The games are part of my childhood, and they aged really well, so if I don’t stop myself from playing them all the time the muscle memory kills all the joy from playing.
Same thing with the two anime series - I love both but it has been a few years since I watched either.
Sometimes I feel like I should rewatch FMA B but then I’m like, nah I still remember it perfectly. To me it’s just a perfect execution of what a story should be.
One TTGL episode that I occasionally watch (even if avoiding the rest of the series) is ep11, when Simon snaps off his grief and guilt. It’s amazing how the right context makes even something as silly as “ore wa ore da!” (I’m me!) sound awesome.
I just looked it up and my first pair of darn tough socks are 7 years old with no signs of failing. I feel like I got my money’s worth. I’m not sure I would even make a warranty claim at this point.
Portugal is dealing with a major housing crisis. Due to excessive tourism and privileges for digital nomads and foreign retirees our population is being priced out of our own country.
Everybody knows lots of people who were forced to emmigrate. Families broken apart, relationships ended, etc. Everybody has multiple stories like that. I mean EVERYBODY.
To make matters worse, tourism needs low pay workers, but there’s a lack of workers willing to live and work for 800 euros in a city where rents start at over a 1000. Instead of improving conditions for its citizens the solution was to bring in a wave of immigrants from very poor countries who are willing to work here in deplorable conditions. Right now our own capital is overrun by tourism and you can barely hear Portuguese being spoken. And it’s spreading to the other cities.
More and more people just give up and leave every day. Universities are failing to fill their quotas because it’s no longer affordable to live in their cities. Politicians and elites don’t care because they have their interests in tourism.
In the bigger cities, when you enter a shop or restaurant, you can feel the annoyance as soon as they hear you speak Portuguese because they think you won’t spend much. It’s not improving at all and the only measures we had to improve it are half-assed. Right now I’m wondering how long until I give up and leave to join the others.
Short answer: it’s hurting the country but it’s making a few people very rich.
We always welcomed visitors and we had a reputation as an hospitable people but we saw that change drastically in the last years.
Some people will criticize my complaints, that tourism brough development to degradated city centers. The fact is those city centers were renovated but not for us. We are not welcome in our own city centers. The traditional neighborhoods of Lisbon and Porto and its culture that attracted so many tourists? Dead. Those people are long gone. Dead or pushed out of the city. Those traditional neighborhoods were Fado was born? Gone. Every last house is an Airbn’b now.
Lisbon is pretty much a Portuguese Theme Park. If you want to experience its culture you won’t find it there. Save your money. Porto is well on its way to be as bad. Braga will get there too.
Portugal, unlike most of Europe, used to be a 100% homogeneous country. There were no national minorities. We have Roma people but they’re considered just as Portuguese as the others. Right now, 20% of the population are foreigners from digital nomads to third world immigrants. I wouldn’t care much if they weren’t taking the place of nationals who are being driven out. And it’s increasing. Some would call it colonisation but I guess we’re in the wrong continent.
Open Facebook and it’s full of ads trying to sell retirement in Portugal to Americans. And they’re coming in droves, some attracted by our universal Healthcare that we pay for while they barely pay taxes. Those ads selling paradise and completely ignoring the fact there are people already living here is so reminiscent of the old ads convincing white settlers to come to African colonies, it’s disgusting.
Anti-Chef: Jamie tries to cook from cookbooks if the greatest, but he’s not a chef or anything, and you see all his mistakes, such as his recent deboning of a chicken, where he mistakenly de-meated it as well and had to venture out for a new chicken. It isn’t bits, just a guy that wants to cook but isn’t always so good about following directions, but he learns skiing the way.
Food Wishes: Chef John was a chef, and he makes a wide variety of things in easy to understand ways. He’s got lots of catch phrases and such, but he’s old so they’re endearing instead of obnoxious. His speech pattern can be somewhat off-putting to some, but I got used to it, and he’s just trying to be upbeat.
Tool Reviews:
Project Farm: Putting tools, small outdoor machinery, oils, batteries, bungee cords, etc through the paces to replicate real world use and some materials testing. It’s pretty fun for a review, and shows what tools are good at their price points.
Music:
David Hilowitz Music: I don’t care about his actual music so much, but he makes obscure instruments or repairs broken ones he finds in the trash and ends up with very unique things. He also makes sample libraries from all sorts of things, musical or otherwise, so you can play a version of all his weird stuff.
Cars / General Mayhem:
Garage 54: Some Russian guys with old Soviet cars that do strange Frankenstein experiments with them. Welding 4 engines together, tires made of various objects, all kinds of horrific and entertaining things!
