Anyone reading this, please please do not finance a car's worth of money on some new gadget you're not even sure if you have a use for. I've had many friends do similar. Friends who took out tech loans from the university at 9% interest for a new gaming rig that was outdated in 3 years, and are still paying it back. Friends that would get behind on utility bills so they could get the brand new Gaming system. Just don't. Having entertainment and fun should be available for all, but do it with in your budget for heavens sake.

If you have 5k burning a hole in your pocket and you wouldn't' notice if it disappeared from your bank account, sure do it if thats what you enjoy.

And frankly I don't consider plumbing, ventilation, electricity and/or gas to be something only for the upper middle class; I think the those living in affordable housing should have those things too.

What makes you think that any affordable housing wouldn't have those utilities? There's lots of that kind of housing in New York's housing projects and they all have the needed utilities. What I wrote about is housing that has private homes, either freestanding or as duplexes or triplexes that not only are substantially identical but have a bare minimum of room for the number of people expected to live there and no way to customize their home other than by putting things on the walls and maybe changing the color of the paint on the walls. And that's why I wrote that upper middle class families wouldn't want to live there. They'd want both more space and more control over what their home looks like.

...onsite labor can be extremely efficient and much more flexible in build materials and customization than 3D printing can ever hope to achieve.

This type of thing isn't intended to be used to construct customized houses; it's intended to produce large numbers of buildings that are either identical or in a small number of designs that are rotated, possibly with slight variations in the order, to make the similarities less obvious. You're not going to get upper middle class families to live in them, but they'd be acceptable for low cost housing. Think of the buildings described in Little Boxes slightly over sixty years ago.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects to have net energy production from the whole machine in 2025/6 Commercialization a handful of years thereafter

Practical fusion will be coming online in 2025 /6 with the SPARC reactor from CFS. High temp superconductors FTW. Practical QC requires maintaining a superposition of at least a million physical Qbits. Nit happening in the next 3-4 decades. At least.

And of course, most newcomers to Linux will take the default desktop both because they have no idea which one is really best for them and because they'll figure that it's the default so it must be best. I'd bet that if the various DEs were listed in a random order not only would far less people would start out with Gnome, but few of them would migrate from one to another because in their own way, they're all good.

Same here, but I abandoned Gnome when I saw what Gnome 3 was going to be and I've never looked back. If they can't manage to raise enough cash to pay for themselves, maybe it's time for it to die.

Now, Congress has stepped back and allowed you to get a hearing aid from anyone.

And note how far the prices have dropped. Proof, if any were needed, that the big name hearing aid makers were gouging the public.

If I wrote that Bytedance was losing money, I miswrote. My intended meaning was that TickToc was unprofitable.

Fuck that noise. That should be protected, and was well with in scope.The EPA is not riding roughshod over any common citizen. A billionaire with no regard to the environment, sure. Any company just straight dumping pollutants into the ground water, year fucking get those guys. Not all land should be developed. Do your own research.

Tomorrow it will be insulin prices or something.

I'd like to see them go after the prices of the interferon drugs used to control MS. My sister used to need to take one of them once a month, and before she was taken off of it the price had gone up to $1600/dose. The feds had put anybody using it on MedicAid automatically, but that's a huge, unreasonable price for something like that.

And hearing aids. Notice how you can now get them by mail order at about 1/10 the price the big boys charge? Wonder why they've always been so expensive until now? Well, here's the answer: "Everything the traffic will bear!" Congress should have stepped in with an investigation decades ago, but they were too busy pocketing campaign contributions to bother.

According to TFS, the company is losing money, but they're still fighting to hold onto it and would rather shut it down than sell it. This suggests that profit was never the main goal of its owners, and that propaganda or other intelligence gathering has always been its purpose.

Point one granted. Point two not granted. Thats a really dumb argument . We don't have two rational parties. Just one. The other is too busy arguing before the supreme court that we shouldn't be a Democracy and elections shouldn't be considered as determinative. Until they accept the extensive proof that 2020 was legitimately won, their lack of votes on anything is not significant.

Obviously, the gig economy. They all complete for low pay random per task jobs.

No, the lack of clear English is the first barrier to getting anything resolved. The lack of empowerment is the second one. But there are very normal obvious requests that can be done by support, if you can get past a language barrier. How do I know? Because I've lived it. Google pixel offers the ability to close caption live phone calls and it does an amazing job with accents. So at least I can understand them. So from that stand point I've been able to phrase my requests properly to get them understood by the support staff. With that accomplished, I've been able to actually get reasonable support. Sure they have a script and limited powers, but most of the time that's all you need.