I got one at a tae kwon do tournament when I was in middle school. It was my first time entering something like that, I lost immediately and was not feeling great about it. I just wanted to leave. My dad made me go back to pick up a trophy from this giant table full of participation trophies. I didn’t want it. I don’t know what happened to it. I didn’t understand why anyone would want a memento of an embarrassing loss. Participation trophies are stupid, or for people who are too dumb to realized they lost and it’s a pity trophy. Picking up that trophy was worse than the actual loss, I remember being more upset about that dumb trophy than anything else.

This was back in the 90s.

In something like a foot race, I get it. Most people running a marathon aren’t trying to win, they are just trying to finish, or hit their personal targets. They can still have a “win” without coming in first. But in a sport where there is a clear winner and loser, I felt insulted getting a trophy just for showing up. At 11 or 12 I already felt too old to be treated like that.

A lot of organized running events give everyone a medal as they cross the finish line.

Part of my brain thinks it is a racket. The organizer buys them for $X and sells them to the event for a multiple. If that isn't the case, it still makes sense for whoever makes them to promote the idea, because they get to sell more of them that way.

The participation trophies of the 80s and 90s were for the parents, not the children. (See sibling comment with 'tae kwon do tournament.') Perhaps it made parenting easier, "Be proud you tried, this shiny bauble is all the proof you need!" Or, IMO more likely, the parents liked the affirmation it awarded them for their effort and/or they made for easier status signaling when displayed in a pile for house guests to admire.

I know as a kid I never gave two poops about 'em. They felt condescending.

Getting a thing showing that you participated isn't such a weird concept. It's just a physical momento, like a t-shirt from a concert or a lanyard badge from a convention. Getting a medal for doing a race is fine. It's a thing I can hang on my wall that I can look at and remember I did that 10k that time. A trophy is a bit weird and overkill, but a simple momento is just that.

"Participation trophy" has become a modern aphorism in many situations where people are rewarded for simply showing up.

I always have to think about "Eighty percent of success is showing up" when I read about participation trophies. I think it's a good idea to stimulate participation. "Winning" is something you only do if you participate a lot.

It’s a sports thing.

If you go to some youth sports league, it is common that every kid will get a medal or trophy regardless of which team in the league won or lost.

But it also exists for adults. Go to the NYC marathon? Everyone gets a medal. I’ve participated in a lot of organized bicycle rides. The rides aren’t even competitive like the marathon is. They are not races. But at the finish line everyone gets a medal regardless of what distance they rode, or how quickly.

The harsh truth about the participation trophies is that boomers complain about them the most, but they are the ones responsible for them! I’m a millennial. I remember being in a youth basketball league in middle school. Our team did not win. At the final day, every kid on every team got a tiny trophy. I was very confused by this at the time. I expected only the best team to get anything. But who was running that league and decided to hand out those trophies?! Our boomer parents!

I take it you don't work in the corporate world.

I see folks get "participation trophies" all the time, they come in different forms.

Interesting. As a child in the 90s I got one of these for everything I participated in.

I also just don't have the mental energy to get mad at that. You ran a marathon? Amazing! Great achievement! Well done! Have a participation trophy!

Doing stuff is great. Doing stuff and sucking at it is great. Who cares?

A similar thread that you should have seen is grade inflation.

Most people get A's and don't learn that much, teachers are punished for giving bad grades, a lot of people graduate without much added knowledge or skill.

I would prefer no grades, but telling so many people they're doing top notch work when they aren't is a problem.

They were a thing in the 90's and 00's for some K-12 events as fallout from the children's excessive self-esteem building movement. They usually took the form of cheap little ribbons rather than trophies. I always thought they were insulting and reminders of losing so I threw them away.

I still am a fan of QR code menus but the west never executed on it well enough. In China I just order from the menu on my phone. No waiting for front of house. If I do have questions it’s easy to buzz front of house and they will come over. It’s simply China is ahead some areas of tech, cashless, QR codes everywhere, everything is an app.

What does China have to do with anything in the post? Neither you nor the author would survive a trip to North Korea either, I don't see this as a valuable comment here - it's a complete non sequitur.

I hate QR code menus because the UX of a phone screen sucks compared to a large printed out menu. In cheap place with big laminated menus with pictures and I can scan the whole thing easily, to the high end restaurants with fine paper printed in fancy fonts secured by ribbon to hardbacked board. The experience of holding and reading these physical things is part of the enjoyment of going out to eat.

