- Fitted sheet must have label on bottom right seam
- Salted butter wrapping text must be red. Unsalted blue.
As someone who uses a Nintendo switch and an Xbox, the A and B buttons should be in the same place on all game controllers.
I can get behind this one.
Fucking yes. @[email protected] for world president.
While I agree with the first thing, I’m concerned what someone with the name Arbitrary might do with more power!
What if they ban chocolate chips on waffles?? I’d be doomed!
No bans of chocolate chips on anything will ever be issued. You have my word.
I fully endorse you now, without knowing anything else! Woo party with waffles with chocolate chips on them time!
It may seem slightly above inconsequential, but parking. Parking is a great example of arbitrary rules having longstanding effects. (Really neat video on parking regulations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8)
As for more inconsequential. Leafblowers Leafblowers immediately banned unless they are
- Less than 20db
- Zero emission
- ONLY USED AFTER 9AM WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY
So 10 times quieter than a silent room?
They said regulate, it’s up to the industry to create a compliant product
They need to suck sound out of the environment
/s
Oh no… Guess we can’t have leaf lowers anymore… Shame…
Can we have leaf highers?
It must be quieter than the sound of a leaf hitting the ground!
Yeah no kidding, this guy uses decibel scale but doesn’t understand decibel scale. I fucking hate leaf blowers but 55dB seems like a reasonable starting point to me. It won’t even barely reach your yard from a neighbor’s.
WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY
These people are usually the sorts who rise at 5am regardless of day and have become bored after 3 hours awake. If they think about it at all, they believe that everyone who is not yet up by 8am is a fool who ought to be out of bed, thus that is the perfect time to make noise.
As to why they rise at 5am, take your pick from: i) Old and unable to sleep for long periods - Will be asleep again in an armchair by 11am once they’ve gone back inside; ii) Military bearing or wannabe - Probably has reveille.wav for an alarm; iii) Abject a-hole who gets a kick out of it. Honourable mention: iv) someone with no choice under direction from one of the above.
You forgot v) collaborates internationally for work, requiring them to be awake early to maximize overlapping hours in their workday.
But even I know not to do noisy shit outside until at least 10. Those few quiet hours in the morning where it seems I’m the only person alive are to drink coffee and cherish.
you also forgot people who work in factories that have to get up at 4:00 a.m. during the week and so they like to sleep in till 5:00 a.m. on the weekends.
I’m guilty of 8am yardwork, but mostly mowing in the hottest part of summer at the coolest part of the day. I’m also guilty of 8pm yardwork when it’s just the only time I can find to get it done. I only mow once every 2-4 weeks depending on how much my grass has grown, so I figure that balances it out somewhat
Small bladder, but I still refrain from impacting others.
Never live in the japanese countryside. Work starts between 5 and 6am every day (sunrise is before 4:30am at it’s earliest where I live). By 9am in August, it’s already getting ridiculously hot for working outside.
Relevant podcast episode:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-los-angeles-leaf-blower-wars/
My neighbor likes to do yardwork at 10pm
Luckily he has electric equipment so it doesn’t make as much noise
Except for the days he decides to do woodworking too
Relevant podcast episode:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-los-angeles-leaf-blower-wars/
Print the food expiration date above the label barcode. Black ink on white background.
Honestly ANY standard would be an improvement over the current reality.
Expiration date see:
the back of your own head
Seriously, I feel like one of those Rubik’s cube champions looking at my yoghurt from all possible dimensions trying to find out if it turned to cheese or not.
I would go with: Remove expiration dates entirely. Because it’s not an expiration date, it’s a “best before” date. Which when you think about it, it’s true that food is “best before” literally any future date you put on the label.
Most of the factors that will cause food to spoil are things not under the control of the companies that package the food. How cold do you keep your fridge at? How long did it take for you to transport the food from the store to your fridge? What was the temperature that day? How long did you have it before you break the seal and start using it? How long was the food outside of your fridge? etc. etc.
Those things are just invented by a marketing department to encourage people to throw out food so they have to buy more. There are no regulations on it, they just put whatever date they think will maximize their profits.
You buy fresh fruit and vegetables (the things that will spoil faster than anything else you buy) there is no expiration date. How do you manage? Look at it, and maybe give it a smell test. The same applies for all food really.
“Best before” dates are a scam that results in food being thrown out prematurely. Grocery prices are too high, we shouldn’t allow these kinds of shenanigans to drive prices higher.
Please don’t die from this advice.
First: Yes, best before dates are sometimes arbitrary depending on the product and where you live. However, basically anything with a package sold commercially has been tested for taste/feel/look over time to determine when quality degrades. If you make cookies you don’t want people only buying up 1+ yr old boxes and thinking your cookies are just supposed to taste like solidified disks of keyboard powder. Having a best before date tells people when your product tastes as intended and when it’s only worth buying from the discount bin.
It’s fair to say sometimes marketing bullshit influences that date.
Second: Expiry dates are a real thing, at least where I’m from. Fridge/freezer temperatures are meant to be within specific ranges and there are food safety regulations around how long certains items can be outside of those ranges - like for transport or during prep.
