>You do. I don't live in the USA and things are worse since lockdown.
Yep, this. It's been worse everywhere since then. I didn't know how much I'd be missing the days of 2014-2018 right about now. If only I knew how good we had it.
>Don't believe the propaganda that Nordic people are happiest.
When you have the highest rates of suicides, coffee, alcohol and antidepressant usage, you're only left with the happy people ;)
Those happiness studies are more about cultural norms of communication and how questions about emotions translate into various local languages. They have little to do with happiness itself and say more about how cultures shape languages.
Before spending money on a good grinder, make sure you have access to reasonable good quality / priced beans in your area! Otherwise your OPEX really starts to go through the roof for shipping coffee (At least my area)
Before making sure you have access to good beans (had to carry on with the theme), make sure you actually want to have "coffee" as another hobby in your life. Maybe it's worth it to outsource to your local cafe the machine maintenance, grind fine-tuning, bean recipes, hours learning milk steaming, hours spent on youtube, coffee forums, commenting in the occasional HN coffee-adjacent articles...
If good coffee is the goal and one doesn't insist specifically on espresso or having steamed milk, the humble pourover is a good starting point. The pourover funnel, filters, and a decent hand grinder are relatively inexpensive and, with only a little practice, the output is as good as any americano produced by the average barista at 1/5 the price per cup.
That's pretty much why I got a semiauto machine. Is it the best espresso ever? Probably not. But I can make lattes in my underwear on Saturday morning that are still better and cheaper than what I'd get at Starbucks. Scratches the itch without being as demanding as a hobby.
Before you buy beans, make sure you have good water first, as hard water can ruin coffee. There are literally products to demineralize water and also to add them back in for optimal water flavor for coffee.
>There are no former intelligence agents from Unit 8200, they call you back every two years for "reserves" exercises
Militaries around the world also have reserve exercises. Israeli one hits different.
Israel is dangerous because they also makes use of Jews abroad to turn them into agents operating for the good of Israel rather than their home country.
I wish anyone would care. We can't even prosecute child sex traffickers like Ghislaine Maxwell because her dad was Mossad-affiliated.
The American public had their chance to voice extreme distaste and stage protests when the Snowden leaks came out. Nobody lifted a finger, we all treated NSA surveillance as a foregone conclusion and moved on. America's collective imagination failed to imagine what would come of our apathy towards surveillance, and now we're all here. Pity.
Oh god, this argument again?! They used the same argument for video games. "Oh stop complaining about our 80$ AAA video games, because NES games would cost you 60$ back then which is a lot more than 80$ today when adjusted for inflation."
Yes we know, games and books are cheaper today when adjusted for inflation (along with stuff like phones, TVs, washing machines, etc) but you know what isn't cheaper? Everything else that's necessary for living: housing, bills, healthcare, education.
So when people today have way less disposable income at the end of the month due to the massive CoL increases, they're not gonna be swayed to buy your books or games, with the argument that when adjusted for inflation they actually cost less than in the past.
So the game and book publishers need to adapt to the new economic realities of their customers if they want to survive. You can't argue them into buying your stuff via inflation arguments, if they have less money.
Less of an issue with gaming that's self regulating now via massive losses of AAA studios and a surge of indie games but IIRC book publishing is more complex.
Normally, free market competition should fix this, but the problem is, unlike the race to the bottom TVs and washing machines, book publishing isn't always a free market but more of a cartel run by a few mafia monopolies and interest groups.
Man, I sure wonder if those engineers building Palantir's, Flock's, and other surveillance SW right now (hello if you're reading this), will have this 20/20 hindsight "oh shit" epiphany moment, when the product they helped build is gonna be used against them or their kids in the future. Kind of like when Dr. Frankenstein finds his end at the hands of his creation.
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu.
Zuckerberg, Gates, Karp, Thiel, all have self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands, to escape the societal fallout of their actions. Do you?
I guess these individuals think like "if I don't do this someone else will, and we'll end up in the same situation - except I'll have fewer millions - so I might as well choose the lesser of two evils".
Some people may have refused to do these things - you just aren't aware of them. It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics and/or intelligence.
>"if I don't do this someone else will, and we'll end up in the same situation - except I'll have fewer millions - so I might as well choose the lesser of two evils".
