Elysium had it backwards. The billionaires don’t want to live in space leaving the workers to live in poverty on the surface. The billionaires want the workers to run space factories while they turn the earth into a big hunting reserve.

Or in my experience, when one of the 4/5 transmitters fails.

Yeah. Who buys a pumpkin for it’s literal value as a food item? There’s canned pumpkin for that. Anything to do with buying a whole pumpkin is all about maintaining an experience and tradition. In that view, pumpkin carving a storebought pumpkin is the base experience, and going to the pumpkin patch is the extended experience. People can choose the level that matches their enthusiasm for fall festivities. Neither purchases are practical, but both can be worthwhile.

I don’t see this as much different as the buying a CD vs concert ticket mockery. Concert tickets are always economically an impractical purchase vs buying a copy. People don’t go to concerts to get a good deal, and there’s just as much crap to deal with as the muddy parking lot and unsocialized animals of a pumpkin patch. People go to concerts for a specific experience that brings them joy and forms memories. Mocking that desire is silly.

What do you have against owls?

Germany doesn’t get everything right.

Two em dashes though.

Many player cat’s cradle

So they speak dutch well most of the time then?

The existence of an article specifically about his opinions on a theoretical tax shows just how disproportionate the power of being wealthy is. When is the last time any of you were consulted on a tax policy that would affect you?

Farming isn’t something that is easily picked up and takes years of practice. Which means that the ones who realize your point end up actually just becoming homesteaders and aren’t really labeled as preppers. Off-grid living does have a fair bit of popularity as well. Homesteading is really difficult, and many fail. It isn’t something that you can drop a few thousand in as a hobby and act like you’ve got it figured out. Homesteading means actually moving and living your ideals. So imo a lot of what you describe is that prepping can be treated like a hobby, something you obsess over and throw some money at to feel more protected. Homesteading requires reworking your entire lifestyle and can’t really be done as a hobby. The ones who have made that lifestyle change aren’t described as preppers, they aren’t waiting for an event to suddenly change their lifestyle where they have to adapt. They have already forcefully changed their reality so they could make the changes on their own terms and timeline.

I agree with you, hoarding might help you in the aftermath of a storm, but isn’t going to do much in an actual collapse. Even farmers would be in danger of starving if fuel became unavailable. Subsistence farming and modern mechanized farming are very different.

The ultimate preppers are just called Amish.

You gotta strike while the lead is hot.

People have been doing something about it. That’s what all the weird return to office intiatives were about. City governements are scared that the downtowns will spiral into collapse so they coerce all the companies that still have downtown offices to get their employees back and spending money at restaurants and such. If the restaurants go out of business and store fronts sit vacant, then there would be no reason for companies to pay a premium for downtown office space and the whole thing collapses Detroit style. Commercial real estate failed to price in remote work, and the covid shutdowns made it obvious just how overpriced and overleveraged it all was.

Does betteridge’s law apply to questions that haven’t been answered yet?

My wife got repeated infections and had a lot of pain from the copper iud.

If you go looking for testimonials you’ll find numerous people who had bad experiences with it.

Also, they really should offer anesthetic or at least a powerful painkiller for the insertion and removal procedures. Doctors act like it’s no big deal, but it’s very painful.

4 pump impeller failures in 5 years. 1 time a mask strap got past the strainer. I’ll take the blame on that, but the other 3 were just long hair and bad design/materials choices.

And the algorithm AI does magic to make our product more awesome than the competitor.

Yeah, the lack of formal definition of what is and is not considered ai definitely muddies the waters when talking about applications and capabilities.

4 times in the last 5 years.

There’s a combination of flaws. The strainer basket doesn’t do a very good job keeping debris out of the impeller. There’s little separation between the steainer and the impeller. So long hairs that are partially caught in the strainer can still wrap around the impeller.

The pump itself has a terrible impeller design. The impeller is nylon and is press fit onto a 1/8 brass rod that just has a flat ground on it, no knurling or splines. The nylon cracks easily and ends up free spinning.

They use the same pump in loads of washer models. So yes, there’s a very large user base, but that’s a lot of people with part failures. The pump is garbage and lg should not be using it.

I’m constantly replacing the drain pump in my LG washer. When a replacement part has thousands of reviews on amazon, you know the brand has to know their parts are crap and either doesn’t care or wanted it that way. They’re on my never buy list now.

Ai is already being incorporated into chip design tools like synopsys. TechTechPotato has an interesting interview with Aart de Geus that is relevant.

Ai is far off from making high level design improvements, but it can greatly reduce the workload on trace and route and other design steps.

It definitely has aspects that could be considered magic, but I wouldn’t necessarily compare them to the Force.