I honestly don’t mind there not being an audience. At least this way you can focus on the question and answers, without people booing, clapping, shouting, etc. An audience is great for a political rally, but for debates like this… I’d rather focus on the actual content.

I’m a biiiiig fan or ranked-choice voting as a concept. It seems like such a nice way to get a more diverse political landscape which isn’t set in stone like the US has right now. It’d certainly give other candidates an actual shot at the position. You simply don’t even SEE third party candidates these days. They’re not in any debate, they never get talked about… After all, why bother when they’re never, ever going to win with the current setup?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting

You would think that US voters would’ve had enough of this system by now. The only reason third - or fourth, fifth, etc. - parties don’t really work is because people keep voting for the same two… and expecting different results. The classic definition of insanity.

Now, it’s not going to be easy to sway enough people, but doing nothing surely isn’t going to fix things either. It clearly hasn’t to date.

As a European… we’re not really fond of this situation either. Both candidates would get laughed off stage here. I don’t mind a seasoned, older politician, but these two should stick to golf and not running a country. Get yourself some better candidates or better, vote for a third party.

That’s some quality plausible deniability right there. Flared base and everything.

That’s definitely ending up in someone wearing a dog collar…

I am, in fact, quite aware of how air conditioners work :D A lot of devices work like this; it’s why a refrigerator and freezer generate heat. And why things like a slushy machine are real power hogs. Basically, anything that gets things cool will generate heat elsewhere.

Thing is, a refrigerator and freezer are very much needed in daily life. An air conditioner thankfully isn’t - yet. But on days where we have 25+ celsius, the aircon is the difference between being sweaty, irritable, unproductive and with poor sleep or… perfectly comfortable. So, we choose to not be miserable. It keeps me sane during heatwaves.

But yes, absolutely nobody should own one. And I highly encourage everybody else not to get one. I’m keeping mine though.

When I heard about the plans to clean up the Seine enough to have actual swimming events, I had to check it wasn’t an Onion article. While on paper it sounds nice - an urban river so clean you could swim in it - in practice it’s pretty much impossible to do. Not even factoring in the cost of it.

If I was an athlete, I’d skip the event if they tried to make me swim in that. There’s no vaccines and drysuits good enough to make me take that plunge. Especially not after half of Paris decides to take an actual shit in it.

Here in the Netherlands, the panels are wired into the grid so you’re always delivering back and not using that power directly. What happens is, they basically deduct the power generated from the power you’ve used. This crediting system will eventually disappear, as too many people are feeding back solar power.

For all intents and purposes, as long as we generate more than we use, we’re paying nothing except grid charges and taxes. So if you’ve got a low energy use day and plenty of solar, there’s really no reason not to run an AC (or a washer/dryer, etc)

We’ve got nine panels on the south facing roof. Right now, reasonably sunny day, they produce about 3.6 -3.7 Kw. That amply covers the power consumption of one of the two LG aircons we have. Those take about 2.5 kW. We usually just run one, depending on outside temp.

I’m not really familiar with solar generators in general, but that feels like you’d need a pretty beefy one to keep an AC powered.

I’ve got solar panels and AC. I’m keeping the house at meat locker freezing while staying within the solar panel production. Might as well use the power when it’s there.

Some people will complain about using AC in general. They can sweat all they want - I’m keeping cool.

Yeah, that’s certainly one odd aspect. Also, there’s a ton of other methods to handle labour shortages. Like activating underused groups, such as women. Or offering retraining so people can switch to different jobs. And higher pay for sectors with shortages doesn’t hurt either, considering the already very low pay in Greece.

Running your existing workforce ragged is NOT the way to deal with this.

But hey, maybe we’re missing some cultural or political piece of the puzzle as to why they went this route.

Borderlands is a straight up dopamine injection for my brain. You shoot someone, damage numbers go up, brain gets all happy. It’s dumb, but I fucking love it. I also love the writing, the characters, the level designs… it’s exactly the type of gaming comfort food that I enjoy.

