Latest news with #RubeGoldberg
Tom's Guide
26-05-2025
- Tom's Guide
I bought this productivity app from Instagram, and it's now an essential part of my toolset
I've long enjoyed trying fresh productivity apps, but I always tend to come back to my favorites. I use Things 3 on Mac and my iPhone as my task manager, and use Notion Mail/Mimestream for archiving my emails as I go to keep them as a to-do list. Then, Notion is my planner, where I manage drafts, invoicing, deadlines and all that fun stuff. Recently, however, I've been using a surprising new contender: Blitzit. Blitzit, as the name suggests, is all about helping you get tasks done quickly. And it really does work, even if it's not without a few foibles in its early version. I love a task list, to the point where my wife jokes that if a task isn't on some kind of list, it's not getting done. It's why Things 3 has been a mainstay on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad for years now, offering a clean UI that easily lets me add deadlines, recurring tasks and more. It's sleek, but it's not without its issues, however. The biggest is that it's only on Apple platforms, unless I want to fandangle some 'Rube Goldberg' system of emails and URLs to get tasks to copy from something on Windows. And, while I could use Notion as a task list, I don't find it as easy to use for that purpose when it's already packed with a whole host of other databases I've created. Blitzit hits the sweet spot, thankfully. It's feature-identical on Windows and Mac, and allows for multiple 'Lists' of tasks. For example, my work for different sites can be kept separate, but when viewing my list of tasks on any given day, I can see them both and rearrange them as I see fit. The app's unique feature is the titular Blitzit mode, and it's great. Load up your day's tasks, either by adding them or dragging them from other lists like tasks for 'This Week' or the 'Backlog,' and then hit the button to enter a focus state. Doing so moves your tasks to the side of the screen, complete with a timer. Every now and again, it'll ping you to keep you on track, but for the most part, it just acts as a handy timer. Once a task is done, you can tick it off and get a neat GIF that adds a bit of whimsy, then move to the next task, or take a break. Worried about your screen space? There's an even smaller window that just shows a task and a timer. Blitzit's ads have suggested you'll complete tasks magnitudes faster when using it, and while I don't have an exact figure to hand, it'd be fair to say lining up tasks and offering minimal chances of getting distracted by, well, just about anything in between them is certainly a useful feature. I'm tempted to throw household chores in, too, just because the app has its own series of reports. It can tell you how many tasks you've completed each day, your most productive day, month or even hours (usually right after the coffee kicks in, which sounds about right), and how much time you spend on each list. It also tracks which tasks you finish early, late or on time, which helps with time-blocking them later on. Blitzit has added integrations for Google Calendar and Notion so far, so you can tie your meetings into the app, or your tasks into a workspace, but I've not found much use for either yet — still, ClickUp, Trello and Asana are slated as 'Coming Soon.' That's also what appeals to me about Blitzit. The app is available at the moment with a one-time fee or a monthly subscription, but the former has been well worth the money, and the team has been transparent about the roadmap. It'll soon recommend things like hydration breaks and ways to make use of your time between tasks to relax, while the dev team has suggested it'll soon have the option to use AI to generate a daily plan. I've been lucky enough to test the mobile version, and it's already off to a promising start, even just as somewhere to drop items for quickly picking up on my Mac or PC. An Apple Watch app is also planned. There's a whole lot Blitzit already does that feels like afterthoughts for existing to-do list apps. Having the aforementioned integrations, the option to add Pomodoro timers, and the audio feedback when you tick off tasks are great. Still, there's one bug that's driving me up the wall, although I wager it'll be fixed relatively soon. Essentially, having a list of tasks for the day, and then reorganising them can sometimes duplicate one of the tasks on the list. All of a sudden, Task 1, 2, 3 and 4 become Task 1, 2, 1, 3, 1 and 4, and deleting one of the duplicates also removes the original. It's relatively minor in my usage as I'm rarely adding much detail to each task outside of a cursory title and a time, but if I'd spent more time loading in subtasks, formatted notes or a schedule, I might not be so nonplussed. Still, given it's available for under $80 with a lifetime license (or $4.99 per month) that works across devices, Blitzit is an easy product to recommend — thanks, Instagram ads!
