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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Totally.

    I’m in a rental townhouse and only have a 110v standard outlet and it absolutely is enough is most cases.

    I was determined to drive at least mostly electric even if it cost somewhat more and the best I could afford was an Outlander PHEV. So if I do have to do more in a day than the battery it just swaps to engine. Daily job commute and other household driving and we are still floating between 75-90% electric drive.

    My wife wasn’t convinced in talking through it with her. However she had never driven either an EV or PHEV. I got her to drive a Kia EV9 and she loved how it felt but it was just too expensive and she still at that point felt like it was only a pure EV thing to drive like that.

    Then we test drove the Outlander and she immediately wanted it. It is an electric first design and you can feel it.

    In my opinion we should have been doing traditional hybrid and/or PHEV back in the late 80s. Built up the battery manufacturing and quality and be on full electric for basically all home use vehicles by now.

    For heavy load and construction it should be bio diesel hybrids. Not that those are ideal either but still the best we can do in short term tech swap.

    And then of course trains. More trains.




  • First thing this is all purely personal opinion viewing stuff from outside and as a general interest in world history.

    I am an American but I have lived outside the USA for a couple years and no it wasn’t on a military base.

    So with that said my personal interpretation is that China is still largely the same China as in ancient times and has decided to take several large chunks of both Communism and Capitalism and add those to the far far larger just continuing to do/be the same as they have for thousands of years.

    To put it a different way, it is a case of fix what they feel was/is broken and keep doing all the things that work and from their point of view China has kept itself as one of the largest Nations in history for one of the longest times of any country.

    So on the bad side you have things like them being willing to be extremely repressive is terms of censorship. Or the oppression of minorities they don’t fall in line enough to the central control of the government. Or minimizing stories that damage their reputation like mining issues.

    On the good side they seem to be able to at least partially consider long term large scale society value. At least from the point of view of engineering. The USA by comparison seems to exclusively only consider short term value. Often in terms of weeks or a financial quarter and occasionally the few year duration of a presidential or Senate term.

    China also seems to care about improving the average life of it’s citizens. This is a big deal and probably the most “Communist” thing. However that also goes along with them seemingly not just allowing but being perfectly happy to have some people have truly horrific lives as long as the baseline average is improving.




  • I both lothe this happening and also know that it is often because of an intended safety feature called gray listing.

    Basically due to resources cost a lot of spam will only get sent once and real emails will get sent again in exactly this kind of way. So it is a very low bar to pass when the system puts a low but above zero spam risk rating on it.

    Yes of course more targeted things like spear phishing try more than once and get past this but bulk market type junk often does get blocked this way.





  • TIE Fighter. Flying as a pilot for the Empire in Star Wars including flying alongside Vader to save the Emperor. Includes getting pulled into a secret society with a cool glowing force tattoo showing your rank in service to the Emperor.

    The game never says your name but in the old expanded universe books you are basically the Empire version of Wedge.

    Edit - It isn’t open world but the limited story does do well at making you feel like you should in the role.

    I’ll add that the game came with a manual that did have the character name and a back story. Short version is your character was an illegal swoop bike racer on a world that had been in a multi generation war. Includes your father dying. The empire stops it by basically making it impossible to for the two world to even be able to send attacks at each other. Then recruits all the youth that would have fought in their own war and just sends them out to different parts of the empires wars.

    Your preexisting flight skills gets you first a mechanic job on a Star Destroyer and then you save a VIP while testing repairs on a TIE Fighter and get pulled in as an actual pilot with a quiet push to get you up the ranks due to your impressive start.



  • Oh I have lived outside the USA at one point and I’m well aware electricity isn’t magic. There were other places too but Guyana most definitely doesn’t have a stable power grid.

    I’m not going to starve my kids over that kind of stance on cash only either though.

    I can’t understand why banks are as stupid as they often are. Why would you refuse money from the federal government. What do you think we successfully stole money from the IRS through a direct deposit?


  • I have a concrete and very stupid example.

    We got a large gift card as an incentive to renew our lease at our current apartment vs moving. The format they sent it in had no physical card and would only work on either online stores or through a service like Google Wallet AKA a banking app on a mobile device as you mentioned.

    So to get groceries while waiting on a tax refund (thanks crappy American economy and taxation methods) we had no choice but to connect and use it that way.