Opinion Havers

Gambling is a net negative, full stop. Some people are really susceptible to it and will lose enormous amounts of money, going bankrupt and forcing society to finance their addiction. Yeah, it's fun, but it's just not worth it in terms of overall net harm.

I'm not a fan of the lottery or casinos either, but at least forcing people to clear the hurdle of leaving their house and going in person is something and it can be semi-justified as longstanding tradition.

App-based gambling (online gambling, basically) has pretty much no limits and someone can wager at any point they're conscious. So you have a megacorp using algorithms to essentially game as much money out of people as they can, and some people are going to just get wrecked by that, and society bears the costs. Furthermore it makes gambling such a lowest common denominator activity without any charm whatsoever, if it even ever had any. Beep boop, oops lost $2000.

Insult to injury is the constant ad spam for it.

Nobody likes ads.

But having ad breaks you can ignore, or grab food or drink during, or have a chat with a friend during, is way better than having ads all over jerseys and the stadium at all times. It's also such trash companies, like airlines from middle eastern dictatorships, credit card companies, and gambling megacorps. Just fucking garbage slop that you're staring at all game and in every promo photo of players and wearing yourself if you buy the jersey.

People are dressing their kids in gambling jerseys or Amex or fucking Etihad Airways! That's psycho actually.

Meanwhile, yeah, again, ads suck and therefore commercial breaks suck too, but as stated you can ignore them, mute the TV or whatever. And you can just get a jersey for your kid that is normal, just the player's name and the logo of the actual team.

The only semi-cool jersey ad is for that one that's an Ed Sheeran tour. That one is almost as awesome as commercial breaks.

I'm appalled by the state of LED lighting.

I would rather change every incandescent in the house for the next 20 years, than figure out all this.

I have an attuned sense for good lighting. I just do. So if I want good LED lighting, that doesn't look flat or cheap, I have to figure out the Color Rendering Index. That's a single number which tells you how good the LED is at showing true color, except, it's a scalar value that describes a 2D vector of possibilities (magnitude x spectrum). So not all CRIs that have the same value are the same quality.

You mean I have to figure out which LED bulb is gonna make red look red?

This is all setting aside color temperature, which at least is pretty straightforward. I've been a 2700K man since day one.

But there's the dimmer situation which is the complete wild west. Not all bulbs work with all dimmers, not all dimmers do a good job for all bulbs, and if you choose wrong you'll either get a dimmer that doesn't dim all the way, or you'll get flickers or random cutouts (think 6 recessed lights of which 2 cut out early as you dim).

Companies publish spreadsheets to tell you which bulbs dim with their dimmers and how well. SPREADSHEETS

And, seemingly, the only dimmer switches that function well are cheap plastic shit. There are no good dimmers that also look or feel high quality.

Line all this up against Prior Era where I would go to Home Depot, pick out any fucking random bulb I wanted, and it would look great, work great, and dim great.

Someone please tell me that the end-to-end carbon cost of making LED bulbs vastly outweighs the energy savings so I can be even more validly self-righteous?

People are doing a lot more talking about cold temperatures using the "feels like" number. This has happened a lot more in the past few years, probably because apps are highlighting this number more. Using feels-like is narcissism-driven, because the feels-like number is always lower, so it sounds like the weather is worse than it really is.

People argue that the feels-like number better reflects how cold it actually is, but of course that's wrong because if it's windy, you dress for the wind, and if possible you stand where you're out of it.

The feels-like numbers also don't factor in the sun. 20F, cloudy, and windy feels a lot different than 20F, sunny, and windy.

So basically this is all just a way for people to dramatize the daily weather more and narcissistically increase their victimhood and suffering.

Obviously, wind chill serves a useful scientific purpose.