Given that this is a laptop we’re talking about, OP is definitely over selling it. Bring a backpack, unpack the laptop box into your backpack (assuming the box is too big to fit in the backpack itself). Something bigger like a TV would be more problematic.

The main worry is that being seen with new-in-box fancy electronics makes you look like “guy with money”. It’s not so much that someone’s gonna steal your TV on the subway, but if you can afford a new TV your wallet probably has good stuff in it. Then it’s just a question of “how bad is the crime actually on this commute?”. Most places it’d be fine but some rough parts of some cities I’d be worried.

I mean…

[Gestures broadly at the state of the world]

People see headlines and the comment section of the social media platform where that headline was posted.

This, basically

https://xkcd.com/1019/

Personal/Family use is fine, it’s kinda fiddly but so is most selfhosted software.

At an organizational level, that fiddliness spirals into a ton of work, which doesn’t really overlap with other IT Duties in the way that troubleshooting OneDrive usually ends up solving problems with the whole Microsoft suite.

The US may affect the whole world less next year if everyone else works hard to find alternate markets, but it’s going to take longer than that for the rest of the world to totally detangle themselves from our mess.

Don’t use bar keepers friend to clean them. That fucked up ours.

The easiest offsite backup would be any cloud platform. Downside is that you aren’t gonna own your own data like if you deployed your own system.

Next option is an external SSD that you leave at your work desk and take home once a week or so to update.

The most robust solution would be to find a friend or relative willing to let you set up a server in their house. Might need to cover part of their electric bill if your machine is hungry.

I don’t think “mods per user” is that important of a metric. “Mods per daily/weekly/monthly post/comment” is a more useful gauge of a community’s activity.

It’s a context thing.

Ohio = a bad place to be. Honestly, as a non-Ohio Midwesterner, I say this should be allowed.

Chat = like addressing the twitch chat. “Chat, are we doomed?” It’s actually pretty interesting from a linguistics perspective because it’s arguably a fourth person pronoun. But in-class I can see it getting out of hand.

Per that last bit, I’m guessing they never had a lawyer present. Would make any of those fabricated statements null and void, if the constitution meant anything.

A relative of mine just had a baby, and her mom came from out-of country to meet her grandchild and help mom and dad in those first crazy weeks with a newborn.

But when she told CBP that she was “coming to help her daughter with the new baby” she got detailed and questioned for 2 hours. Eventually they let her through but they were really trying to pin her coming to work illegally on a tourism visa.

If you or a loved one are in a similar situation, just say you’re “visiting family”. Apparently it’s a legal gray area in this shithole to help your child take care of a newborn.

I think that quote was from later in his life.

AoE2 is one of a small number of video games I can entertain an argument about building an immense skill gulf between average and top tier players, like chess. But the size of that gulf is just incomparable.

There are approximately as many titled chess masters* as there are total monthly AoE2 players. And truly, the difference between a Candidate Master and a Grand Master is probably as big as the difference between a candidate master and an average player. Grand Masters are just so insanely skilled, they can pull some crazy flexes by forcing their opponents’ moves due to traps they set tens of moves ago.

I watched a GM streamer playing against his subs, with the rule “no matter how bad you’re losing, you can’t forfeit” so that he could show of these stunts. He was doing stuff like promoting every single pawn to a queen (which gets tricky because when you have 8 queens you have to try to not accidentally checkmate your opponent until you get the 9th). Taking only the pawns from his opponent, and then forcing all of the pieces back to their starting square before checkmate. Forcing an “underpromotion mate” (where you win by turning a pawn into a knight rather than a queen, pretty rare circumstance). Drawing basic pixel art with the pieces on the board at checkmate. And these weren’t all against noob players, some of them were quite skilled or even semi-pro, but to someone at the top tier of chess there is almost no difference between semi pro and beginner.

GMs are crazy good.

*All master titles combined, not just GM.

I wanna see Elon play a grandmaster and get absolutely memed on. The gulf between the average person and a top tier chess player is probably 10x greater than the gulf between the average person and a top tier gamer, in any video game. Chess just has such a large player base and literally centuries of tactical/strategic development, few games can even claim to have fostered the level of expertise required to be a top player.

Side note: chess skull is often correlated with intelligence. There might be something there, but at the top levels it’s really just about having played thousands and thousands of games and recognizing patterns between is how often you’ve played. Perhaps some genetal intelligence translates well to chess, but little chess skill translates to general intelligence.

To quote Paul Morphy, who was a worldwide chess champion at 21 years old but retired at 22: “The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.”

I don’t know if you mean turn Lemmy fans into lemmy fans, or lemmy fans into Lemmy fans. But either way, I’m for it.

Bill Nye kind of is a dick though.

Some people are really warm in acute person-to-person interactions, but lack the chronic empathy to spread long-term kindness. See “southern hospitality” clashing with who those areas vote for.

Others have a well-oriented moral compass but are just really abrasive in person. That’s Bill Nye. I’ve met him and he’s not like, super mean but he’s got a bit of a holier-than-thou (or rather, smarter-than-you) complex.

Cool how you used the quote markdown for a bunch of stuff I didn’t say.

My argument is “The banks have a ton of capital. They are willing to grant lower classes access to that capital, as long as the bank is able to make some profit from it. If the bank cannot profit, they will just sit on that wealth and lower classes will lose the only access to such capital that they currently have.”

Like I said, the fact that many borderline necessities in the US require access to capital beyond one’s individual means, is a real problem but separate from this argument.

Nobody with financial sense is taking out a 16.9% loan on a car. 5% is pretty typical right now for people with a decent credit history.

Whether or not that’s reasonable, is certainly up for discussion.

Definitely shop around, but sometimes the dealership does have an actual competitive offer. Especially if you threaten to use external financing (and have the pre approval in hand), they might knock down their interest rate to save the deal, as the loan is where the money actually is.

You pay for the ability to access capital you do not currently have. Nobody owes you thousands of dollars with which to but a car. If you want to buy a car with money you don’t have, then you have to give the bank something in return. That something almost always is “more money than we initially lent you, over the course of the loan period” and if you shut that down, banks just won’t give loans anymore. Suddenly poor and middle class people have lost their biggest tool for accessing capital.

Lack of public transport is a separate problem. The US has dropped the ball across the board there. Only a handful of cities have any reasonable public transport and even those systems are old and often shitty.

Education being so expensive that it needs to be financed, is a separate problem. Education is too important to leave to the free market, letting our system metastacize to this extent is the result of decades of compounding failures.

16.9% interest is predatory, but “interest above inflation” is necessary if you want banks to do anything besides hoard money.