I don’t know anything about fancy lecterns, but looking at the Amazon link someone posted, I can certainly recognize particleboard with a wood-grain veneer on it… Honestly, $2k feels expensive for that, I’d say it should be about $500 at Ikea.

it’s like building stuff with Legos.

I got Minecraft when it was still in beta, for exactly that reason. I was in college, I had some free time, and I liked messing around with the demo - it reminded me of all of the fun I had playing with Legos as a kid. I think it cost me maybe $15?

Now, a decade later, I still play it fairly often, and given all of the content that’s come out since then, it might be the most worthwhile $15 I’ve ever spent.

Basically, yeah.

Essentially, old folks have always taken up a good chunk of the housing market by having a bunch of small households (think two sets of grandparents vs a family of four). However, the baby boom was, well, a baby boom - as the boomers are aging, they’re taking up a lot more housing than the preceding generation did at their age, which is squeezing the market as younger folks try to buy houses.

I feel like some of that comes down to… Well, us, the adults. For some ungodly reason, we’ve been calling it things like “a love story” and “a tragedy,” and now people just don’t know what to expect.

We’ve also somewhat sanitized it. The pop-culture focus on it tends to be the lengths they go to in order to be together, or the families coming together at the end; but we tend to ignore that the couple is just trying to be together to bone, it’s full of dick jokes, and at the end they basically get cockblocked so hard that they die.

Actually, now that I think of it, Kenneth Branaugh is great and all, but I’d love to see a Seth Rogen adaptation of this one.

It’s pretty easy to break water down, but it’s also super easy to make it - just burn anything organic.

Usually you can’t see the water being formed, but there’s actually a really common example: car exhausts on a cold day. If you notice a bit of water dripping out of the tailpipe of the car in front of you at a red light, that’s actually the moisture in the exhaust fumes condensing on the cold tailpipe.

I would assume it’s distillate if you can see through it, but… Why does it glow? I’ve never put concentrates under a blacklight, but that seems kind of questionable.

Honestly, it’s kind of like wine: the more kinds you try, the more you start to pick out the differences; and you can learn a lot about them without any sort of formal education.

An easy way to do that is by starting a weed journal. When you pick up flower, write down the strain(s) that you got, and then when you smoke it, write down stuff like how it smells/tastes, or how it made you feel. Before too long, you’ll start to be able to pick out things that you liked (for instance, lemon and pine scents, giggly and calm effects) and things that you didn’t like (skunky smell, sort of a racy feeling, too sedative, etc.) about different strains.

And, really, don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t work or takes a long time. When I picked up from a friend, I really couldn’t tell the difference between most of what they had; and when I picked up from a sketchy gray-market delivery service, there was more of a difference, but still nothing super substantial. It wasn’t until I’d been shopping at a dispensary for like six months that I realized that even though I “just liked weed,” I did actually have a preference for sativa-leaning hybrids with a fresh pine scent.

Yes and no.

Your THC is always degrading into other minor cannabinoids, but it happens very slowly at room temperature. Heating it up will speed that reaction up, though not by a ton until it gets pretty dang hot (this is why bud that’s already been vaped tends to be very heavy in CBN). A week in a hot car probably didn’t do wonders for your preroll, but depending on where it was (direct sunlight or shade, in the glove box or on the floor, etc), the amount of actual heat that the preroll was exposed to could vary quite a bit (my center console stays weirdly cool, for instance, but the glovebox gets very hot), so I can’t say for sure if being left in the car degraded the THC.

That said, terpenes are quite volatile, and tend to influence the entourage effect of the weed, so you also could have lost enough terps to potentially dull some of the week’s expected effects as well.

The responses are tagged “translator,” so I ran “kde” into Google translate set on detect language… Turns out, “kde” is both a Linux thing and the Czech word for “where.”

That’s… Actually probably exactly how Star Trek would handle modern Earth. Part of the prime directive is that any species that gets contacted by the Federation has to achieve a certain level of technological and societal advancement first, and we’re close, but I’m pretty sure we’d get put on the “check back in a century” list.

So, if they’re nice aliens and they just watch us for a while and leave, maybe our first contact just got waitlisted?

Apparently they’re pretty good - my coworkers loved them when I worked at a sporting goods store!

When I was young, everyone on the internet was an old man, especially if they said they weren’t. Now that I’m older, everyone on the internet is a robot.

…Is this that “progress” thing I keep hearing about?

/s

You nailed just about everything that I’ve been enjoying about Lemmy, too!

To me, it’s definitely reminiscent of reddit circa 2011-2012. There aren’t any bots yet, so discussions feel more grounded; and it has a similar air of wonder to it, like people are still excited for both what the community is and what it can be.

…Except for the sorting. Sorting by Subscribed or Local feel reddit-ish, with the former being a self-curated feed and the latter being a broader discovery feed of whatever going on in your chosen instance. Sorting by All, though, feels a bit like stepping back to my old high-school 4chan days, but with less sharpies in buttholes.

It’s not just tech companies, though - Twitter and Reddit are circling the drain for the same reason that you can never find an employee in Target and call center waits are so bad. There are two basic ways for a company to increase profits, and everyone is picking the wrong one.

The first way to increase profits is to invest some of them back into the company, by paying staff more/paying for more staff and getting better equipment to enhance the customer experience. This method relies on happy customers sticking with the company, but because of that, it takes time, and they can’t immediately tell if it’s working, so they might not know if their improvements are actually helping or not for quite a while. A very human analogy for this is trying to improve how much energy you have through self-care, exercise, and a good diet - it’ll probably work given time, but it won’t do much by tomorrow or next week, and it might even seem actively unpleasant at first.

The second way to increase profits is to cut costs. This is basically instant gratification for businesses: anything they cut is an immediate boost to their profits because it’s money that stays in the company’s coffers. The flip side of this is that it completely hamstrings their ability to do just about anything. Less staff means more stress on the remaining staff, increased turnover, and less man-hours to devote to projects that might increase profits when completed. Still, companies tend to choose this method because it makes the shareholders happy now and it makes the C-suite look like they made the company a bunch of money. To continue my analogy from earlier, this method is basically like trying to improve your daily energy level by doing cocaine: it works really well right now, but it’ll leave you feeling like garbage tomorrow, and if you keep doing it to maintain that energy, you end up feeling worse and worse without it, and eventually you might end up selling something that you need to get more.

So, in short, everything sucks because businesses are now trying to snort up all the cash like they’re a 1980s businessman doing lines off the changing table in a public restroom.

I feel like there’s a weird disconnect in the way that a lot of people perceive physical and digital infrastructure.

For something like a road, it’s natural to assume that maintaining it costs money - after all, you can see the wear and tear on it, you can see the guys patching it, etc. Because of this, things like paying tolls are an annoyance, but most everybody accepts it as the cost of keeping things running.

For a website, though, almost everything is hidden from the end user. You don’t know how the server is doing beyond “is it up or down,” you don’t know how big the dev team was or how many people maintain it, or what costs they incur… And so, people seem to be more prone to assuming that “it just works,” without considering the costs behind it.