> For someone working 9-5, non-wfh, most of their road use is for getting to and from a job

Nah - most of their road use will be embedded within every single product they consume across every waking (and sleeping) moment of their life.

Whether that's the immediately obvious direct road-transport involved in getting finished items from the farm / market / factory to their local store for them to be able to buy or whether it's the never-ending long-tail of indirect road-transportation usage that's ultimately critical to every aspect of modern life - from the most basic movement of raw material to produce energy (and the moment of the people who do the extraction and production), through movement of materials to grow their food - whether the literal seeds; the fertilisers, the raw materials to make the spade that was used and so on ad nauseam.

> Realistic, maybe, but realism doesn't make me want the product.

Relatable is probably what they are going for here.

Essentially the angle they seem to be going for is...have you got a busy household with lots going on like these guys? Look how much our new product can help make everything a bit easier/bit better.

Personally I would take an ad with a 'relatable' family over an 'aspirational' one, but I do take your point - the level of snark in that ad is pretty high.

(Also - disclaimer...my household reality is nothing like as frantic as shown, but I deliberate seek to have day to day family live running at a much slower pace than a lot of people seem to want to/aspire to)

I think in the UK sense 'tabled' is borne out of a pretty literal meaning - based on the proposal literally being brought to the table where the committee are meeting to assess (and potentially vote) on its viability.

it's the item of furniture that everyone is sitting round. the fact that people might put other things on it is about as relevant as asking why one particular person is called the Chair when everyone is seated, or why it's a conference room when the cleaners happen to also do hoovering in there.

Another way it would help is making it easier for users to analyse the T&Cs they are signing up for.

Most people aren't well versed in reading T&Cs and whilst LLMs won't do a perfect job, they would likely do a decent job at assessing and highlighting potentially unfriendly clauses such as this.

> If I scroll through Facebook or X/Twitter, it's miles of ragebait. There's good stuff in there too, but why the hell is it showing me posts from Angry Conservative Mom and Being Liberal and other stuff like that? I don't want to see it, but either I engage before I can stop myself, or they at least think I will.

You see it because you don't take the time to curate the content that it feeds you.

I don't use Facebook anymore because what I primarily used it for is better served by WhatsApp groups, but even so it is still incredibly easy to curate your feed and get rid of content you don't want to see.

The same is true of YouTube, X/Twitter and pretty much every other social media site.

E.g. on Facebook you click the ... next to the post in question and you can either choose 'hide' (typically if it's ad) to never see it again or 'not interested'.

In YouTube you do the same by clicking on the 3-dots and saying you're not interested in the content, or you subscribe to the channels you want to see and instead of having youtube.com as your bookmark/homepage you have youtube.com/feed/subscriptions as your bookmark.

It takes a smidge of work and it's not a 'one and done' process because they still recommend random new things all the time based on the things you engage with/the things they promote for whatever demographic subset(s) they've pinned you as but once you've got your feeds curated they become much fewer and farther between.

And honestly...sometimes the algorithm does surface something i'm interested in.

Finally just a word of warning with curation - you have to try find a balance if you want to avoid your entire online world becoming an echo chamber. In my eyes the curation isn't about trying to get rid of opinions you 'disagree' with, it's about trying to get rid of low quality content that serves the most reactionary/click-baity of content

I curate my YouTube feed. Facebook and Twitter I’ve just abandoned aside from very occasional visits. I’m not motivated to maintain an adversarial relationship with them.

There's something very beautiful about the attention to detail and forethought that has gone into rooms like this.

The wonderful combination of beauty through a clear focus on functionality, supported by just enough of a sense of majesty to lift the whole space beyond pure functionality makes it a little more special.

This is probably a place that was always considered at least somewhat beautiful given its strong design, but more generally speaking I find it really interesting seeing how functional ~1930-1970s era industrial units like this have kinda become fascinating and (in their own way) beautiful places in the eyes of so many (me included).

I often wonder how people in the future will look back at our current humdrum infrastructure and what they might think of it. No doubt there'll be just as much nostalgia and fascination in some quarters, but i have to admit it's a little hard at times for me to see what elements of modern infrastructure will become the focal point of curious minds in, say, the 2050s.

