Pumped storage hydroelectric plants are totally a thing for the uninitiated. This approach seems less reliant on geography.

The US isn’t #1, but our placement on this list still sad

Tech genius is only the most recent wave in this fad. We love our hero worship, which results in cycles of this type of thing.

The most recent example is probably the Robber Baron era of the guided age. Some notables of the time include Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, etc. Edison and Bell didn’t reach that level of wealth, but they probably would have if they were alive today.

Don’t worry, a lot of that money is still around wrapped up in family trusts. Sure, they’ve given a decent chunk away to white wash their names but these weren’t good people.

0 is really cold, 100 is really hot. How hard could it be 🤷

/s

All units are made up to some extent. Things like oz vs cups vs pints vs quarts vs gallons absolutely drives me up the wall. Let’s not even talk about things like using cups as a unit of measurement for flour…

This is an actual thing. It even has a fancy name. Geophagia is nearly universal around the world in tribal and traditional rural societies.

She was always too small for her breed. Not sure why she was sick.

Sounds like a runt, which is fairly common with cats and dogs. That’s where “the runt of the litter” came from. It also applies to farm animals with singles litters (cows) and larger litters (pigs). I have not seen it get applied to a bird before, but it make sense.

A runt is just something with a low birth rate. It turns out that there’s a very strong correlation between birth weight and health.

Goodhart’s law in action.

But let’s only do it in some English speaking countries and not others! I am joking, but this is one of the reasons why American English has diverged from British English.

Relevant xkcd:

I bought an ally x about a year and a half ago. At the time it commanded a substantial premium over the OLED deck, but it had the specs to back it up. Since then the price gap has closed and Asus has released another version of the Ally. Asus isn’t the only other handheld maker in town and you can install Bazzite or Steam OS on most of the deck alternatives. Unless you want an out of the box experience that doesn’t involve windows, I am not sure the price point for four year old hardware makes any sense.

Consumer spending is something like 68% of the US economy. I suspect that’s the case in most countries?

Consumer spending drives the US economy.

The number of things that run on excel in the corporate world is staggering…

Can confirm. I’m still rocking a 1070 Ti on a 1440 monitor and it more than meets my needs, granted I’m playing somewhat older AAA games. Looks like a 4060 is even better.

It’s a 19 minute / 2.4 mile trip. But your point still stands - you’re not covering wear and tear.

You’re going to have a hard time beating $2/mo unless you roll it into something else like blackblaze ($100/year for unlimited storage), Microsoft office 365 ($100/year with 1 TB of OneDrive), etc. If your space is going to photos, the speed and responsiveness of Google photos far outpaces some of the alternatives (cough cough OneDrive).

Self hosting is a viable alternative if you’re interested in having more control/local storage or if you are interested in this kind of thing and want to do it/dabble in it as a hobby.

I personally built a NAS, which will take far too long to amortize vs just paying $2/mo. I chose this route because I value a local backup and because a NAS can a bit of a lifestyle product. “It can double as a server!”. Sounds fun, but I would want to build the thing I host which will also take time so… You could potentially build a NAS that will average out to $2 or less a month if you have spare parts or score some used parts cheap. Odds are that route could also be used for self hosting.

How big? Potentially huge if you can get people to abandon car ownership by having a super convenient offering. Owning/leasing/maintaining a car is already expensive. We seem to be running at a situation where lower priced new cars become the thing of the past.

Not likely under Trump sadly

it’s not that unusual for regular skilled jobs to achieve 6-figure yearly salaries.

This is a… very messy and complicated area to talk about and there are plenty of stats and data setsyou can cherry pick to make things sound better than they are. Consider things like median vs average, whether or not you excluded retired folks, etc.

This graphic is a decent toe in the water:

A crop helps

I recently had a drive fail in my 4 bay nas. Amusingly, synology branded drives seem like they’re pretty close to p ice parity with OE drives these days.

Solid natural wood is a horrible material for loudspeaker cabinets. Granted, this fact isn’t limited to just speakers. Wood expands and contracts with humidity, which means making boxes of any type out of solid wood complicated. Cabinet doors have floating panels in the center for exactly this reason. That’s why you should use breadboard ends if you want to frame a wood table, otherwise your table will risk warping and cracking. There’s also the whole non-uniform density thing. Most loudspeakers use something like MDF as a substrate and will veneer the outside. MDF is both stable and uniformly dense, which makes achieving a “dead” (or non-resonate) enclosure a lot easier.