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Friday Fun Thread for July 24, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What is something that you completely can not understand why it exists?
From time to to time I notice something and I am like wow there is a market for this.

One big one for me has always been Starbucks. I can not imagine paying their prices for coffee. And I generally want a coffee within the first 15 minutes of waking up so the idea of putting on clothing and going to a coffee store everyday seems both a huge waste of time and money.

So for the most part I can’t understand the volume of business at coffee stores.

While I disdain Starbucks, I frequent local espresso shops and order all kinds of girly drinks. It's tasty, it's fun, it's something I can't entirely recreate at home, it's a fun outing with Mrs. FiveHour or by myself with a laptop to sit for a few hours. I don't think I could go every day, but on the scale of indulgences, I find it perfectly fine.

But I can't understand:

-- Lifted pickup trucks. Nobody drives off-road. Nobody. It's not a real thing people do at the scale where you would need any kind of rig to do it beyond a Subaru Outback with good tires. But I can't go anywhere without seeing trucks that have been lifted to the point where they handle like hell, at a cost of thousands of dollars.

-- The vast majority of DoorDash traffic. I understand the value when one is three sheets to the wind, or ill, or whatever and getting food delivered becomes more valuable. I don't understand how it accounts for such a large share of orders that it's a huge element in the service economy. I'd think the average person would order delivery once a month or less, it appears to be much more than that.

-- Cruises. The whole set-up seems wildly unpleasant, particularly if I'm going to have spend my time on a boat cooped up with other people who wanted to go on a cruise.

My extended family has a lifted pickup that we all sort of pass around. I think it's in my cousin's name. Literally the only thing we use it for is to go up on the Land. Other than a few bike trails that I've cut, it's completely unimproved. It wasn't lifted until the stream washed out - at that point it was either a build a bridge, lift the truck, or add a snorkel.

The use case for something like that is very small, and the brand new lifted trucks confuse the hell out of me.