This really works!

I wanted the scene where Homer is pulling an all nighter and orders Marge to put the coffee pot on. Search terms 'coffee pot' and hey presto:

https://frinkiac.com/caption/S15E22/1142350

You will be delighted. Feel free to inspect some sources.

If only you could see it. In the big cities the air quality has improved, however, I am not sure if it really has, or if we are now just burning hydrocarbons more efficiently so that the particle sizes have become invisible.

Put it this way, although cars are allegedly better than they were, fuel consumption hasn't dropped considerably. The cars are more numerous than ever, and, although there are EVs, there are still more ICE cars than there were in the good old days when petrol came with lead in it.

I am not sure that most people in urban areas even know what good air tastes and smells like. I take a canal path through lush countryside, far from any cars for most of the way. This canal has an aqueduct (or is it a viaduct?) over a motorway and the contrast is incredible. You go from basically smelling flowers to air pollution and back to clean air again quite quickly, so the filth is totally noticeable. Note the cars on the motorway are going at speed, so they should be working efficiently (until a few decades ago 56 mph was what engines were optimised for regarding efficiency in the UK).

If just living in a major city then you don't get this instant switch from bad to good air. So you just don't notice it. If you could see the filth, you would prefer a swimming pool that was pissed in, it is that toxic.

If you do have to live in a city, my top tip is to find out if there are any meteorologists in town. If there are, buy a house next to where they are living. Anecdotal, however, I used to work with meteorologists and they would always live to the West of the city centre, to get cleaner air than those living in the east of the city, or further downwind.

Again anecdotal, however, due to the canal and motorway experience described above, in post-industrial countries such as the UK, it is definitely the vehicles rather than any other source. Given the choice of microparticles that just get in your blood or clumps of big particles that you can eventually cough up and spit out, I would much prefer the latter. My hunch is that the legislation to improve vehicle emissions has optimised the exhaust for nanoparticles. Please prove me wrong!

For urban areas the risk of air pollution is another reason for cities to have congestion pricing to support public transportation.

Sure thing, here's a report from the Greater London Authority tracking the history of air quality in the city since the "Great Smog" event 1952, which caused an estimated 4000 deaths.

https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-...

The main takeaway is that yes, urban air quality (including fine particulate matter) has improved massively over time, but most of it had little to do with road traffic, as for decades it wasn't a significant contributor to the overall mix. The important change was the move away from burning solid fuels like coal for household heating and in power stations within cities, to using gas and electricity with larger, out-of-town power stations.

As other sources have declined, road traffic has indeed become the largest contribution to urban air pollution, but even here there has been progress. Fine particulate emissions have continued to decline as car manufacturers have adapted to more stringent regulation (cheating scandals notwithstanding). A bigger problem now is higher non-exhaust emissions caused by larger and heavier vehicles. This is something else that will need to be solved via regulation. Other policies like Low Traffic Neighbourhoods can also help to restrict the worst pollution to major roads and away from where most people live.

Urban air quality is never going to be as good as that in the countryside, but it's not true to believe that no progress has been made, and that it's simply been a switch in the type of pollution.

> I am not sure that most people in urban areas even know what good air tastes and smells like.

I run air filters in my apartment throughout winter months, which tend to be the worst in terms of air quality here.

When I go outside in the morning I can really smell the stuff in the air, for a brief moment, until I get used to it. But you definitely notice the difference!

> Anecdotal, however, I used to work with meteorologists and they would always live to the West of the city centre, to get cleaner air than those living in the east of the city, or further downwind.

The industrial-revolution era mill owners were very aware of this too. Posh area of Manchester is to the south (westerly winds;) Leeds to the north (mix of northerly and westerly winds I believe).

Also, anecdotally, smaller towns and villages can have poor air quality too due to log burners. They're an absolute pain. You can tell when an area has become gentrified when shiny new chimneys start popping up or a log burner shop opens up!

Exhaust fumes were easy to optimize.

Lots of particles cars emit are from tires and break pads. I think someone was measuring that but I don’t have sources but most likely I read that somewhere in the comments of HN.

One good thing about electric vehicles is that regenerative breaking effectively eradicates brake pad use and pollution. Only tire dust remains significant.