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Farmers Need Free Markets, Not Tariffs and Welfare
If you want to, say, make juice from an orange, the typical way is to mash the orange on a simple squeezer. But the early-to-mid 20th-century cartoonist, Rube Goldberg, had an even better way. His "simple" juice-making contraption involved pulling a string, which releases a guillotine blade, which cuts a cord that engages a battering ram that then enrages a sleeping octopus, which attacks the dangling orange and squeezes out its juice. Goldberg's bizarre cartoon machines were hilarious and have for decades inspired students to create their own real-world variety. One website notes that dictionaries in 1931 turned his name into an adjective that means "accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply." I've always enjoyed perusing them because they remind me of the world's unnecessarily complicated systems—and see them as analogous to how our governments operate. Let's take the issue of farming. The simplest way to provide food for the population is to, you know, let farmers grow what they want to grow, sell their products to whomever they choose, export them in response to demand, and so forth. The more important the product—and food certainly ranks high on any list—the better it is to allow markets to work. Instead, our government micromanages the situation with complex regulations and subsidies that distort the market, raise prices, and pick winners and losers. Farm policy has been a mess for decades, with both parties to blame. Every politician (and voter) loves farmers, who are perfect fodder for gauzy backdrops of real Americans nurturing the land, flying the flag, and epitomizing everything good and wholesome about the nation. The early Iowa caucuses reinforce this dynamic. Farming is a tough and risky business, but it is, in fact, mostly a business. Creating a mythology about it only makes it harder for lawmakers to address farm policy in a sensible manner that benefits everyone. Farming has been in the news lately, as the Trump administration talks incessantly about imposing massive new tariffs on agricultural products. It's also intent on deporting a large portion of those farms' labor pool. Last month, Trump assured farmers that he would protect them from any negative effects of his on-again, off-again trade war with China—not a surprise given federal taxpayers typically provide massive subsidies to farmers. "The Trump administration provided more taxpayer dollars to farmers financially damaged by the administration's trade policies than the federal government spends each year building ships for the Navy or maintaining America's nuclear arsenal," according to a 2020 study from the National Foundation for American Policy. "The amount of money raises questions about the strategy of imposing tariffs and permitting the use of taxpayer money to shield policymakers from the consequences of their actions." What a crazy policy contraption. Basically, the feds impose damaging new taxes and trade restrictions on farmers for reasons mostly related to ideology and rent-seeking, then undo their effects by making farmers more dependent on government largesse. Often lost in the discussion, but one reason that U.S. farmers are so dependent on selling commodity crops to China and elsewhere is that past policies essentially subsidized them to do so. Like with all things political, various federal farm policies have created a series of odd bedfellows. Many environmental groups have lauded past farm bills because they provide incentives for farmers to set aside land as open space, but overall the federal meddling has harmed the environment. For instance, federal sugar subsidies have greatly diminished the Florida Everglades by encouraging the conversion of wetlands into sugar fields. As is typical, federal subsidies end up benefiting the biggest players. Overall farm incomes remain above average, but politically savvy agriculture lobbies cry poormouth to boost their handouts. In 2023, market-oriented groups opposed congressional efforts to boost those subsidies by noting: "Increasing price guarantees for covered commodities would only boost federal payments to the largest and most successful farmers, who already received almost 66 percent of all commodity subsidies in 2021." All these policies drive up food prices for non-farmers and reduce our choices in meats and produce. As Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute explained in 2022, if the feds deregulated, "Different crops would be planted, land usage would change, and some farm businesses would contract while others would expand. But a stronger and more innovative industry would emerge that had greater resilience to market fluctuations. Private insurance, other financial tools, and diversification would help cover risks, as they do in other industries." Instead of creating this convoluted, counterproductive policy that mimics a Rube Goldberg farce, the government should do the basics to help farmers. It should scuttle tariffs, halt subsidies, eliminate costly shipping levies, create a guest-worker program so farmers can have a consistent labor source, lower taxes, bolster water infrastructure and let markets do the rest. There's no reason to use an octopus to make orange juice. This column was first published in The Orange County Register. The post Farmers Need Free Markets, Not Tariffs and Welfare appeared first on
