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I STILL don’t get this obsession with “participation trophies.” I’ve never seen one, I’ve never met anyone who says they’ve awarded one to someone, and I’ve never met anyone who received one.

I’ve seen very minor “door prizes” that say, thanks for attending this event, etc. But this “participation trophy” canard has coasted for 30+ years now.

I got one at a tae kwon do tournament when I was in middle school. It was my first time entering something like that, I lost immediately and was not feeling great about it. I just wanted to leave. My dad made me go back to pick up a trophy from this giant table full of participation trophies. I didn’t want it. I don’t know what happened to it. I didn’t understand why anyone would want a memento of an embarrassing loss. Participation trophies are stupid, or for people who are too dumb to realized they lost and it’s a pity trophy. Picking up that trophy was worse than the actual loss, I remember being more upset about that dumb trophy than anything else.

This was back in the 90s.

In something like a foot race, I get it. Most people running a marathon aren’t trying to win, they are just trying to finish, or hit their personal targets. They can still have a “win” without coming in first. But in a sport where there is a clear winner and loser, I felt insulted getting a trophy just for showing up. At 11 or 12 I already felt too old to be treated like that.

A lot of organized running events give everyone a medal as they cross the finish line.

Part of my brain thinks it is a racket. The organizer buys them for $X and sells them to the event for a multiple. If that isn't the case, it still makes sense for whoever makes them to promote the idea, because they get to sell more of them that way.

A similar thread that you should have seen is grade inflation.

Most people get A's and don't learn that much, teachers are punished for giving bad grades, a lot of people graduate without much added knowledge or skill.

I would prefer no grades, but telling so many people they're doing top notch work when they aren't is a problem.

"Participation trophy" has become a modern aphorism in many situations where people are rewarded for simply showing up.
I also just don't have the mental energy to get mad at that. You ran a marathon? Amazing! Great achievement! Well done! Have a participation trophy!

Doing stuff is great. Doing stuff and sucking at it is great. Who cares?

The participation trophies of the 80s and 90s were for the parents, not the children. (See sibling comment with 'tae kwon do tournament.') Perhaps it made parenting easier, "Be proud you tried, this shiny bauble is all the proof you need!" Or, IMO more likely, the parents liked the affirmation it awarded them for their effort and/or they made for easier status signaling when displayed in a pile for house guests to admire.

I know as a kid I never gave two poops about 'em. They felt condescending.

Getting a thing showing that you participated isn't such a weird concept. It's just a physical momento, like a t-shirt from a concert or a lanyard badge from a convention. Getting a medal for doing a race is fine. It's a thing I can hang on my wall that I can look at and remember I did that 10k that time. A trophy is a bit weird and overkill, but a simple momento is just that.
I always have to think about "Eighty percent of success is showing up" when I read about participation trophies. I think it's a good idea to stimulate participation. "Winning" is something you only do if you participate a lot.
They were a thing in the 90's and 00's for some K-12 events as fallout from the children's excessive self-esteem building movement. They usually took the form of cheap little ribbons rather than trophies. I always thought they were insulting and reminders of losing so I threw them away.
It’s a sports thing.

If you go to some youth sports league, it is common that every kid will get a medal or trophy regardless of which team in the league won or lost.

But it also exists for adults. Go to the NYC marathon? Everyone gets a medal. I’ve participated in a lot of organized bicycle rides. The rides aren’t even competitive like the marathon is. They are not races. But at the finish line everyone gets a medal regardless of what distance they rode, or how quickly.

The harsh truth about the participation trophies is that boomers complain about them the most, but they are the ones responsible for them! I’m a millennial. I remember being in a youth basketball league in middle school. Our team did not win. At the final day, every kid on every team got a tiny trophy. I was very confused by this at the time. I expected only the best team to get anything. But who was running that league and decided to hand out those trophies?! Our boomer parents!

I take it you don't work in the corporate world.

I see folks get "participation trophies" all the time, they come in different forms.

Interesting. As a child in the 90s I got one of these for everything I participated in.
Not to mention the fact that the generation complaining about them is the same generation that gave them out in the first place!
Other than that the author wont survive one minute in China (I doubts they are interested to visit anyway), a lot of the reasons/rationales seem pretty weak. I also hate QR codes as menus, but not because printing a menu is easy, it is the human interaction that suffers. I can spend days without communicating with humans here… which is quite distopic. Although enjoyable every now and then (after a 80 hour work week for example…)
I still am a fan of QR code menus but the west never executed on it well enough. In China I just order from the menu on my phone. No waiting for front of house. If I do have questions it’s easy to buzz front of house and they will come over. It’s simply China is ahead some areas of tech, cashless, QR codes everywhere, everything is an app.
What does China have to do with anything in the post? Neither you nor the author would survive a trip to North Korea either, I don't see this as a valuable comment here - it's a complete non sequitur.
Why even go to a restaurant in person anyway, when food delivery exists? The reason is to be social. QR menus neglect this.
I hate QR code menus because the UX of a phone screen sucks compared to a large printed out menu. In cheap place with big laminated menus with pictures and I can scan the whole thing easily, to the high end restaurants with fine paper printed in fancy fonts secured by ribbon to hardbacked board. The experience of holding and reading these physical things is part of the enjoyment of going out to eat.
LED headlights are not really a problem. The problem is how tall the modern cars are and how high are the headlights mounted.
It’s also an issue with people buying LED bulbs and putting them in cars not designed for them. That is what leads to the blinding lights.
It's not just that. LED headlights are much more focused beams than the old bulb lamps.