Chef John’s recipes are always spot on; it’s rare for me to make something of his I don’t like. Sometimes they require a bit of extra effort, but he always tries to make his recipes as accessible as possible, talking about what shortcuts are appropriate.
Netherlands here. We’re dealing with a couple of difficult problems, each of which making each other worse:
Nitrogen oxide emissions crisis
Nitrogen oxide emissions are a serious problem for biodiversity, and as a consequence the EU has put limits on how much nitrogen emissions can be emitted close to Natura2000 areas (which are a form of official nature reserve).
However, the Netherlands is a very densely populated country, and also has a lot of these Natura2000 areas.
Now it turns out that basically all human activity emits nitrogen oxide in some form, and it’s completely paralyzing the ability for anything to get done.
This problem is core to a lot of the other problems my country is dealing with right now.
The government is trying to limit nitrogen emissions, for instance through means such as buying out animal farms, but this is not very popular.
Housing availability crisis
About a decade ago the government abolished the ministry of people’s housing, because it was believed at the time that such a ministry was no longer necessary to provide enough housing. This coincided with the after effects of the 2008 housing crisis.
As a result, every year since too few houses have been built to meet demand, and now we are dealing with a crippling shortage in the housing supply.
The government has since realized the problem and is attempting to tackle it, but the aforementioned nitrogen oxide crisis also makes it very difficult for new housing development to obtain the necessary permits.
So instead the government tries to push hot-fixes like rent-caps, which ultimately just reduce the supply of rental properties even further. This is because land-lords cannot make a profit renting out these properties with the proposed rent-caps, so they just sell the property instead.
High inflation / High cost-of-living / High interest rates
Last year, like much of Europe, we were dealing with pretty high cost-of-living and inflation rates.
This is a direct result of our prior dependence on Russian gas, and the war in Ukraine disrupting the supply of that gas.
I stand with Ukraine, and I think it is good we quit cold turkey on our addiction to cheap Russian gas, but it had a lot of serious knock on-effects on the cost of living and the inflation rate.
The ECB (European Central Bank) has tried to fight the inflation rate with interest rate hikes (and it would appear they are succesfull at doing that). But by raising inflation rates, they do slow down the ability to invest in the economy. This in turn affects things like the ability for property investors to build housing, which worsens the housing crisis again.
Full electricity net
On top of all this, we are also running out of capacity on the electricity net.
This is going on at the same time that we are trying to eliminate our natural gas consumption for environmental reasons, as well as the need to reduce our reliance on potentially hostile foreign powers (see Russia).
This is causing numerous issues with regards to businesses switching away from gas, new businesses opening, new housing construction, etc…
Severe employee shortages
Despite everything, the Dutch economy has been running pretty well, and as a result there has been very low rates of unemployment. It’s gotten to the point that there are significantly more jobs available in basically every field, than there are people to work those jobs. That is causing other serious problems in turn.
As an example, public transit cannot find the necessary workers to get all the trains to run reliably on time.
Another example is a shortage of workers in the construction industry, which worsens the aforementioned housing availability crisis, and the electricity net being at capacity.
Another example is a shortage of engineers able to plan out extensions for the electricity net
This shortage can pretty much be extended to every industry right now.
Asylum crisis
On top of the other stuff going on, we also have a large amount of asylum seekers trying to obtain refugee status in the Netherlands.
Under normal circumstances these asylum seekers would apply for asylum in Ter Apel, which is an asylum processing center. They would stay there until they obtain refugee status, after which they would find a regular place to live elsewhere in the country.
However, the severe housing shortage is making that last step impossible, which is causing refugees to stay in Ter Apel for far longer than they reasonably should be. This is clogging up the system with people to the point where Ter Apel has long since exceeded capacity.
This causes numerous problems, and politically it’s very difficult to get other parts of the country to carry their weight in dealing with this crisis.
The main concern is that refugees take away houses from the Dutch people who are also unable to find housing.
14 years of a mainly liberal-conservative government (VVD), and a future mainly populist government (PVV)
While I think the VVD (liberal conservatives) is not as bad as some people make the party out to be, they are liberals… And liberals seem to be allergic to interfering with market forces, even if those market forces are actively making things worse.
Because of this, government action on all of these crises over these past 14 years has largely been too little, too late.
The people are fed up with the inability of the government to solve these issues, and have voiced their displeasure in last year’s general election.
But instead of voting for a party which will tackle the fundamental issues mentioned above, they largely voted for the PVV (populists) who blames all problems on the refugees and migrants.
