The self-checkout thing is annoying but I don't really mind. I typically only have a few items and I can get through a self checkout pretty fast. When MOST people are using them though then inevitably the slow pokes who can't figure it out still manage to clog up the process.

24 hour stores I also deeply miss but realistically as someone who often went there are weird hours of the morning, the stores were nearly empty during those times. They probably weren't making enough money to justify it hence why they didn't break the 24/7 operating hours back after COVID.

Locking up stuff is a case by case basis. Certain ones do and certain ones don't depending on loss levels. Realistically if the public in an area is constantly shoplifting then its a matter of locking the stuff up or just closing the store altogether.

Resources are allocated depending on what's making them money. Twitch isn't exactly raking in a ton of money at the moment, and they're not likely apt to subsidize it with funds from other divisions.

Apple only LETS you use one app store. Google lets you use any one you want - most people just happen to choose to still use the Google Play store.

The difference is in having the choice, not which option most people pick.

The most common emergency I could imagine is needing gas and their readers are down or your card won't work etc. Even at today's prices $20 worth of gas is still typically plenty enough to get you home.

No - there can be mature and immature activists. No different than if I said "All adults have to accept that sometimes you have to forgo luxury expenses to pay bills."

You wouldn't say "Adult is just what we call financially irresponsible people now." would you? The statement that all of a group has to perform an action doesn't mean that many of them aren't already doing so.

All activists - be they political or technical or whatever (this disagreement seems particularly non-political), have to accept the fact the sometimes NOTHING will work, and you have to be ok with that.

You're not owed the change you seek. You can try to make a change and people may or may not agree with you. If they don't, that doesn't give you license to adopt increasingly more drastic measures until they accept it - that's how terrorists are born.

Sometimes things just don't go your way, and you have to be ok with that.

I wouldn't go that far, but realistically nearly no one is willing to pay for what is effectively a large discussion forum. Those things have existed on the internet for ages, and they've always been free.

Traditionally these were run by people who were just really passionate about a particular topic and weren't really intended to make any profit. If Reddit went pay-walled I'm sure many people would return to such forums (they're still out there and in use).

I think part of it is that the majority of PhD's seem to just become professors, which at the end of the day is still a teacher. Not a lot of people really want to do that.

If you want to work in the industry a Masters or even a Bachelors is typically fine.

Plus personally I will say that I had to deal with parental pressure. By the time I was completing my Bachelors my parents were basically to the point where if I wanted to continue it had to be with no external support at all (while loans and grants were covering tuition, they were giving me about $500 per month to cover living expenses). They wanted me to just go ahead and get a job.

I'm not even sure what you're getting at there. Your post has nothing to do with eliminating the penny. We're not adding a new $1 coin - we've had $1 coins for a long time (though they're less popular than the bills).

I don't like Trump, and I don't agree with most of his policies, but this is fine. I wish it weren't necessary, but with pennies costing more to mint than they're worth, its just not financially wise to keep making them.

The only other alternative would be to revise them so that they're significantly smaller, or a hollow ring shape, or something else to bring the cost down to a low enough level, but that's a temporary bandaid on the problem and eventually inflation would bring up costs to above the value again.

Its a one-time use credit card # where its still attached to your account, but it has a limited expiration and limited funds available. Its just a way to mitigate damage in case your card # is leaked.

It all depends on your habits. The phone is dirt simple for me - there's no apps to select or anything - you just press your thumb to unlock and then hold up the phone. Particularly if you're already walking around with your phone in your hand its significantly faster then having to pull out my wallet, then pull out the card, then put the card back in the wallet and the wall back in my pocket. Granted, pulling out the card isn't some huge inconvenience, but if timing it I guarantee you my phone is faster to use.

Not sure how it could be interpreted as "showing off". Its a simple function that everyone can use if they want - its not as if its some weird thing reserved for the elite amongst us.

Plus just having it setup has saved me a couple times when I got to a store and realized I'd accidentally left my wallet at home. Granted this has only happened to me twice in the last 4 or 5 years, but I was still happy to have it available when it did happen.

I can agree with the complaint about Snaps. The old package system worked so well but these self contained snaps are just frustrating. I totally get using snaps for large packages like Chrome or Libreoffice or the like, but I don't want to install a snap for a random command line utility.

I'm using the Ubuntu based Linux Mint for now, but if they keep pushing it I'll be migrating to Debian (or Debian based Mint) eventually.

Xfinity/Comcast was still coming through and laying coax in my neighborhood about a year ago. I'm not saying fiber isn't the better choice, but you can do 2Gbps on modern coax and probably less than 10% of your customer base will even be able to notice any speed improvements above 200Mbps (ie they can stream all their stuff and browse the web - if they don't download large files its all the same).

I'm guessing they just got their notation wrong on the 25tb part. I mean my RAID array at home is more than 25TB and I don't think I can store "the internet" on it . . .

There's a reason there's tons of memes in the IT world about how expensive AWS is. Yes, "cloud services" reduce the need to manage on-site hardware, and it does have its uses (eg, off-site backups become a lot easier), but at the end of the day to a large degree cloud services end up costing more than you'd pay to just buy servers and keep them on-site.

Similarly, a lot of our software vendors as of late have been wanting to move to a software as a service model. They tout the awesomeness of not having to maintain your servers anymore, but its often far more expensive, and much more limiting. With a regular SQL server or the like on-site I can write tons of scripts to sync data from one application to another and keep things up to date, but with SaaS I am dependent upon the vendors hopefully including an API for any data access outside of the UI, which often either a) doesn't exist at all, or b) the amount of data exposed is incomplete compared to what I could pull via a SQL query.