A steam outline engine if you will

I think at this point Mint is a brilliant option for mom or Dad’s laptop that’s still on Windows 10 and Microsoft deemed “too insecure” for Windows 11, but Bazzite and other newer Distros do so much better at being distros for gamers right out of the box that those are better to recommend to gamers

The price is irrelevant, because they aren’t for you or regular consumers. They’re already reserved and being shipped to AI data centers.

I mean this is the standard operating procedure for all top end data center products, they aren’t sold on consumer marketplaces but can be purchased by suppliers with existing contracts and relationships

As they ramp up yields larger capacity drives will slowly trickle into more consumer channels until eventually the 40+TB drives are like the 8-12tb drives are today

we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons

Conveniently they’ve been building tons of prisons that could be put to use for this

I love the automation but holy crap do not make me make 20 steps of 20 different widgets just to make one thing, that is the most frustratingly dull form of making things expensive to craft in any factory game. Just add more expensive materials not 20 unnecessary interstitial crafting steps

Grand Theft Auto 4 - wasn’t fun to play, though I keep trying since I want to see where the story goes but get too jaded to make it far.

Around the time GTA 5 first released for console I was playing the (terrible) PC Port of 4 and I got pretty far but ended up stuck at a specific story mission where you need to fly a helicopter and no matter what I just couldn’t get the helicopter to fly fast enough to the point where I was either missing something or it was bugged out. Honestly both are solid possibilities. I’ve never felt the need to return to it and finish that story.

I did like the relationship building aspect and how folks would randomly call you to hang out. Honestly I feel like that was something 5 should’ve kept, it definitely made the characters feel a bit more alive and slightly less 2 dimensional

Sounds like my experience with the first Watchdogs game. I snagged it a couple of years after launch, thoroughly enjoyed it and it was honestly one of my top games of that year. Apparently that’s the trick sometimes is don’t buy whatever game at launch

I tried so hard with Terraria back in the day but never could get into it. I suppose it was partly because I approached it thinking “2D Minecraft” which it is not

I enjoyed Kingdom Come: Deliverence but I couldn’t get past the lock picking part of one of the early quests. I’ll probably circle back to it at some point

I’m really struggling to make heads or tails of your core point that you’re trying to make.

I shared my story about trying to do some car replacement trips by acoustic bike, how it took a full year of training to be able to consistently make the school runs by bike (with a trailer mind you), and then pointed out how ebikes completely remove that physical fitness requirements while providing all of the same benefits of an accoustic bike

Also I love how you keep changing and leaving out details of my story as you go along. I really can’t shake the feeling you’re not actually trying to make any specific point and just want to argue with people

Bruh you seem really stuck on this idea of “dormant physical athleticism” whatever that means.

Let me break this down for you, the human body has muscles, these are like motors for moving bits of flesh and bone around. Like motors, the amount of physical energy they output changes based on the energy that gets input. Since humans don’t really have control of the chemical energy flow to these muscles, the way you can change that is by pushing these muscles to their limits, and as you keep doing that these limits start increasing.

Its really quite awesome, because unlike most things in life, your muscle gain directly correlates to the amount of work you put in. Its one of the few things you can directly control!

You should probably reread my comment because that was literally what I said

Side note about normal bikses: The way I compare them, normal bikes are limited to physical exertion. Ebikes are limited to time, very similar to cars. Though at the long range cars are still more comfortable

I started biking again 2 years ago, honestly partly pushed by various city planning/car rejection media when I realized I could start being the change I want to see in the world. I’d done some strength training during the pandemic but holy crap was I not in shape enough to be biking. It took me a full year of biking nearly every day to be able to bike my kids to school in a trailer (about 2 miles round trip)

Even now where I finished last summer biking over 22 very hilly miles, I struggled to bike to a haircut just a mile away after just 3 months of winter hibernation, and now that it’s early spring I got up to 5 miles so far within a few bike rides.

Point is, for the average adult, biking is an option but it takes a ton of time and work to build up your strength. Ebikes completely change the game because anyone can ride 10-20 miles on those, and if you have balance issues or other health issues you can get an etrike! They’re such incredible life changing machines!

I just want to say, I absolutely love this kind of question because it forces you to imagine realistically what a car-lite world would look like, and it completely changes the line of thinking from problem identification to problem solving, and in a way that truly will change the world for the better

This is one of those questions where you have to look to the past to really understand the possible future.

Rural America was built by railroads. You know why there’s a town every 10-20 miles on a rough grid? It’s because steam locomotives built during the 20th century would need to stop to refill on water every 10-20 miles. These old steam locomotives were slow usually only running up to 30-40mph. The train would need a spot to stop & refill with water so when the railroads didn’t platte out towns to sell the land they just built through and increased the value of, towns would organically pop up near these stops anyways.

If we fast forward a little to the 1880s or so, electrification was going bonkers, and many electric companies would say “while we’re building these power lines, what if we also ran electric trolley services too?” So the trolleys would advertise the versatility of this newfangled electricity thing while also providing a second revenue stream to electric companies. This is when electric interurban services really hit their peak. There were thousands of interurban lines across the US at this time, but many didn’t survive out of the 20th century, and of those that did very few survived past the second world war, and of those, even fewer survived into being bought up by city transit agencies.

This pre-car period had most people either living in dense walkable cities or living on homesteads and walking/riding horses/carts multiple miles to go to the nearest town for the day. People didn’t move around a lot during this time, and the world was much smaller and life much quieter. This is part of why circuses and fairs were so big is it was the most exciting thing happening all year.

