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.

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.

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.

Isn’t that the definition of a race condition, though? In this case, the builds are racing and your success is tied to the builds happening to happen at the right times.

Or do you mean “builds 1 and 2 kick off at the same time, but build 1 fails unless build 2 is done. If you run it twice, build 2 does “no change” and you’re fine”?

Then that’s legit.

AKA - the test suites at half the companies I’ve worked. Except they use a loop with retries as well

I’m not questioning your motives directly. I’m suggesting that the changes you’re looking for are still going to cause more harm than good to most people.

Is your family privileged? Absolutely! Is it fair to the others that they are able to buy homes and even keep them if they fucked up financially while most other lose everything? Not in my opinion.

Have you ever read Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut? I’m not a capitalist, but I still firmly believe you need to show your work when you want to take action that hurts the lower 99% to “even the playing field”.

As a privileged person, you might want to add some empathy to your answers in the future.

You just wrongly accused me of not having af air discussion among equals, and then you pull this? The only thing you know about me is that someone in my extended family has made enough money in their life to buy two rental properties. They don’t owe me anything. How does that make me privileged?

Further, you’re accusing me of lacking empathy. Why? I have the same problem with preventing them from buying a house as you would have if I said we needed to kick EVERYONE out of their homes because somebody out there is homeless. It’s the same thing to me. It’s obviously not the same thing to you. Do I get to say you lack empathy because of it? Because I don’t plan to. Instead, I like to engage as to why that’s a bad idea.

I will kindly direct you to my very first comment in this thread. Cheers.

Your first comment did not include a “why”. But you also don’t seem to want to engage. Just throwing out a horrific idea on purpose to troll? I think I’m going to presume you’re acting with self-awareness because I don’t want to insult your intelligence.

So you do you. I’m out. Not like what you’re suggesting will ever happen for people to lose sleep over it.

I understand the idea and its great if they were able to do that but the world would look a lot different if they would actually do it differently

I don’t think anyone has demonstrated that’s true. If everyone but megacorporations stopped owning property other than the one they live in, I don’t thin housing prices or rent would go down. In fact, it would have unexpected side-effects like increased rental rates (since you’d have to jump through even more hoops). Imagine if you will, the pre-flip car lease market. Owning cars was the way of the poor, leasing a new car every few years was the way of the rich. If only owner-occupied could be rentals, rent would skyrocket and the MANY people who want to rent would have to fight with each other. Consortiums would find a legal way to buy luxury rental buildings and have a dedicated “owner” live in them. As you implied, supply and demand. A lot of people don’t want the liability of property ownership for reasons other than “being too poor to buy a house”.

There would be more houses to buy and they would be cheaper, their money would need to be put in other things to collect interest

Yeah, it would collect more interest. So long as nothing happened to them (which it hasn’t), they’d end up a lot richer. But it’s a lot more risk because if something did happen to them, it would be harder for that money to be earmarked into a trust in the kids’ name like the houses are. So they would have had to live with the real risk that their son would end up homeless, but yay they’d have a lot more money.

The problem with a lot of people suggesting real-estate reform is that they don’t understand why individuals (not big businesses, that’s different) buy rental houses. It’s rarely about maximizing profit, it’s about minimizing or mitigating risk.

To be clear: your extended family is not the problem imo and would not suffer from a law like this.

Except, it sounds like you just said they would not be allowed to do what they did, and would be stuck with riskier propositions. Those houses were purchased under little LLCs so that if they got sued into bankruptcy their kids would still have a home (they themselves are under Homestead protections like most homeowners in my state). Not that they expected to be sued, but it’s called “doing anything to make sure my kids don’t end up on the street”. That’s what happens when you grow up in poverty. And there really is no better, simpler, and more reasonable way to make sure your kid won’t be homeless than to buy them a house. And if you’re not filthy rich, that doesn’t mean buying it cash and handing it to them on a silver platter. (technically, I think that silver-platter method would still be allowed under the plan I’m objecting to because the kids would have an owner-occupied house in their name… yay rich people I guess. My family isn’t rich enough for that)

The problem is the lack of business-reason to spend money on things that do not raise the property value. Unfortunately “fixing things” usually carries a negative value return.