Expiry dates are based on testing the development of bacteria colonies/degradation of the ingredients in an average of settings one would expect those products to go through.
Just because something says it’s expired doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unsafe, though. Except: in a commercial kitchen it is illegal to sell expired ingredients because of the testing that goes into determining that date.
I’ve worked as a chef, have taken multiple food safety courses, had good relationships with food inspectors. And I’ve worked in a production kitchen where the products were sent to testing facilities for determining the dates we put on the labels.
The expiration date isn’t for the customer. It’s for the grocer. They should not be allowed to sell expired food.
They should be allowed and required to give away or offer for donation any food that is still edible after its expiration date.
By all means, eat all the expired food you want. I certainly do. Just don’t try to sell it to anyone and we’re golden.
Even if the best before dates are removed, you need to have A DATE to reference the age of the product. Maybe it wont spoil in one week, but if its been 2 or 3 I would really like to know.
Most food has a Julien Code to tell you when it was manufactured/packaged.
I’m gonna fucking get sick from every milk yogurt and ayran in existence, DO NOT DO THIS
I think it would be better to replace it with “fabricated on” date
In the UK they have two categories. One is Best Before and the other is Use By. A product will have one or the other but not both. One is a recommendation and the other is a command. And out of date cracker is different to out of date raw chicken. (eggs have a Display Until and a Use By date on the same pack).
Laptop keyboard layouts. There is no reason they should be so different.
Specifically, those laptops that have full-sized left and right arrows, but half-sized up and down arrows - those earn 1 week of jail time for the CEO per unit sold.
While we’re at it, the power button must be in the same place on all laptops.
Adding a copilot button to a laptop, 10 years jail
no trial
I wholeheartedly agree. But unfortunately my regulated standardized keyboard would probably be very unpopular, especially in the US.
ANSI keyboard no more. ISO keyboards only.
Caps Lock has no use beyond writing angry replies in the YouTube comment section, so Caps Lock will be replaced by Compose.
Adding a power button, or anything similar such as suspend, in a place where it might be pushed by accident is highly illegal.
Oh, and all keyboards will be US Dvorak from now on. Sure, you can change the layout in software, but the lettering on the keys remain dvorak.
And 50% of all keyboards sold will have to have a penguin instead of a windows logo on the menu key.
Caps lock is stuck in what is a great place for a modifier. Specifically ctrl. Compose can be somewhere to the right.
I prefer to keep ctrl where they are. But if you insist on moving left ctrl to caps Lock, that means that bottom left is available for compose.
Compose is best to have on the left side, as the first key struck immediately after it is usually one of the characters on the right. Plus, historically, keyboards that actually had a dedicated compose key had it in the left. Where shift is now, I think.
I’m very much fine with that, too. I just think it was on the right on Sun keyboards. Either way, not the most common key but infinitely more useful than a caps lock.
It has some niche use®s. I for one use it daily - My preferred keyboard layout is US Dvorak, but as a noggie I sometimes need to type æøåÆØÅ, so I use compose for those, as well as the occasional trademark, copyright, degrees, etc.
You forgot interrobang‽ The most important and incredulous reason for a compose key.
I just want every keyboard to have a home and end button (I’m a coder, and my current keyboard doesn’t have them, and I have to set a binding in every. single. thing.)
Preach! I need all my keyboard shortcuts, dammit.
The Sims 2 had wonderful keyboard shortcuts for toggling walls and jumping between floors via Home and End and Page up and Page Down respectively and this was carried through to The Sims 4
Legend has it that there my be up to 2 other uses for these keys, too.
But surely not more than 2, that would be crazy.
Makes it so hard to use console command history
International standard paper sizes (A4 etc.) in the U.S.
Metric units aka SI units aka sanity
I assumed it was global… What do you use in the US?
A pretty-much arbitrary system based on a standard letter size of 8.5 in x 11 in, with multiples and fractions thereof. It lacks the critical √2 aspect ratio, so pages designed for one size have the wrong proportions when scaled up or down.
That sounds like a massive pain in the backside.
No, it promotes Freedom™.
Sports teams that change cities must also change names.
No more “Utah Jazz”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Jazz
Similarly, cable channels that veer from their original content must also change their names. Mtv hasn’t been Music Television in decades.
Sounds like you want trademark reform.
There are basically no requirements for maintaining trademarks. If a company owns a name they can use that name and branding forever, no matter how false it becomes, no matter how much the business or product changes, they can keep the name. This shouldn’t be the case.
If an ice cream company is named after their two founders, the company shouldn’t be able to keep using their names after they’re no longer involved. But under current laws they can.
A glass company can build its reputation on making heatproof glass, then change the glass so its no longer heatproof, while still selling it under the same name. This is unjust.
Companies should be forced to rebrand upon major changes. Current trade mark laws are fundamentally misleading.
The point of trademarks is to avoid market confusion.
MTV didn’t instantly eliminate all of it’s programming and created new programming overnight. They had reality TV shows playing alongside music videos in the 90s. There are some people that might like a reality show that was on MTV when they were playing music videos, then suddenly the name of the company changes because they don’t play music and those people can’t find the show they like? Even though it’s still on, still being made by the same company, but under a different name because curmudgeons don’t think it’s appropriate that a company with the letter M in it’s name isn’t focused on music?