Why even go to a restaurant in person anyway, when food delivery exists? The reason is to be social. QR menus neglect this.

The author might have confused "fellate" and "sodomize".

The family Cactaceae comes in 127 genera with some 1,750 known species.

It was a cool statement 25 years ago when the author was young. This "blurb" of an article gives me the impression that in some ways she thinks she still is.

The writing is insufferable.

It's not just that. LED headlights are much more focused beams than the old bulb lamps.

As a guy with moderate myopia, even low beams can be extremely annoying up to the point of physically hurting my eyes if there are no street lights to reduce the contrast.

I like that I can see better and further, but at the same time if I put my car's low beams just slightly higher so they project more than ~30m away, I get flashed from cars passing in the opposite direction, no high beams required.

Matrix/Adaptive headlights should be mandatory with LED headlights to be honest.

It’s also an issue with people buying LED bulbs and putting them in cars not designed for them. That is what leads to the blinding lights.

Depends.

If you're a restaurateur, do you have the .ai files your agency created, an Adobe Illustrator license, and know-how to get in there and change the prices? And then know where/how to deliver the result to get it printed? If so, you probably still have something better to do...

You probably pay an agency an hourly rate plus markup to get them updated, prepped and sent off to be reprinted.

Next time: negotiate fixed prices/timelines for small updates, own the files, and own the relationship with the printers.

So.. the owner made a mistake getting expensive menus printed and then corrected his mistake?

Even if he didn't have to adjust prices due to inflation, surely restaurants adjust the items on their menus frequently. I have been to a restaurant that printed new menus daily because it changed daily. It's like 10 sheets of paper or cardstock. It's not that expensive.

Maybe tablets would be a good compromise?

I will say that my grandfather once limped a car to safety (slowly) using the handbrake after the brakes failed on a hot day. That was in the 70s.

I suspect modern brakes are much less likely to outright fail like that, and so I don’t know if we still need the emergency aspect of the emergency brake as much.

Yeah, unfortunately that's what the word "boomer" has become. Also everyone talks about boomers, millenials, gen z, apparently people forgot there was a generation between boomers and millenials.

Anyway: it doesn't really matter because this "generations" split is bullshit. The cut-off dates are arbitrary, and there are all kind of people in all generations.

"Boomer" is an insult that directly references a protected characteristic, as such it's not only insensitive to use in the workplace, it's illegal. You'd be well within your rights to report this to HR, though I wouldn't recommend that in most cases. At the very least it's worth bringing this up to your manager if it happens repeatedly, phrase it as wanting to protect the company.

Maybe note in writing somewhere that this happened in case you get laid off and need some negotiating leverage to get a better severance. Email to yourself can work well, then it's discoverable.

Yes for younger people boomer is generic for "old person"

This is what boomer means now yes. Language changes over time

I’m an actual boomer. I don’t get offended when I hear it. I just know the person who called me a boomer is an idiot.

Theyre just frustrated by the ageism flung against them for being birn in a shittier environment by people who had the silent and greatest generations leave them an amazing economy

What's hilarious about boomers? Is that if you could summarize their narcissism in one fatal flaw for the entire generation. It is that they did not "think of the children" at all

> There are no adverts on netflix

The base ($7.99) Netflix plan does indeed have ads.

There’s something about the inclusion of tech in the ordering of food that takes away from the experience. It turns it into something where the focus is on fast calories per dollar. It might make sense at your regular lunch spot, but not at a place you take a date or meet your friends.

> should be a website

Yes, and please make the website one that actually works on mobile.

In some restaurants, I've seen the QR code go to a full-page PDF version of the menu. Like, thanks, but I can't read that on a mobile device.

With the payment I’d be more wary.

I worry about bad actors placing their own QR codes over the official ones to redirect people to sites to steal the money, payment day, or both.

> In all cases it should be a website, not a "download our app"

Increasingly often, it is "download our app". And they will try to force it by sabotaging their website. I did a pickup order from Walmart once. You're supposed to take a numbered parking place and check in, but if you try it from the website on a mobile, it'll redirect you to download the app. There's no getting around it. I don't recall if I tried desktop mode on the website, but the website is a pretty cluttered widescreen mess anyway. (Fortunately at the parking area there's a phone number for checking in posted.)

