Or like most of human history. People have been alcoholics far longer than capitalism has existed.

They buy most power from TVA, the rate city council controls is the fixed rate markup they charge on top. Our power is $0.07/kwh by the time you pay for it.

Deliberately underfunded or mismanaged, maybe. It’s been like this since the 90s at least. But I don’t think they need any intent for a buyout for it to suck. Afaik, there is zero interest from any private buyers for our utilities.

If I had to point to a specific failure, it’s that the rates are set by city council, and raising them is wildly unpopular. Everyone who proposed it loses re-election. We have some of the cheapest power in the world but fat lot of good that does when it’s not on.

Tbf, my city has a publicly owned utility company and it suuuuucks. Literally writing this comment on my phone during a 12 hour power outage during perfect weather.

I’ve played thousands of hours of TM in Linux back to the TMNF days, works great. Honestly Uplay causes more problems than TM itself.

Come on man I don’t like google either, but SEO exploitation has been a cat and mouse game since search engines were invented. They’re all varying levels of suck the last few years. It’s not an easy problem to solve, and AI has made it far more difficult.

My entire subscription feed is hundreds of edutainment channels pretty much. It’s my alternative to the discovery/history/science channel for the modern age (and tbh it’s higher quality too in many cases)

It’s also really really good for learning practical skills like home repairs and automotive maintenance.

Some favorite channels:

Nilered

Styropyro

Practical engineering

Technology Connections

Breaking taps

The thought emporium

I’m definitely not disagreeing with that, my point is like you said, both good AND bad changes come out of drastic shakeups, and you don’t know which one you’re going to get.

Important to note here, the status quo is the status quo for a reason. Incremental evidence based change happens slowly. It cannot happen fast, and that’s good. Slow is stable. The clear vision is “the system we have but marginally better tomorrow. And then the day after tomorrow, marginally better than that.” It’s foolish to vote for anyone who promises drastic change, left, right, up, or down. It’s a trick. It’s like changing 5 variables at once in a science experiment and expecting any sort of result better than random chance. We don’t have a perfect system but rolling the dice on a wannabe fascist dictator is obviously not the way forward if you have two brain cells to run together, but an alarming amount of people seem to just not get it.

I have some bad news

A couple percent of the housing market is also going to always be vacant due to turnover as well. That accounts for a large portion, if not the majority of that 16M.

Those people can speak for themselves. I like getting plastered then walking around shirtless in below freezing temps. Makes me feel alive.

Curtains are stupid expensive, I have a big window with curtains that are in dire need of replacing but I’m looking at several thousand dollars for just that one window.

I have a baratza encore going on about a year. No complaints, does a pretty consistent grind for my pour over. It can do espresso, not amazingly well but for the price the performance is more than acceptable. Supposedly you can swap in the burr from one of their higher end grinders for a couple Andrew Jacksons and it does much better for espresso that way.

I’m like 90% of the way there although I do have diagnosed ADHD which makes time management and organization difficult but not impossible.

Honestly, it was school that was hard to deal with. I was pretty messed up until I got out of college and got a career job. It’s amazing what a fat paycheck, a good night’s sleep, and not having to worry about differential equations homework does.

You never know what some people used to be like. I know a top tier defense attorney who used to be a heroin addict, and a company VP who was homeless for 3 years.

Longshoreman overtime is ass-backwards though. They clock crazy high OT and do shit like sleep on the clock and they get any shifts outside normal business hours counted as OT. The average pay is well over $100k iirc

They’re also super insular and basically the only way to get a job with them is to be a family member of someone who’s retiring.

I like unions but the ILA is basically a front for the mob. Their leader literally got involved in a ton of RICO charges that didn’t stick because a key witness mysteriously turned up dead in a trunk.

Also part of the reason they’re so insistent on paper records and refusing automation is so they can traffick humans, illegal goods, and steal stuff.

I’d happily pay $20-40ish for a quality textbook. I have many times before. It’s when they want to charge $300 and give almost nothing to the authors that I have a problem with. Extra scummy when they make a new edition that’s just barely different enough you can’t use it for class because the practice problems don’t match or give you one time use online codes that render it worthless for resale.

In a similar vein, look at a graph of global poverty levels. We’ve done an astounding job of improving that metric over the last several decades, even if it feels like we’re stagnating or moving slightly backwards in many developed nations.

There’s also lots of things that would’ve been a death sentence 50 years ago that we’ve either completely eliminated or found such effective treatments that they are mere inconveniences now.

With just a web browser, teams, and visual studio open my work machine sits at 95% usage of 16gb. Half the time my compiles can’t even finish without getting axed by the oom killer. SSMS is a hog too, I often have to close half my stuff to get to work right.

Supposed to be getting an upgrade but my company is taking their sweet time.

I’ve been waiting for HDR and color management for like 5 years now and it feels like progress is dead in the water and now we’ve ended up with two custom implementations between KDE and gamescope. Heck, Kodi has supported HDR for ages when running direct to FB.

I know it’s tricky but geez, by the time they release an actual protocol extension we’ll already have half a dozen implementations that will have to be retooled to the standard, or worse yet we’ll have a standard plus a bunch of fiddly incompatible implementations.