I'm not normally a fan of tips, but this seems like a reasonable use of one to me. The picker isn't paid on the shininess of the apple they bring you -- they're paid to pick as quickly as they can from what's on offer. The potential for a tip incentivises them to go beyond that requirement -- to pick the nicest/freshest rather than the most convenient.
Costs are a big thing, sure, but for me it's electrical reliability. For better or worse our heating oil and natural gas supply are both more reliable than our electricity supply. I don't need the heat going out in the dead of winter when some wind storm drops a bunch of branches on power lines.
I'm aware that both my boiler and a natural gas furnace have electric blower motors. It's a lot easier to power them from a generator than it is to have a generator than can power a house worth of heat pumps.
You can have both, though. A person doesn't have to make a binary decision of heatpump OR natural gas.
Please remember that traditional aircon is also literally a heat pump. It's perfectly acceptable to have a ducted heat pump and a ducted natural gas furnace both sharing the same ductwork.
In this use, the heat pump and the furnace are just installed series with eachother, with one singular blower motor that is used for both roles. This arrangement is very similar (identical, really) to the layout that combined (heat+aircon) systems have used for many decades.
Power out, or simply very cold outside? Your house still has a natural gas furnace (which can be made work with a fairly small generator), and your rig doesn't require expensive-to-use heat strips for the coldest days either.
Starrett doesn't really compete on price, as evidenced by the fact that this is a $95 item whereas the cheap alternatives go for closer to $10 on Amazon. So they're probably not making or selling very many of them. But they sell enough to make it worth keeping them in stock, and eventually they'll run out so they'll need to make new parts. Assuming low volume (I say this just in case I've accidentally picked the one weird thing that does sell like hotcakes), they're not going to spend any engineering time evolving that design. The input materials aren't going to stop being made. It is what it is, it does what it does, some people buy it, and so the name of the game becomes how do you make that specific thing they want with the least overhead? You use the same tooling you've used for the last 50 years. When you need a new batch of parts, you pull out that tooling, stamp out a bunch of leaves, and put the tooling away until you need it again.
There are many many manufactured items that fall into this category.
For those not familiar, Starrett has a reputation of quality. If you want the best you buy Starrett and pay the price. Often those Amazon alternatives are good enough, but often they have minor usability issues such that they are not as nice. Sometimes those Amazon alternatives are wrong in ways that matter and they can't be used at all.
I have a couple of Starrett items only because I lucked out at machine shop auctions and they came in boxes with other stuff that the auction house couldn't be bothered to sort.
I'm not a professional, I'm a metalworking hobbyist and the cheap imported electronic tools are more than good enough for me. However, my Starrett Dial Test Indicator is like jewelry, it's so beautifully well made. My cheap Chinese mechanical DTI is probably almost as accurate, but one is obviously far better made than the other.
The Children's Television Act didn't have anything to do with it? My understanding is that that's what brought in the E/I programming that fills (filled? it's been a few years since I looked) the space Saturday morning cartoons used to occupy on the broadcast networks. I've no doubt the other things the author lists contributed too, but it's surprising to either see E/I omitted or to learn that it had no noticeable causal effect.
From what I recall in the 90s (and this is just my own memory). I remember enjoying the cartoons even with the E/I regulations. None of the cartoons I got were really the GI Joe style advert cartoons.
But what I also remember is that the broadcast networks over the years started reducing the number of cartoons they broadcast. I remember watching cartoons until like noon in the heyday. By the end of our broadcast cartoons, they were strictly a 1-to-2-hour event.
I suspect that part of the reason for that is cartoons became a lot less lucrative with advert requirements.
It wasn't until my parents got satellite TV (which got a LOT cheaper over my childhood. The old behemoth dishes were a sight to behold) that I experienced cartoons more like the GI Joe period. Cartoon network, nick, disney all had hours of unregulated cartoon nonsense with hours of kid targeted commercials.
And, by then, Saturday morning was dead as a cartoon time. Why wake up early for cartoons when you could simply turn on the cartoon channel?
Prior to Cartoon Network, and computer animation, there was:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
X-Men
Doug
David The Gnome
Care-bears
My little pony
Hello Kitty
He-Man
Garfield
The Littles
Duck Tales
Thundercats
Simpsons
Today we have:
Family Guy
Bobs Burgers
South Park
King of the Hill
Simpsons
3D animation took over and if you can do 3D, why make it look like a cartoon?
obviously there’s more… but just pointing out the shift away from cartoon.
Today there are still cartoony cartoons like The Dragon Prince, Miraculous, and Bluey but generally the decline in animation quality because of "3D" is noticeable. I keep hoping that Disney will make a comeback and bring us more shows like amphibia, owl house, and gravity falls (Hailey's on it was pretty good too). Cartoon network had adventure time, steven universe, infinity train, over the garden wall, Craig of the creek, Iyanu, etc. Streaming services like netflix put out cartoons too like Kipo and Hilda.
The cartoon landscape is different now, but it's not gone and if you wanted to you could easily wake up early on a Saturday morning and binge great cartoons all day.
Blender’s grease pencil enhancements should help some but ultimately we need better tools for 2D cel animation in our 3D art tools. There’s only so much ToonBoom can do.
It's very interesting how the industry spent decades refining the art of 2D animation, only for most of them to throw it all away when 3D became cheap and good.
What do you mean by 3D animations? AFAIK, there's still a ton of cartoons produced using 2d animation techniques for children/teens, they are simply all done using computer animation.
I was surprised as well. It seems the CTA really helped kill kids programming on broadcast stations. In the LA market there was Saturday and Sunday morning cartoons. By 2000 both NBC and CBS (IIRC) had stopped Saturday morning programming and ABC's entertaining content had been replaced by E/I dreck.
This is interesting. Even as an adult I was always a big fan of Saturday morning cartoons. And I have a very distinct memory of somewhere around 1999-2001 that fading out of existence and being replaced by the sort of schlock you describe.
You can't be serious. The wording of every article is in worst way possible while completely ignoring crashes from competitors - i.e. European Space Agency's launch in Norway, lunar landers being lost or even that sub-space Blue Origin all-female flight with such cringe slogan (Taking Up Space) that it's been edited from wiki.
I'm not pinning anything. I'm commenting on why SpaceX failures get more press than SpaceX successes. If it bleeds it leads is the way it's always been. And I'd be remiss to point out that there's /more/ appetite for it in the case of SpaceX because of feelings towards Musk.
Although I feel like SpaceX's successes (many of which have been truly remarkable, like the booster catches) get plenty of press themselves, you make a fair point. I apologize for taking your previous comment in bad faith. :)
Sure but I also remember watching a number of very impressive launches, landings, etc "firsts". Recently I don't recall any of these, and this was watching SpaceX direct streams on their site.