That said, I did visit a museum last year that had some pylon insulators and some other old 1990s electric-grid equipment and I found it kinda interesting and beautiful in its own way so what do I know?!

Definitely an art deco feel to the interior when I disregarded later model telephones and apparatus. Poirot himself would waddle in and be right at home.

The photography is also beautifully done. Although mid-century and earlier industrial spaces are usually beautiful on their own, the photography really highlights that. I highly doubt I would be able to capture it the way this photographer has.

The iPhone came about 6 years after the iPod, which itself was wildly successful so certainly Apple was nowhere near bankruptcy when the iPhone launched.

They also weren't on the brink of bankruptcy when they made the iPod either - the original iPod launched in 2001 which was ~4 years after the Microsoft investment you mention (that happened in 1997).

Apple actually launched the highly successful iMac (the colourful ones) back in 1998, and it was arguably the success of that which restored Apple to having good profitable. I.e. it was already well on the 'up' by the time the iPod launched and propelled them to even greater financial success.

Can't speak for everyone but in my experience using public toilets (predominantly UK, pubs and train stations):

* there's not always a properly functioning seat / seat at all

* the seat is not always dry

* the cubicles do not always have a functioning lock

* the bowl is not always 'clear'...for reasons probably best left unexplored, people seem to choose public toilets as a place to carry out the most incomprehensible and unimaginable of all bowel movements. I've been greeted with bowls that let's just say would be benefit being assessed by a trained professional

Public toilets are also often pretty grim places in general due to the smells, sounds and general lack of hygiene/cleanliness.

All that said...IF the toilets look in decent repair I personally will use the cubicle and sit down, but it's probably less than 30% of toilets that feel like that's an option.

Also just to say I am someone who always sits to pee whenever at home/in a person's home and i'm not someone who anyone would ever call a germaphobe, so I do generally choose to sit rather than stand.

The gents loo at a non-posh UK pub is about the lowest you can go in the western hemisphere.

> "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...

Most developed countries have a 'legal deposit' system with a national archive/national library that requires publishers to send a copy of their works to them. They've existed in some form for centuries in some countries.

Example for the UK - British Library guidance: https://www.bl.uk/services/legal-deposit

> Another example is used car sales. Before the internet it was local and required work to find cars for sale.

Certainly in the UK there were plenty of established options pre 'internet' to make finding cars easier.

Physical weekly magazines like Autotrader existed prior to the internet which had a small photo of the car a brief description and key details and asking price. People also used magazines like Parkers Guide to estimate the valuation of their/prospective cars based on mileage/condition etc.(Kelly blue book I think is equivalent in the US?...based on sitcom knowledge)

There were local used car garages too of course, but many of those also had their cars listed for sale in autotrader listed as 'trade' sale rather than 'private'. Or they'd be in the local newspaper on a set day of the week (where I was - Wednesday had a special 10+ page pull out of 'house listings', can't remember what day cars were but same happened)>

I know people travelled very long distance to buy cars using autotrader because my dad made an amount of side-money in the 1980s and 1990s from it. typically he'd buy a used (often damaged, 'no MOT') car, repair it, run it for a few months, sell it for a profit and repeating the process. He went all over the country to buy cars and he sold his cars privately to people from all over.

Also larger used car retailers and approved-used car garages have long since moved stock around their locations to support sales and used to have similar in-house magazines/brochures that showed all their available stock.

You lament the 'hustlers' scouring FB but arguably that's a much less problem than the risks pre-internet whereby local car garages could rip off local consumers because those customers quite probably only a limited field of reference to understand the value / worth of a car and so could easily be sold something for way more than it's true worth due to lack of comparable data. One of the biggest benefits of the online world is you can quickly see what is a 'normal' price for an item and so it's a little harder for people to be completely ripped off (though of course it still happens, savviness as a consumer takes a bit of work/time and a willingness to shop-around/do research).

Except now the modern car flippers have so much data on prices thanks to the internet that they know exactly what cars to buy and how much profit they could make. So it becomes much easier to do, making it more prevalent, and causing prices to rise.