Valdair

I haven't enjoyed their main channel content for ever. Every once in a while if I'm interested in a product and have exhausted all other decently sized tech channels, I may watch their coverage but I've likely already made my mind up on the thing. I don't and wouldn't trust them for GPU, CPU or case reviews. I do generally like listening to the WAN Show, but Linus is sticking his foot in his mouth an awful lot these days. I like his vision for the lab, and I like what he ultimately wants to build with it, but I really worry they're going too fast and going to bake in a lot of problems that will haunt the platform for ever, assuming it even gets off the ground. I was already worried but this video made me even less optimistic. I only knew about some of these oversights, the extent is pretty startling.

We typically spend between $800~1400 between two people on all food in a given month. Granted that's high, but considering that includes everything from grocery trips, meaning paper products, cat food, alcohol... one thing that was interesting for me looking at the data is our ratio of spend on eating out doesn't strongly correlate to the total we spend for the month. For instance:

July was a super high outlier overall, but it was driven by our grocery spending more than our eating out spending. Major contributing factors were meeting friends more often than usual (four weekends of providing alcohol) and a Costco run. Our eating out generally constitutes lots of runs to e.g. Subway, Chipotle. I get a $6 coffee ~once a month, my wife doesn't drink coffee. We very rarely go down to sit-down restaurants and have a $50-100 meal, basically only for birthdays or anniversaries. That also hit in July (anniversary).

Part of what's going on is I think rapidly fluctuating food prices and the fact that for the last ~year groceries had been so much more expensive than normal and a lot of "fast food" at least hadn't appeared to update their prices at a comparable rate. So we might be spending $10 to make a meal for two at home or $20 to eat out together. So eating out ~twice a week vs. ~once a week barely registers on a typical monthly food spend.

Looks like it is basically not changed. I downloaded the data and compared it against US population census data from https://population.un.org/wpp/

If anything it dipped during the pandemic and is returning to "normal" (although I can't see before 2018).

Yup. My wife and I both own Subarus, we get "please let us buy your car!" letters from local dealerships on a monthly basis and have been since we bought hers in 2018.

This was exactly the calculus I was doing with my wife in 2017~2018. Her car was a fourth-hand 2003 Hyundai Elantra which had been run in to the ground before she ever even got it (but to be fair, it was both free and better than what she was driving before). I was looking at used car prices and thinking, is it really worth it to save less than $5k when I get a car that's 5 years newer with 50,000 fewer miles and all of its warranty in-tact? The PF advice I was seeing at that time was maddening, and mirrored a lot of what you're saying - "cars lose half their value off the lot, buy a used civic for $5k and drive the wheels off" - but that had already not existed for years. And then the pandemic supercharged used car prices and they just sort of never came back down. And then rates went up and they still won't come down.

We ended up buying a brand new 2019 Impreza in an undesirable color for $19k, financed with nothing down and 0.9%. Now it's paid off, I feel like in retrospect it was very much the right call.

I'll be significantly cleaner than average I expect... I don't like cases, but a long time ago, circa when shiny black plastic was making its way in to touch screen phone design for the first time, a friend and I discovered if you keep your phone in a microfiber bag (like some sunglasses come with, particularly Oakleys we bought together at the time) it effectively cleans itself in your pocket. I still do, and I cycle those out and clean the bag once a year or so, or if it falls on the ground or gets something spilled on it. I have more now from different sets of sunglasses, laser goggles, etc.

I also happen to work in a clean room where you're expected to wipe anything you bring in, including phone, laptop, etc., with isopropanol-soaked wipes before entering so that's like disinfecting and taking off the oil every day or every other day.

No one else I know ever cleans their phone beyond wiping it with a shirt or something when the oil & smudges becomes too noticeable.

This is a woeful misuse of this meme lol...

Indeed, at least that's the idea. Viewing and posting from kbin.social.

By trying to present themselves as the center instead of the far-right, they slowly move people’s’ conception of what the “center” is further and further right. It’s been happening for decades.

I’d like for kbin/Lemmy to be a full substitute, but right now only meme subs on lemmy are taking off or getting significant traction. It’s actually sort of annoying and makes me not want to bother. Apps are rough, block tools are inconsistent, see tons of posts twice or more all day (would happen on Reddit too, but pretty rarely, when big news was relevant to several large subreddits). Until the smaller subs I frequented Reddit for in the first place start coming over, kbin/lemmy can’t realistically be a replacement. Just something I check for a few minutes to try to leave app feedback and contribute traffic where I can.

It will take a very good app and a couple more high profile niche subs (like /r/piracy) mostly shifting to the Fediverse to start a real migration.

At least the actors and writers do or make something for their money. Even if they’re highly paid. The thing that is out of whack is executive pay - and how they make several orders of magnitude more than they should even when they make terrible decisions that cost other people their jobs, and even then when they get removed from those jobs they get lavish severance packages. Being mad a a handful of ultra wealthy artists is misdirected.

To what are you referring when you say “those weird JWST red shift observations”? I’d be curious to read more about that specifically.