Bingo. Tale as old as time. The elites have always stayed in power by paying half the poor people to oppress the other half for them. And if you're thinking about the French revolution as a counter example, then I need to remind you that the wealthy elites didn't lose their heads there, the monarchy did, the rich people got away just fine.
Today the elites got the peasantry to be arguing whether something is "woke" or DEI, and to riot and burn down cities whenever a repeat felon gets killed by police, while the Epstein criminals get away with it while laughing all the way to the bank and nobody rioting.
> It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics
Nothing to do with globalism here. It's still exclusively up to US citizens to implement their destruction. US national security and surveillance tech isn't outsourced to India for them to worry about labor competition from abroad.
Mostly, the motivation of people making these products are doing so because they believe that if they don't do it, then the "bad guys" will keep winning: terrorists, burglars and whatever boogieman is the current "Public Enemy Number One".
> ... unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also not safe from government overreach
But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we?
And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him".
I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
Ghislaine Maxwell is a woman. A fitting proxy for this whole situation, when you realize that she's the only person (so far) to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
OK, and so what if she's a woman? You think women can't be evil to commit heinous crimes or what? Evil doesn't do gender discrimination.
>she's the only person to have been put in jail over this whole "powerful men abusing women" situation.
Well she's was the one responsible for finding and pimping out underage girls to those "powerful men" meaning she's the one to get caught red handed and receive sentencing. Most of those "powerful men" on that island weren't caught red handed, they were just mentioned in the files in ambiguous terms, which isn't enough of strong evidence "beyond reasonable doubt" to slam dunk jail them on the spot like Maxwell.
Bear in mind your examples are only those few who were stupid/unlucky enough to get exposed and caught, ending up as patsies to parrade to the public as fake "proof" that the system they pay taxes and answer to, somehow isn't corrupt to the core and working against them.
Meanwhile other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now(himself a client), and former client Bill Clinton used to be president, and their families amassed generational wealth, security and political influence that no mere mortal will ever be able to have no matter how hard they work. There's no justice here.
>A £1500 car is £1500 because it's expected you'll need to replace the engine or transmission pretty soon.
Really not true at all. Care to share your sources for this claim? Anecdotally, I've (plus friend and family) owned plenty of beater cars in that ballpark price, and none had failures needing to replace engine or transmission. Most of their faults came in the electronics (sensors, actuators, fuse box, wire harness) plus suspension, body rust, etc basically the same parts EVs also have.
Meanwhile, if you look up 'EV clinic' postings online, you'll see they find plenty of design failures with European and Korean EVs that are basically ticking timebombs(sometimes literally, hello Stellantis) where electric motors, inverters or battery packs are guarantee to fail in a short timeframe due to various design faults that were entirely preventable. Most common faults with poor EV designs I saw, seem to be the seal of the electric motor stator cooling which fails quickly leading coolant to flood the motor rotor killing it, needing a rebuild.
From what I gather from their analysis', the crux of this issue seems to be that some modern EVs, especially those less premium ones, are cost cut to the extreme in a race to the bottom to maintain shareholder value, both at manufacturing but also at design phase, leading to cut corners everywhere and such issues being a common occurrence and manifesting en-masse after their warranty runs out. From their analysis, IIRC Tesla's powertrains seem to be some of the most reliable and well designed, with the likes of Audi, VW, BMW, Mercedes being less so and Stellantis being trash tier.
Meanwhile, plenty of older ICEs are largely immune form such massive reliability faults, because they benefited from decades of industrial design and development experience done in a past era where race to the bottom cost cutting and planned obsolescence weren't yet a thing. So I wouldn't be surprised when an older 1500$ ICE car will last longer than a 1500$ EV.
In Germany for example(and other EU countries) you get money back from the government on your tax return for your daily commutes to work, if you live far away enough from work to qualify for commuter subsidies. Those subsidies you get no matter which transportation you use, bicycle, train, car, etc. And plenty of people commute by car when their work/home is far away and remote enough for cycle/public transportation to not be very useful or convenient.
Funny how their solution was to subsidize burning fossil fuels for car commutes to the office instead of, oh I don't know, MANDATING WFH!, given Germans are such staunched green environmentalists. Sure, let's turn off nuclear and ban plastic straws, but let's also subsidize the generation of diesel, brake pad and tire fine dust particles we breathe in, for commuting by car to work. We can't forget our car industry lobbyists.
I am guessing its a deduction in calculating your taxable income. You also say it applies to all forms of transport. That is not a subsidy. It is not different from allowing a factory that uses a fuel to deduct the cost of that fuel in calculating their taxable profits.