They propose to significantly reduce the number of people coming into the country.
However, they seem to ignore that our economy is highly dependent on skilled migrants coming in to work for companies such as ASML. They also seem to ignore that reducing the number of people coming into the country will worsen the general employee crisis we are already dealing with.
So while I hold out hope that they might be more effective than the VVD, I’m not holding out hope for any meaningful change in the next term.
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I probably forgot a few things, but these are the main issues my country is dealing with right now.
Sorry for the long post, but there is just a lot we are dealing with.
In Canada we are dealing with a housing crisis, a healthcare crisis, and a climate crisis (we still have wildfires burning in January) on top of alt-righters trying to reverse all progress that we’ve made.
So very similar to America- not quite as dramatic. Though Albertabama has been quiet for a while so I expect the Premier to do something stupid soon.
It all seems quite a bit overblown to me. There’s legal precedent for the President to take over a state’s national guard and use federal troops to enforce a court order (see Brown v Board of Education):
“In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas Army National Guard to block the entry of nine black students, later known as the “Little Rock Nine”, after the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower responded by asserting federal control over the Arkansas National Guard and deploying troops from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division stationed at Fort Campbell to ensure the black students could safely register for and attend classes. […]” (Source: en.wikipedia.org/…/Brown_v._Board_of_Education)
The current wording of the Insurrection Act provision (which has been amended a few times since initial adoption), according to Wikipedia:
<span style="color:#323232;">"Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion."
</span>
Just my $.02 but I’d guess either the feds back down or Texas does. Hopefully nobody gets trigger happy.
The aftermath of racial desegregation court victories are some of the most interesting things in recent US history. A law would be struck down and sort of left like that… and people would take it upon themselves to organize and challenge the new law, often in the face of violent opposition. Freedom Riders taking busses down to the south to challenge desegregation of public transit being met with mobs and put in jail.
The reference to Little Rock Nine suddenly made me realize that Forest Gump was 38 at the time of Forest Gump.
I’m 38 now. As tired as I am of Hollywood reimagining films from the nineties, I would appreciate a Forest Gump born in the 80s. The whole concept could really be repeated every 30 years or so.
A lot of you all must be too young to remember. This isn’t a new thing for Texas to do. They threatened to secede at least once (maybe twice) while Obama was president. Once it was straight out of the North Korean playbook, claiming a training exercise the military was conducting was a cover for a military invasion of Texas.
The Dollop did a podcast on Jade Helm as it was happening. Definitely recommend listening to that one if you like American history podcasts. It’s episode 100 I believe
And thats why I’m not worried about them doing anything other than what they’re already doing. They know they would be fucked if they leave.
And if they do? Well then we deal with it when that time comes. Hopefully a bunch of left leaning people leave, including my brother and his wife, and a bunch of MAGAts can go there and talk about how much they love America while also leaving it.
The older I get the more I eyeroll at the political posturing. It’s definitely worse than when I was younger, but also it’s all happened before. It’s just loud people trying to be loud to keep us all afraid and obediently going to work, then every 4 years it gets loud again so we vote for who they want us to.
Real convenient the border is such a huge issue a few months before the election.
Of course we still have to take it seriously, the minute we let our guard down they start implementing stuff, look at roe v wade, but even then they didn’t know what to do after that. It’s all about staying in power for them
I get what you’re saying, but at some point we have to admit that there really aren’t any adults at the table. A direct example is the governments covid response and another more recent is the emergence of the so-called freedom caucus. Basically I subscribe to the depressing notion that all these fuck head fascists that came before have sewn their seeds and now there is an alarmingly large amount of the populace who have drank the koolaid, made from those seeds, and even worse is a lot of the original sewers (heh), have lost the thread and are drinking their own koolaid…
Texas has made an issue over their independence and God-given right to be Texas, in defense of their the right to own chattel slavery since their first secession. From Mexico. In 1836.
Texas reconfirmed their desire to die on the hill of their divine right to own people, by seceding from the US in 1861.
After the civil war, Texas was a haven for the Confederates - and their ideology has been fomenting ever since
They’ve been talking of secession openly since at least the 1990s.
I think this is the first time since the civil war that other states have involved their national guards in support of a hotbed issue that could lead to a secession.
no, He’s merely expounding on his original question, he knows that likes are invisible on YouTube, so why do people call out others for liking their own comments /videos when there’s no way for anyone to know who clicked “like”
Youtube’s default player will now resize the viewport depending on the aspect ratio of the content, so I suspect it would do the same for vertical video
Shorts are weird. They don’t respond to keyboard controls like K for play/pause, arrow keys to scrub and change volume, you can’t actually scrub at all. I’m pretty sure you can’t see what channel posted them or when? Play them in the regular window and voila, normals ass YouTube video. Just short.
