I'll bet the confusion stems from the rest of the world having essentially forgotten what is a check/cheque almost a generation ago.
I only used them twice in my life, last one was in 2012 and I had to get a supervisor at the bank to find the procedure to get a checkbook at the time.
The last time I (EU) touched a check was in 2006 - my elderly landlord used that to refund overpaid utilities. I had to google what to do with that thing - the bank I was with wasn't handling checks at all, so I had to go to a branch of a different bank. And even there they first had to look up what to do with that thing.
Maybe it's different for non-homeowners or people without kids. Just looking back at my records for about 2 years, I've written 36 paper checks in that time, not including the "online bill pay" provided by my bank which are often just physical checks they send in the mail: Kids extracurricular activities, school PTA donations, memberships in local clubs, pool service, home improvement jobs like fences and concrete, appliance repair, and, of course, property taxes.
Last check I wrote was for some car repairs at a local shop, where using a credit card would add a 3% premium. I agree, local services and contractors are some of the last people who you still can't pay electronically, but it's getting increasingly rare. Most will now at least take Venmo/Zelle.
I do own a home but find that almost everything can be paid online now. I write just a few paper checks per year. Even my taxes I pay on the state or IRS website (with ECH, so effectively a check but without the paper).
I’m a homeowner and have kids, and I’ve never written a check in my life. I can login to Bank of America and have them print and mail a check for free, but the recipient has to wait.
I only have to do this rarely, and it’s always because the recipient wants to charge a “convenience fee” for having me pay with ACH or debit card or credit card. (The seller is assuming people would rather pay an extra $3 to $5 to not have to write a check or mail anything).
What's hilarious is that at the end of the day your transaction is added to a text file and sent along with the image to the Federal Reserve Bank Clearinghouse via SFTP. It's then communicated back to the other bank in the exact same way.
> Up to this point, iNat functioned as an unstructured anarchy. Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative.
While I love that anarchists and sociocrats exist, I would say from personal experience (admittedly, over 30 years ago when I was a student) that every single "anarchist collective shared living space" will get to a point where someone (even me, even if I'm attempting to be chill about everything) will grab someone by the shirt front, haul them to their feet, and threaten to knock seven shades of shit out of them if they don't take their turn of washing the dishes.
Any successful business has a lot of dishes to wash.
lol says you, its been my experience that reason.com does NOT post made-up stories, they simply have priorities aligned with their political biases which is relatively normal nowadays. AI agrees.
google:
"Reason.com is a reputable source that adheres to journalistic standards, but its content is filtered through a specific, consistent libertarian lens."
can you post the neonazi part? I couldn't find it. if you're uncomfortable posting actual nazi text, post the wordcount that precedes it in the article and I can count the words that precede your neonazi discovery.
They are a pain in the arse to set up properly and you really need a (edit: very patient, thank you for putting up with all my sine tones, Tommy) deaf person with a suitable hearing aid to help you set it up. If the loop is the wrong length and has the wrong impedance you'll never get the amp balanced up properly, and you can't just take the installer's word for it.
Beyond that I have very little experience of them.
FWIW, it is also possible to get standalone induction receivers that you can plug headphones into, which can be useful for "is this working" checks (for example https://www.ampetronic.com/products/ilr3-audio-induction-loo...). However you really need someone with hearing aids to tell if it's useful or not.
I visit the theatre a lot: ~50 West End visits in 2025, plus several regional venues. It's amazing how many times I've had to abandon the hearing assistance system because it doesn't work well... too quiet, distorted, delayed, poor balance between voices and instruments. Sometimes it just isn't functional at all, and nobody's noticed.
While I'm on the subject: saying "it's a loud show, you'll be able to hear fine" is a bit like telling someone who's short-sighted but has no glasses that "it's a bright show, you'll be able to see". It's not just about volume, but clarity and understanding.
For the lecture theatre and classrooms at work, we've gone over to IR transmitters and a neckworn loop, which is apparently better for everyone. You can also just use it with IR headphones, which suits certain flavours of neurospicy.
Not a bad option for a lecture theatre, but it's worth noting that IR is line-of-sight and can be easily interrupted by people moving or the receiver twisting as you shift position. Multiple emitters can help with some of this, but there are still challenges.
Both are true. Jobs was a dick and Woz handled it nicely.
Woz got screwed over. Should he have pushed back on this? Maybe. Would Woz have had a better life if he had? I'm doubtful. I'd say Woz got the better deal in the long term. His friend had a tumultuous life and ultimately died of stubbornness. Woz seems to have had decades of good living.
If one guy's pot is worth 10 billion, and the other's is worth 100 million, and the first guy got rich from the second guy's work, things seem a little bit upside down. 1% of Jobs wealth is still a lot of money, but the disparity is stark for two people who co-founded the company.
Maybe! I could certainly see something like the firmware switches on something way heavier that pulls down an already marginal supply.
Remember the very early Raspberry Pis that had the polyfuses that dropped a little too much voltage from the "5V" supply, so a combination of shitty phone charger, shitty charging cable, and everything just being a little too warm/cold/wrong kind of moonlight would just make them not boot at all?
They were losing usb once in a while if ran 24/7. Had to make them self reboot every couple hours. Fortunately it didn't matter for what we were doing with them.
> I would disagree with that. You do not need a big flashing distract-o-tron in the middle of the dashboard.
Except my car's screen is not distracting: I set it up for my destination, I give it a glance when needed for navigation, and I basically don't touch it until I'm done driving, because (second part of the previous comment) the UX is so well done that I don't have to. Worst case, voice control works well enough for e.g. changing playlists and songs or changing destination mid-trip.
> Cars should have exactly zero screens.
People have been attaching tomtoms and mobiles to the windscreen for the past 30 years anyway to solve exactly the same problem (navigation), and they were always inferior solutions to a well done integrated screen: detaching on a bump, leaving forever-smudges, having to update all maps offline, removable meaning easier to steal, limited functionality, ..... So I disagree. I'd rather have governing bodies evolve to take screen UX into account at regulation: most cars with screens couldn't have been sold.
The display dims adequately , and is far less distracting than competitors , who usually have multiple displays and flashing lights. Especially luxury brands who do the above and have "bejeweled" decorative LEDs all over the cockpit.
Tesla has the most subdued interior of every brand on the market.
sure, I would prefer 90s interfaces if I had the choice, but given the products on the Market , Tesla's attentiveness to the driver experience ( low LCD brightness, moderate contrast UI, reducing demand on the driver) exceeds all competitors by a large margin : better than luxuries, better than German cars.
Even leaving the big distracting floodlight in the the middle of the dash out of it, I don't like Teslas because I don't think an 80 grand car should feel like a 30 grand car.
If they want to sell cars at that price they need to not feel like a base-spec Skoda.
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