I run into similar sabotage issues with Facebook (yes I am just a year or so shy of being a boomer). You can no longer use messaging on mobile, it tells you to download the app. Desktop mode does work, though (for now; I'm sure someone will try to take it away). All this stuff used to work on phones.

Cable used to not have ads.

Amazon prime has ads.

Just wait

With a QR menu the restaurant will sell all information they can get from your phone to ad vendors. The only place I have have seen QR menus are at national restaurant chains.

If a restaurant does not have a printed menu, I leave and go elsewhere. Luckily were I live, QR Menus are very rare.

So you pay before you get your food? Some boomers might not accept that ;)

LED headlights are blinding. One thing I’ve noticed is that many people, especially people with non-LED headlights, are resorting to running with brights on at all times. Pretty sure it’s not legal, but I have to admit that many LED headlights on low are actually worse than old style brights. It sucks driving at night, and seeing LEDs directly is physically painful.

Inspections don’t help; any slight variations in road angle puts someone in direct sight of correctly adjusted headlights. Unadjusted headlights aren’t the problem, and probably never will be, unlike the old headlights. Most LED headlights are relatively new and perfectly adjusted (and are designed to stay adjusted forever.)

I don’t know the whole story, but I heard that Europe has widely adopted dynamic masking on LED headlights and that in the US, lobbying of some sort is preventing adoption. I would LOVE if we had such a thing… or some fancy night goggles that could mask all bright points without masking anything dark (or maybe even boost the darks)… I would be willing to pay a lot of money for that.

Edit: a search just informed me that the headlight laws changed in 2022, and dynamic masking is coming here. https://www.mcnicholaslaw.com/adaptive-driving-beams-on-the-...

I agree that the problem with headlights is misalignment, not brightness, but there are some vehicles that come misaligned from the factory. cough F150 cough.

The F150 lights are so high that they're blinding even when properly pointed down. We need proper regulations for maximum height too. And while you're at it, regulations for maximum hood height so that they stop killing so many pedestrians.

I don't think the problem is with LED lights in particular, it's really the "color temperature" of lights and brightness or "lumens" are two high. Old incandescent lights could have also been too bright (think police car lights shining into your eyes).

But I generally agree - ever since I got PRK eye surgery ultra white car lights are hard for me to handle. My wife has always been sensitive to light (she has lighter eyes), so that goes to show that there's certainly a range of tolerance for this and it's really a safety issue.

Inspections are a good idea, but I'd like to see some control over what can be sold to prevent the installation in the first place.

Who cares whether somebody says "I hate LED headlights" or "I hate the lack of regulation and/or enforcement around LED headlight brightness/angle characteristics in my state"? It's a pointless distinction colloquially. We all understand the problem. Nobody is confused. And it is a huge problem. Sometimes I have to pull over because the oncoming car has completely drowned out all other sights. It's reckless and dangerous, and that's all that matters until it's fixed. Then we can talk about the useful feature of LED headlights.

I think he posts from a US standpoint where regulations for the aftermarket is problematic and adaptive headlights are allowed but with such high standards that no automaker has them yet. Also LUMEN is a very stupid way to market car headlights as it just depicts the light intensity. Candela is usually used for this specific application since it’s a measurement of light intensity in a specific direction.

> They work everyday. They never get burnt out.

Until they do (because everything has a failure rate) and cost thousands for an entire new projector assembly. Compare to the cost of a halogen bulb every couple 10k miles.

They are fantastic, but not for the other drivers. I live in Sweden where it's very, very dark for a large chunk of the year. I'm also not a boomer. But when it's very dark, the difference in blinding is staggering between meeting an old yellow light headlight vs a modern LED headlight. It's not about lack of inspection (although that is also an issue as it seems many headlights are not properly calibrated), but difference in the warmth of light itself. LED headlights is great for you at the cost of everybody you meet on the road.

Agreed, I love my (stock and factory aimed) LED headlights. Haven’t had an issue in 5 years where I would’ve replaced multiple lamps in an older style headlight, which was the case with the Subaru I owned before.

LED headlight retrofit kits are probably what should be illegal, that’s where you get the poorly aimed and overly bright headlights.