QR codes wouldn’t solve this problem, because they would still house a link that has to be opened in the NaviLens app to be of any use.

These codes don’t just take you to some static document. It opens up in the NaviLens app, which when use features like the gps, gyro, and camera in your phone to provide more rich, contextual information.

You point out the key weakness to the whole approach (dependency on a single third party). Though I suspect that the content in question is also hosted by NaviLens, so the codes would still stop working if they ever shut down.

Just taking a look at their website, it seems to me that NaviLens’ value proposition isn’t just “codes that download a document”, but an entire framework for building and presenting essential documentation in a way that is accessible to people with vision impairments. I can see why it would be cheaper and more effective for a city to buy a service like this than to hire their own software developers and accessibility experts to build out their own bespoke system.

QR codes are rarely contentful themselves, they are almost always just a URL pointing to the real content.

It’s done this way because URLs are smaller, and you can update the content without needing to go around replacing all the QR code stickers.

Food, especially fresh food, used to be a lot more expensive when adjusting for inflation. A canned chicken like this doesn’t look super appetizing right out of the can, but it probably tasted OK after you shredded it and put it in a casserole. And it was significantly cheaper than buying a fresh whole roasted chicken, assuming you lived somewhere that fresh whole roasted chickens were even readily available. Food like this became particularly popular during the great depression, and stuck around for decades afterwards.

Nowadays, between industrialized farming, highly optimized supply chains, and a buttload of government subsidy, fresh food is comparatively cheap. You can get a whole roasted chicken right off the spit for $5-10 at just about any grocery store. So for most people the value proposition of a $3 canned chicken isn’t really there anymore, especially if you don’t have an enormous baby-boom-era sized family to feed.

Yeah, you’re not really paying for the soda. You’re paying for the labor that goes into providing the service, maintaining the equipment, etc. Oh, and the paper cup which probably cost more than the liquid you put in it. The high margin on things like soda also subsidizes the cost on lower margin food items.

The true value of soda is also somewhat obfuscated by the fact that most people’s point of comparison is packaged soda. A bottle you buy at the store also didn’t necessarily cost a lot to make, but actually distributing pre-made soda to retailers is a lot more expensive than shipping syrup which can be mixed with water on-site. That added cost is built into the price of packaged soda.

But regular god is also used to push oppression.

See:

• The Crusades
• Anti gay/trans nonsense going on in the shithole states lately
• The Spanish Inquisition (nobody expected this one)
• Basically the entire Middle-East

People putting their faith in anything they don’t control inevitably leads to this.

Nvidia’s acquisition of ARM never actually went through.

I like Sucker Punch, but I think think the gratuitous costumes worn by the women during the fantasy sequences hold it back. Not because such outfits are inherently flawed, but because the execution contradicts the message of the film.

This is a movie about women dealing with sexual abuse, and the fantasy action sequences both serve as a metaphor for them overcoming the struggle and as a means to empower them. But the way the costumes were designed and the scenes were shot end up feeling exploitative in a way that the text of the film would seemingly be against. This is a recurring problem I have with Zack Snyder; his choices in visual storytelling are often at odds with the actual story he is trying to tell.

Few words are inherently bad, it’s the inappropriate context in which they are frequently used that leads to them becoming socially unacceptable.

Voodoo cards were largely irrelevant to new buyers by 2001. The Vodoo 5 line was launched in 2000 and wasn’t a terrible value, but then Nvidia launched the GeForce 3 in early 2001 and ate their lunch. 3dfx went defunct in 2002 and their assets were bought up by Nvidia.

But your point is completely valid, culture moves slow even when business and technology don’t.

Hateful Eight was shot and presented on 5/70 mm film. That’s a frame that is 5 perforations tall and 70mm wide. That gives you about 3.5 times the surface area of standard 35mm film, though at a much wider aspect ratio.

IMAX is 15/70, so the same frame width as 5/70 but three times as tall. Though you actually inverse the width and height metrics because IMAX film is run through the projector horizontally rather than verticallly.