I just use brown kraft paper and some basic ribbon in a color appropriate for the occasion. I think maybe $15 in materials has given me a solid decade of gift wrapping and I haven’t even gone through half of it yet. Costs basically nothing on a per gift basis, and I get way more compliments on my wrap jobs than I did before I switched to using brown paper.

You could probably ding them for fraud, but as others have said, this is fake.

Coke keeps running ads because that’s how they keep the brand as a cultural staple. They aren’t trying to sell more coke right now, they’re making sure that people in 50 years will still be buying it.

For the voters, they really don’t believe it. I have conservative family members. Everything is always “Oh that’s just bullshit cooked up by the crooked Biden crime family” “Oh he didn’t mean the words he said very clearly, what he really meant was blah blah blah” followed ten seconds later by “I like him because he tells it like it is”

I just don’t get it. What makes this guy seemingly have a force field that can make people deny their own eyes and ears? Ignoring morals here, just thinking with those patterns would give me a cognitive dissonance aneurysm.

This can’t be overstated enough. There are huge swathes of the USA where the only stores within half an hour are dollar general or gas station convenience stores. You literally can’t eat healthy on those sources, and the nearest actual grocery store could be an hour or even more away.

Kinda hard to eat well when just getting the ingredients would take half a days time.

Hell, I’m in a city and if I didn’t have a car my only options in walking distance are a convenience store and a couple fast food places. Nearest grocery store is a 12 minute drive or a 3 hour bus ride if the bus even shows up.

Correct assessment. Absolutism in political systems is unproductive and leads to poor outcomes.

I am familiar with marxist theory. The problems lie in what you just said. As Marx said, it is the natural progression of a society that has progressed through the stages of capitalism and entered post-scarcity. People who advocate for other channels of achieving communism are misguided, as post scarcity is a pretty hard requirement and a lack of that aspect opens the mechanisms of resource allocation up to exploitation. And unless you can somehow stop shitheads from being born, someone is going to be enough of one to take advantage.

Even the OG natural progression of society version of communism has issues. For one, you still have the shithead human problem. There’s always going to be people out there who want it all, and they’ll exploit whatever they can to get it. Communism, being stateless, doesn’t have particularly good mechanisms for dealing with that.

Communism is an definitely an ideology. Literally first sentence from Wikipedia: “Communism […] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology…”

But yeah, it’s kinda suspicious that every nation scale attempt at communism has ended in failure or a system that is decidedly not communist, whether through internal strife or external influence.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.

Buttons and dials aren’t cheap. Even in economy cars it probably costs the manufacturer a few bucks for each one, accounting for the switch itself and all the trim that goes with it.

It only takes a handful to outweigh the cost of the typical LCDs used in car systems.

I’m talking about breaking into the industry. You just need to get an entry level job or two that will probably suck, then work your way into the niche you want with job experience. You probably won’t even really actually know where you want to ultimately go until you’ve been working for a few years and had time to gather new skills that you didn’t get in school.

Exception being academia, but if you wanna do that just go get your grad degree, and by the end of that you’ll have a way in or have learned that academia sucks your life force out for far less than the industry pays.

Yeah pretty much. I have a personal website that I set up with a pipeline to automatically build and deploy. Creating it taught me a lot of things and it was definitely a focus when I had interviews. Homelabs are great too, shows you have some self driven interest in the subject, especially if you don’t have a bunch of work experience to advertise.

I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.

Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.

If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.

I wouldn’t call it defeatist, nuclear should never be more than a stopgap to 100% renewables. if anything, it’s awesome that we’ve gotten far enough with renewables that switching to them entirely is now a viable proposition. It sucks that we spent so much time dependent on fossil fuels when we could’ve been using nuclear, but the past is the past and the future is bright.

I will say, small modular reactors might have a place in the energy mix. They would be fantastic for more isolated grids where stability is difficult to achieve with 100% renewable energy. Think small island nations or remote areas. Also would be good for emergency and disaster recovery scenarios. We (as in the USA) also already have the supply chain to build them somewhat efficiently since we use them on our aircraft carriers. Just needs some tweaking to work well on land and for the regulations to loosen up to make it economically feasible.

Sure, if we could snap our fingers and have a bunch of nuclear plants it would make sense. But the tech is all ancient, and the regulatory structure is oppressive. It will take decades to build out the amount of nuclear capacity we need and cost inordinate amounts of money, and we’ve already passed the tipping point where renewables are the better choice.

Just as an example, it took us 14 years to build a single reactor in the Vogtle plant costing over $30 billion dollars. We’d need massive reforms to the regulations and supply chain for building reactors to bring those numbers down and that just won’t happen fast enough.

Even China, who is the world leader in nuclear power these days is slowing down building of new reactors in favor of renewables, and they do not have the regulations and supply issues we have in the USA.

A few years ago you would be right but we’re just about there, especially once sodium ion batteries become more mature which is definitely going to be a “next few years” thing, not a speculative maybe it’ll happen someday thing. There’s also ways to store power other than chemical batteries, like pumped storage hydro.

As someone who was vehemently pro nuclear, unfortunately we missed the boat. The time to invest heavy in nuclear was 50 years ago and instead we did the opposite. Renewables have caught up and nuclear is so far behind that it makes zero sense to build any new reactors when we can just build out more renewable power gen and battery storage for less money and without the whole nuclear waste handling problem.

From what OP wrote, they aren’t total strangers given he knows she likes comics. He sounds fairly young so I’m guessing she’s in his social circle or someone from school. If they were total strangers or just met for the first time, then yeah I’d say it would be a good idea to strike up a casual conversation or two before asking them out. You just really don’t want to develop strong feelings for them before you ask them out. It’s a recipe for pain if she says no, and can make things pretty awkward if they’re going to have to keep seeing each other regularly.

It’s a good idea. You may want to plan a second activity like lunch or a walk in the park as well.

And just be direct. Something like “Hey, do you want to go on a date with me? We can grab something to eat and go to the comic store.”

If she says no, don’t push it. Just say okay and wish them well.

I too was terrible at talking to girls. I still am but my girlfriend doesn’t seem to mind lol

Whatever you do, just don’t try any pickup artist or smooth talking tactics. It’s gross and cringey, doubly so if you don’t have the confidence to pull it off.

I would also disagree with a lot of the other comments, if you want to date this person, make it clear you want a date. Don’t try to do the be friends then turn it romantic thing. It can work but not when you already know you want to date them.

Nixos is great, but unfortunately I can’t use it at work. I have migrated my home server infra to it though and plan to migrate my desktop the next time I have a free evening.