Solar is so much cheaper than Nuclear and the efficiency sway is so reasonable, it’s still the better option in non-ideal circumstances.

With initial cost of deployment being the biggest obstacle to nuclear, I’m not sure it will ever be the best green option for developing countries.

This is doubly true since it’s lifetime cost-per-kwh is much higher than that of solar.

You’re not wrong, but I’ve also worked at companies that successfully contested unemployment claims. It can depend by state, but “it was entirely this person’s fault” is a bad start. Employers win about 30% of contested claims, and then about 15-20% of appeals (#1 cause for an employer losing a contested claim or an appeal appears to be withdrawing or not showing up for it). (Some numbers)

And the main reason employers lose when they show up is lack of preparation. In a case like the above, if they can show a policy (preferably one signed by her) that directly forbids her onlyfans account, they probably have a pretty good case to shut her down.

That said, they’re very unlikely to waste their time and money to fight it. Ultimately (as my current employer’s HR put it) “it’s just a cost of doing business” and a waste of money to pursue.

She was terminated “for cause”. To get unemployment, she’s likely to have to fight for it. She’s likely to win, but it’s not a free thing.

There are valid criticisms to UBI (usually specific to each implementation), but “lazy workers” will never be one of them.

Simple answer. Most of us (and most of the world) thinks At-Will employment is barbaric.

It is entirely reasonable to require some substantive effect to warrent termination, even if that substantive effect is not directly the teacher’s fault. Her having an onlyfans account, not grounds for firing. Her onlyfans account passed around by students? Grounds for termination.

There’s a (not so new) trend in the US for companies to crack down on side gigs. Yes, sex work is a politically charged side-gig, but we shouldn’t ever be supporting a company’s right to fire people having side-gigs without a very good reason. So long as your side-gig never encroaches into your day job in any real (not hypothetical) way, there really isn’t a good reason.

HR where I work is excessively paranoid about terminations. They will want a paper trail of performance failures or argue to death that “then they’ll be able to argue they were really fired for a protected reason. Get me a paper trail of performance failures”.

Not saying our HR is worker-friendly. They’re just VERY lawsuit-averse.

Flip-side, I worked at a company that fired anyone for any reason and just kept cash aside for wrongful termination suits. And they had a HUGE HR team, whose job it was to keep the employers happy.

At Will employment. “In a meme” is not a protected class, and a reasonable bank employee could see her meme-attachment having a detrimental effect on business (you don’t have to be in your reasons for firing someone as long as those reasons aren’t protected or being used to hide that you’re firing them for a protected reason). I’d guess she’d have no case in almost any state in the US with their lack of employee protections.

One thing of note with the Steam Deck is that it CAN stream games from your PC, allowing you access to your whole library. You get access to fewer games in SteamOS (there’s still a ton). You can always look up what games are natively compatible with Steam Deck before you buy. The big ticket games are usually compatible nowadays (Starfield was markedly absent, but BG3 is there all-the-way).

I don’t really get people saying fuck Nintendo. It’s their IP, and Yuzu team was pretty blatant it’s made for piracy

Because a significant percent of people have always seen IP as theft and IP lawsuits as shakedowns. Real Talk - IP was codified to solve one problem (it wasn’t casual piracy, it was inventors being ripped off by evil businesses), and it made that problem worse. We should’ve just thrown it out from there and tried something else, but then the evil businesses convinced the soccer moms that their little Billy listening to Metallica on Napster was everything wrong with this country.

It’s not what you do when you try to stay under the radar

And people walked down the street smoking pot in my state before it was legalized. We still said “FUCK the war on drugs” when they got harassed by cops.

Are you referring to Presh Talwalkar or someone else? How about his reference for historical use, Elizabeth Brown Davis? He also references a Slate article by Tara Haelle. I’ve heard Presh respond to people in the past over questions like this, and I’d love to hear his take on such a debunking. I have a lot of respect for him.

Your “debunk” link seems to debunk a clear rule-change in 1917. I wouldn’t disagree with that. I’ve never heard the variant where there was a clear change in 1917. Instead, it seems there was historical vagueness until the rules we now accept were slowly consolidated. Which actually makes sense.

The Distributive Law obviously applies, but I’m seeing references that would still assert that (6÷2) could at one time have been the portion multiplied with the (3).

And again, from logic I come from a place of avoiding ambiguity. When there is a controversiallly ambiguous form and an undeniablely unambiguous form, the undeniably unambiguous form is preferable.

. I use MediaMonkey since v0.1

I think that’s one of the ones I tried. It’s just more convenient to have unlimited access to music, whether I own it or not.

as she runs into walls now when the system is down because there is no light.

What do you do for lights? Like motion/position detection into each room? Or voice control?

