Hmmm, for some reason the first thing I thought of was “www.customgiantdildos would sound better than www.giantcustomdildos because of how the words flow.”

“I’ve got in two fights before”

Excuse me? Over what, having to yield for 10 seconds to someone else? Fucking children.

Try living in an older section of my city, where all residential roads are all effectively narrower than these NIMBY childcare center candidates are whining about. Forget getting in a fight, yielding and learning how to negotiate with cars, bikes, peds, and muni vehicles is called life. If you get upset about it here you’re clearly not a native to city life, and it shows.

Yet another victory for manged ⁠☆queeromacy☆

Ah shit, that reminds me I need to go get killed by the airstrikes of internet randos in helldivers again. 10/10 game

It doesn’t help that carmakers get incentivised to go big by fucked up fuel standards. Here in the US the CAFE standards were gutted during their creation to carve out looser standards for obese pickups and hummer-sized SUVs. The bigger they get even within a given segment, the less stringent the requirements are.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popularity-federal-policy-pollution

Plus people “feel safer” and all that other jazz when they drive them. It’s just… It’s so stupid to have to watch people continuing to chose shit like this.

IMO it’s such a multi-faceted problem that at this point about the only thing that makes sense is to switch lanes (heh) and focus on other transit methods. More people will take transit or bike if it’s easier than parking their mile long farm vehicles in tight urban spaces and being helplessly fumigated by standstill traffic.

Yeah I was going to say, phones are currently growing bigger after hitting a sort of “peak small” lol.

They’re getting so huge that it’s hard to find a small one without ordering an old model. I like to be able to see things and all but at a certain point they don’t fit comfortably in my pockets

I hear you. I want to be positive about this because I want to keep playing, and the reversal (for now) makes me OK with doing so.

But Sony has a horrid track record. Edit - so does Msoft, people often forget how bad both of them are.

I also expect they’ll try to work it back in somehow to capture more revenue and/or data. If it’s not this again in a stealthier form, then it’ll be something similar. No crossplay without PSN or no credit store without PSN, something like that.

Exactly, Sony played bait-and-switch tactics. If the requitement had been there from launch, people just wouldn’t have been able to buy it and would have stayed away.

But this forced people to throw away money, or at least try to get a refund for the base game.

Not sure if those stupid credits were refunded to people who were gonna get screwed by this but I doubt it (yet another reason never to do micro transactions).

To echo the OP’s reply below, there are a lot of different reasons combining right now to make them popular.

One of the factors that has improved the most over the last 5 years is how much more access people have to safe and cheap optons. Buying a cheaper e-bike even just 5-6 years ago had you gambling on components and hoping your battery and charger were certified and sourced reputably. And, while you could order online, the experience wasn’t always great.

Nowadays it seems like almost everything has certified chargers and batteries, and the overall build quality of cheap bikes and scooters (bikes especially) has improved as well.

Combine that with being able to order a bike or scooter online, ship it to your door in just a week or two, and get going with minimal assembly and adjustment. Boom, that’s an attractive option, even before you hit incentives. E-bikes and scooters are so insanely cheap to own and operate compared to a car (even a super cheap car) so it just makes a ton of sense that people would choose them.

It’s weird here too because states set sales taxes. I live in Oregon, and we don’t have a standard sales tax here. That means what you see is what you pay at the register for most things, and it’s so freaking nice.

About the only thing I regularly see is the bottle tax (0.10/can added at the register). That’s refundable too, at least theoretically, so it’s not that bad.

Yeah, I agree that there aren’t many budget cargo-in-front options yet (none that I could find in 5 sec of googling).