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Time for Scary Movies to Make Us Laugh Again
Final Destination, as a horror franchise, is known for its reliable results. Each of its first five movies begins with someone having a premonition of a terrible disaster (a plane crash, a highway pileup, a roller-coaster accident), persuading a group to avoid it, and then spending the rest of the movie dodging the Grim Reaper, who seeks to collect the souls he lost. Death exists in these films as an amorphous concept; there's no cloaked villain carrying a scythe. Instead, the characters keep finding themselves in implausibly dangerous situations, where a procession of coincidences might lead to them getting squished, impaled, or otherwise maimed. Death is, in many ways, a comforting villain for a slasher series. It's not malevolent like the Freddys and Jasons of the genre; rather, it's goofily irresistible, a fated force that insists on smooshing a meathead in the face with his own gym equipment. It also mirrors the tone of the Final Destination saga, which follows a consistent, if slightly repetitive, formula. Sure, the fourth movie leans on 3-D photography (it was hot at the time), and the fifth reveals itself to be a surprise prequel to the first. The plot beats of the installments are always the same, however: A plucky-if-whiny group of young people comes to the realization that they cannot forever outrun the specter of doom. I learned that Final Destination was returning, after a 14-year break, when I saw a trailer for it at the theater. It showcased one of many set pieces in the film: As a surly tattoo-parlor employee closes up shop, terrible things start to happen—his piercings get caught on a chain that's attached to a spinning fan; flammable cleaning fluid starts to leak everywhere. I felt my fellow theatergoers have the same shudder of recognition that I did. Oh, an inexplicable Rube Goldberg machine of death? This is Final Destination! It must be back! [Read: A movie that has fun with the inevitability of death] Back it certainly is, with Final Destination: Bloodlines. There were reasons to be skeptical of its quality; the co-directors, Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, for instance, were perhaps previously best known for making a live-action Kim Possible movie for the Disney Channel. Reviving mothballed horror classics—à la the failed Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street reboots—is also a practice with a shaky track record. Yet Bloodlines is a total delight; it's also arguably the best of the series because of an added soupçon of self-awareness. The film begins, as usual, with a vision of cataclysm: a Space Needle–esque building that both collapses and explodes. Instead of taking place in the modern day, as is typical of Final Destination films, this disaster happened in 1968—and is later revealed to be a vision that a woman named Iris Campbell had decades prior. In stopping the accident, Iris delayed the deaths of hundreds, who then perished over the decades. When Bloodlines begins, she's lived in seclusion for years, having doomed her descendants by cheating death herself. The living members of the Campbell family, by all accounts, should never have been born—giving the plot an intense timeline for them to deal with, as they come to realize that Iris's actions have now caught up with them. The well-established stakes help the story speed through the most boring part of the Final Destination schematic, where people refuse to believe the supernatural madness befalling them and then grow progressively more convinced of it as the body count rises. Maybe this premise sounds like pseudo-philosophical fiddle-faddle. But what I love most about Final Destination is the absence of heavy, heady themes that have pervaded the horror genre of late: Rarely does a modern scary movie encourage the audience to laugh, or leave behind some especially frightening image that can amuse as much as haunt them. Not so in the Final Destination films, in which people die in the most outlandish fashion and are, at best, afforded a five-second funeral scene; maybe one family member gets a comforting pat on the back. There's a sinful sort of glee in watching all of this unfold, knowing that the same mournful character might be the next one to die. Iris even lays out the exact order in which everyone will go and the sort of hazards to look out for, which means the protagonists second-guess their every step to a Looney Tunes–level extent. [Read: The triumph of a film that flips on us halfway in] Essentially, it's fun to have a horror movie you can cheer during. The packed audience in my theater clapped and applauded as the deaths became gradually more absurd (in particular, I tip my cap to the oldest stuntperson to ever be set on fire on-screen). If Scream revived the slasher in the 1990s with its clever meta storytelling, Final Destination helped bring back the proper amusement park vibe for the genre, jolting the viewers every few minutes with a gory surprise that had them screaming and giggling at the same time. Bloodlines is well plotted and brilliantly grisly, but most important, it knows how to enjoy itself. I'd say that having fun, more than anything, is what people are seeking from the communal cinematic experience. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Time for Scary Movies to Make Us Laugh Again
