2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price

A good mix of calm and hectic, I play Lonely Mountains: Downhill from time to time and have some good fun. Looks like they have a skiing game now too.

From what I know of the audiophile communities, to achieve better sound than that found at a cinema would require an investment akin to years of ticket purchases. Quite impressive to have such an experience in your own home.

Copper spools have the sheathing stripped off, wire cut to reasonable lengths, then brought to multiple recyclers in stages.

To be sure, the odd idiot will show up with a unadulterated spool and try to get paid, but most that go to the effort of abducting these things off the side of the road aren’t entirely stupid.

Then again, a less scrupulous yard might still buy the spool as it comes and strip it themselves.

Community rhetoric aside for a moment, I cannot imagine hearing one of your children tell you over the phone their sibling was struck down in front of them. How traumatizing for them all.

I would move to the moon so my back pain doesn’t bother me as much.

This is a good showcase of how a few individuals can leverage power to fend off massive interests. For the good of the public even, in this instance.

Often find yourself inside many stores you find irrelevant when strolling around town? All those unlocked doors must be such temptation.

I own several bike trailers, built a few cargo trailers myself, and ride with them a few times a week, so I’m going to chime in with some thoughts after looking at their Vimeo page, which inexplicably has more information than their website.

The Convoy appears to be a standard bike rack built atop an electric unicycle. I say this to illustrate that it’s offering maybe 30% more carrying space than you could reasonably get with a rack over the rear wheel of the bike.

The most striking thing to me is the use of a 14" wheel, yet the cargo area is the same height as a rack on the bike. If it was a bit longer, the centre of gravity could be lowered quite a bit. Though the compact nature could be useful to people with tight space limitations, I can’t help thinking a long tail bike would be more versatile.

12kg weight for 50kg of cargo capacity isn’t too bad, though my most used cargo trailer weighs 22.5kg with about ten fold the carrying capacity. It’s much longer though, bit over five feet. Storing something this long isn’t problematic for me though - my next one may be longer.

For a trailer that attaches to the axel, I like the connection design they’ve used (similar to the Burley Coho XC) and the tensioner being simple and effective for applying pressure on the powered wheel. It is also a stylish addition to a bike, which can be important.

The self steering aspect is quite interesting to me, though I’m not really sure it is needed for something with one wheel. The wheel does need to steer, given the trailer does not have any articulation from the bike, but why it has active steering is something I don’t understand. It’d be interesting to know if they tried a passive steer solution that didn’t work since the wheel is so close to the bike or something like that.

Unfortunately I have little confidence there is a niche for a product like this as I believe the dentists are buying Urban Arrows.

Based solely on your comment, I’m looking forward to watching a scene where Christian Bale goes around Wall Street collecting mugs in The Big Short 2: Polymer Boogaloo.

Thank you. I did think about that also.

‘Volunteers’ did the counting, but surely they should have known or been informed that a quorum of votes equal to x% of the community are required for the vote to be valid. If the count doesn’t meet or exceed that value, discard the ballots.

Or even why was the vote permitted to take place in less than the required notification period? I presume the answer to these questions is either incompetence or bravado on the part of the board members taking their position for granted.

I find it unlikely that if the vote had went the other way, the board would have had the integrity to raise the same objections.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, having a sufficient vote notification period is important.

Though if that were the board’s true concern, they surely would have announced intention to notify the community alongside their statement cancelling the vote for this reason, which hasn’t happened insofar as I can tell.

I think that if half of the community shows up with less than a day’s notice to make themselves heard, that’s probably representative enough for how the community feels about these board members.

I found an update about the vote to remove the three board members.

Homeowners voted 190 to 20 in favour of removal, however the board cancelled the vote claiming there wasn’t a 24 hour notice given to the community and subsequently that 210 votes might not qualify a quorum of more than a thousand homes.

Imagine the power of combining this tosser initiative with the revenue sharing aspect of New York’s vehicle idling program. Save the planet and get paid all at the same time.

I’ve seen some of the photos of people driving American-sized pickup trucks around Europe and I hope they get outlawed. Unfortunately, Europe and Asia do have so many more options - sometimes even by American companies much to my annoyance.

I occasionally look into getting a Kei car of some sort. Though it’s not really practical for me. Maybe one day, by the time a sub five inch flagship phone is developed perhaps.

Small vehicle sales represent less than a fifth of the market. Major manufacturers have ceased production of sedans and hatchbacks in favour of larger platform SUVs and pickup trucks.

I realise that vehicles aren’t really the focus here, but the smartphone market isn’t too dissimilar in certain ways. The major manufacturers have discontinued their smaller for factor devices citing ‘sales’, but those devices cost nearly what a larger one did so it’s reasonable that consumers would opt for the bigger screen, especially when it’s typically coupled with a larger battery and superior camera.

Also similar between these two markets, if you look overseas, or at older used models, or make any of a variety of compromises, you can find something if you’re determined. Or you don’t find something and just deal with the giant phone that sticks half out your pocket and you can’t sit down without removing it.

Personally, I’m enjoying watching the advances in folding phones. They are approaching Westworld standards pretty quick. Trouble of course will be when they get there, it’ll cost the same as a car and at that point it better unfold some wheels too.

Similar to vehicles, smaller phones probably would sell just fine.

The issue would be that not many people would buy a phone 2/3 the size unless it was also 2/3 the price. Even if the manufacturing of such a device was 2/3 the cost (it wouldn’t be), the bottom line for the manufacturer would be same number of devices sold, but 1/3 less money.

Companies don’t do less money.

Too bad burgers outpaced inflation then. It’d be nice to have a $1.50 option commonly available.

I agree about everything in your first point. I hadn’t previously considered that the novelty of a new technology would necessarily increase have disproportionately high initial cost.

That said, I feel like any calculation of cost against how many hours played is entirely subjective. Your suggestion of $0.75 / entertainment hour is quite different than what I consider ideal. Games will vary genre to genre, person to person, platform to platform.

A person with limited time might exclusively play shorter titles, or maybe just multiplayer titles. A person with significant free time might spent hundreds of hours replaying an RPG.

To be incredibly broad, I would say that games shouldn’t cost more per entertainment hour than half of what any given person earns at their job - but even that is quite subjective and should be taken with salt.

You make a good point, and I agree. I wasn’t thinking that it was the only thing on the market and therefore the price is whatever a new technology costs.

I tend to think of video games - being a form of entertainment - as a great way to be entertained while also being an incredibly low cost option for the amount of time I spend enjoying them.

Buying a $600 console just to enjoy a single $60 title is an extreme example but to me, if that game provides 100 hours of playtime, that seems well worth it. Cheaper than going to a theatre or most other forms of entertainment.

To be sure, I don’t do this, but I’ve always viewed gaming through a $/h lens, and could never understand why so many people saw it as a waste of time. That’s what I was thinking when I wrote that comment earlier - it seems to me that you get more playtime with some RPG from this decade than you would playing Pac-Man. Though perhaps I feel that way because games like Pac-Man don’t appeal to me.

Thinking about it, your point might be valid again, with the Atari being a new technology, people were likely to sink far more hours into a title than they might do with modern games since we have so many to choose from now. I’ve never thought about it that way. Thanks for pointing this out.