I’m feeling grumpy…. I know, let’s make fun of this What’s the best sofa under $1000? article!

It has a stupid double-decker aspect to it and the cushion is too high. Now that you can get a very comfortable air mattress with a build-in inflator for like $50 on Amazon (which has been true for years at this point) there is no reason to ever buy a convertible sofa. The 80s can have their pull-out back, hard pass.

This looks like a kids’ beanbag chair that molted and is now bigger. The only place any of these should ever be is in a basement play room that no one ever has to look at.

Looks like they ran out of parts halfway through making this and ended up with the mid-century version of a fainting couch. Lol no.

This looks alright but not really comfortable in a homey way. Also those button things on the back look stupid. I’d be happy to see this in a waiting room. Not in my house.

This is fine, I wouldn’t get it in this color, but it’s fine. But the legs look like afterthoughts and one is noticeably crooked. If you saw a car ad and the car had a wheel on crooked would you buy that car? Pass.

I’m not going to dignify this monstrosity with a substantive comment. If anyone I knew bought, obtained, came into possession of, or really had anything remotely to do with this object I would un-friend them.

I cut off the name of this sofa manufacturer because no one needs it. Within approximately 0.0003 seconds of this image coming into your field of vision you knew where this is from. This is a couch that you buy for $100 on craigslist. I would rather be force-fed Swedish meatballs until my gut ruptures than pay $700 for this depressing mediocrity.

It’s fine. Looks like it’s on toothpicks though.

Announcement: I’m out of steam and there are still 6 left. I skip to the end

I have an idea, instead of a couch lets get something that looks like conjoned triplets. It’s fluffy AND skeletal.

That was fun. and I didn’t even make fun of the gushing blurbs for each one.

Things that have gotten better and things that have not

In my lifetime. Born: early 80s.

Food

Better. Easier to buy high quality ingredients, average restaurant much better, no more eating somewhere based on how it looks from the outside (though there was a romance to that).

The internet

Better, obviously, I remember when we had Compuserve. But since enough bandwidth for video ads became widespread, arguably worse.

Computers

Way better. Plus, an underrated effect of the move to flatscreens from CRTs was that desk ergonomics and aesthetics improved.

Cars

Way better. I read that stability control has saved more lives than any safety intervention since seatbelts. One expects a car to continue life well beyond 100,000 miles now.

Flying

WORSE. Then: security was easy, snack/meal service was plentiful, and the pilots gave me wings to pin on my shirt. Now: have to take shoes off, charged for all sorts of things, seats cramped.

Being in a public space like a checkout line or a subway

Worse, everyone is looking at their phones.

Urban cycling

Better, mainly because bike lights have gotten noticeably better in the last 5-10 years. I find that bike lanes are a mixed blessing, though I will never hate on a separated bike lane.

Politics

Haha.

Going to the movies

Better. Remember calling to hear the times? And then you didn’t know until you got there if it was sold out?

Movies themselves

Tough one. Pass.

Music

Better. I feel like, aside from some seminal rap groups that people are going to be listening to for a long time (Tribe, Wu Tang), the 90s did not have a lot of great music. VH1 says the top five songs of the 90s were Smells Like Teen Spirit, One by U2 (seriously? I don’t even think that’s in my top five U2 songs), I Want It That Way, I Will Always Love You, and Vogue by Madonna which I don’t even know. Basically any #1 by Rihanna or Kanye is better than all those songs so I rest my case.

Basic cable TV

Worse, there actually used to be good things to watch on the History Channel, Discovery Channel, etc. (Obviously, overall video content is way better with Netflix HBO etc.)

Beer

Better—so many microbreweries.

World peace and hunger

Probably better if you tally the numbers, though it doesn’t always feel like it.

Future environmental outlook

Worse. Remember when we almost got cap-and-trade?

Sports

• Baseball: worse, games take way too long now.
• Hockey: better (post-lockout changes), then a dip, now better again. Less fights though which is certainly less entertaining. And take away the trapezoid please.
• Men’s tennis: Better, no question. People will look back at the Federer/Nadal era as the absolute golden age.
• Football: The game is better, but the overall experience of watching is now colored by knowing that these guys are addling their brains.

Roads

Worse. Maybe it’s just because I moved to Philly recently and also only started driving regularly recently, but boy are the roads bad.

Coffee

Better.

Taking pretty good photographs pretty easily with something easy to carry around

Way way better.

Staplers

Noticeably worse.

So much for the Tesla killers

The new Audi and Jaguar electric cars (or crossovers or whatever) both have EPA ranges under 250 miles, which is disappointingly low, at least for the US market. (The Audi’s EPA range isn’t out yet but this Car and Driver article says it will be just over 200 miles.) For comparison, here are a bunch of electric cars—a few of which have been on the market for years now—their range, and battery size, which shows that sheer battery size isn’t at all the issue:

Here’s just the range divided by battery size which is probably clearer. It’s hard not to conclude the Tesla has a true technological advantage, maybe in battery or motor efficiency or car shape or all three, though other factors could be at play as well (more conservative use of battery capacity? prioritization of charging time over range?).

The idea of the “Tesla killer” was that as soon as the luxury automakers got their act together, they would offer electric cars equivalent to Tesla in the basic technology (range and so forth) and far superior in other respects (build quality, luxuriousness, etc.). However it appears that the first part of this proposition has not been realized.

library(ggplot2); theme_set(theme_classic()); library(directlabels)

EVs=read.csv(text = "Car,                EPA.range,     Battery.size
Jaguar I-Pace,      234,           90.0     
Audi e-tron,        205,           95.0     
Tesla Model X 100D, 295,           100.0   
Hyundai Kona,       258,           64.0
Chevy Bolt,         238,           60.0
Tesla Model 3 AWD,  308,           75.0 
Tesla Model 3 RWD,  334,           75.0 
", sep=",", strip.white=T)

direct.label(ggplot(data=EVs, aes(y=EPA.range, x=Battery.size, color=Car)) + geom_point() + 
xlab('Battery size (kWh)') + ylab('EPA range') + guides(color=FALSE))

EVs$ratio = EVs$EPA.range / EVs$Battery.size

ggplot(data=EVs, aes(x=ratio, y=rep(" ",nrow(EVs)), color=Car, label=Car)) + 
geom_text(angle=45) +   xlab("EPA range (miles) divided by battery size (kWh)") + 
theme(axis.ticks.y = element_blank(), legend.position="none") + ylab("") + 
scale_x_continuous(limits=c(2.1, 4.6), breaks=seq(2.1, 4.6, by=0.5))

(☉_☉)

Noticed in a dead tree copy of Businessweek:

AI-enabled facial recognition is now a fact of daily life in many Chinese cities, where it’s used to autonomously issue tickets for offenses like jaywalking.

If everyone follows the rules because there is no escaping sanctions, does it still count? Source.