Trademarks are about people being able to know which company they’re buying from. The name of the company is relatively arbitrary. You could start a company making computers and give it an arbitrary name like I don’t know “Apple”. then people will associate the quality of the computers with that arbitrary name “Apple”. Well you could if someone didn’t do exactly that already. It’s not so much the name it’s the consistency that matters most.
And many names we just kind of forget their origins because they’re irrelevant to what the company now does. Does Motorolla have to change it’s name because they no longer make record players for cars? Does DC have to rebrand because very few of their comics are about detectives? KFC can’t call themselves that because a vast majority of their restaurants aren’t in Kentucky?
I’d actually go the other way if anything. Make it illegal for a company to change it’s name. Facebook promotes eating disorders to teenagers? Sorry you aren’t changing your name to Meta, you can’t do bad shit and erase that negative brand association by re-branding. You want your brand to be considered good? Then do better.
“Local” sports teams should be comprised only of locals. No buying and trading from other regions.
I like this. It’s stupid that LA has the Lakers… because LA is known for it’s lakes? They also have the Dodgers… yeah because people are always dodging streetcars in LA?
The MTV thing though… I think they’ve already made it so the M doesn’t stand for anything now. They removed the “Music Television” part off of their logo anyway.
Basketball:
"Soon it was commonplace for entire teams to change cities in search of greater profits. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don’t allow music.The Raiders moved from Oakland to LA back to Oakland, no-one seemed to notice."
TV remotes, computer speakers, car radios, etc must have two sets of volume up / volume down controls. One for upper volume limit, and one for the lower.
Now I can hear what the characters are whispering to eachother, without waking up the entire apartment complex when there’s a gunshot on screen.
Or hear the quiet parts of music when I’m driving without blowing my eardrums out when the contrasting high energy part kicks in.
That’s called a compressor and you could run your stereo through one or use a mobile app to do the processing on your phone.
All of my my windows machines that are hooked up to screens have Loudness Equalization enabled, which works a dream!
My Linux boxes have another software I can’t remember the name of, which do the same thing but does require more tuning.
I couldn’t watch anything without it.
If you have a surround setup, try boosting only the center speaker. Dialog is usually played through that.
Someone else mentioned a compressor. If your tv/hifi has a night mode, it’s doing that exact thing.
This is not as straightforward as you might think. If there’s an actual quiet part it would amplify the background noise.
Do I not amplify the background noise when I turn it up myself? I think they’re looking more for a “variable volume” option rather than any actual audio engineering
You wouldn’t turn up the volume when you know the scene is meant to be quiet. Or at least, you wouldn’t turn it up so high you can hear the background noise at the level you want to hear dialogue.
It frustrates me to no end that you can customize audio levels for vocals, music, sound effects, etc in video games, but you can’t individually customize anything volume-wise on a TV.
If you play videos through VLC player, you can adjust the dynamic range, which sounds like what you are looking for.
If you run Linux, you can even do it at the system level.
every date MUST be in RFC 3339 format. e.g. 2024-09-08, with optionally the time: 21:41:24+02:00
and hell no not ISO 8601 cause then people would use stuff like 2024W154
Thank you! Also nobody wants to buy a copy of an ISO standard
I think that ISO 8601 is available for free. But agreed that the RFC version is superior.
Would you allow long dates?
For example, Jan. 11, 2022, or 7 September 2010.
no, for cross-language interoperability. ok I just noticed that this breaks other calendar systems but well
Broadcasting audio from a personal device in public should be a misdemeanor.
Especially hiking trails
Having a conversation with a voice assistant in public should be a minor felony.
It can be in some places.
To branch off from this, can i be the regulator for anyone using speaker phone in public/shops for 1v1 conversations by holding the phone next to their face to talk and walking around.
I don’t know, my emotions?
I lol’d
- Pwm flicker should be regulated on all LED devices, from smartphones to household bulbs and car turn signals.
- Price displayed is exactly what you pay. With tax, no credit card or smartphone surcharge or “cash discount”
- Tip screen on POS cash registers is displayed before you swipe/tap your card, not afterward.
Dishwashers and dish sets have complimenting standards. E.g.
Dishwasher rack is set A.
Dishes (plates, bowls, tupperware, etc.) Would advertise as “fitting rack sizes A,B, & D!”
Check out this person with their “matching dishes”! Well, aren’t you fancy?
The number of hotdogs in a hotdog pack and the number of hotdog buns in a hotdog bun pack cannot be coprime
Packaging for supermarket products should have what the product is big and the branding small. Not the other way around.
Oh. Sound mixing on movies/tv shows should be such that voice lines are always perfectly audible even on shitty speakers. Make actors e n u n c i a t e like they did in the 30s. Christopher Nolan has a lot to answer for, turning all of media into mumblecore chief among those things.
LEDs on electronics need either a maximum brightness or an adjustable brightness. I have taken to covering the LEDs on charger bricks with Sharpie/tape (often multiple layers of tape) to dampen the brightness because I cannot function with these damn things at night.