It’s often actually the only addon I install in my browser. But usually I like to keep a few other things like LibRedirect, Dark Reader, Bitwarden and OneTab around.
I looked through your list and found 2 other addons that you can replace with uBO. The first is Consent-O-Matic, you can configure Firefox to automatically block all 3rd-party cookies and use the following lists in uBO to block the cookie popups and notices: “AdGuard/uBO - Cookie Notices” (It’s pre-installed in uBlock Origin, you just need to enable it in the settings) and this one: www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/abp/
You can also replace the ClearURL addon with the “AdGuard URL Tracking Protection” list, it’s also pre-installed, just enable it.
You might gain a little bit of extra speed by disabling/removing those 2 unnecessary addons, and it will definitely minimize your browser fingerprint, making you less susceptible to tracking
I enjoy helping people out, when I have some free time. Otherwise I would waste my time scrolling on Tiktok or Instagram Reels lol.
I believe Firefox now does what ClearURL advertises (removing tracking elements in URLs), but I’m not sure I’ll have to check again
Yes, they added such a feature in version 120 I believe, but I would still use the uBlock list. The performance impact is not noticeable at all, it doesn’t hurt. But the ClearURL extension is kinda unnecessary.
Clean urls breaks a lot of things so I don’t use it anymore. You can delete trackers if need be by yourself (usually everything after “ref” or everything after “?”
I would also like to add:
Ublock Origin with Javascript enable by default in settings
Container Tabs
Tree Style tabs
Bitwarden
Simplelogin
Privacy Badger
Dark Background and Light Text
Tampermonkey (use to redirect to old reddit to view without JS using ublock)
At the same time, if we can get the 14th figured out the “pledging troops in opposition to the federal government” seems like the things insurrectionists do.
Its a meaningful and new escalation. This dismissive attitude is exactly why there will be a war. These governors should be removed and charged with sedition.
I have the m1 macbook air, and its wonderfully performant and long battery life for how I use it… mostly just word-processing and web-browsing.
But the repair concerns are legit, when I decided to get the macbook, I decided I was going to play apples game and opted to get their service plan. I’ve had apple care+ on a tablet before and their service is great when you don’t have to pay their ridiculous repair fees. So at a rate of $100 per year, I’m essentially leasing my laptop after I bought it. I have it automatically backed up to my home server, in the event that one of their stupid engineering designs destroys my data (See Louis Rossmann videos).
Idk if I’d ever really recommend anyone get a macbook if they don’t need to, personally, the battery life and standby time are just killer features for me. I have ADHD, and frequently forget to charge my laptop… if I’m not on my meds and I pick up my laptop to do something and its dead… I’m not going to do that thing. With the macbook, I make next to no conscious effort to keep it charged. If it’s under ~20% and I happen to be near a charger, I’ll charge it. And thats the extent of me managing the battery.
My wife on the other hand, her windows machine (and most seem to have this problem as I understand) is always dead. She’s resorted to putting it into full hybernation mode (significantly slower to wake up) and even then, it somehow seems to still lose quite a bit of battery in between uses.
Aside from that, its light, small, its sturdy. I use windows for work and for gaming on my desktop, so I’ve got not strong aversion to it, its pretty much just the battery life and standby thats the killer feature for me. So… yeah, thats my take. If the battery situation isn’t a big deal for you, go for the framework. They seem like a solid company, making solid laptops, that are easily and affordably repairable and upgradable.
Speaking as someone who has disassembled multiple Macbook Airs from multiple generations: Fuck working on Macbook Airs, and Macs in general.
I personally will never buy an Apple product at any price for any purpose, for a multitude of reasons. My preferences aside, if you ever want to work on your own machine Apple is objectively the wrong answer. OP is really looking at two machines that are on complete opposite ends of the spectrum, here.
Do people really do home repair or upgraded on laptops in 2024 though? Desktops sure, but I haven’t found laptops to be particularly amenable to home upgrade since the early 2000s.
Never mind upgrading, if you need to repair your Macbook – replace a busted screen, swap out one of their famously shitty keyboards or trackpads, etc. – you’re in for a rough time.
Frameworks yes, but that’s pretty much the only ones you can nowadays. I do little things like replace the screen or barrel jacks on my family’s laptops, but that’s about all you can do.
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