Final Destination, as a horror franchise, is known for its reliable results. Each of its first five movies begins with someone having a premonition of a terrible disaster (a plane crash, a highway pileup, a roller-coaster accident), persuading a group to avoid it, and then spending the rest of the movie dodging the Grim Reaper, who seeks to collect the souls he lost. Death exists in these films as an amorphous concept; there's no cloaked villain carrying a scythe. Instead, the characters keep finding themselves in implausibly dangerous situations, where a procession of coincidences might lead to them getting squished, impaled, or otherwise maimed. Death is, in many ways, a comforting villain for a slasher series. It's not malevolent like the Freddys and Jasons of the genre; rather, it's goofily irresistible, a fated force that insists on smooshing a meathead in the face with his own gym equipment. It also mirrors the tone of the Final Destination saga, which follows a consistent, if slightly repetitive, formula. Sure, the fourth movie leans on 3-D photography (it was hot at the time), and the fifth reveals itself to be a surprise prequel to the first. The plot beats of the installments are always the same, however: A plucky-if-whiny group of young people comes to the realization that they cannot forever outrun the specter of doom. I learned that Final Destination was returning, after a 14-year break, when I saw a trailer for it at the theater. It showcased one of many set pieces in the film: As a surly tattoo-parlor employee closes up shop, terrible things start to happen—his piercings get caught on a chain that's attached to a spinning fan; flammable cleaning fluid starts to leak everywhere. I felt my fellow theatergoers have the same shudder of recognition that I did. Oh, an inexplicable Rube Goldberg machine of death? This is Final Destination! It must be back! Back it certainly is, with Final Destination: Bloodlines. There were reasons to be skeptical of its quality; the co-directors, Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, for instance, were perhaps previously best known for making a live-action Kim Possible movie for the Disney Channel. Reviving mothballed horror classics—à la the failed Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street reboots—is also a practice with a shaky track record. Yet Bloodlines is a total delight; it's also arguably the best of the series because of an added soupçon of self-awareness. The film begins, as usual, with a vision of cataclysm: a Space Needle–esque building that both collapses and explodes. Instead of taking place in the modern day, as is typical of Final Destination films, this disaster happened in 1968—and is later revealed to be a vision that a woman named Iris Campbell had decades prior. In stopping the accident, Iris delayed the deaths of hundreds, who then perished over the decades. When Bloodlines begins, she's lived in seclusion for years, having doomed her descendants by cheating death herself. The living members of the Campbell family, by all accounts, should never have been born—giving the plot an intense timeline for them to deal with, as they come to realize that Iris's actions have now caught up with them. The well-established stakes help the story speed through the most boring part of the Final Destination schematic, where people refuse to believe the supernatural madness befalling them and then grow progressively more convinced of it as the body count rises. Maybe this premise sounds like pseudo-philosophical fiddle-faddle. But what I love most about Final Destination is the absence of heavy, heady themes that have pervaded the horror genre of late: Rarely does a modern scary movie encourage the audience to laugh, or leave behind some especially frightening image that can amuse as much as haunt them. Not so in the Final Destination films, in which people die in the most outlandish fashion and are, at best, afforded a five-second funeral scene; maybe one family member gets a comforting pat on the back. There's a sinful sort of glee in watching all of this unfold, knowing that the same mournful character might be the next one to die. Iris even lays out the exact order in which everyone will go and the sort of hazards to look out for, which means the protagonists second-guess their every step to a Looney Tunes –level extent. Essentially, it's fun to have a horror movie you can cheer during. The packed audience in my theater clapped and applauded as the deaths became gradually more absurd (in particular, I tip my cap to the oldest stuntperson to ever be set on fire on-screen). If Scream revived the slasher in the 1990s with its clever meta storytelling, Final Destination helped bring back the proper amusement park vibe for the genre, jolting the viewers every few minutes with a gory surprise that had them screaming and giggling at the same time. Bloodlines is well plotted and brilliantly grisly, but most important, it knows how to enjoy itself. I'd say that having fun, more than anything, is what people are seeking from the communal cinematic experience.