If we could incentivize small, lightweight electric vehicles over the current trend of large (heavy) luxury vehicles, there would be a lot of benefits. I’d like a trend towards “easy and safe motorcycle” instead of our current “living room that moves itself.”

The 'no AI used' disclaimer is a nice idea, however, how long is that going to last?

We could all have disclaimers or identifiable 'stickers' such as what we had in the olden days of IE6, to send people over to Firefox/Chrome/whatever.

However, next time the tech bros scrape the web, their AI beasts could learn the trick, to decorate their piffling output with similar disclaimers.

In the olden days, 'the camera never lied', however, nowadays, 'the camera always lies'. Even if it is not AI, you know it has been staged and Photoshopped to within an inch of its pixels.

So, what to do?

One way would be to have 'guilds'. Maybe tie it into academic institutions, where teaching staff are at the sharp end of AI use and exacting penalties for AI abuse. Imagine if there was a 'guild of human writers' and being in it meant better SEO with the consequence of abusing AI meaning getting kicked out of the guild.

Ultimately though, without any 'guild system', it all comes down to quality content.

I am not sure that London is the example needed for the topic, in part due to what happened in 1666, which was when the 'great fire' decimated the city, leading to some reforms such as requiring buildings to be built from anything but wood and for them to have parapets to prevent a burning roof setting fire to an adjacent building. Coupled with this was a height restriction, for the Fire Brigade, not to 'preserve views of St Pauls'.

In America, if the city burns to the ground, they just get on with it, they aren't 'institutionally traumatised' for centuries, but the Great Fire cast a long shadow over history and building codes, which restricted the density of the housing.

Also important but not discussed in the article, is the matter of building materials. When Sir Christopher Wren was redesigning London after the fire, he could not specify glass and steel since that wasn't around back then (well, glass existed but the Pilkington process to make flat glass hadn't been devised yet).

Most British towns can be dated by their building materials, starting with the original buildings built from stone from the local quarry. The type of stone found locally determines what these buildings are like, so you might have limestone, as in Cotswold stone, with a creamy colour, or, you might have nice red stone, for example, in the Welsh Borderlands.

Next came the canals, and with it things like Welsh slate and iron. Then the trains came along, bringing bricks and steel with it. Then there are modern times when you can have marble from Italy and whatever else flaunts wealth (or is cheapest).

Putting it all together, familiarity with the materials and where they are from enables the relative age of parts of a British town to be identified.

Needless to say, all roads lead to somewhere, in the UK it is London, where so much has changed that it is not so easy to see the 'onion layers' of materials used in the city as it has grown, mostly because London is more like hundreds of villages that merged together as they all grew. Plus, London is always under constant redevelopment.

The green belt is a relatively recent development, dating back only a century ago, when the smog situation in London meant that kids had rickets due to lack of sun. Pea-soupers made it necessary for there to be some escape to the countryside. Interestingly, trams were what you needed to get around in that era because smog was like the worst fog imaginable, making it impossible to get from A to B on a vehicle that was not on rails.

Also not in the article is how the railways had a sideline in building towns for their railways to serve. The low density suburbs were once far from London, therefore requiring the train, and the dream was to escape the city with the smog for these new 'garden cities'. Had they built vast sky scrapers in (say) Hemel Hempstead, instead of actual houses then you would not have the same appeal.

If you are in the UK and interested in seeing development patterns, one gem is the Lever estate on the Wirral, built to serve Liverpool's industry on the Mersey River, which was where the Lever Brothers operated. They were Quaker types and, on their worker estates, they built wonderful parks, libraries and art galleries. The Lever estate has this amazing art gallery in the middle of it, with artwork far better than anything you would expect to find anywhere outside the big European capitals.

The whole thing with the Quakers was a 'war on slavery' that was won in 1807 and 1833-1838, with the idea being that machines would replace slaves. They wanted their workers to be anything but slaves. Despite being few in number, they had many sectors of industry sewn up, notably confectionary and soap. Places such as the Lever Estate 'set the standard' for those wanting more than slums.

Finally, we did have the high rises of the 1960s. They didn't work out as they lacked community, leading to crime and a general downward spiral. Glasgow, once the second city of the empire, was notable for these, however, most of them had to come down, for lower density housing estates to be built elsewhere, further up or down the Clyde.

