This seems like it would be really obvious, no?

If you are simply buying fruit juices at the store you are getting zero to virtually zero fiber. So you are getting a bunch of calories but without feeling any sense of fullness that you would get if you instead just ate the fruit.

Fruit is healthy but you are much better off just eating the fruit and drinking water. If you really want to drink the fruit juice you should just blend the fruit so that you are also getting all the pulp. The fiber is excellent for you and will help prevent you from turning all that juice into "empty" calories.

Cars have always been relatively expensive to own and operate and the American way, unfortunately, has been to take out lines of credit in order to purchase vehicles they could just barely afford.

It's insane to think about but the average car payment for a new vehicle in 2023 was $726 and the average loan term is nearly 70 months!

Smaller homes cost more or have HOA fees they can’t make work. Most all options have taxes they also can’t make work.

It's pretty insane that America has virtually no supply of inexpensive small homes. It's all about the 2500+ sq-ft behemoths that cost $400,000+.

Even though it's a "worse" deal per sqft I think the market for sub $200,000 homes in the 500-750 sq-ft range would be absolutely booming if it existed.

A comment he made to me once was “Nobody builds low-income housing. a mid-rise luxury condo will only cost a bit more to build than low income apartments, but you make a shitload more”

Yeah, I completely believe it.

Space-efficient middle housing for the poor and lower middle-class is not something we can rely on private companies to do in America. It's something that is going to have to take government intervention.

The apartment complex I was in took up as much land as around 5-7 average sized new construction homes yet it housed 42 46(I actually remember two of the buildings having 8 apartments each) apartments. It was also in a part of the country where a car was basically required. There was space for every apartment to have at least 1 car and have space to spare. Realistically probably about 1.5 cars per apartment could fit parked in the complex.

Unfortunately there’s a larger than you expect percentage of people out there who just think “fruit healthy” and that’s where the thought ends

Totally fair point. As usual I tend to overestimate the general public.

Call me whatever, but Valve does so much for Linux gaming that when I do buy games I make sure to get them through Steam. Between Proton and the Steam Deck it seems like Valve is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Linux gaming is in a great place right now and Valve deserves a lot of credit.

They also have Steam Input which is incredible. The customization and control you have over your experience is insane.

Epic Games on the other hand can't even be bothered to support Linux properly. Valve earns their cut.

Those are good rules.

American cities used to be designed around reasonable things like walking and using Streetcars but then were bulldozed to make way for the automobile.

Freeze the banana and then blend the frozen banana with peanut butter and a little almond/oat/other plant milk and it's like a milkshake without the dairy. Amazingly good!

That's a good point.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I would imagine that in Japan the issue of loneliness cuts very deep due to the cultural and societal norms. I would also think that if you were to keep all those same norms but introduce in the car dependent design and infrastructure of the US then the problem would get even worse, no?

It’s ridiculous enough that we’re switching to electric cars with 0-100kph under 7 seconds and no one bats an eye…

This is a good point.

Nobody seems to care at all about acceleration even though it can be just as dangerous as sheer speed in the hands of most drivers.

No worries, I wasn't trying to imply that to be honest. I liked your comment and was simply trying to add some extra information for anyone else that stumbled upon the thread.

I'm not entirely sure about AMD but NVIDIA certainly seems keen on the AI market to the point that they don't really care about the consumer gaming market anymore.

To be honest I stopped following PC hardware altogether because things were so stagnant

That's exactly what happened to me as well.

It's not exciting at all to pay attention to mediocre launches of expensive products. The GPU in my gaming PC is several generations old at this point but I don't really care. There are still plenty of good games that will run fine on it and I'm just going to hold tight. There are games that I still have yet to purchase that will run fine on my hardware. I'm not going to give my money to terribly optimized games or games that require high-end hardware.

The more expensive PC gaming becomes the more high-end hardware doesn't really matter. I think developers and publishers know that they need to target the average consumer because they need to sell volume on these games. If the average gamer is playing on older and/or lower end hardware then they need to service that market. There aren't enough 4090 buyers to sell the volume they need to make money. Hell, at these prices I'm not sure there are even enough 4070 or even 4060 level buyers to do that. Tons of people lost interest and aren't buying into this even if you still see posts online of people purchasing new GPUs.

I waited out the crypto market and I don't have problems waiting longer.

I think statistically speaking the absolute best value is a 5 year old car that has been at least reasonably well-maintained. The vast majority of depreciation happens during those first 5 years.

For those that do need to finance a car, a three year loan term should be the maximum. I think you are 100% correct on that. There are people with car loans that have terms of 7 years. It's sad that people are setting themselves up for failure like that. If you can't afford the monthly payments on a 3 year term then you really can't afford the car at all.

I think a big part of why people seem to really like the film simulations in the Fuji cameras is because you can create or copy other people settings, "recipes", and you get a nice live preview right on the LCD screen as you are shooting. It gives you a much closer visualization of your desired final product right on the back of the camera as you are shooting.

RawTherapee has film simulations built-in

Have you used them? If so, how do you like them?

I have no experience with RawTherapee but I'm someone that doesn't like spending a ton of time editing photos.

You got hit with a bunch of down votes but it's not incredibly hard to avoid Amazon, it's just a little less convenient. Of course, it's going to depend and vary based on where you are located.

But it’s not complely free shipping. It’s $140/year free shipping.

That's the thing. The more expensive Prime gets the more people who do pay for it feel locked in.

People end up feeling like they need to do more and more shopping on Amazon in order to justify that steep yearly subscription cost. Dumping Amazon completely is more effort than simply shifting more of your shopping over to Amazon. This causes people to get more and more locked in and comfortable with using Amazon for the vast majority of their online shopping.

The other side of that coin is once you do drop Amazon Prime you realize that Amazon isn't irreplaceable. It's fairly easy to avoid them if you are willing to compromise a little.

Do you happen to know exactly how that all works and how it matters for individual users?

My understanding, and I might be wrong, is that it really doesn't matter which instance you join due to federation. I thought the only time it mattered was if one instance decided to cut federation with another, and even in that case it would just affect your ability to interact with the instance that was de-federated.

I think quarantine is only for confirmed suspected infected items. Windows will move it and prevent any use of items until you confirm you want them, at which point they are just regular files and folders.

That actually does sound like what I remember. Maybe I was thinking about something else.

I did hear about something called "Controlled Access" a while back. It looks like it might be an option that could work in certain situations.

I think the best thing I ever did was learn on a 250cc. It's way harder to wreck your day or get yourself killed when you inevitably grab a bit too much throttle as a complete newbie. I would even encourage people to learn on a 125cc or even 50cc. The basics are the basics and you can pick those up on a bike with less than 10hp just as easily if not more easily than a bike with 100+hp.

It would be amazing to see government mandated limiters in cars, in general, and not just for learners.

I know that a lot of people don't agree with that but the public has proved they are incapable of driving within reasonable limits. No one needs a car that can go the speeds that cars are capable of going. It's totally possible to setup a system that enforces the limit only on public roads so that people could still take their cars to the track. We very much have the technology.

It blows my mind that the general public is completely accepting of things like smartphone OSes that can spy on their every move and log their every detail yet if you mention limiters on cars all of the sudden they become staunch advocates for personal freedoms. The hypocrisy blows my mind.