I feel like all file-like UIs suck. I hate Windows Explorer, Mac Finder, Nautilus Google Drive, OneDrive (yes I’m talking about both local and native file UIs but I dislike them all). Are there any that you consider good? Because I’d like to try it.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/makankosappo-hadokening

This is awful. Thanks for sharing.

When I got banned I tried to create a new account several times and used up several clever usernames which were immediately banned. So I gave up on having a Reddit account. Several months later I decided to try again, this time with a username that was just a random string of digits and using a brand-new browser. I think I was on a cellular connection instead of my home internet when I created the new account. For whatever reason it worked that time. Maybe the fingerprinting isn’t as effective if you haven’t logged into Reddit for several months?

It depends on the cause of your back pain so I agree with the people who said maybe see a doctor. Some people have weak back muscles so strengthening exercises help. My back pain was caused by tight hamstrings and overuse of my back, so I fixed it with a lot of hamstring stretches and getting out of my office chair as much as possible. My brother in law has a bulging disc so neither of those things would help him.

Probably the biggest help for me was WFH so I could get out of my office chair - I can lie down, walk around, or sit in different chairs when I’m taking a break, and I take a lot of breaks. I stretch my hamstrings after most workouts so I’m warmed up. I bend over to touch my toes with my feet together for 90 seconds, starting gently, breathing as I relax, and slowly increasing the stretch a little as my muscles loosen up. Then I take a 30 second break, then I move my feet to somewhere width apart and do another 90 second slow hamstring stretch. Another 30-second break, then I put my feet about halfway to a split and do a other 90 seconds touching the ground. Then a break then as wide as I can go and bend over to touch the ground. I think the slow process really helps me relax.

Yeah that looks like resistive heating, so there’s no reason to think it’s more efficient than the small heater which definitely uses resistive heating. It’s impossible to know for certain but my gut says the small heater is the right call - since you’re heating a smaller area, there’s less surface area to lose heat from, and heat losses are what drives heating costs.

What kind of unit is the central system - heat pump? Resistive heating?

There are a lot of details we’d need to determine this, so I don’t think we can give you a firm answer. But heat pumps are dramatically more efficient than resistive heating, so if the central system is a heat pump that’s probably the right answer. If the central system uses resistive heating then it’s probably not much more efficient than the small heater.

Blame is not a finite resource. Just because 2 people are involved doesn’t mean they’re both 50% to blame — they can both be 100% at fault.

So to answer your question, the person is responsible for their onerous views. They chose to watch that trash and believe it. We can have compassion for them without absolving them of blame. At the same time, they are a victim of the people lying to them. So it’s fine to blame the person consuming the bullshit and the person producing the bullshit, and the fact that there are 2 people to blame doesn’t make either of them any less to blame.

True, but the original question was a hypothetical about the absurd consequences of ruling in their favor.

According to the arguments currently being made to protect Trump from prosecution. The premise of the question was “If presidential immunity is absolute.”

True, but it’s worth noting that this is an average and will vary wildly. Since I started tracking my annual returns have been 9.42%, 1.12%, 8.44%, 17.28%, -5.30%, 22.04%, 18.75%, 15.60%, -17.58%, and 18.11%. Which averages out to 7.75% — not far from the usual 7% figure.*

So for anyone just learning about investing, you’ll almost never have an “average” year. Each year will be all over the place. It’s only when you’ve been in the market for a long time that your returns will average out to something close to typical.

*I’m also ignoring an important distinction: IIRC the stock market averages close to 10% returns if you only look at dollar values. But when you account for the fact that inflation makes reach dollar worth less, on average returns are 7% in terms of real purchasing power. The returns I posted above are not inflation adjusted, but they include some bonds which don’t return as much as stocks. So it’s no surprise that my returns are on average less than 10%.

Voyager: https://vger.app/. Also available as an Android and iOS app.

In theory that gets around the legal issue but then you’re getting into practical issues: Trump is protected by the Secret Service so either it will be extremely difficult from a practical perspective, or you would have to get quite a few people to go along with the conspiracy. Again, this highlights what a terrible idea immunity is because the possibilities get horrifying really fast.

I am super duper NOT an expert but I believe the President can pardon crimes in DC, so that would get around the state court issue. Same for outside the US: I’m not sure states can punish crimes outside of the US. Even if they can, they may not have laws on the books to handle that sort of thing.

Theoretically, Biden could do it and not be prosecuted.

But if he ordered a member of the military to do it, they are required to refuse illegal orders. I don’t know the rules about illegal orders but I bet this would fall under that. At the same time, the President can pardon people convicted in military court so that’s not much of a deterrent.

Similarly if he ordered a civilian (say, CIA) to assassinate Trump, that person could be tried. But again, the President’s pardon power makes federal charges not much of a threat.

BUT — the President cannot grant pardons for convictions in state courts. So anyone involved would be in trouble if it happened in a US state. And if the Supreme Court did not make the President immune from state-level prosecution, Biden could be tried for being involved… but it seems unlikely that they would go for “the President is immune from federal prosecution but not state prosecution.”