I am not sure the article makes sense in the British context, it reads more like examples picked to suit a hypothesis. I also would have liked it if the author had explained why inflation came in to play from 1914. Note that after WW1, the UK lost all of its skilled tradesmen because someone decided that they were needed for cannon fodder. This was a tragedy, not just for them and their families, but also for the quality of housing and what was possible after WW1.

Mortgages also need to be in the picture, in feudal times there was no market in property, however, the mortgage came into being and that changed how development happened in a big way. This too affected how dense housing would be.

Is that you, Julian?

I jest, but, once upon a time I worked with an infallible developer. When my projects crashed and burned, I would assume that it was my lack of competence and take that as my starting point. However, my colleague would assume that it was a stray neutrino that had flipped a bit to trigger the failure, even if it was a reproducible error.

He would then work backwards from 93 million miles away to blame the client, blame the linux kernel, blame the device drivers and finally, once all of that and the 'three letter agencies' were eliminated, perhaps consider the problem was between his keyboard and his chair.

In all fairness, he was a genius, and, regarding the A320 situation, he would have been spot on!

What are the obstacles to making GM EV1 replicas, albeit with modern batteries? The design still has merit and would undoubtedly be long range with the lead acid batteries swapped out for something new.

You can get businesses making replicas in small numbers, for example, I am sure you could get a Lancia Stratos, however, would GM have a big copyright ban on such a venture?

Traditionally, lack of demand and the fact that GM was fastidious about keeping them off the road means that they would probably threaten a lawsuit. Electric cars in general have only become popular in the last 5-10 years; the lore of the EV1 has grown accordingly.

Copyright law for art and sculpture requires registration of each design; in searching the copyright records it appears that GM doesn't do this. Really the more appropriate forum would be to get a design patent but those last for only 15 years anyway.

Trademarks must be registered (and also apply to specific categories, though a kit car and production car are in the same category). Surprisngly, "EV1" is owned not by GM, but by Kia (the graphic is different). What this means is you can make the (GM) EV1 logo no problem, and also sell a kit car as something like "inspired by the GM EV1" but if you sell it as an "EV1" then Kia might come knocking.

In short, I don't see much getting in the way of making an EV1 kit car as long as you don't advertise it as a literal GM or EV1 car. Though as stated, you can include or sell separately an EV1 badge that buyers can slap on their own property without issue.

I don't think that copyright would apply because the EV1 design largely serves a functional purpose, and design patent infringement would face an uphill battle for the same reasons. For copyright of a "useful article" the functional aspects of the design cannot be protected, only the artistic ("separability"). For design patents, elements of the design that are dictated by function cannot be protected (N.B., there is some nuance there for alternative designs). The strongest exposure for EV1 replicas is probably trade dress, and the iconic design ("secondary meaning") of the EV1 should strengthen those claims.

Also, trademarks do not need to be registered to be enforced, although it is wise to register them.

Why would you want it? Modern Evs I would assume are superior in both safety and design.

I suggest seeing how Revology was able to proceed.

(They make reproductions of 1967 and 1968 Mustangs)

https://revologycars.com/

They probably would. If the Saturn is older than 25 years, it can be registered as a classic car. The fact that it's highly modified with new parts doesn't really matter. It's what people in the hot rod scene have been doing forever.

For newer cars, you could probably register it as a self-built (kit car).

The states register vehicles, not insurance companies.

And while a big box insurance company might not insure a heavily modified vehicle, there are niche insurance companies who will. Or you could even self insure in a state that allows it.

I imagine it's not hard to get liability/collision insurance on a modified vehicle, and that's all you really need; most insurance will cover damages you cause on "any vehicle" you drive, so it doesn't usually cost much to add an additional vehicle unless it's particularly risky; that this has a real VIN and a real manufacturer should make it pretty easy. If you really think you need comprehensive insurance, you'd need to get specialty insurance anyway, because normal insurance is going to give you a near zero value on a car like that.

Why not? The only issue is if that Saturn was scrapped - once a car is scrapped there is no legal way to get it titled. (but you can still call it home built with parts from the scrapped car - it just needs a new VIN).

You're saying copyright but it's more likely to be a trademark issue.

You designed a new beautiful car - a cube 3 m by 3 because, why not? Very modern, has plenty of space. You can even install solar panels at the top to charge its batteries.

