Just a public service announcement: xylitol is incredibly toxic to dogs. Way more than chocolate.
Since it's commonly added to candies and even some forms of peanut butter, please be careful when leaving these things around your kitchen. A few pieces of Ice Breakers sugarless gum can kill a 50lb dog.
Xylitol. It's made from a birch bark extract. I only learned the specifics after I caught my pup having dug an empty pint of Rebel out of the trash and lost it. Then I looked up the info online. Some sweeteners will upset their stomachs, but Xylitol will kill them.
I'll give my unpopular opinion here: eliminate all extracurricular sports in American schools. There is too much money, time, and resources spent on materials, facilities, staff, and programming that only benefit a minority of the student population.
In other parts of the world there are sports clubs to accommodate those kids (and, eventually and more importantly, post-school adults) eager or talented enough to push their limits, and they can do it after school or on weekends.
The article above fails to mention the connection why a lot of parents subject their kids to year-round training. They're looking for the golden ticket to get their kid a college scholarship or, even less likely, fame and fortune in the NCAA and beyond. That system needs to be dismantled.
(Protip, to you young parents reading this: your kid will resent the pressure and 99.9% of the time they will outright quit the sport once they're out of your house. Think about how much time and money you've spent to date. Don't you wish you had those weekends back?)
My high school district alone employs multiple "vice principals" that are coaches for the big football team. They get the administrative title so they don't have to teach classes. They all make six figures plus a retirement pension, on top of a football stadium that costs a fortune to maintain for 12 games a year. And we're not even in Texas. =)
We also have an obnoxiously early start time, which has been proven time and time again to hurt student performance. Some kids are up at 6:00am to catch the bus. Why can't we move the start time later? After school sports.
I'm a Scoutmaster (USA). It is disheartening to see kids and their parents give up Scouting to in order to attend practices or games. Some do it because they think they'll have a better chance at scholarships (they won't), the rest I'm not sure. I played sports and did Scouting when I was a kid, and I got a lot more out of Scouting.
I have a nephew who played baseball his whole life, whose parents sunk tens of thousands of dollars in training, tournaments, etc. He got one partial scholarship that would never amount to the money they spent, and he gave that scholarship up after a year to transfer to another university where he would have more playing time, and it's unlikely he is going to be picked up.
Somehow my sports never interfered with my troop meetings or campouts, but I can't say the same for the Scouts in my troop.
The scholarships aren't that hard to get. I got several scholarship offers and was at best in the top 30% of players. One of the worst kids on our team got a scholarship but of course it was to a small school far away. The thing is though that college sports are more demanding than a full time job in addition to doing actual school. For even 99.99% of college scholarship athletes there is NO chance of any professional career of significance. I loved playing high school sports, but college was a major escalation for very little pay off.
I wasn't ever athletic (short and autoimmune issue made most sports painful), but I'm pretty sure my good results for college admittance was because of my Eagle Scout
Today, Scouting has lost a lot of luster for complicated reasons, and sports are so dominant that I wonder if there is anything comparable for kids today. Maybe music, but that generally is much more expensive than scouting.
> I'll give my unpopular opinion here: eliminate all extracurricular sports in American schools. There is too much money, time, and resources spent on materials, facilities, staff, and programming that only benefit a minority of the student population.
> In other parts of the world there are sports clubs to accommodate those kids (and, eventually and more importantly, post-school adults) eager or talented enough to push their limits, and they can do it after school or on weekends.
But that is what the author of this article is writing about, expensive travel teams.
> The article above fails to mention the connection why a lot of parents subject their kids to year-round training. They're looking for the golden ticket to get their kid a college scholarship or, even less likely, fame and fortune in the NCAA and beyond. That system needs to be dismantled.
In my experience, which is not the same as analyzing data, it is almost never the parents pushing their kids to compete at the highest level. It's expensive, it's time consuming, and parents are usually happy when their kid gives it up. It's more like the kid sees what other kids are doing and wants to do the same thing. That puts the parents in a tough position.
There's loads of data that indicate better educational and life outcomes for kids who participate in sports. Of course the high pressure and things like travel ball are bad. The toxic parents that think their kids are going to go pro are awful as well.
I think sports should be extremely encouraged if not required, but should be done strictly through schools, but it's a somewhat free country so people can do what they want.
