My concern is the opportunity to lie.
An empty room is tough to gauge the size of (even in person).
A staged room, with a bed and dresser gives you a better idea of how spacious or not spacious the room is, and how you might furnish it. This is valuable information when forming an opinion about the house and its suitability.

Realtor photos already have a fisheye problem with a lot of the pictures and video as they trying to show more of the room at once which causes scale to be tough to determine.

Add AI staging to that and it is even more problematic, because they can stage it with furniture that isn't scaled correctly. I've seen some AI staging where things are just scaled wrong, like the bedroom dresser is only 4" deep, and couches are sunk into walls. But its not obvious to look at it. Or there's two cars in the garage but they're 15% smaller than they'd actually be so it looks more spacious. OR there's two large couches with a large coffee table between them with a fireplace off to the side, and room to walk around it all and then you realize that either the fireplace is 8 feet high and 12 feet wide and the ceilings are 25' high ... or the furniture is scaled to 25% actual size.

You didn't say what size the TV is though or where you sit.

I have an 85" TV in my media room and we sit quite close to it maybe 8-9' away from it.

The difference between 4k and 1080p is very noticeable when watching 4k content. I also use this screen for gaming, and text is noticeably clearer and sharper and easier to read at 4k from the couch (shout out for factorio).

Most movies and games don't really benefit though. I'm just happy when i get good actual 1080p content without lots of compression and other artifacts.

If you are buying a TV to put over the fireplace (too high to sit close comfortably) and/or your living room is laid out that your seating is 15' - 20' away, and you are putting in a 44"-55" TV... you aren't really going to see a difference from 4k.

That's the key: for 4k to be really 'worth it' the TV needs to be BIG and you need to be pretty close to it.
And once you have that - then the content really matters too.

I have yet to see use case for 8k. The same BIG + CLOSE argument for 4k vs 1080p applies but now it needs to be even bigger. And there's practically no content.

"I'm assuming any domestic worker at this point has to be physically here for some reason."

I wouldn't assume that. The reason could simply be that the hiring manager wanted the team member local to make them easier to manage and interact with. Sure it cost more than offshoring them, but the onshoring cost could have been justifiable. Now there's a 100k new reasons to reconsider it.

There will be cases where they really do need to be physically onsite, security as you suggested being one reason. Having to interact with physical hardware/assets as part of their role is another. In some cases they'll pay the 100k for the h1b, in some they'll hire an American... in others they'll figure out an offshoring solution, in others they'll just eliminate the position entirely.

I'd be very surprised if there is much of a net increase in jobs for American's as a result of this policy.

"repairable"? Its a system on a chip. For the most part ... either it works or it doesn't. There's not much to repair. That said.. yeah, I've got an intellivision flashback that died pretty quickly - so i guess its a valid concern.

I'm disappointed in the game selection on the Spirit. It doesn't have the Dungeons and Dragons games (which also go by minotaur and crown of kings to avoid licensing the DnD name).

It does say it sports a usb port for "game expansion" - so maybe there's a way in there. (official or otherwise).

HDMI and wireless are nice though. I really can't be bothered to hook the original one up with its its whole ancient antenna hookup system. The flashback was nice while it lasted because it was at least RCA. I use jzintv now on a PC.

I currently have usb adapters for both the original system controllers and the littler ones that came with the intellivision flashback a few years ago - works very well.

But wireless would be nice, so I might still buy it for the controllers if someone figures out how to get them working with a PC.

Aargh...

Are we only counting pets that were actually mine? Or do family pets count? I've no idea what i would have originally used.

If its the first its LA... or maybe I put L.A. or maybe Los Angeles or sometimes i misspell it Los Angelos... so maybe i did that.

If its the 2nd one, then its St. John's... but maybe I put in St Johns without the apostrophe and period? Does that matter? I might even have put in Saint Johns...

Oh... wait... does it want the city I lived in when the pet was born, or the city the pet itself was born in? Because if the latter then its Mt. Pearl... although i might have put Mount Pearl? Actually that's just where the pet's mother's owners lived.

And I think now you understand why I'm totally locked out of my account in the first place. Good luck getting in.

Zuck didn't fall asleep at the wheel. He was driving straight for the cesspool, wide awake, and on purpose from the beginning. Anyone who couldn't see where he was going was simply not looking.

I don't disagree, but if you want to supplant the public square with an online space, it needs to be decentralized and ideally should actually belong to the public.

"It uses less electricity than a modern frig"

So that seemed incredible; but after doing some research it is plausible (with caveats). I have a few questions:

1) What 'modern' fridge are you using for comparison? There is a substantial difference between 1982, 2002 and 2022.
2) What are the volumes of the two fridges being compared?