The common things flippers do (and I know this from some friends who did real-estate for flippers) is buy houses that mostly need the most efficient changes - new tile, paint, etc, with minimal inexpensive fixes to make the house saleable. And honestly, that’s obvious when you say it. The extension of that is that if you can cover up an issue or the issue is not outside margins of being saleable (old septic, safe-but-near-EOL electrical, less ideal insulation, intentionally avoiding discovering asbestos where it probably exists, etc), you should.

Then, depending on local laws, flippers have more limited disclosure requirements than builders. Which means anything that isn’t “gross negligence” that cannot show up on a home inspection… you. just. don’t. do.

Here’s an interesting article on the risk.

But if you think that it’s reasonable for someone to own a house where they work, where they originally were from, and where they want to vacation, then quite frankly I don’t think we are ever going to see eye to eye.

I think there’s an “OR” there, not an “AND”. Or are you refusing to see eye to eye with someone who buys a house somewhere because their career moved, then chooses to keep the old one because they were able to rent it? If that’s the case, why?

Also, if it could conclusively be shown that keeping people from having a second home wouldn’t affect homelessness (which I suspect is true), would you still want to prevent ownership of a second home? If so, why? Just want to stick it to the middle class?

I’m sorry, but considering the top 1% has more than twice wealth of the entire bottom 99% combined, it seems counterintuitive to pass radical reforms that have a larger effect on the lower 99% than the top 1%.

I mean, if I were filthy rich and that kind of thing passed, I would just deed out a single plot of land with a 100-mile or more strip between two 100-acre squares (probably work with other 1%ers to have a co-op of that thin strip of land) and I’d get away with having as many houses as I wanted.

But someone like you or me finds a good price on a little 800sqft second house close to work saving time, money, and environment on commuting? Banned?

I have extended family that fall into “lower-upper class” but also know their income has an end date (comes from a lucrative career). They saved up and every time one of their kids turned 18, they bought a house to use as a rental property with a “just in case, my child will never end up homeless” gameplan. Not a huge cash expenditure for them and not a huge profit center, it bought them peace of mind a WHOLE lot cheaper overall than adding an apartment to their house for him to move back into as an adult.

I always found that reasonable, and it did in fact keep them from ending up with a basically homeless 30-something.

I’m okay with house flippers because they’ll buy undervalued run down houses nobody wants and turn them into desirable homes.

House flippers are arguably responsible for a housing-quality crisis. Flippers often fewer lower code requirements than new builders. You end up with a lot of houses with nothing but cosmetic remediation and fairly substantial issues otherwise.

What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

You mention bug reports as if they care to fix bugs in the first place.

For most skills, there low level human equivalents in the real world who will never “choke under pressure” once when doing the thing thousands of times throughout their life. When we’re talking about one of the heroes of a tale that are also “the best of the best”, I think it’s ok from a literature, fantasy, or gameplay standpoint for them to have a 100% success rate despite the fact that a failure risk would be possible in the real world. This is doubly true (DM point of view) when failure would be uninteresting or mess with suspension of disbelief. If an ace pilot is trying to fly through a bad storm to land where the firefight is going to happen, he bloody well makes it. I’m ok with “success with complications” on a 1, but the complications should be fun as well. You land ok, but the wind that hit at the last minute caused some damage to a wing. You might need to find another way out" or even "unfortunately, you weren’t able to fly evasively enough because of the buffetting winds, so they know you’re here.

Nobody wants Skyrim syndrome, where a master thief gets caught pickpocketing someone (we Bethesda players do something called save-scumming to keep the immersion). I used to go to a pickpocket show at the local renfair and the performer never got caught. And he was not a “master thief”.