As an old fart, I actively dislike photorealistic graphics in most cases. I’m playing a game, and I kind of want it to look like a game, which generally means more surrealistic - exaggerated contrast, high saturation, low texture - than realistic. I’d rather play where the characters look like caricatures than my next door neighbor. And that doesn’t even go into great games with sprite-like graphics.

Enough is enough. You’ve saturated the art budget, it’s time to pay writers more.

I got my current number around 3 years go, and the vast majority - easily 95% - of calls I get are still real estate, political, or job search spam for the previous owner. It’s on permanent DND, but I’ll check the text log every day or two.

Also, at least for the Yubi implementation, fixable in software, firmware >= 5.7 not vulnerable. Also not upgradeable, so replace keys if you’re worried about nation-state attacks.

Woodworking planes.

You can go to Home Depot and get a plane for $15-20, and it will - mostly - cut wood. Spend $50-60 and get a decent name brand tool that gives a lot less grief. Spend $500 and get a Lie Nielsen that’s just on another level.

Here’s the thing, though: you have to be pretty competent to appreciate the difference between the $50 and $500 tools; and if you know what you’re doing, you can easily tune the $15 so it works almost as well as the $500. Buy cheap to get started; upgrade if it turns out you stick with the hobby. I’ll never know if I could have learned easier/faster starting with a $50 plane, but my guess is that I’d still have been gouging the shit out of everything.

University is ok if you’re starting at zero and don’t even know what’s out there. It’s for exposing students to a a breadth of topics and some rationale of why things are as they are, but not necessarily for plugging them into a production environment.

Nothing beats having your own real world project, either for motivation or exposure to cutting edge methods. Universities have tried to replicate that with things like ‘problem based learning,’ and they probably hope that students will be inspired by one or two of the classes to start their own out-of-class project, but school and work are fundamentally different ways of learning with fundamentally different goals.

There’s a new theory going around that we age stepwise at 44, 60, and 78. Plus/minus a few years, individually, because biology is fuzzy.

And exercise isn’t very good for weight loss. There’s about the same calories in a 15 minute run as a 12 oz beer or a 30 gram “serving” of potato chips.

Maybe you can find a way to couple activity to something else that you do want to do. Exercise for its own sake is tough for me, but I don’t mind walking 15 minutes to get lunch, and then, obviously, 15 minutes back. The meme’s message is that you don’t need to sweat, get out of breath, or get swole to have meaningful physical activity.

Fun fact: armadillos are all born as identical quadruplets. If you saw 5, then one was either a parent or adopted.

Without an adblocker, I used to mute the system and put youtube in a background window. Do something else long enough for the video and all its ads to play, then go watch it. They wouldn’t play the ads on a second play through, and it would interrupt the cycle of constantly playing a new video.

I have something similar, but wifi. Never even tried to connect to it, because you just use the buttons to set temp & time.

I can imagine, though, that an app might have buttons for ‘eggs’, ‘yogurt’, ‘steak’, etc. Or maybe let you program temperature-time sequences. Or let you check how much time is left from the next room. Conveniences. Definitely no need for them to phone home, though, except maybe for an ad-driven ‘recipe of the week’ type thing.

The Android app should still be fine. I’d expect Apple’s move to be followed by a lot of creators adding a “Don’t use the iOS Patreon app” to their profiles.

I mean, apps that are just the website are a bad idea in the first place, but this specific problem is entirely contained to the iOS app. If some people prefer an app to a bookmark, that’s on them.

Colon is part of your large intestine.

It’s a long-standing theme. Thomas Pikettey claims that, throughout the 20th century, about 50% of people own nothing, 40% own their “stuff” - house & car - and 10% own everything else. And, really, that it’s even just the top 2-3% who own the vast majority of that everything-else, except for a brief window after world wars destroyed all the capital, and temporarily put the world into a slightly less unequal condition.

Fame and glory? You think Elon Musk notices an extra billion dollars here and there, or do you think he likes being the Lord of X and the Master of Tesla?

You’d need some way to cache that video, though, because it’d take 24 hours to write 8TB at SD card speeds of 80 MB/s.

Only looking at northeast Ohio, the population and income maps you show are high along the Cleveland-Akron-Canton corridor, where the voter purge is west of there - Wooster & Mansfield.

Dunno. The last 2 weeks posts on c/personalfinance are just return2ozma doomscrying an imminent recession. As near as I can remember, there’s been people warning of imminent recession every day for the past 30 years. Occasionally, they’re right.

2. What electricity costs in my area. $0.32/KWh at the wrong time of day.

I assume you have this on a UPS. What about using a smart plug to switch to UPS during the expensive part of the day, then back to mains to charge when it’s cheaper? I imagine that needs a bigger UPS than one would ordinarily spec, and that cost would probably outweigh the electric bill, but never know.

The politicians made sure to exempt themselves from all the consumer protection, anti-fraud laws. They live in bubbles where their own political agendas are too important for limitations.

But I suspect, because my brand new phone number gets a lot of political spam, that 1) a lot of people can’t live with it and change their numbers to escape or 2) a lot of it is recycled burner-phones, previously used to launder donations to fit legal donation limits. But it’s given me a personal rule to never make a donation from my real phone or allow my real phone to become associated with any political process.

You can’t use house #1 as the collateral for both the mortgage on house #1 and house #2, because the bank is smart enough to know that you don’t actually own house #1. If house #1 has appreciated significantly from the purchase price, or you have paid off a good chunk of the mortgage, you may have enough equity to take a loan (eg home equity line of credit / HELOC) on that equity to get down-payment money for a second house. That’s generally a slow process, unless you happen to own property in a market bubble.