proudblond

I had a similar incident; I was in the second lane of a freeway and a truck was going to merge into the first lane from a cloverleaf, and my Tesla freaked the fuck out and slammed on the breaks. I was lucky there wasn’t a car behind me for a bit.

Oh, nothing inherently wrong, but we’ve already had a couple of incidents of bad behavior. My kid got mad about something and sent some angry messages to a group chat that included racial slurs. It was a big learning experience to say the least (for all of us). Since then they’ve learned to unsend their messages, it seems, so while I can say my kiddo learned something, I have to hope that he also learned the things I needed him to learn. Being a parent is so much fun!

Someone is downvoting everything but I agree. I try and keep my helicopter parent impulses under control, but it is nice to know exactly where my kids are. My son (12) has a locked down old iPhone and Apple makes it pretty easy to make it practically a dumb phone. We literally have it set up so that he has to ask for permission before using any apps, with the exception of calling and messaging. (Even messaging is iffy; we want to be able to text him but it opens up texting with friends.) He doesn’t need it at school so he doesn’t bring it, but as he gets older, I’m sure it’ll start to go with him and I’m not upset about it. If he wants to go somewhere with a friend right after school instead of going straight home, it’s fine with me as long as I know about it. Without a phone, it’d be hard for him to make such plans on the fly, and let’s just say that planning ahead isn’t my ADHD-kid’s strong suit (yet—we’re working on it). As long as the expectation is set that he doesn’t use it during school, I think that’s okay; it can just live in his backpack until school is over.

Yes I 100% agree! Making everything automatic also makes people complacent and they don’t check to make sure everything is working as intended. I rather miss my light switch in my car. Daytime running lights are dumb unless they are just always-on headlights and taillights.

In older cars, where you could manually flip the rear view mirror to dim it, my dad would flip it back and forth trying to flash the person behind him so they’d get the hint about their high beams. Not sure it ever worked…

Back when I still used Nextdoor, I once posted a picture of the regular (green) headlight dash icon and the blue high beam icon, and spelled out what they’re used for and that people should know the difference. I got flooded with hearts or whatever the Nextdoor equivalent of upvotes is, I’m sure all from people who already knew and were also frustrated. There are definitely some people who are either ignorant or oblivious; I wonder if any of them saw my post and learned something? Can’t say the problem got any better.

You’re right and that makes me want to cry a bit.

Supposedly it’s that he stands that way to make himself look less fat, but your version is just as plausible.

You’re most likely right. Though, she is holding twins in the picture I think. Depending on genetics, it’s possible that a few of the other siblings are also twins. But that’s still a hell of a lot of pregnancies, and twin pregnancies are generally harder and riskier than singles, so… yeah that’s not really any consolation.

I think these cloud companies have been pretty successful convincing people that at-home storage is more at-risk than the cloud because you could always have a house fire or something, or your hard drive could fail, or whatever. But it seems the pendulum is now swinging the other way as people get wise to the inherent dangers of only keeping things on the cloud, and trusting a company with your data no less.

I lived through those brownouts but I was a teen and didn’t understand what was going on, just that it was annoying. We had just moved into a house in a very hot part of town where the wind goes to die and it suuuuucked.

I bet there are at least some working there who have their heads in the sand about how bad a company it is and just want to believe they’re good people doing good work. I don’t think many people want to admit to themselves that they’re just doing something for money. But yeah… the proverbial rock they live under must be mountain-sized.