How can those studies be sure they aren't conflating cause and effect?
Maybe the traits that often lead to success such as being tall and athletic build help you succeed in your career (most CEOs are taller than average for example). You can be fit and healthy without organized sports.
Most kids playing sports aren't necessarily tall and athletic, anyone can play, not everything is the varsity football team in a competitive district. Most kids playing sports are just average.
Schools are great at making kids dislike sport. They are not so great at making them enjoy it.
The kind of sport good for education of kids is the one they like, that causes only low pressure and where you do not feel like complete failure for not being as good as others. You cant get that in school, but you can get it in clubs.
My two cents: Americans deeply distrust education. It is naturally hierarchical, which is to say not democratic. It is labor intensive, and resists efforts to make it capital intensive.
But sports programs, and jobs programs we tolerate pretty well.
But the price doesn't change from the time between putting the ticket in your cart and checking out with your credit card. These articles are implying that this could happen in a grocery store. There's no way consumers would stand for it.
Airline booking sites enforce the same by holding your cart for 30 min/1 hour or so. After that you are required to repick your tickets with possibly higher prices.
Apple uses lots of other chips in the products besides the M-class mega processors being built at TSMC. Think of peripherals and MFI authentication chips.
Woke up each morning, checked fuckedcompany.com for the latest news, then went over to Yahoo! Finance to watch my holdings get ground into dust. Lather, rinse, repeat for a year or so.
FC and Slashdot. There was a lot less traffic in the Bay Area in 2002 than 2000, and it was easier to find parking in downtown Palo Alto, but the eBay parking lot on Hamilton Place in San Jose still looked like a supercar showroom of the PayPal mafia. (Probably because eBay was used to liquidate the detritus of speculative economy like :CueCats and Webvan promotional materials.) Silicon Valley (San Jose - Santa Clara - Sunnyvale) commercial real estate vacancy rates hit around 25%. I opted to return to finish my EE/CS undergrad and do security research and IT consulting in .edu to pay for university.
Stores aren't going to change the price six times a minute. Like you said, existing laws would stop it from happening and customers would revolt if it did. The headline is just hyperbole form NPR even if it's technically true.
yep headline is a bit over the top. sadly, ive lost my faith in customers. i do remember seeing gas stations prices being manually updated in the daytime during rush hour. i can imagine even a change in price once during open hours could cause confusion.. and it would be hard to catch. how many folks do you know actually pay attention to price next to item vs checkout price? - most folks i know just pay-whatever and ignore 2nd checking at register
The next big thing was supposed to be Field Emission Displays. Microscopic electron guns directly behind each phosphor. The big manufacturers experimented and tried getting it commercialized for decades, then pretty much gave up in the 2000s when LCDs got stupid cheap.
I have an HD plasma and it is fantastic. It is the very best living room display I have owned.
Like the CRT, it has glowing phosphors in a tube. Unlike the CRT, it is pixel addressable, where the CRT is basically not addressable, or maybe just field, frame and or line addressable. Of course the tradeoffs are well known. Resolution scaling on a CRT is rarely an issue, except when the dot mask is too coarse. It still looks great. It can be a major issue with pixel addressable displays, when uneven multiples are in play.
In my experience, a good plasma is right there with the CRT on color gamut and contrast, even does well on speed. Or can. Mine is 120Hz and does not lag more than a CRT does on 60Hz signals.
(If you want a fast one, get one of the 3D capable TV sets from that era. They have fast video processors and basically can run at least double the necessary frame rate. And if you have an nVidia GPU and good CAD software, you can even use one as a wall sized 3D display featuring a bunch of things an ordinary set will struggle with and large assembly visualization as well as technical surfacing being two use cases I found amazing.)
AMOLED looks like it may be the next plasma. I have one from Waveshare that is 10.5" and has 2560x1600 resolution. I wish it were bigger. It is fantastic! It has a much higher DPI than my plasma does and appears to not require a PWM cycling of pixels to get those hard to hit grey levels.
I am learning I like displays where the light is not filtered down to a color, instead is just emitted at the color. Micro LED could be another contender if they can get the dot pitch high enough.