The average 1940s fridge looks to be only 6-8 cu ft; while the average 2000s fridge is 20+ cu ft. Even if it slightly beats the modern fridge on total electricity, it's probably only cooling 1/3 to 1/4 the volume

For example in the 1940s you might be around 400kWh; but if its 7cu ft, its only getting 57kWh/cu ft/year; and comparing it to a 550kWh fridge from 2002 cooling 21 cu ft for 26kWh/cu ft/year. (And that's a 20 year old not particularly efficient "modern" fridge... you could get that down to 300kWh annually on a new fridge if you buy specifically for efficiency)

Sure the 1940s fridge might beat that not particularly modern or efficient "modern fridge" on total use but it's still not really a win unless you only need 7 cu ft. And if all you need is 7 cu fit, in 2025 you can get 8 cu ft for 167kWh year. (60% less electricity)

cites: some data on 2025 fridges
https://shrinkthatfootprint.co...

data on refrigeration energy usage and capacity over time:
https://www.researchgate.net/f...
https://appliance-standards.or...

Fair comment, but the point stands that it's in there and sooner or later it will.

That's such an arbitrary calculation. The big turning point was in the 70s energy crisis when energy star became a thing. And there is a huge efficiency jump from 1970 to 1980; sure 2020s appliances are significantly more efficient than 1980s appliances but is a logarithmic improvement curve and there's no justification to buy one every 10 years.

I bet it uses 4-5x the electricity of a modern one and is slowly leaking Freon too. Nice flex!

You probably could pay for a new basic fridge in a couple years with what you are wasting in electricity to run that old one.

Get a new one without an ice maker and just use ice trays and it'll be rock solid too. (The vast majority of the reliability issues across ALL brands are in the ice makers.)

What difference does the age of the iceberg have in relation to where the ice in it came from. The fact that we weren't talking about climate change when this iceberg broke is irrelevant.

The source of the ice in the iceberg under discussion is Antarctica. You didn't even have to RTFA, this was even mentioned in the summary.

That aged well.

Your point? That would be most people by a huge margin.

OneDrive offers
- protection against local hardware failure.
- protection gainst loss in a laptop theft or loss situation
- protection against loss in a fire/flood, catastrophe situation unless you have remote offsite backups (*)
- protection against ransomware
- protection against accidental data overwrite and other common user errors
- simplified data migration to a new device (especially good for people without IT... but its handy for IT too if, people can just sign into a freshly imaged laptop and go)

vs...
- increases risk of disclosure in a cloud breach or phishing attack

(* and if you DO have current remote offsite backups you are probably using the cloud to facilitate that anyway.)

That's not to minimize the risk of a cloud breach... but you need to properly assess your risk profile. Data stored locally can also be targeted and ex-filtrated, the risk is generally smaller, but it remains, especially if its valuable enough to target.)

And I know plenty of people who have had devices break or get stolen many times and lost valuable data, or lost data in an automated low effort ransomware attack (and targeted high effort attacks too)...Point is: for a lot of people, probably even the large majority of people, cloud storage is very much a net positive.

There is almost no scenario where the initial cost to put things into orbit, and the increased cost to build them to exist there, maintain and support them there, and replace them when they fail is ever paid back by the efficiency gain in having it there though.

Unless you've got essentially unlimited free energy to put things into orbit ... but if you have that you probably don't need space solar panels in the first place.

Lots of people who travel abroad use a VPN service because various corporate sites are geoblocking countries for various b2b and other small scale portals. I see this pretty regularly.

Lots of people who travel abroad use a VPN service for some peace of mind in sketchy internet cafes etc. It ensures you are using a known DNS provider, all your non-encrypted traffic is opaque, and you can use 'nearby' endpoints so aren't running packets around the globe.

Another significant use for VPNs is to route around censorship blocks. And log-less VPN services can be used to drop leaks to journalists and stuff... assuming you trust the vpn service.

Some people just want to confound potential tracking and profiling by their local ISP... in exchange for potential tracking and profiling by their VPN service... but maybe they know the ISP is selling their data, and they trust their VPN isn't.

Your computer, email app, pdf viewer, printer, scanner, and mobile phone, are all non-human and naturually can't have a valid I-9 ...therefore under federal law also cannot 'be used' to work in hiring or staffing? Is that your position here?

AI probably cannot legally make hiring decisions, but as a tool to process, summarize, grade,rank, or perform social media correlation or other pre-background-check type stuff ... it probably can be used by a human just like any other tool.

That said, It probably shouldn't be used for that for a lot of good reasons, but all that is entirely unrelated to whether it can have a valid I-9.