Of course, all this show how insane and dangerous the idea of Presidential immunity is. It’s a terrible idea.

The men are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement!

I don’t understand the disadvantages yet except environmental concerns.

As you point out, PoS basically solves the environmental concerns. (Some people might say it still consumes too much power but I disagree, I think power consumption under PoS is acceptable).

This is just my opinion, but I think the big disadvantage is cryptocurrencies are a pain in the ass to use. Lengthy story about what a pain it’s been to use them in Spoiler tag. I think this story is a bit of an outlier since I hit all of these issues, but the fact that a technically inclined person who is just getting back into cryptocurrency after a long hiatus can have this much trouble with it does not speak well use ability or safety.

::: I have a few coins I mined back in the day (before switching all my computing power to BOINC), and I saved off my wallet.dat from those wallets. I wanted to use them recently, so I reinstalled the wallet software. That worked, but then I had to download the entire chain again, so I had to wait more than a day to actually use the coins. Putting cash in a bank is faster if I’m already a customer of the bank. If I’m a new customer I might have to wait, but the point is cryptocurrency doesn’t have a clear advantage here.

The coins I had weren’t Bitcoin, but the shop I wanted to buy from only accepts Bitcoin. So then I had to exchange mine for Bitcoin and pay transaction fees. I guess you could say it’s my own fault for holding a less-popular coin but I’m not sure cryptocurrency is living up to its own hype if there’s exactly one or two coins that you have to use, just like how in the US there’s no real alternative to USD.

I found a no-account exchange, and I had to carefully enter keys and figure out amounts of coin > BTC. And I had to trust the exchange to give me what I wanted. If the no-account exchange didn’t exist, I would have to create a whole new account on a website I don’t entirely trust just to exchange one coin for Bitcoin. That’s a layer of trust in a “trustless” system. I also don’t like creating yet another account with my info in it — yet another way that cryptocurrency is not better than traditional finance.

Then not only did it cost transaction fees, it took hours for the transaction to go through. I could pay more for it to go faster, but now we’re talking about fees that far exceed those of credit cards or regular money transfers. Then I had to send the Bitcoin to the online store and wait for that transaction to clear. More time and more transaction fees. The purchase worked without a hitch, but it wasn’t any better than using a credit card.

I had to buy extra BTC because it’s really difficult to know exactly how much you’re going to pay including transaction fees, so after the transaction went through I tried to turn my remaining Bitcoins (I think it was worth ~$13?) back into the kind of coins I keep, but I set my transaction fee too low and the trade I set up expired before my coins went through. Luckily I had given the exchange a refund account, but that meant I had to wait over 24 hours before my transaction actually happened, and then the exchange had to send back my Bitcoin, incurring fees at each step.

While waiting I tried to cancel this Bitcoin transaction, but the software I used didn’t support that. So then I tried to extract my private key to enter into another piece of software, and that was surprisingly difficult. I thought cryptocurrency was supposed to put me in control, but without a LOT of technical knowledge I was just as powerless as I’d be with a bank that froze a transfer. I asked for help on a few forums and some people tried to help but the whole thing was confusing and eventually I had to give up and just wait for the transaction to go through.

Then I had to do the BTC > mycoin transaction again, and this time I think the fees were 5-10% of the amount I was transferring. That’s way more than Venmo’s immediate transfer fee or even credit card fees (I think those are around 3%?).

I will say that during this process I discovered the Electrum wallet, which is very good and works on a lot of platforms. Some of the issues I had would not have happened if I had used that all along. But there are so many wallets out there it’s hard to know which one is best and obviously when I started this process no one told me it was the best. And maybe it’s not and that just my opinion.

In summary, I’m interested in cryptocurrency and kind of enjoyed using it in the way learning new things can be fun. But it was slower, less convenient, and more expensive than regular currency. Cryptocurrency boosters are going to have to improve all of these problems before it’s competitive with regular currency, and I don’t see a lot of discussion about how much these pain points suck and how to improve.

:::

This is true, but it’s hard to see why we would ever move from fiat currency to cryptocurrency as the primary means of exchange. Currently cryptocurrency’s advantages are modest and its disadvantages are substantial, and I haven’t seen a lot of movement toward fixing that balance. I’d like to give traditional finance channels some competition to reduce fees, lock-in, and inconvenience, but cryptocurrency is going to have to get a lot better for average people if it’s going to be a real alternative.

I agree there’s something to be said for this — If you have a above-board business that credit card companies don’t want to service because they think it makes them look bad, that should not shut you out of electronic payments yet that’s basically where we are at least in the US.

This is a little hard to balance with the fact that the same things that let you circumvent gatekeepers like credit card companies also make it attractive for genuinely immoral things, but that’s a trade-off. Every currency can be used for immoral things and just because cryptocurrency might make it a little easier doesn’t mean it’s inherently immoral.

I didn’t say cryptocurrency was any better or worse for fraud and abuse than regular currencies. Honestly I have no idea which one is better or worse for fraud and abuse. I’m just saying it’s not clear that the particular way that cryptocurrency is more secure than regular banking is actually beneficial.