Moar Borderlands!

I’m excited as fuck for Deadpool 3! It’s my number one most anticipated movie this year to be honest.

Deadpool 1 was certainly a breath of fresh air for me when it released. A great introduction to a unique character. An antihero with a healthy dose of humor that’s not usually found in other superhero movies. Absolutely loved the fourth wall breaks, loved every character in it, loved the soundtrack…

I got into Deadpool so much, I actually started reading the comics to get more Deadpool :D

The Greeks are insane for going along with this. Revolutions have started over less. Clearly their politicians no longer have the best interests of the Greek people in mind.

If it runs that poorly and it’s still lacking basic things like ultrawide and DLSS, you’re clearly doing something very wrong as a developer. If you want to make PC money, you should also properly use the platform.

“Greetings, we’ve been trying to reach your civilization about the extended warranty on your Class 7 interstellar exploration cruiser…”

I miss forums as well, and I’m actually moving back to them. Back in the early 2000’s, I visited like a dozen forums each day. I was a member of like three watch forums, a camera forum, a Star Trek forum, some gaming forums and others. Just ‘doing the rounds’ kept you busy for a while. People also were insanely knowledgeable on those niche forums, and they all had their own specific culture and flavor to them.

Places like a niche subreddit are… OK at best. They are convenient and easy to visit, but don’t tend to have the level of knowledge and discourse that I generally enjoy. You also run the risk of your sub getting ruined by people who are into the wrong aspects of your particular hobby. For example, on a watch FORUM, the discussions are about design, mechanical features, history, photography, how to repair, etc. etc. On the subreddit, a lot of posts tended to be drive-by posters who ‘found a watch and wanted to know what it’s worth’. or ‘is this fake’. The subreddit didn’t curb that, so eventually I and many others just stopped going there. It was basically too easy for people to post there just because, well, they could. Whereas on an actual watch forum, you can do a bit stricter moderation and the registration requirement weeds out low effort posting.

Some consider that ‘gatekeeping’, but I see it as a valid way of protecting one’s chosen community.

I don’t think I’ve met any Brazilians back in those days; (online) gaming is really expensive there from what I heard, right?

One fun thing in the old COD lobbies was always to teach others slurs and general cursing in your language. I learned how to curse folks out in like 50 languages. Each country also has its own unique style of cursing. We Dutch really like to incorporate diseases for example.

I’m certainly not going to say you’re wrong on that first part. I’ve been online since 1996. At that time, the internet was the domain of white, heterosexual, nerdy, generally well educated guys. And me being a white, heterosexual, nerdy, well educated guy… well… going online felt like coming home. Those were my people. I still really miss those days.

But I also know that the experience of someone not like me would’ve been wildly different. I learned a bajillion slurs on COD lobbies after all. It’s a good thing that more people now feel welcome online, as it led to platform growth and functionality that we otherwise wouldn’t have had if it was just ‘my kind of people’.

The current safe, sanitised, gentrified gaming sphere also has benefits: COD lobbies these days are very pleasant by comparison. You even have to sign a code of conduct to get on multiplayer. It feels more welcoming, less hostile. Of course, companies certainly have been financially incentivized to attract as wide an audience as possible. For example, the very first GTA game sold about 6 million copies. GTA V has sold 200 million. And with ever-increasing development budgets, you can’t afford to cater to a niche, you want to cast as wide a net as possible to recoup those costs.

I miss that era. Companies didn’t mind a bit of edginess and weren’t afraid to market to adults. The console culture itself also isn’t what it used to be.

These days, gaming consoles all need to be safe enough for five year olds to play on them. And it’s caused everything to be just too bland and safe, both in marketing and the console itself. Can’t really have things like Xbox 360 Uno with the live camera feed and no moderation. Or the wholly uncensored COD lobbies.