I’ve wanted to get into automation several times, and I’m never settled enough in a house to spend the money. There’s always some reason we want to move and I don’t want to do all that permanent work to move. I even worked at an IoT company for a few years on backend and embedded code, so I have literally no excuse…

At least we have that mandatory 14-days-return-policy.

Not sure where that is. That would be nice (except that they could reduce the cashback anyway). Consumer Protections these days have been eroding in the US. Even our so-called consumer protection laws have landmines to protect the businesses.

I’ve used playnite a few times. I always forget about it for some reason or another. Gog has a built-in tool like playnite and I fail to use that, too.

Still do that. For over 25yrs I nourish my library. Just the MP3s made room for FLACs.

I still have it somewhere I’m sure, but I really gave up on it, for the convenience of youtube music of all things. Literally every song I ever had including a couple super-obscure albums I’d lost. And it’s SO convenient. It just works for me everywhere I want it.

Yeah ok, I get that. I’ve got 2 servers running 24/7 with proxmox/hyper-v, so those tools all run in seperate VMs. But especially in this case, it’s practically no maintenance

Every time I mean to start setting up servers, some reason (or my wife) talk me out of it. I’m jealous. It’s on my bucket list. I’m the only guy I know who has run server clusters professionally who has never had his own.

I must say that i’m in the warez-scene since the early 90s and I never had a virus-problem.

I have had a couple over the years; usually use the “nuke and restart” solution. Only one was REALLY major and I was never sure whether it was software or a dumb family member. My password-protected screenshare app went live one day and started buying Chinese gift cards with a clearly automated script. Thank god someone was in the office when it happened and they only got through a couple hundred dollars before we pulled the plug and called our bank.

You won’t see that elsewhere here. No way. First you gotta prove it wasn’t YOU that broke it at home. I could on for hours…

I know resellers hate Amazon returns, but they agree to them. I will literally make buying decisions based on the presence or lack of the “Free Returns” flag. I would literally pay for “return insurance” if AllState started to do that, too. I hate return hassles.

He’s basically threatening to move to a subscription-instead-of-purchase model. They’ve toyed with this idea for years, and have been trying to normalize it.

These memes are always using terribly structured logic to justify piracy.

Agreed. Nobody needs to justify piracy. Piracy is automatically justified because the reasons people justified banning piracy were bad-faith. Digital IP is theft whose only purpose has failed.

Subscription models are great when they’re not trying to fuck you. There are upsides and downsides, but if you have options between subscribing with a one-click unsub or buying games and you choose subscribe, it might just be for good reason.

I got Game Pass because I wasn’t sure I’d like Starfield. I now have 20 games installed (including Starfield) and just pause game pass when work is too busy for me to get value out of it. I’m at about $70 total spend. Yeah that’s more than starfield, but I’ve enjoyed close to $500 in games, some of which I either wouldn’t have bought and love or WOULD have bought and am glad I didn’t.

But if somebody makes you pay $20/mo for Dildo Simulator, and colors and sizes are paid DLC, then they’re just trying to fuck you.

a game i actually played on epic.

Here’s a few of mine (not sure if any come from Amazon): Control (this was awesome!), shapez (almost bought it, then it was in my inbox), loop hero, Guardians of the Galaxy (Christmas free games), Outer Worlds (ditto), Evil WIthin 1 and 2, most of the fallout games, Death Stranding, Gloomhaven… I’m only on page 5 of 20 lol. Only 1 out of 5 of their free games are any good, but between big giveaways and the like, that’s still ~15 good free games a year lol. So needless to say, Epic is always installed on my computer.

It just never occurred as a prime (no pun intended) reason to pay… Errr… Prime

Perhaps THE problem with Prime right now is that none of their services except maybe TV is worth $11/mo on its own. Their free games aren’t Humble Monthly, but HM is just games. Their TV isn’t Netflix, but it’s $4/mo cheaper. You can get free shipping without Prime now (that wasn’t true before), but next day is phenomenal. As for books, there’s not really any replacement I know of. It’s not perfect (has this annoying thing about having books 2 on in some series, without book 1), but if you read a book a month, it pays for itself.

Warez were never convenient. Just “free”. Yet, with a tiny amount of “work”

For sure. It’s always been a baseline of convenience. I remember the old days of curating my mp3 collection every 6 months, removing dupes and fixing organizational shifting. But if I do that stuff for apps, I have to maintain freaking sandbox environments for each app, make sure my computer is backed up in case I have to wipe it, make sure nothing auto-logins so a remote attack doesn’t happen, etc. About 1 in 2 cracked apps show up as a virus and you can never know whether it’s a false positive, so you have to use a computer condom and then STILL get tested.