Globe and Mail
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
Mark Carney tells Canadians how to play Mouse Trap properly
Maybe you, like me, had a friend who owned the board game Mouse Trap when you were a kid, and perhaps you also coveted that thing all the way down to the deepest chamber of your heart. But in case you don't know this mesmerizing little wonder, it's a Rube Goldberg machine turned into a kids' game with janky little plastic pieces mounted on a cardboard base. If you land in the right spot, you get to kick off a chain reaction: boot kicks over bucket, ball rolls down ramp, lever rises, army guy launches through the air. And if – only if – all of those mechanisms work exactly right, at the end a little net will descend on your opponents' mouse figures, trapping them so you can win. I started thinking about that game as Mark Carney assembled his cabinet and the first real sense of what his government might be and do began to surface from the election haze. There are a few things the Prime Minister took pains to emphasize this week, like critic quotes on a movie poster that help you understand how you're supposed to think about the things you're seeing. One of those ideas is that he is not here to putter. Mr. Carney underlined that his cabinet was sworn in faster and Parliament is returning sooner than those things usually happen after an election, and that the Throne Speech in less than two weeks will lay out his government's mission. 'So we're going to go hard,' he said on Tuesday at Rideau Hall, standing before his freshly minted front bench – the real one built for purpose, not the trivia quiz curiosity he assembled out of found parts when he took over as Liberal Leader shortly before triggering the election campaign. Mussio: For Carney to succeed, he must convince Canada's elite that it's time for change The second big understanding the Prime Minister wanted to land this week is that when the boss changes and focus sharpens, everything is different. CTV's Vassy Kapelos interviewed Mr. Carney, and when she questioned how much would really change given that he has many of the same prominent ministers Canadians have been hearing from for the past several years, his answer was, 'Well, first off, now you're hearing from me. I'm a new prime minister.' She kept pressing him on how his government would deliver something different when his top lieutenants were the people swearing up and down six months ago that Justin Trudeau was doing the Lord's work. The Prime Minister said she was fixating on the wrong thing. 'If I may, you are going into process and personnel,' he said. 'I'm going to results.' He underlined this same idea throughout the leadership race and election campaign, when he would say repeatedly that his government would focus on outcomes, rather than programs created or dollars spent. This clearly implied, but left elegantly unstated, the fact that the Trudeau government really loved touting that it had created this program or shovelled that amount of money out the door. What became of it all after the giant novelty cheque handover and the applause was of much less interest. That government, in other words, really enjoyed the ball rolling down the ramp and the little army guy flying through the air, and always wanted credit for that part of things. Mr. Carney is telling Canadians that the net falling on the mouse at the end is all that matters, and that is what he and his government are focused on. And as for precisely which end results people should judge him by, he laid that out this week too. A reporter asked the Prime Minister what success would look like on the cost of living, or what barometer people should use to judge his government's success. 'Canadians will hold account by their experience at the grocery store, when they're paying their electricity bill, when they or their children are looking for a place to live,' he said, adding, 'And then, of course, accountability comes at the ballot box.' So Mr. Carney says that this government will do things better because it has different leadership – him – and is fixated on results, not seeking credit for effort along the way. He sets the bar for success on those results at Canadians feeling like they can afford their lives more comfortably – even as the economic damage and inflationary strain of U.S. tariffs is quietly accumulating in the national bloodstream at this very moment. The Prime Minister led his party to a wildly improbable election win by promising to handle the greatest existential threat Canada has faced in decades. And he said he would do that while simultaneously refashioning the Canadian economy to work better for its citizens and to absorb the damage dished out by the White House mad king. On Wednesday, when Mr. Carney's new cabinet gathered for the first time, it was one of those rare moments when the ritual and rigidity of politics couldn't slam a lid on the human stuff. Most of the new ministers and secretaries of state had first-day-of-school face: glowing, overwhelmed, frozen and vibrating all at once. One of the journalists remarked to colleagues, in a bless-their-hearts voice, that this would be the very best day for the new cabinet members because it would only get harder. Mr. Carney himself has not looked for one moment even slightly fazed to suddenly find himself Prime Minister. But even for the unflappable, the very beginning of things – when the game board is set up for you, when you can tell yourself that all the little mechanisms are going to function exactly as you expect, when the end result is still a possibility you can pluck out of the future air – is the easiest part.
