Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.
The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.
Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.
The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.
No. Tipping culture 100% existed before COVID. This isn’t an opinion. It’s well documented. You are either willfully ignorant or a troll. This discourse has run its course.
The article is saying “before” as in “before the changes that happened because of COVID”. I don’t know when the inflection point was where we shifted to shit wages for traditionally tipped jobs, but it was many many years ago. When COVID hit we were not giving living wages to servers.
I’ve just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It’s a combo of things prompting me.
First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.
Second, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don’t want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I’m getting value. I just want actual good content.
I totally get wanting to play the game when it’s fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it’s definitely part of the experience to be on the “in” side of that.
With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don’t hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.
This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.
Well no, they couldn’t. The article literally says that prior to this only that one bar in New Jersey could use it because they had a statewide trademark on it. Because they dropped it, anyone can now use it including other small bars in Jersey.
What this is doing is ensuring it remains open for use by anyone. Taco Bell, Taco Johns, Taco Suzy, whatever. Before, anyone could register for the trademark if no one else had, and start screwing over other small players.
Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.
As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms…I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn’t a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there’s never any activity and they don’t go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?
As a real life example of my own, I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn’t congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.
I don’t know exactly why that is, but I’ve had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you’re in?
The problem really is that lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass of users to support many small communities that are all self sustaining. And discoverability is so bad for communities it’s entirely likely that if there are 8 people out there that want to discuss X in the fediverse, 3 are in one community, 2 in another, and 3 in a third, and none of them ever finds the others. The lack of users causes a lack of content and they all the up not engaging at all.
If you have enough users the idea of multiple communities holds water a little better. But I think it’s a significant barrier to actually gaining those users.
Fully agree with you on artists not getting their fair share, and I would argue that the issue is sadly endemic across the entire music industry and was that way long before streaming services even existed. Spotify is merely the most visible representation of a long festering issue that spans generations.
I can only speak for myself but I do actually still buy CDs for bands I really like. I will also occasionally buy merch or go to shows. Some of these bands I very certainly would never have discovered without Spotify (or a service like it).
Ultimately I agree that I’d like people to understand their options. I think the biggest likely barrier is convenience. I have a NAS server, and a virtual host set up that runs a Linux server with Plex on it, and I have that open so I can use Plexamp to play live albums or any other stuff I own that isn’t on Spotify. But like… That’s a massive barrier to entry to simply create something close to the experience Spotify offers out of the box. And it’s definitely not as polished. I do it because I’m a hobbyist, but most people aren’t like that. So then if you want to buy music individually, you’re stuck listening to actual physical CDs, or ripping them and loading them on your phone or mp3 player. Old school cool for sure, but new school convenience is sure hard to beat once you’ve had a taste.
This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.
We do not care that we don’t own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it’s almost a perk that I don’t because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify’s library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.
I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don’t want to go pirate it, I don’t want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.
And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I’m a member at our local zoo. I don’t expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I’m a member at our museum. I don’t feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don’t own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.
Spotify is the exact same for me.
Came here to say this one. It’s been ~30 years and there still isn’t another game that quite hits in the same way. The perfect combination of jrpg, weirdness, emotion, humor, horror/dread, and lightheartedness. Earthbound has it all.
Is it wrong to buy my kids “read banned books” shirts?
Joking, but only sort of. I’m so irritated that this is the world they are growing up in. That I’m going to have to have conversations with them about why people are trying to restrict what they can learn based on bigotry and why that is wrong. There are so many other things they could be worrying about, I hate that we have this as an additional and completely unnecessary distraction.
Completely understand Scholastic’s move here. It’s unfortunate in a vacuum but on the other hand I’m very glad they aren’t simply dropping these titles entirely.
If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don’t call them the “search engine guys”, that’s not what they are about. They are the “mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys”. Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.
All those other things didn’t exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being “free” with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.
There’s already been a new flavor of coke developed and allegedly chosen by AI. If that’s not some kind of singularity moment, I don’t know what is.
5900HX: mobile Radeon CPU 6800M: mobile Radeon GPU
This game looks roughly equivalent to TW3 because it is roughly contemporary with TW3. (2015 vs 2017). HZD was well known for being a very pretty game in motion when it came out, though this video doesn’t really do it justice to be honest.
I imagine the point of the video is seeing the framerates on mobile hardware in Linux.
From a pure graphical fidelity point we’re there now.
From an animation standpoint we are light years away. The absolute best animations or facial expression renders I have seen are nowhere near good enough to actually pass for real. And honestly I am not sure I’ve even seen meaningful improvement in this area in a long time. Even in this demo videos the cars don’t look quite right as they move, and cars are much easier than people, or the way cloth moves when on someone who is moving.
I’d like to think this is the next big focus for graphics, but animations are a lot harder to get right than pure visual fidelity. I hope studios start focusing on it because it will take take us to that next step.
Even the way the cars moved in this video looked…floaty. These ultra photorealistic graphics are really cool but I think you nailed it talking about facial expressions, mechanics, and I would add animations in general. It will be even more jarring when everything looks so real.
You keep asking this in this thread. What answer do you want? The game has a shitload of content in it. I’m 35ish hours in and I have so many random quests and things to do. I’ve spent hours wandering around planets. Around cities. In space stations. Scanning things, reading stuff.
It’s completely fine if what the game has to offer doesn’t appeal to you, but if you truly cannot comprehend how anyone could enjoy it, then I’m afraid you just don’t have much perspective.
This is, objectively speaking, a large scale open world game with hundreds of hours of content. It should be self evident that what it has to offer will appeal to some and not to others. How can you think that because it doesn’t appeal to you, it shouldn’t appeal to anyone? That makes no sense.
Somewhere in the vast chasm between “these are the best gameplay element ever conceived” and “this crap cannot be enjoyable with these left in” lies the actual description of their impact for a normal person.
They are perhaps marginally tedious. It bothered one modder enough that he modded them out with a mod that has about 7600 unique downloads. It bothered millions of others so little that they…just played the game anyway.
I’m so confused. Whose dishwashers are you talking about? I’m in the US, you’re describing every dishwasher I’ve ever had, except that we always hook it up to the hot water line. Our unit takes very little water, it takes hours to run a load due to efficiency features. It has a heating element inside to take whatever water it gets and keep it hot for the cycle.
I don’t really see why it’s any less efficient to use the hot water we are already heating with our water heater (which heats much more efficiently than a small electric heater would). The water originally arrives to my house cold, it has to be heated one way or another. My dishwasher is less than 10 feet away from my water heater, water is not losing appreciable heat on the way to the dishwasher.