Dishing out 100 bucks would need a lot of benefits to convince me. Though i get you. Trading money for tinkering-time. All depends on our preference and skill and nerdiness 😂

I’m in an ok place right now. And Amazon is still the cheapest place to buy anything, for me. If I spend over $1000/yr there on everything, a lot more if you count the holidays, then Prime has already justified itself. And slower or not, Amazon with Prime is STILL the fastest Christmas shipper.

Anecdote… We bought Ring cameras from the Ring site for a family member in November. By mid-December, they still hadn’t shipped because Christmas orders were so backlogged. So we bought them again on Amazon and they were on our doorstep 2 days later, just a couple days before Christmas. Was it next day? No. Was it worth it? YEAH.

Then we had to fight with Ring for 2 weeks because they wouldn’t cancel the order. We got the Cameras the 2nd week of January and my wife was on the phone with them 6 or 7 times before they finally approved a return. Amazon has this thing called “Free Returns” on most items. You can literally write in “I was drunk shopping” for your return reason and nobody bats an eyelash.

But i doubt it just downloads and that’s it. No tracking? No phoning home? No play-statistics? Hmm

I can’t be positive. I’ve never run any network traces on it. But it doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of service DRMs. No “connecting” popup or login prompt. I’ve played Amazon-downloaded games offline. If there’s a hidden DRM, it’s more-or-less obscured.

Let’s be honest, though. Amazon gives the games away for free in an app that will never be used to sell products; and they do it as a bullet-point for Prime and to nudge people towards Luna. It’s obviously the games they get for free that they give away. I see no reason for them to do more work than they have to, plugging in a DRM.

But i never heard of anyone actually using the app instead of maybe even playing one of those freebies and then quitting the app again 😁

It’s hard to remember what games I got through Amazon vs Epic, but I clearly remember a few times I was excited about an Amazon Games offering added an Epic game.

In Amazon Games natively, my happy games are Autonauts, Terraformers, Close to the Sun (recently), and a few of those short adventure games I completed that nobody wants to spend $20 on but everyone loves to play.

I tried watching like 3 things. And one i could rent, the others pay extra and i was like “wtf? This is prime? Fuckit”

Their rent thing sucks, but I *never *see rentals in front of me when I use Prime Video on my TV. I named 3 of their big exclusives, but there’s plenty more either exclusive or just licensed. It’s never the most awesome shows of any service, but I could still find a few hours per day of video if I tried.

It just sucks that you’d need like 5 services and still can’t watch EVERYTHING

Yeah, I’m with you 5000% on that. That’s where Gabe Newall is right. I’d probably be willing to drop drop $100/mo or more on a service if it had EVERYTHING on-demand, convenient, with no DRM of any kind. And I’d never once think to download-and-unsub or distribute or anything.

…as for your experience, I say wave that damn Jolly Roger. Gimme convenience or give me death. I pay because things are convenient for me. If it wasn’t, I probably wouldn’t be paying either.

The games are on their app (nope, thanks) or epic (no thanks).

Their app is surpisingly fair. No inherent DRM, just click “download” and it downloads. Epic… well, I have 100+ games I got for free, so I have it anyway. I probably have a $1000 collection of “free” games on Epic at this point.

The tv stuff is the worst I’ve seen back when i actually paid for my series/movies

With all the subscription services, I think that’s the rule. If you like what they have, you love it. If not, you go elsewhere. At least Prime is cheaper than some of them, but at the end of the day it’s about the stuff you enjoy.

For me, it’s WoT, Reacher, Good Omens on top, along with a few of their FreeVee partnership shows. But I have to respect they also have The Boys, which I’ve been meaning to get into.

I mean, to me they beat Apple+ and Hulu, lose to Disney+ and Netflix. At $11/mo, I get all those things along with the expedited shipping and the books. Convenient, but also not overpriced.

And when the other website costs more, has worse return policies, slower shipping, and possibly is even a scam site? The problem with Amazon is how good it is even when it’s being evil.

As I said elswhere, I look EVERYWHERE before Amazon first. That involves me checking out BBB on mom&pop storefronts and trying to filter out the scam stores or the ones with significant issues. It involves me price-checking, coupon-checking, seeing if services like Rakuten can get the price to match Amazon’s. I don’t expect most people to do all those things and neither should you.

And even then, I end up buying from Amazon about 2/3 the time. Because I won’t pay 20% more in some meaningless protest that isn’t going anywhere.

It’s an extreme-case prisoner’s dilemma. For shoppers to prevent a Walmart/Amazon monopoly, people would have to both give up convenience AND affordability in hope that everyone else had the same radical values. There were PLENTY of boycotters for both, but they just weren’t anywhere near enough.

At some point, when you’re starving and Sam Walton comes by and offers you food your family can afford, you pull the trigger. And I don’t fault someone who does that.