Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world

Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything

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2 yr. ago

"We're not colluding with our competitors to fix prices on rental units, we all use a third party service to collude for us" is such a bullshit legal excuse that I'm shocked they even floated it.

With old masonry wall construction, you need to be very careful about how you retrofit insulation to the walls. Insulating the interior makes it very likely that you'll have moisture-related degradation of the stone and grout making up the wall, as you're cutting off drying potential from the interior side of the wall. If it's possible, insulating the exterior is your best option, otherwise you'll need to be very conscious about selecting vapor-open insulation and finishes on the interior side, which will limit your options considerably. This article from Building Science Corporation goes over some of the details, and offers some options for interior-side retrofits that might not cause the wall to fail down the road.

Even if their military is a cesspool of corruption and incompetence that lacks the real-world capacity to invade a wet paper sack (something that I wouldn't take for granted even if the rumors and reports about it are true, given the sheer volume of men and materiel China has to throw at an enemy nation regardless of quality), China at war with Taiwan would create a global economic crisis, between shipping disruptions in the Pacific and the knock-on effects of isolating China economically in retaliation.

Really, the best thing for everyone would be for Xi exit stage left somehow and be replaced by someone with less imperialistic ambition, but for the moment he seems fairly secure in power, which is why we've seen Western nations making efforts to decouple their economies from China, and more overtly signal their support for Taiwanese independence.

Shit, here I am in the plains states with a WFH job for a firm the next state over, seriously considering moving my family to a more expensive state with less shitty politics. (Or Europe, depending on where I could get a digital nomad visa.) I've got some real concerns about what happens after the elections and I don't feel particularly comfortable being here, with the way that my family looks and my politics are.

I long ago came to the conclusion that a slice of the American Dream is still out there to be had, as long as you don't mind cutting it out of a bunch of suckers and rubes. Alas, my petty sense of morality is stopping me from joining the ranks of the wealthy elite, but at least I can sleep at night knowing my lifestyle isn't directly financed by the misery of people I made a conscious choice to hurt.

"massively successful" in the context of Larian's entries in the Divinity series or even Pillars of Eternity, which moved almost three quarters of a million units in its first year on sale, don't count as successes in the eyes of AAA publishers like EA or Ubisoft. Dragon Age: Inquisition moved more than a million copies in its first week on sale, was Bioware's biggest launch (probably ever, given the current state of the studio), and still barely made an impression in EA's bottom line. In the same year FIFA 12 sold 3 million copies in its first week, and with its Ultimate Team gacha system represented a much longer stream of ongoing revenue than anything a self-contained single player RPG could provide.

Not to mention, deep single-player RPGs are massive undertakings, that appeal to a somewhat fickle playerbase. EA and Activision have demonstrated with FIFA, Madden, and CoD that they can cheaply reskin the same game over and over on an annual basis and move multiple millions of copies each time, without making an effort. Why take a risk on a relatively niche genre where your game could flop because of an off story beat or wonky mechanic, when you can just stick your last megahit in the photocopier and have it poop out another nine-figure megahit?

BG3 is of course a massive success and should be celebrated, but big publishers want to maximize their return on investment, and right now that means wedging live service offerings, loot box mechanics, and micro transactions into whatever genre maintains the most engagement over time. Right now that means multiplayer shooters and sports games.

Older variants of the 737 are some of the most ubiquitous aircraft in the world, with very solid safety records. The 737 MAX, however, is the product of a Boeing much diminished in terms of engineering mindset, and it shows badly.

Difference between an industry used to being regulated like planes dropping out of the sky onto people's houses might be a Bad Thing, versus one that is used to regulatory capture and a low public profile.

I landed my last two jobs (and in that timeframe another four offers and probably a dozen recruitment pitches I seriously entertained to some degree or other) via LinkedIn, either via contact with colleagues or messages from recruiters. Granted that I'm in a niche specialty of a relatively small profession, but for me LinkedIn has been the most reliable source of job offers for at least a decade. Many of the "better" options really only serve fields like the tech industry, or are so dominated by listings for tech jobs that have appropriated my industry's professional titles that it's impossible to sort any signal from the noise.

I was just over here thinking this was about the practical utility of a $100 bill versus a wad of 100 $1 bills making an infinite quantity of the former preferable in comparison to (i.e. "worth more than") the latter...

As the old saw goes, never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. Guy's about to have every piece of dirty laundry he's ever forgotten about aired in public.

Of course he'll just go home and cry about it into his swimming pool full of cash, but I'll take billionaire tears over no billionaire tears any day.

He's suddenly full of righteous indignation now that he's had a taste of his own medicine. Hypocritical fucknugget.

I had an architecture professor who studied design for aging in place, and this sort of thing was one of the things he advocated for. Aging and death are a part of life, and designing a room in the house to be able to support hospice care for a family member is a way to make a difficult experience more humane.

For a second, I thought maybe he was engaging in the popular tax avoidance strategy where you keep your investments in stocks, and then rather than sell them for liquid cash and pay capital gains tax, you take out low rate, interest-only loans using the value of the stock as collateral. It's the sort of bullshit loophole available to the billionaire class to avoid paying their share of tax...

...but no, guy's just leveraged up to his eyeballs in real estate and gold-buggery, and has the audacity to claim to be a finance guru.

I've somehow killed half the Hitachi/MetaboHPT batteries I've bought, and two of three chargers to boot. If anything else in my house made a habit of mysteriously dying for no reason I'd blame the power company, but as it stands it's just the power tools, and I am by no means a heavy user. Maybe my garage just gets too hot? I dunno.

That would put me in the Sixth House (seems like we've jumped ship from the Potterverse to the Locked Tomb series now?) as a Metabo HPT user -- at least for battery-operated tools. I've got no allegiances when it comes to corded power tools, though -- got everything from Harbor Freight only-need-it-for-one-job specials to DeWalt saws and routers, and a big ol' Craftsman drill press I inherited from my grandfather.

Had that happen to my case a few months back and haven't bothered to replace it. Tempered glass is super strong on the face of it, but if you get the slightest scratch on the edges the internal stresses in the glass will literally blow it up. I know it will mar, but I'd rather have an acrylic window any day of the week, or better yet, a sleek solid side panel.

They say the building code is written in blood, and hoo boy did Vlad Tepes leave a mark in that part of the world.

I don't know about manufacturing environments but I deal with laboratories a lot, and I'm a bit baffled at how quickly lab operators have jumped on battery-operated wifi sensors for lab monitoring systems. I have like three room sensors attached to my EcoBee thermostat at home and I can barely be assed to change the batteries in those things, I cannot imagine dealing with batteries and connectivity troubleshooting for a building full of sensors whose reliable operation is often critical for regulatory compliance. Seems like the perfect application for PoE systems, to me

As an architectural professional, I kinda want to skim over Russian building codes on the off-chance that they just have really shitty practice around fall protection at windows, and all of our jokes about it misunderstand the situtation after all.