The world has changed so much since the invention and proliferation of the automobile that it’s really hard to imagine a car-lite world, but also there’s aspects of modern society that simply can’t exist without cars. I’m imagining a societal change pushed by something like legislation which doubles vehicle registration fees every year for a decade. Sure that $250 the first year will hurt a little, and the $500 the second will hurt a bit more, but you’ve got a good 3-5 years or so before it’s really going to start hurting most families, and I’d imagine it would be the $4000 mark where most don’t renew which is conveniently after 5 years of the registration fee doubling, and enough time for new bus services to be spun up and plenty of time for people to invest in bikes and manufacturing to adjust to the new demand patterns

The concept of road tripping becomes very different, and travel honestly gets more expensive. I was just looking at Amtrak tickets today chasing an idea of taking a couple day trip out of town during my kids spring break, and I’m immediately looking at $250 to go 200 miles, 5x the cost of just loading the family in the car and driving that distance

Without cars anyone living in rural areas is immediately stranded. Most of rural America has been rebuilt around cars because rural America was the first place cars were able to sell successfully (in fact car companies had to engage in conspiracies to force sales in cities once everyone who wanted a car had already bought one) there’s many houses which are multiple miles from the nearest store of any kind, and many small towns lack any kind of grocery store. Many business and public schools in rural areas are located miles outside of any town and require people to drive or take the school bus just to get there. With about a century for rural America to rebuild into the car centric life that it is and most of the railroad tracks gone, it’s pretty impossibls for rural America to de-car

Suburbs are similarly challenged to rural areas, but at least have the benefit of being close enough to their cities and hubs of commerce that biking and biking to/from public stops remains very viable. Exurbs where they aren’t connected to the urban fabric but are entirely reliant on easy vehicle access to it are absolutely fucked though, and would probably spin up new Intercity bus services to compensate, but needing to transfer bus services to get to anything rapidly makes these already undesirable exurbs become far more undesirable

Small towns that never had the population growth to spawl are even better off. Many of these small towns are super walkable and bikable today with limited infrastructure changes that might be desired. Stroads built to serve big box stores or industries would be the only major challenge, but generally all that needs is a road diet and/or a dedicated parallel greenway

Shopping will definitely look different. For one thing single use plastic bags become completely nonviable since they carry so little per bag even compared to just paper bags, and it’s difficult to carry more than about 3 plastic bags of groceries at once. We’d also definitely see a reversal from fewer larger stores which are further away back to many more smaller stores that are closer to people’s homes. Parking lots will be quickly realized to be unneeded, likely to be torn up with new housing, stores and bus terminals built where those parking lots once stood.

The average road and street will also change dramatically. With people mostly walking, biking and taking public transit, suddenly the minimum acceptable street changes a lot, where right now it’s relatively smooth pavement with relatively good drainage, in a world where people primarily walk, bike and take transit they will instead demand trees and narrower paved areas, bringing it down to human scale. A “narrow” 40 foot wide suburban street will rapidly become much too large and many will be rebuilt to be more pleasant for cyclists and pedestrians (I’m imagining 10-15 foot wide medians with trees, benches, water fointains and a nice greenway in the center, maintaining a pair of 10-12 foot wide lanes on either side for deliveries, emergency services and buses, or the inverse, with the road space narrowed significantly to 16-20 feet to allow for careful passing potentially with a parrelel greenway depending on traffic, again with trees, benches and water fountains)

See I worried about this with my phones for a while, but then I realized I’m literally just doing the job of a charge controller for the phone which only cost about $300, and by the time any wear might show up from enjoying the fast charge capabilities I’ll have already have switched to a newer phone since I tend to upgrade every 2-3 years

Because you are now assuming everyone’s just going to become a cyclist vegan living in densified 300 sq ft condos doing their communal laundry every two weeks with recycled bath water.

Except simply requiring remote work to be an option for all jobs where its feasible will significantly reduce pollution as we all observed in Q2 of 2020

Just to muddy the waters, I worked with a guy who had “system administrator level XII” in his email signature and one of the teammates asked him about it. His response was that he just put that in to see if anyone noticed and occasionally bumps the number up when he feels like it’s about time to do so.

So you never know when someone stuck a private joke into their email signature like that. Heck when I was brought back to my role I was never given a clear job title so I just put the most accurate job title I could think of in my signature of “IT Contractor”

Not the person you asked, but you and everyone reading your comment know that’s not a good faith argument.

The reason incest is frowned upon and often illegal is because of the danger it poses to any potential offspring. Many genetic diseases rely on recessive traits that require both parents to carry the recessive trait in order for it to be exposed. If two biological siblings have a child, that child would therefore have a massive amount of recessive traits exposed since both parents would share a massive amount of DNA

At a population scale, genetic diversity is critical to survival of a population, and a collapse of genetic diversity through too much inbreeding tends to lead to a very unhealthy population that can be easily wiped out through disease. This is much less of a risk with random incest today thanks to how much humans move around these days, but the flip side is that there is some risk of this from so called “super surrogates” who have genetically fathered hundreds or thousands of kids. The likelyhood of these kids meeting and reproducing can be quite high, which can therefore noticably reduce genetic diversity in a population, and ultimately reduce the health of a population

I’m curious how this impact snow plows. Every speed bump I’ve seen in the region I live in that gets a few feet of snow each winter will have little flags that should stick out over the snow to indicate to plows where they should lift up for a speed bump. I should look sometime to see how scratched to hell they are though to see if plows hit the bumps a lot