I don't get how your argument infers from your parents comment.
To me it would be the opposite conclusion: stay away from ARM SBCs with proprietary firmware and just go Intel-x86 NUCs if you don't want surprises.
And yes, RPI was(is?) a proprietary-FW SBC as the Broadcom VideoCore GPU driver was never open sourced from the start and relied on community efforts for reverse engineering, which the rPI foundation then leveraged to sell their products at a markup to commercial customers after the FOSS community did all the legwork for them for free. Like so long and thanks for all the fish.
Meanwhile Intel iGPUs had full linux kernel drivers out of the box. That's why they're great Jellyfin transcoding servers.
I had to throw away, literally, a Gigabyte BRIX, because its firmware did not recognised any distro I throwed at it from internal drives, only if connected externally over USB.
The experiements with various kinds of SSD modules, Linux distros, and UEFI booting partitions, end up killing the motherboard in someway due to me manipulating it all the time, whatever.
Raspberry PIs are the only NUCs I can buy in something like Conrad Electronic, and be assured it actually works without me going through it as if I had just bough Linux Unleashed in 1995's Summer.
IDK, why does this matter? What if there's no retail stores close to me? I haven't been into a retail electronics store in years, when online ordering and easy returns makes it so much more convenient, especially for cases like yours with the Gigabyte Brix not working properly. So what were you trying to prove with this because I'm confused as you keep own-goaling yourself.
The thing is, for such a niche use-cases it's expected it's not gonna have major retailer availability since it's not something the general consumer is gonna be knowledgeable enough for it to sell in high volumes to be wort for retail stores wherever you may live to stock up shelves on NUCs with Linux preinstalled just to cater to your limited demographic who refuses to order online for some reason, is a very tall order and not really a good faith argument for anything.
The market for people who are like "ah shit, I need to spontaneously go out to the store and pick up a NUC right fucking now, and it has to have Linux preinstalled, because I can't wait a couple of days till it arrives online or know how to install Linux myself", is really REALLY small.
It does, because I get to punch someone if it doesn't work, instead of looking hopless to an online form.
On a more serious note, how do you want normies to get introduced to the Year of Desktop Linux, outside WebOS LG TVs, Android/Linux and ChromeOS, instead of getting Mac minis and Neos at said stores?
I guess it is buying SteamDecks to play Windows games. /s
Raspeberry PIs are the few devices that normies can buy with GNU/Linux pre-installed.
Now I'm certain I don't want to deal(even on the internet) with people who consider punching low wage workers in retail sector, as the acceptable resolution for their issues with product defects of manufacturer. Especially given this is what free returns of online orders is good for, makes it even more looney.
LE to your reply from below here: Excuse me but a form of expression for what? The spec sheet of that Gigabyte Brix explicitly lists only Windows 11 as the supported OS, not Linux. You tried to install an unsupported OS, and you broke it in the process. What exactly do you expect the retail store workers to do to fix the issue you yourself caused via using the product in a way it wasn't advertised? You can contact the manufacturer for warranty or return it via the online return window, but the fuckup is still on your end and not the issue of retail workers.
How many physical stores sell the alternatives at all? IIRC there is one in Cambridge specifically selling Pi kit and related stuff, but that is about it.
I almost never shop at Target. It's not near to me, and it's not on my list of destinations when I'm away from home.
But I was in Target one day anyway, and they had a Raspberry Pi 3 kit for sale on the shelf. IIRC, it was one of the Google DIY smart speaker kits. I thought that was neat to see.
My usual source for Raspberry Pi stuff is Microcenter. That's also not near to me, but it's a viable destination that's worth a trip all on its own.
At this Microcenter, they move enough Pi hardware that they don't even have them on the shelves anymore. They're instead stocked at each checkout register, and priced at or below MSRP. They're right there alongside a wide assortment of minimally-packaged house-brand SD cards and USB keys and other geek fodder.
It's quick and easy to walk in and grab a couple of spools of printer filament, some 22AWG solid wire for breadboarding, a card of LR44 batteries for the digital calipers, and a Raspberry Pi. (Well, it can be quick. Last time I went, I got sucked into the mechanical keyboard department for an embarrassingly long time.)
Anyway, they also have NUC-shaped computers there if someone wants go that direction instead. Just pick one out, pay for it, and take it home.
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