Some questionable calls are more important than others. Some would be so important that even a small chance of success would make it worth challenging. Others would need to be nearly certain to succeed to make it a good decision. There's a lot of luck involved in which situations occur.

YouTube does have the thumb down, but it's used less since they hid its counter. Plus there's no clarity on whether it reduces algorithmic ranking, or whether that's just based on views, where clickbait is king.

That's no moon.

Yes - that's the point. I needed to run Windows 11 because I use Windows specific apps. I also have 2 personal macbooks, have an employer provided macbook for my professional job and will probably install some version of Linux on the old system and maybe turn it into a NAS of some sort.

But then that wasn't the point of your reply was it? Because in your rush to play whataboustism and score some internet karma you seemed to have missed the last line of my post - "just so Microsoft, which had declared Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever, could sell a buncha new licenses for forced obsolescence."

That was THE point. I'm well aware of Apple's built-in obsolescence and hate it which is why I still gave the nod to Windows because I USED TO BE ABLE TO RUN NEW WINDOWS VERSIONS ON OLDER HARDWARE. But not anymore because MS has now added forced obsolescence.

uh-huh, behind my desk is an intel computer I built myself 10 years ago - Rampage V edition 10, Intel i7-6950X EXTREME (it runs fast because it has EXTREME in the name...also ran fantastically hot but that was another issue...) quad channel DDR4 that was overclocked and an MSI NVIDIA GTX 790. It STILL runs like a champ and I could do about 80% of what I needed it to including coding, photo and video editing and mid level gaming and all around home server.

And what I thought would be my last build... wasn't... because I was forced to update because... get this... while I could get a TPM module for the motherboard - the CPU ISN'T SUPPORTED.

So this year I forked over a ton of cash and built a whole new rig just so Microsoft, which had declared Windows 10 would be the last Windows ever, could sell a buncha new licenses for forced obsolescence.

There really isn't a better way to deal with the abuses. Here's some personal experience.

Fortune 500 company - bottom half of that group is all I will say about them - laid me and some others off in a big layoff a few years ago. Yeah, they got rid of a few H1-Bs in the layoffs, but the vast overwhelming majority of layoffs were white American males over 40 years old, who just happened to be making good money. In my department, only Americans got laid off and not a single H1-B was impacted by the layoffs. I've been told that this is supposedly "illegal", but it's exactly what happened. They kept the H1-Bs because they make less money and they can't leave unless they want to return to India.

Same company, but a few months before I was laid off, a college student I barely know (friend of a friend kind of thing) was offered an internship by the company. I told the student that I knew his manager and I thought highly of her so I figured working there would be OK. Probably didn't hurt that this manager was Indian as was the student. He told me his dream was to work on stuff that gets patented. I told him that in our state we did not work on that kind of thing, but we had an R&D office in another state that did. I told him that he'd never get to work on stuff that gets patented here but if he got his foot in the door with the internship, maybe he could eventually get there because the company liked to hire its interns. He did indeed get a job offer after the internship, which he accepted, making him an H1-B. I have some limited contact with him and he's still there. And he has no plans to ever transfer out of state to the R&D org and work on patented stuff. All it took to make him completely give up on his dreams was an H1-B paycheck.

Final story about the same company. You might remember in Trump's first term he put limitations on H1-Bs in IT because of abuses. My company wrote a job description up for a job they wanted to fill during those restrictions. I saw it early one morning when I was getting coffee as it was on a bulletin board. The job was in another state and the requirements were super specific and honestly a whole lot of bs like the job required a master's degree and experience doing chip design. My guess is that if an American with the very specific skills somehow applied for the job, they'd just offer the H1-B salary and expect the American to say no. So the job stays open for I guess maybe half a year or more and finally they get permission to hire a specific guy for the job from India. Know what he does? He writes code in Java for them. That chip design and master's degree "requirement' stuff was bs to try to make sure only he could match those "requirements". He was the only employee our org in the company hired for an entire year. I mean, if you can't hire H1-Bs, they simply weren't interested in hiring anybody.

Plus my utility in CO just cut the price of their 100% renewable offset by about 60% (because they are transitioning to 100% carbon free power, and they need to offset less now) and so my rate is actually lower than it was 2 years ago.

My credit score is well over 800 and I don't see how I'm exploitable. I haven't paid any CC fees or interest in decades, and have no debt anywhere else. But maybe I'm missing something obvious. Can you explain a bit? (serious question).

First, who actually goes to banks in person any more? Second, I can think of half a dozen business local to me that currently don't have the same closing times already. So your argument falls flat.

I never said anything about either ratio or geography. Are you replying to the right person? Regardless, again, the alternative solution is to adjust hours, not clocks. If you arrive at and leave work or school an hour later in the summer, it has the same effect as DST.

So, how does anyone enter the workforce?

This is comparing apples and applejacks. If you only care about cost per calorie, people may as just drink canola oil and take a daily vitamin pill. What we really need to do is look at the total cost of living when eating real foods vs packaged trash "food". If we were honest about adding up the related external costs of illness, healthcare, discontent, disability, etc and look at it more holistically, I believe the "cheaper" shit food starts to lose out fast. But nobody wants to do that. Hell, we can't even get people to agree that being a fatass is unhealthy.

And the idea that it costs a lot to eat healthy is a myth that needs to die. Some things are more expensive, sure, but you can make a healthy meal with cheaper options as well. The truth is that people are lazy and addicted to the results of 50 years engineering to create the mouth porn that line most store shelves.

Easy to say when you live in or near London (which as I recall, you do).

There's nothing wrong with local time, and there are good reasons humans have used it literally for as long as we've had clocks. You are trading one mental adjustment -- "what time is it where Bob lives?" -- with a different one -- "what time is it where I am when the sun is directly overhead?" Guess which one you need to worry about more often?

And if you think adjusting to time zones is annoying now when traveling, imagine needing readjust your entire mental model of the solar day - where sunrise, noon, and sunset are on the clock. But hey, I guess you didn't need to adjust your watch. Hurray?

Local time is a "human sized" solution to the problem of timekeeping while UTC is a planet-sized solution to it.

Nonsense. Every single business has a list of their operating hours posted. Some open at 6am, some at 10am. Some are open on Sunday, others closed. Some close for certain holidays, others for others (or none). Some receive deliveries earlier than customers, others don't.

Most people in the US may not be accustomed to the idea of summer hours, but it's not a complicated idea and people would catch on pretty quickly.

You can't really use a wok on any home cooking appliances, regadless of heat source. The only exception are the specialized wok-specific ones some others mentioned, and even those kind of suck because they limit how much you can move the pan around.

I had a gas stovetop for years and a wok (both round and flat-bottom) was pitiful. There's a reason that restaurants basically use a 100K BTU jet engine to cook with a wok. Can you cook food in a wok on a standard stove? Sure. Will it ever be on par with asian restaurants? No. You're better off just using a griddle or flat frying pan on home stoves.