Now tell me, without differential equations: * how it deforms at impact? * how much more or less air resistance it has and how it depends on speed? * how quickly solar panels can charge the battery given that charging speed is non-linear?

So you’ll end up building countless prototypes and crash them, run at different speeds and charge with different panels and battery types. 100 years later you find out that its shape is just not good.

In the meantime solving few simple differential equations and optimization problems would tell you the same.

Or something very close to programming. How do you add two empirically measured probability distributions describing how two teams perform?

1. A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life. Trig in construction & wood working, calculus & integration when doing finance, &c.

2. It's not about teaching how to crunch numbers, it's also teaching general problem solving, and using tools to break down complex problems using your various tools to solve it. This translates directly to everyday life.

As a programmer we use calculus and integration all the time in performance testing and stats when we aggregate the data and pull insights. I have started getting into making canopies for events and I have todo a lot of trig to calculate the dimensions of the shapes before I send them to the printer. Hell I even use lots of my high school physics when I go to calculate the load to choose to right type of rope or metal wire and to determine if anchoring points are safe or not. We also use a lot math when calculating generator loads and building power grids for raves & festivals. I also do aerial circus and we use lots of physics when setting up rigging points and determining safety margins. Hell just having a basic physics understanding is really important to figure out if the carabiner you're using is going to kill you or not.

So yea math is really fucking important, and you do use it everyday even if it's just the problem solving it teaches.

> A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life.

Planning a route through an amusement park or mall to reach the most things in the least time...

There's a lot we don't need mathematical perfection on so it never registers as math, but improved intuition can unconsciously help in completely unexpected ways. Like an understanding of latency for why a line at a convention was set up badly.

From what I understand, 'rave' was a late 1980s to early 1990s phenomenon. It was a time when everyone had an excellent time, high on drugs. Nobody was 'calculating generator loads and building power grids' even if you had 14kW of sound system to plug in, monitor speakers and some lights obtained for the weekend from the local theatre.

Electrical items would be plugged in with a slight risk of electrocution or fire, possibly in a pig's shed, in the pouring rain and in the dark. But this was not a worry since the show had to go on and there was the danger of the police turning up in force, with the legal right to steal the whole sound system, which could be big enough to require a semi truck to get it places.

Either the setup worked or it didn't. There was nobody doing advanced maths to get it working, and yes, there would always be a setup problem or two, which happens with kit that is made to work hard. The far more useful skills were the soft skills, so teamwork and coordination, not maths.

In time the rave scene was commercialised to the festival nonsense we have today. A proper rave was a full-on temporary autonomous zone where you could have small children trying to sell you acid tabs or ecstacy. Everything about it was illegal and nobody was sober.

Moving on to festivals and organised mandatory fun events, you have to have an entrance fee, the guys providing the music have to be paid, there has to be a small army of people in high visibility 'security' jackets and you certainly don't have small children trying to sell anyone any drugs.

In this secondary 'professional' context, where the goal is to make money not give people the best party they have ever been to, you really do have to 'calculate generator loads and build power grids' or else you won't get the venue, insurance or the event happening.

Clearly the free party scene is not what it was. Kids today have their five hundred social media friends so they don't need to socialise in real life. However, there was a time, not so long ago, when it all came together wonderfully, with the rave scene, and, part and parcel of that was the complete lack of professionalism. There was fun in taking your life into your own hands.

The aerial circus sounds fun (as does the canopy making). However, across all of the extreme sports where some acrobatics is needed, nobody is doing maths. Engineers behind the scenes, maybe, but the performers? It is all about dedication and practice. To take a relatively modern 'sport', parkour. That dangerous jump from building A to building B, that is done by eye, gut feeling and intuition, after lots of experience doing other jumps. No parkour person is going to whip out the old slide rule to work out the parameters of such a jump.

You mention the carabiner, which is a mountaineering gadget. Again, nobody doing mountaineering is doing fancy maths to select the right carabiner for the job. It comes down to intuition again, and what you and your climbing partner have fielded for the day.

Regarding finance, maths is allegedly useful, but how many bookkeepers are doing any maths beyond addition, subtraction and calculating percentages, mostly for tax paying purposes? In America, where everything is financially engineered and the economy is all about debt payments, maybe more maths is needed for the average citizen, but those hundreds of millions struggling to make their car payments just need a living wage, not added maths skills.

