jqubed

I won a game in Civ V recently as the Aztecs but kept going because the Polynesians were my neighbors the whole game and a thorn in my side. Just before the end the French asked if I wanted to declare war on Polynesia so I agreed to start in ten turns. I haven’t picked it back up, though, because I know it’s going to be a big slog and I haven’t sat down with the time or mental energy for it. But it’s also kept me from starting another game.

What’s funny to me is Ireland wasn’t trying to collect these taxes, the European Commission decided that the Irish taxes were too low and amounted to an illegal subsidy.

We have a flat monthly fee of $26.50 and usage is $0.1133/kWh (all prices US dollars). It’s also possible to have a Time of Use plan; for residential there’s still the flat $26.50 fee and then peak usage bills at $0.2345/kWh and off-peak at $0.0623/kWh. If you have a bilateral system (solar panels) the credit for power supplied during peak hours is $0.1539/kWh and off-peak is $0.0373/kWh. Integrated battery systems are not allowed if you go with Time of Use metering. For now the basic residential service (same rate all the time) credits solar production at the same rate as consumption, but that could change in the future.

At 50¢/kWh even adding batteries and trying to be as disconnected as (legally) possible from the grid might pay for itself!

I only saw a promo for it once and was pretty grossed-out, but had to at least look up the Wikipedia. I don’t think I was the target audience, other than it reminding me of 30 Rock.

It depends entirely on the band, my budget, and time. One that tours regularly, that I’ve seen before and can see again, probably only an hour, hour-and-half. One that’s not from this country, or I’ve never seen and they’re likely not going to tour anymore, or it’s a really unique show? I’m more willing to travel far, potentially even another country or continent if I can afford it. The farther I go the more I want to make a big trip of it: at least a weekend if not even a week or more if I were going to Europe or something. The closest I’ve come to that, though, was making a long weekend to Washington, D.C. during the cherry blossom festival to see Muse. That was about a 4 hour drive away.

I was also thinking flats/apartments where people go to hang out as a good metaphor. Not necessarily fancy ones either, the kind of cheaper, basic ones most people start with early in their adult life.

Weirdly (or not, perhaps) MILF Island was turned into a real show (sort of) not once but twice. On The Cougar a 40-year-old woman was seeking a partner among male contestants who were all in their 20s. On the rather more disturbing MILF Manor a group of women between the ages of 40-60 stay in a villa seeking to pair up with a pool of younger bachelors, which turns out to be made entirely of the women’s sons. Wikipedia says in season 2 the ex-husbands were also added to the dating pool so the sons had to compete against their dads for the divorced moms.

You have 13 months left on Windows 10 before it becomes potentially unsafe to use:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support

TL;DR: Repairable, but no long-term OS support and not easy to load an alternative OS on.

The specifications pages for the HMD Fusion and HMD Skyline explain the phones are only guaranteed to receive two major Android operating system updates and three years of Android OS security patches. There's no guarantee of a release schedule for security updates on the Skyline, while the Fusion will get two years of monthly updates and quarterly updates for the last year.

I think it’s a valid criticism. I was a longtime Android user (at least a decade) but my last Android was a Pixel 2 that I bought at launch. That was the first Android phone I’d had that I wasn’t dying to replace after 2 years. I made it to 3 years and then the phone stopped getting security updates, a Qualcomm problem as much as a Google problem at the time. Meanwhile I looked at my stepdaughter using my wife’s old iPhone, which was 6 years old at that point and still receiving updates and still easy enough to take to a local shop for repairs when she would break it. That was my largest reason to make the switch.

I’m glad to see Google is now promising much longer support on its phones, 6 to 8 years on more recent Pixels, and it seems fairly easy to put an alternate OS on. Other Android brands should really try to follow that lead.

I’ve been assuming that their user engagement is down. Fifteen years ago when I was fresh out of university I had several hundred friends and could spend hours every day going through posts from dozens of different people. Now it feels like I can spend ten or fifteen minutes to see everything and mostly it’s from the same half-dozen people, and I’ve realized most of them are people I don’t really know as well and frankly am not as interested in seeing. At first I thought it was because they were the most prolific posters and I’d inadvertently trained the algorithm to show me more from them by interacting with them the most.

But over the past year I’ve noticed if I actually click on someone else’s profile, maybe having seen their name on a memory or just randomly think of an old friend, most of them only make a few posts a year or haven’t posted anything at all in years. Their accounts still exist, but they’re not using them.

If your feed was only this, a few posts a day from a few people, you’d have no reason to be on Facebook much. So they fill it in with junk from other places that will hopefully engage you. If it doesn’t they’ll try other posts. Whatever it takes to keep you browsing longer.

Yikes. Are you already in a relationship where that could also cause an issue with your S/O? Making them feel jealous/nervous that you would leave for the attractive nurse if you had the opportunity?