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Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

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Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#121

Post by splonk »

chihuahua wrote: post #114
jeramey wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly used to! That machine introduced me to a weird variety of things when I lived near it almost 20 years ago. Cheap thrills as a broke young 'un. Thanks to it, I still have to try strange sodas when I am traveling--especially abroad. It's not always good, but it's always fun.

Have you visited the Coca Cola museum in Las Vegas? Not sure if it still exists, but I went in 2000. They had about 100 different sodas from around the world. These days, I haven't had any soda in years. 35+ grams of sugar per can is a terrible idea.

There's also one in Atlanta, and I think maybe Orlando as well. Always fun to see the tourists getting surprised by the one bitter drink in the whole collection (Beverly, from Italy). Wikipedia claims it was discontinued 12 years ago, except for the Coke museums.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#122

Post by mindcrime »

userbinator wrote: post #115
shadowtree wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elevator_accidents https://www.elcosh.org/document/1232/d000397/Deaths+and+Inju... here is a tragic death of a child in the US, 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/07/14/elevator-...

here is a tragic death of a child in the US, 2021 That's a very different type of injury to what the parent comment was referring to: "elevator crashes", where the car falls to the bottom of the shaft. The list of elevator accidents is mostly composed of ones involving construction, freight, and mine-shaft elevators.

"elevator crashes", where the car falls to the bottom of the shaft.

Yes, that was the kind of incident I was mainly commenting on.

The list of elevator accidents is mostly composed of ones involving construction, freight, and mine-shaft elevators.

I probably should have made a point to qualify what I said above as "passenger elevators in office type buildings" or something. Definitely did not mean to include mine-shafts / construction site elevators, etc.

That said, I don't have the original reference handy, but I recall that where I read that original statistic was a credible source.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#123

Post by splonk »

abeppu wrote: post #64
ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist. I don’t have much commentary on the matter other than to say it makes me sad.

What are "things like this"? Is it things that exist in public but which don't have clear attribution? B/c in 2020 there were the "monoliths", which were pretty cool. Or, you know, Banksy still exists. Or @fog_karla / @karlthefog for that matter. Is it playful, non-scalable experiences? There's Improv Everywhere. My city has a number of curb-side bird-house sized "libraries". There's a guy who keeps doing extremely l…

> My city has a number of curb-side bird-house sized "libraries".

Possibly these: https://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/

There's quite a few in San Francisco, I always enjoy running across a new one. Often the owners do some fun themed decoration for them as well. Can't say I've ever actually read anything from one, but I have dropped off some books before.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#124

Post by mastazi »

soneca wrote: post #94
mastazi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate you putting out an alternative link. Unfortunately I cannot access archive.is (shows a Cloudflare page with Google reCaptcha). Why not using the more well known archive.org instead? Also IIRC archive.is is hard to access for some users depending on the DNS server they're using.

I get those from time to time. Isn’t just solving the captcha enough to reach the page?

> Isn’t just solving the captcha enough to reach the page?

sure but why not using an alternative service that doesn't have the reCaptcha to start with?

Edit: Just to explain more the problem: depending on your privacy settings, it might take up to a couple minutes to solve the reCaptcha because Google makes it much harder for users who are running anti-fingerprinting tools in their browser. This is also my case. In the end, I usually just give up and don't visit the page in question.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#125

Post by ashtonkem »

fighterpilot wrote: post #23
pbronez wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally a story about this thing happening.

It's literally a story about this having happened in the past and having stopped.

Three years ago, not in like 1999.

These kinds of things pop in and out of existence all the time, it’s not like this soda machine disappearing three years ago proves that it cannot ever happen again.

Honestly, my bet is that the source of these out of production sodas dried up or got too expensive. This would be less “the world has changed” and more “forty year old sodas have finally run out”.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#126

Post by throwawaycities »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist. I don’t have much commentary on the matter other than to say it makes me sad.

> I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist.

Everyone says crypto is the answer in search of a problem, but if you’re really sad and would support it I’ll make a collection of mystery NFTs where you/buyers can’t see the art until you buy the NFT.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#127

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

ALittleLight wrote: post #84
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be able to compartmentalize slightly better than GP, but as much as that machine is charming as hell and brings warmth to my heart, soda has more or less been a plague on humanity. Unlike soda, alcohol has a lot going for it, because unless you abuse it, it can be a pretty wonderful, unique inebriant.

Soda can make you fat and brown your teeth. It doesn't create addicts who destroy their lives over it. Soda doesn't kill people via Drunk Driving. Soda doesn't contribute to violent crimes and domestic violence.

It’s not fair to write off the harm caused by soda as just causing brown teeth and fatness and to then to juxtapose it with domestic violence and drunk driving. That’s a basic strawman, which I sought to exclude by carving out “alcohol abuse” in my OP. Because alcoholism is terrible, especially when it affects a close loved one, and was not the subject of my comment. Fortunately, the vast majority of people who consume alcohol are not alcoholics. But many people, if not most people in 2021 United States and other parts of the world are obese. Of course obesity is not alcohol-fueled domestic violence, but that’s obvious.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#128

Post by Nition »

kibwen wrote: post #95
Nition wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say you set up this vending machine today. More and more people quickly find out about it. Eventually a few people are waiting for it to be restocked so they can quickly buy all the rare cans and sell them on eBay, so it's empty most of the time. Maybe the owner gets discovered. The fun is gone and it gets removed.

This is subject to survivorship bias, though. These days it's certainly easier for things to go viral, but things can only go viral if they get found in the first place and, crucially, if those who found it choose to share it. Maybe the clout economy of instagram etc. increases the odds that people will expose such things for likes, but I personally know of at least one fantastic, incredible (, almost certainly illeg…

Yeah, good point. Of course most of the big things you know about got ruined, because the ones that didn't get too popular, you don't know about.

Re: Capitol Hill's mystery soda machine

#130

Post by progman32 »

kypro wrote: post #52
ComputerGuru wrote: post #2

I feel like we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly impossible for things like this to exist. I don’t have much commentary on the matter other than to say it makes me sad.

Not sure how many people will get the reference, but I was thinking this just yesterday about the Pokémon red and blue games. Back in the nineties many rumours spread about hidden secret in those games, but we didn’t have the internet to verify or debunk them. Like many kids back then me and my friends spent hours trying to move that truck to get a mew, but it was impossible, it was just a rumour that spread because…

The internet has also made some of these myths into realities: https://hackaday.com/2017/03/17/theres-a-mew-underneath-the-...

There's plenty of mysteries in games today. Check out Boundary Break by shesez and perhaps especially videos by oddheader for a taste.

It is true, perhaps, that there is more organization or at least communication between people solving a particular mystery today.

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