I will stop shouting at the clouds now, however, have you done any of your canopy designs in Blender with the cardboard box plugin that enables you to unwrap a 3D shape into 2D flat surfaces? If that is a no, then give it a go and see if it works for your projects. Note that it enables you to do a render that the client can approve before printing happens.

1. Just because a few commercial American events masquerade as raves or fedtivals, doesn't mean all events are like this. You just don't hear about the good events. We have to calculate generator loads because we're running 500-1000 person festivals with permits &c, but it's still an underground party operating by rave rules. No high vis security or police around. Also we're not doing this in the US, please don't project your shitty culture onto the whole world. 2. Aerial circus it's extremely important to inspect the rigging points and the hardware being used due to the sheer amount of force being generated by drops. You absolutely need to know the load of carabiniers, regular rock climbing ones are often not sufficient. 3. Blender could be a fun idea but you often are limited by the room and where the rigging points are, than what you can dream up.

> How much mathematics is needed anyway? In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?

A lot. It's also pretty funny that your examples of useless math are 3 of the most concrete and directly applicable concepts in the entire set of human knowledge. Try, idk, ergodic Ramsey Theory next time.

> What about trigonometry?

Ever heard about FM radio? Or anything that takes a Fourier series? Anything using complex numbers? Game programming? Graphics? Positional encodings in large language models?

> Differential equations?

My brother in christ, literally Newton's second law.

> Integration and calculus?

Ever needed to numerically find the minimum of a function or solve an equation? Newton-Raphson? Literally all of machine learning?

The thing with math is that if you aren't familiar with the concepts then you don't know what you don't know.

I think you are just proving my point. As an example, FM radio. You and I know how that works, and, I reckon that just the two of us could build out our own station and hand-soldered receivers, even making it stereo. Personally though, I would hope that we would go straight to a DAB-style radio with a few data layers for weather, the schedule and whatnot.

However, from what I understand, the only people listening to FM radio are car-dependent commuters and people that have a trade, whether that be building, hospitality and so on. They all know how to find their favourite radio station and get the volume to a level that they can hear. What percentage of these people know how the radio works beyond that? Or are we talking rounding errors here?

As for LLM things, the hundreds of millions that have ChatGPT installed do not need to know any maths whatsoever. They just write prompts. There are some outliers, such as students trying to cheat on their science projects, maybe they should put down ChatGPT and pick up a textbook, but none of them need to know about 'positional encodings in large language models'. They just don't want any of that, the goal is not to do any 'system two' thinking.

This does not mean that a very small amount of programmers need to know such things, but the vast majority of people have better things to bother themselves with.

Game programming, it is the same again. Millions or even billions might spend their lives in front of consoles, but the people writing the games are relatively few in number, and when you take away the people making textures, running tests and whatnot, an even smaller number of people need to know the tricky maths.

I am not sure whether you were just trolling me or not. Where I live, most people have jobs where they definitely don't need to know anything more than basic arithmetic.

A truly epic weird take.

My weird take is this: calculus and other sorts of advanced mathematics are cultural artifacts as much as they are tools and people should be exposed to them more or less for the same reasons that we are exposed to Shakespeare or the history of world religions: they are beautiful, and learning them changes us in positive ways.

One thing I've learned after most of a lifetime being smart is that being smart barely matters. It doesn't matter whether people are good at math or bad at it or smart. Most people never achieve fluency in most subjects. But children deserve to be taught math as a matter of basic dignity and eudemonia. The attitude that education is a pragmatic thing meant to achieve some end other than enrichment of the person is why the US is so fucked.

Your weird take has made me think again.

The thing was that I went to a school where I was one of the lucky few to be in the top set for maths. We had a deal with our teacher where he could leave us unattended and we would collaborate amongst ourselves to get all of our assignments done. He would just pop by at the end of the week to see how we all got on and to set the next assignment. Only on rare occasions would he have to actively teach us.

Our class was calm and we brought in home computers (as it was then), board games and cards. We would be betting our lunch money on games of Bridge, since that was (weirdly) the hot game to play. We all passed with A's.

All of the other classes had maximal supervision, maximal homework, additional 'special needs' classes and utter carnage, should the teacher leave the class unattended for a femtosecond. They were taught properly, but none of them were any good at maths and none of them went on to do anything that paid the big bucks.

