Look on the bright side: I bet a fair number of folks like me didn’t know about this and now it’s on my front burner to-do list to check it out! Thanks for the good work.

Greenshot is so handy. I’ve successfully converted several of my coworkers to using it. Some of our corpo contract IT folks are secretly pissed about it because unlike us they aren’t allowed to use open source software (LOL) so they have to put up with windows snipping tool

Startup times getting down below 20s definitely helps with this. I haven’t had a machine that took over 30s for a few years now… even my phone isn’t that slow.

Was recently asked to look at a laptop because it was “running slower than normal” and “takes a long time to resume from sleep.” Hmm, ok. It’s only a few years old, probably just bloateare.

I powered it on and immediately got served an early-2000s size dose of 10+ minute startup time. This laptop from only a few years ago still came with a spinny disk drive… Ugh. Didn’t even bother trying to optimize it. It’s getting cloned up to an SSD before I even try to work on it.

Whenever I see “Culture War” in a title I know it’s going yo involve a shit take from selfish regressive pricks.

People are so incredibly fucking selfish.

“I’ve got in two fights before”

Excuse me? Over what, having to yield for 10 seconds to someone else? Fucking children.

Try living in an older section of my city, where all residential roads are all effectively narrower than these NIMBY childcare center candidates are whining about. Forget getting in a fight, yielding and learning how to negotiate with cars, bikes, peds, and muni vehicles is called life. If you get upset about it here you’re clearly not a native to city life, and it shows.

It doesn’t help that carmakers get incentivised to go big by fucked up fuel standards. Here in the US the CAFE standards were gutted during their creation to carve out looser standards for obese pickups and hummer-sized SUVs. The bigger they get even within a given segment, the less stringent the requirements are.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popularity-federal-policy-pollution

Plus people “feel safer” and all that other jazz when they drive them. It’s just… It’s so stupid to have to watch people continuing to chose shit like this.

IMO it’s such a multi-faceted problem that at this point about the only thing that makes sense is to switch lanes (heh) and focus on other transit methods. More people will take transit or bike if it’s easier than parking their mile long farm vehicles in tight urban spaces and being helplessly fumigated by standstill traffic.

Yeah I was going to say, phones are currently growing bigger after hitting a sort of “peak small” lol.

They’re getting so huge that it’s hard to find a small one without ordering an old model. I like to be able to see things and all but at a certain point they don’t fit comfortably in my pockets

To echo the OP’s reply below, there are a lot of different reasons combining right now to make them popular.

One of the factors that has improved the most over the last 5 years is how much more access people have to safe and cheap optons. Buying a cheaper e-bike even just 5-6 years ago had you gambling on components and hoping your battery and charger were certified and sourced reputably. And, while you could order online, the experience wasn’t always great.

Nowadays it seems like almost everything has certified chargers and batteries, and the overall build quality of cheap bikes and scooters (bikes especially) has improved as well.

Combine that with being able to order a bike or scooter online, ship it to your door in just a week or two, and get going with minimal assembly and adjustment. Boom, that’s an attractive option, even before you hit incentives. E-bikes and scooters are so insanely cheap to own and operate compared to a car (even a super cheap car) so it just makes a ton of sense that people would choose them.

It’s weird here too because states set sales taxes. I live in Oregon, and we don’t have a standard sales tax here. That means what you see is what you pay at the register for most things, and it’s so freaking nice.

About the only thing I regularly see is the bottle tax (0.10/can added at the register). That’s refundable too, at least theoretically, so it’s not that bad.

Yeah, I agree that there aren’t many budget cargo-in-front options yet (none that I could find in 5 sec of googling).