sugar can help cut that

If you can, consider using some fresh or canned tomatoes, or even plain tomato sauce, that’ll probably get you a better texture, but I suspect that if that were an option you could, should, and probably would skip the bloody Mary mix

I’d also maybe consider adding some bell peppers to the mix to make it a little chunkier. Maybe some corn.

Maybe some bacon, chorizo, some diced meat in addition to the ground, etc.

I like to add a beer, but starting with bloody Mary mix that’s probably gonna thin things out a bit too much. Wine and stock would be other options but with the same problem.

End of the day, chili is a stew, and the origin of stews is pretty much just throwing whatever you have in a pot and letting it simmer, there’s not too much to it.

Not a Cincinnati guy, but I have eaten chili there and made my own, and I’m gonna second that

But I do add some cocoa powder to my regular chili recipe, and people rave about it. Sounds a bit weird, but consider, for a momento the existence of Mexican Mole sauces that often contain chocolate. I’m not adding much, it doesn’t taste chocolatey, but it does add something nice to the whole flavor profile.

Adding it to Cincinnati style chili wouldn’t be traditional, but I could definitely see it working very well with the flavor profile if you didn’t care about making it authentic

You are right that paint is kind of its own thing and doesn’t really fit into the RGB or CMYK systems

But I would say it’s overall still subtractive. The paint and whatever you’re painting on isn’t giving off any light on its own, its just reflecting whatever ambient light there is (which is usually more or less white) and subtracting from that.

You could maybe argue that it’s more replacive (is that a word?) than additive or subtractive. It just kind of is what it is. It’s just replacing the substrate’s reflectivity with its own since it’s opaque like you said.

And when you mix paints it tends more towards that grey-brown because like you said it’s not layered, it’s more that each pigment is right there on the surface next to each other reflecting and absorbing their part of white light.

So if you mixed cyan and magenta paints together, instead of light passing through layers of cyan and magenta until all the red and green are filtered out so that only blue light reaches the white paper and is bounced back to your eye, you’d have cyan piments reflecting blue and green, mixed in right next to magenta pigments reflecting red and blue. So both are reflecting blue and the resulting color will probably look blue-ish, but the cyan is reflecting some green, and the magenta some red, so that pulls the color more towards grey (somewhere between white and black, even if you mix all 3 it cant really get down to true black or true white because some light is always going to be absorbed and some reflected)

You are right, but I felt like that kind of gets a little too far out of an easy-to-explain model, and decided to kind of push that off into the stuff I said I was going to gloss over because colors are weird

I suppose it’s sort of more like the pigments are intentionally imperfect to compensate for the also imperfect way that our eyes pick up colors that aren’t exactly red/green/blue

Put another way, let’s say white is 100% of each red, blue and green light, and black is 0% of each. Every other color is made up of different percentages of those three.

Your monitor is counting up from zero, you just need to add the colors you want.

On a white canvas you need to subtract from 100.

Cyan is basically negative red, magenta is negative green, and yellow is negative blue.

Like others have said, it’s about additive vs subtractive color

And to start off with, probably everything you know about color is probably over simplified, or even outright wrong. Light and color and how your brain interprets that information is pretty complex stuff. Even this explanation is gonna be glossing over things.

Starting from the basics, white light contains all of the colors of the rainbow.

Your eyes, however, are mostly only sensitive to red, green, and blue light, most people only have receptors in their eyes (cones) for those 3 colors. They do pick up a little bit from the surrounding parts of the spectrum but not much, and your brain sort of fills in the gaps from there. If your red cones and green cones are both getting stimulated by light, your brain will interpret that as yellow or orange depending on just how much each is picking up.

So your monitor is starting with no light across all 3 colors (black)

And then adding light to get the desired colors.

But if you’re drawing or painting, ou’re starting with a white canvas, not a black monitor, so how do we go about getting the colors we want!

Well we’re going to put paint or ink on the canvas to absorb the colors we don’t want.

Back in elementary school art class you probably learned about complementary or opposite colors. Unfortunately the colors you learned were kind of wrong. Close enough for kids mixing finger paints, but not exactly.

The opposite of red isn’t green it’s cyan.

The opposite of green isn’t red, its magenta

But the opposite of blue is in fact yellow, so one out of three is something I guess.

What does that actually mean though? Well yellow ink absorbs basically all of the blue light while still reflecting red and green.

Cyan absorbs all the red light, while still reflecting blue and green

And magenta absorbs all the green light while still reflecting red and blue

So by mixing and matching those 3 colors, you can dial things down from 100% white light to a mix of red green and blue that your brain can interpret as other colors.

In theory mixing a bunch of those 3 colors together, you can eventually get down to black, in practice your pigments aren’t perfect, and even if they were it would get expensive to use that much of those 3 pigments which is why most color printers are CMYK, with “K” standing for black for reasons I’ve never bothered to look up and I’m not gonna start now.

So your monitoring is adding light from 0 up to make the color you need. It’s “additive.”

And paint is dialing things down from 100 to the desired color. It’s “subtractive.”

Hopefully that all makes sense, color is weird.

Philadelphia - it’s just Gritty.