Arguably, when it came to arithmetic, due to the low-key gambling and games playing, everyone in the top set had an edge over everyone else. They were merely learning by rote. We were learning in a collective self-directed way within a culture of learning that we very much developed by ourselves. We also learned how to collaborate to solve problems, which conventional education considers to be cheating. Our 'client' was the teacher, and we needed to keep him sweet as we didn't want to lose our privileges. So that was the motivation, not the usual nonsense about how you will never get a job unless blah blah'.

Hence, I have another truly epic weird take. With art we also teach the history of art as a separate subject. So why not have 'the history of maths' as a separate subject?

Imagine learning about what was discovered in antiquity, before people had calculators, slide rules, even pens and paper. Why did that Persian mathematician need to devise tools for doing clever things with numbers 2500 years ago? What are these tools useful for in today's world? How do you code up a script to implement such tools to save on the mental arithmetic?

Such an approach could get nearer to your truly weird epic take. We would be introducing the wonders of maths to kids in such a way that they would be learning a little bit about ancient civilisations as well as the applications in the modern context.

You don't work in production, engineering, or finance, do you?

You clearly are not a multi-drop delivery driver, a chef, a customer service advisor, a nurse, a sales assistant or a barman.

As it happens, I was working in production AND engineering AND finance all at the same time. I will leave you to guess what roles are in the middle of that Venn Diagram, however, that was a while ago when one of my clients was Lehman Brothers. I had deliberately tried to avoid working in the city, so I was reluctant to work with them, however, they hired my intern for mega bucks. That didn't last long though, as we all know! Ah, the shame...

It is precisely because I do the technical roles that others are scared of that I know most people don't need to know maths beyond basic arithmetic.

One huge advantage of this is that I never treat the maths illiterate with condescension. Unlike some I don't sneer at those that are just trying to get by in life or those that have found there is more to life than maths. Condescension is just plain ugly and there is no need for it.

AI is fine for phones and consumer operating systems, you don't have to use the features but they are there for you.

However, I think there is a demand of at least one (me) for a Linux system with no AI whatsoever. Firefox could make itself the browser of choice for the minority that don't want any AI. Sure, you can configure it to be AI free, but that is a bit like being able to be vegan at a meaty restaurant where you can always spit out the meat.

Firefox has been struggling of late and they don't do scoped CSS, which makes it as good as IE6 to me, but I think they could get their mojo back by being cheerleaders for the minority that have decided to go AI free. This doesn't mean AI is bad, but there is a healthy niche there.

Apart from anything else, there are new browsers like Atlas that are totally AI. I would say that an AI enabled Firefox is not going to compete with Atlas, but AI free is a market that could be dominated by them.

There is going to be a growing market for no AI. In my own case, my dad was 'pig butchered by an AI chatbot' to die penniless, so I have opinions on AI. Sam Altman would not want to meet me on a bad day, unless he has some AI that specialises in extreme ultraviolence.

Then there is an ever growing army of people that have lost their job to AI to get nothing but rejections from AI powered job boards.

Then there are those that have lost friends to AI psychosis, then there are those that have no water and massive utility bills due to AI data centers. The list goes on!

Sounds like I need to put together an AI free operating system with AI free browser for those that have their own reasons for resenting AI!

I would like to know which stickers they were. Maybe I would recreate a few for irony. There are plenty of candidates for irony, from Enron to crypto. There are also those companies that it is hard to be excited about - I mean a Microsoft sticker would mark you out as a rebel.

Oddly, the only stickers I have on my computers are the Intel ones that come ready applied. Younger me would have gone in for stickers but younger me had pen and paper with no laptop. That said, back then it was school bags that got decorated, albeit with fabric patches and badges rather than stickers. Here was how you showed allegiance to music bands and football teams. I didn't do that though since I was not one of the cool kids.

One sticker set I would like consists of morally dubious companies such as defence corporations and failed companies from things such as crypto, mixed up with USAID psyops such as 'Free Tibet'. However I can't be bothered to put in the work. That is why stickers that are ready made succeed, it is minimal effort.

Younger me was surprised at how much stickers cost. When I was working in a bicycle shop we had Oakley sunglasses for sale, and the product was cool. In period people would buy Oakley stickers from us to put them in the back of their car. I expected these to be freebie promotional items but no, they cost a fortune and could not be just given away.