The FSM is a fetish attempt to mock some of the world’s largest religions. One day I hope to see the FSM come to be the exact mockery of the people who made it, ie the ones who take somethings in life so damn seriously that they make it something they serve and worship, and then ask it to help them back.
When searching on Amazon I always change sort to Best Sellers. The default is Featured Items which shows ads at the top and throughout results. For some searches that have a small number of real results, the majority of the list will be ads. Sorting by Best Sellers eliminates all ads in the results.
Since most things I buy from amazon are commodity type items I need quickly and cheaply, my method has been "Prime Only" + "Sort Lowest First". Add on a score minimum filter if the first results are junk.
If you're just looking for something that's all whitelabeled stuff all coming from the same alibaba source, you can just find who's selling the same thing at the cheapest price currently. The prime only label is needed to filter out the stuff with extreme shipping pricing and times selling for $1. Would be much nicer if they could just properly sort everything with shipping included like ebay but whatever.
The results have long been flooded with brands with names like XEZAXFE all selling the exact same thing so it's the fastest and easiest way to find what I'm looking for if it's not brand name (which I wouldn't trust amazon to send me a non-bootleg version of otherwise if I want brand name).
One of my favorite parts of Mario 64 was being able to angle the camera to see behind walls and get unexpected camera angles. With 3d games being new, it was really cool at the time. Nintendo really seemed to go with a technically imperfect camera that allowed for great gameplay.
I can't tell if you are advocating for that to still be common. Regardless, I just want to point out the survivor bias in anyone saying this should still be done based on stories like this one. The children in similar circumstances who were killed aren't here to talk about it. (Not trying to be rude)
Survivor bias is not as powerful an effect as the HN contrarians who always bring it up seem to think. Here's an example of why: Each kid reports not only their own experience, but also those of the people they know. Kids with active social lives grow up knowing 20~100 other kids. The death of a friend is a memorable event. There's no world in which kids were dying a lot from playing outside but we just never hear their perspectives, because in that world, every surviving kid would be talking about their three or four childhood friends who all died from lethal accidents on the playground or crossing the street.
Those things did happen and still do, but they were rare and impactful occurrences that had lasting influence on the lives of the people in the victims' social circles. If anything, each one will have been overrepresented in the self-reported stories of random commenters.
That story was much more common than ever hearing about anyone in school that got run over crossing a street.
Pearl clutching story incoming.
My elementary school was located on an "island", so you always had to cross a street to get to it walking. We also had a "Safety Patrol" program. 5th graders (10-11 y/o), and soon to be 5th graders, could take a street Safety/rules test and scoring a 100 got you in the program as a "trainee". The trainees would go through a before school program to learn all the things to do to cross a street, plus other walking road rules (when/how etc). We also did things like putting the flag up on the main flag pole and taking it down/folding it each day and some other duties (mostly by sergeants, who were also subs for corner crossing). We had to be at school about 2 hours before it started and ~2 hours after ended.
Once we got through training we were assigned to one of the schools 4 street corners where there was 2-3 other 5th grade safety patrolers (maybe a 4th/5th grade trainee) and a 5th grader lieutenant who was the main one responsible for proper safety on that one corner. As in, our job was to help other kids walking to school cross the street properly, they were to wait until we walked out across the street and escorted them across. Which they did or were reported and got in trouble. There are no adults anywhere at this point except for the occasional drive by check from the adult in charge of the program. The main supervisor was a 5th grader Safety Patrol Captain that made the rounds between the 4 corners making sure all was well.
I ended the year as a lieutenant. There was not a single child run over by a car; seeing a parent that walked their kid to the corner where we picked them up to escort across was a rare sight.
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