As a guy with moderate myopia, even low beams can be extremely annoying up to the point of physically hurting my eyes if there are no street lights to reduce the contrast.

I like that I can see better and further, but at the same time if I put my car's low beams just slightly higher so they project more than ~30m away, I get flashed from cars passing in the opposite direction, no high beams required.

Matrix/Adaptive headlights should be mandatory with LED headlights to be honest.

Also being poorly adjusted so they point too high or driving with the brights on.
Interestingly, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) doesn't seem to think headlight glare is a problem [0], as unconformable as it may seem. I suspect there may be a selection bias at play here though. They also conclude brighter = safer. Part of me wonders if the glare also forces drivers to go slower, counterintuitively leading to safer driving.

Anyway, either way, it sucks. Some of the headlight glare is so bad now that I'll see afterimage streaks from headlights even during daylight hours!

[0] https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/headlight-complaints-abound...

> Go fellate yourself with a cactus.

I don’t think this makes sense.

The author might have confused "fellate" and "sodomize".
> I don’t think this makes sense.

Neither does most of the article. Being upset about 2FA considering how incredibly easy it is? Pretty dumb write up. Lotsy of cheugy humor that's not really funny, as well.

The family Cactaceae comes in 127 genera with some 1,750 known species.
It was a cool statement 25 years ago when the author was young. This "blurb" of an article gives me the impression that in some ways she thinks she still is.
The writing is insufferable.
> Printing menus isn’t hard, or even costly.

I'm not a fan of QR code menus either, but printed menus are not necessarily cheap. The owner of one of my favourite restaurants told me that he couldn't raise prices on his menu to match inflation because the cost of re-printing all the menus with increased prices would eat up the difference. IIRC, the restaurant later shifted to a cheaper and simpler menu design.

Depends.

If you're a restaurateur, do you have the .ai files your agency created, an Adobe Illustrator license, and know-how to get in there and change the prices? And then know where/how to deliver the result to get it printed? If so, you probably still have something better to do...

You probably pay an agency an hourly rate plus markup to get them updated, prepped and sent off to be reprinted.

Next time: negotiate fixed prices/timelines for small updates, own the files, and own the relationship with the printers.

So.. the owner made a mistake getting expensive menus printed and then corrected his mistake?

Even if he didn't have to adjust prices due to inflation, surely restaurants adjust the items on their menus frequently. I have been to a restaurant that printed new menus daily because it changed daily. It's like 10 sheets of paper or cardstock. It's not that expensive.

Maybe tablets would be a good compromise?
I used to be able to buy a piece of software for $30, and I owned it until that computer became an antique. All your turning Photoshop into a monthly subscription did — was make me download the free version, GIMP.

Dude. Photoshop was like $700 back in 2008. You weren’t buying that anyway, you were pirating it or using an old unregistered copy of Paint Shop Pro.

I’m not gonna argue that every single app being either a subscription or an in-app purchase funnel now doesn’t suck, but you were not buying that for $30 unless it was from Bob’s Totally Legit House Of Burnt CDs.

> There’s a button for the hand brake now, it’s called the ‘electronic parking brake’. Nopeity nope nope. It’s called the oh-shit brake for a reason. I want to yank on that summabitch like my life depended on it, because — it might.

At best doing that will do absolutely nothing useful, as anyone who's accidentally driven off with it set will know. At worst it'll spin you, since the hand brakes only lock the rear wheels. This is used deliberately to perform a "handbrake turn", but if you're yanking it like your life depends on it you're turning a front impact with big crumple zones into a side impact.

> Also, standardize the points of rewards programs so we have an idea if we need 104 or 97,000 points to redeem them for the pocket lint prize.

This already exists, called money, and obviously won't be used because it's easier to realize how low the number is, but also harder to cancel/inflate away.

Broader than that - is there any big generational divide about subscriptions (or, for that matter, many other points on the list)?

With a QR menu, if I can also order and pay from them, then they are far superior to having to try to flag someone down. If not its less useful, but it's useful for multiple languages.

In all cases it should be a website, not a "download our app"

There are no adverts on netflix, and I have a lot of subscriptions, but its still less (pro-rata) than I paid for satelite tv with adverts in the 00s.

Someone called me a boomer a few months ago and I was deeply offended. I’m gen x. The person was gen z. I was like dude do you not know what a boomer is? They had no idea that baby boomers were the generation born after world war 2. To them “boomer” was a slur applied to anyone older than them. I agree that actual boomers tend toward some unfortunate beliefs and characteristics, but “boomer” has become an ageist slur.

As a 50+ year old in tech maybe I’m overly sensitive to this?

> Did you Know Writing is My Full-Time Income?

I have a very hard time believing this quality of writing earns you an income.

I agree with all (almost all maybe?) of these. Aren't they pretty un-controversial in general for consumers, but represent the business/consumer adversarial disconnect? Or maybe I'm wrong and people love QR menus etc.

I couldn't have stated the 2FA thing better... Same with scare tactics (and forcing your hand) about software updates in the name of security. You can't just invoke security as an auto-win card! "Think of the Children."

LED headlights are fantastic. They work everyday. They never get burnt out. In the spirit of boomers, if they're blinding you, go complain about the lack of inspections in your state. I love LED lights.
Tiny print is terribly inaccessible for a lot of people. Just make the print fucking normal and legible.
"Don't trust anyone over 30"