All that said, I keep a few CRT displays. I really like them for retro computing and gaming.
microLED is the next plasma, with tiny non-organic LEDs. Organic LEDs have some problems with color gamut and (AFAIR) response time that make them inferior to plasma, whereas microLED, while still exotic, is being rapidly developed.
I've even worked on a color science-related project that attempted to use LG OLED TV as a poor man's reference display, and turns out they use a lot of tricks like dithering, heavy power limiting and low brightness resolution for each subpixel that make them look bad when pixel-peeping.
Ahhh, thanks for that. microLED was my first hope, until the AMOLED tech seemed to fill the gap for the smaller, high DPI, display use case at least. Nice to see the rapid dev going on.
Are there differences between OLED sources? I'm using Samsung AMOLED displays at present. I don't have access to an LG.
Do you have any thoughts on DPI for microLED?
I will definitely poke at the displays I have more to see what I can learn.
Sorry, cannot answer these questions competently. From my understanding, LG has monopoly on TV-scale OLED displays, so others big players in premium TV market (Sony and Samsung come to mind) bet on productizing uLED.
I have the second to last generation Panasonic plasmas. 42" 1080p display. At first the picture was amazing but over time it degraded slightly with what looks like subtle noise affecting the entire display. Solid colors have a faint shimmer of noise in them. As if white noise was blended with everything.
I still use it as a bedroom TV. I can barely lift it myself and it claims to use 450watts of power. It's certainly a lot. It's notably warm near it and will heat my room if I don't open the door.
Still the picture quality is very good at a distance. Only oled or micro led displays look better.
This could be that you just noticed it? Panasonic plasma cells brightness is controlled by PWM off a 600 Hz carrier (it's even proudly advertised as "600 Hz!" on the TV box and stickers). While the number is quite big and stands out nicely against "240 Hz" advertised as refresh rate for the competing LCD TVs, it did not provide many different brightness levels per pixel (keep in mind that it's divided by 60 Hz or higher frame refresh) so those TVs were running temporal stochastic dithering to create more levels. If you looked closely at a new plasma TV screen it was very noisy with random pixels firing up at high frequency.
The level of noise went up dramatically after the first year. I read that this is part of the panel aging. It hasn't gotten worse since then. My two biggest gripes are high brightness areas don't work on large portions of the screen. A windows file browser is basically unusable.
The heat is probably what will eventually get me to replace it.
The heat! Many plasma displays had a faint heat you would feel on your face if you were near that I found uncomfortable. I am not sure if others felt the same.
I had a year of sickness, or so, back in the day. I decided I was gonna blow as much money as I could on the "best" TV setup. I bought a 42" plasma TV, and I sat it on the floor in my living room, in front of a window.
You could see the heat-haze above the screen, the air shimmering in front of the window, after it had been on for a while.
Lovely display, far too expensive, and far far too heavy, but for the five+ years I kept it I think I got my money's worth.
I had a Zenith 42" plasma (maybe Zenith Z42PX2D?) for about 10 years before the screen became insanely noisy and LG OLEDs hit the market. Really an amazing display though, at "tv distance" (6 to 8ft) the 852x480 resolution was not at all noticeable as "low resolution".
What I actually found was dog-shit quality video looked AMAZING on it, as did downsampled high-res video -- I had a media center pc hooked up via DVI, and off it went.
I replaced it with a 1080p 55" OLED in 2014 or 15 when it became unwatchable, and it's been incredible as well aside from very rare, short instances of judder.. As per my Zenith experience above, I figured lower-res (not 4k) would be better in the long run.
Curious to see how long it lasts, but it's still very bright and very good almost a decade later, no burn-in, no dead pixels, and it's on constantly.
I've still got a 42 inch GT60 plasma and while it certainly runs hot it's pulling about 140W on average so it's no space heater.
It's become a bit more noisy, but not in a way that impacts viewing for me. After a while you don't see it anymore just like film grain...
The problem with MicroLED is that they remain very expensive to produce, so they may have no chance to compete on price, and the quality of OLED is getting better as well. Apple recently abandoned their MicroLED plans:
https://www.yolegroup.com/strategy-insights/did-apple-just-k...
Since it's commonly added to candies and even some forms of peanut butter, please be careful when leaving these things around your kitchen. A few pieces of Ice Breakers sugarless gum can kill a 50lb dog.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/paws-xylitol-...
reply