How so?

I think there’s two different approaches to this. This chair is obviously designed as a luxury experience, as the process takes a full 15 minutes.
My idea is designed for efficiency, to reduce the amount of time it takes to bathe in the morning without reducing cleanliness.

Interesting idea. Seriously over-engineered though.

If you want a ‘human washer’ you don’t need a $350k fancy chair with heart rate monitors. Just take a page out of the automatic car wash.

Human stands in a stall. Shower allows human washing of hair and face. Then just hold arms out making a diamond in front of you (think TSA body scanner position, but with arms forward instead of upward) and a 360° robotic sprayer starts at the neck and goes down spraying soapy water, then back up again with a slight up angle to get the groin and armpits. Shower comes back on to de-shampoo hair, then the same 360 robot does two passes with clean water to rinse everything off.

If you get fancy with machine vision and body position sensors, the 360 wand could flip 90° to do the hair and would be angled backward a bit so it doesn’t get water or soap in your face.

You could build this for a lot less than $350k. And instead of $1500 worth of body sensors you have a $50 waterproof emergency stop button.

It boils down to this: If you support the direct will of the people in choosing a candidate, you probably like RCV. If you want the party to have significant influence in choosing a candidate, you probably don’t like RCV.

It is possible the Democrats are realizing that their establishment selected candidates are not competitive against modern Republicans.
It’s also possible they are considering somebody more radical but want plausible deniability about how that person came to be elected.
Or it’s possible they are just out of ideas. Or maybe all three…

Amazon is a total mess.

If you want a quality item but don’t know what brand you want, it’s near unusable. All the results are random Chinese vendors with what look like random names, half of them are rebadging the same noname Temu-quality crap.

It’s gotten to the point where I Google for product recommendations or look at YouTube (keeping in mind that 90% of them are sponsored ‘unbiased reviews’ of the product in question) rather than searching Amazon.

Of course then you get the brand name stuff sold by random grey market resellers for $5 below Amazon’s price so they claim the buy box and you get a product where the mfr won’t honor the warranty.

This is exactly it. Back before Black Friday was a household name that appeared in advertisements, there were some real good deals to be had, especially if you were willing to go before noon. That’s where you got rushes of people banging down doors at 6:00 a.m. for the very best deals, but there were plenty throughout the day.

Then Cyber Monday became a thing. Then it became Black Friday week.
And in the process it lost all meaning. It’s no longer anything special, it’s the same deals you get on many other major holidays.

So I just don’t bother anymore. Like I’ll grab something if there’s a good deal but I don’t put much special attention into it anymore because there’s no point.

How exactly is this going to be worse? Putin keeps a bunch of territory, gets welcomed back into the global economy, Ukraine gets hard limits on NATO membership and they’re on military in exchange for a weak non-guarantee of security. You could sum the whole thing up as ‘let’s all agree Russia won’.

It’s bullshit. It legitimizes military conquest of territory. The only compromise should be that Russia stops their illegal invasion, Russia’s internationally held funds are 100% given to Ukraine for reconstruction, and the border territories get to hold a vote to decide which country they want to be a part of.

As this is now, it’s just legitimizing the occupation. As an American I am very disappointed that our President would push such a thing.