They finally pissed off the mouse. AI image generators are cooked.

Sure, but I don’t think the price balance was historically close to today. Appliances may have been, relatively speaking, a much bigger investment to the point where paying a repair technician for a service call was usually the better option. Today, not so much.

I have a ten year old Samsung washer. It started leaking badly a couple years ago. I opened it up and replaced one small rubber tube for $5. If I had to pay someone $500 to fix it, I’d have been better off buying a whole new appliance. I won’t be surprised if this is the only repair I have to do for many more years.

I suspect this is actually what’s changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it’s only a little more than fixing their old one. And when they replace, they tend to think of the old brand as bad, and look for a new brand.

So everyone has negative stories about their appliances across just about every brand, except Speed Queen because those are so expensive, you’ll actually pay a repair person to fix it instead of replacing it. It’s like how some sports car brands are notoriously high maintenance, but what Ferrari owner cares about maintenance costs?

Decades ago the relative cost of a washer or dryer was much higher compared to repair labor. You’d pay the Maytag man to come fix your dryer if it had a problem.

But, it takes a lot of work by designers to get the fake lighting to look natural. Raytracing would help avoid that toil if the game is forced RT.

It’s like a gambling addiction. “Just one more prompt, it’ll definitely do all the work for me correctly if I just tweak this verbiage.”

don’t understand what they’ve written

Well first of all, they didn’t write it.

It is not expensive, assuming you don’t mind giving someone else your microplastics. In fact, you can get paid about $100 to do it in most places. How? Apharesis is exactly what is performed when donating plasma.

Someone wearing a mask tries to kidnap you, draw your handgun and put a hole in their face. I’m surprised this exact situation hasn’t landed in the supreme court yet. Pretty sure it won’t be favorable to the masked goons.

This shows that the way to get rid of landmines is not to have countries sign a piece of paper. It’s to give them a better alternative, whether it’s literally peace, or another dirt-cheap area denial defensive weapon that isn’t indiscriminate. Because the paper is worthless once real stakes are on the line.

I think autonomous drones will eventually supplant landmines. Whether that’s better or worse, I don’t know.

Kerrygold

Kroger diet cola. It’s better than diet coke. Always fucking out of stock though around me.

If they get another despot, drone him to reroll until you get a decent build.

No, this changed: https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/analysis-of-iaea-iran-verification-and-monitoring-report-may-2025/

No, days to months away from weapons grade enriched uranium if they so chose. If you don’t trust what the International Atomic Energy Agency has to say about nuclear proliferation from on-site assessments, I guess there’s no convincing you of anything else.

Iraq, after the Gulf War, was never found by the IAEA to be in possession of or active production of uranium in excess of 20% target enrichment. That’s a level consistent with civilian-only use.

The IAEA has repeatedly confirmed Iran has enriched uranium to 60% in increasingly large quantities. Iran has also admitted it, and provides nebulous excuses when pressed about it. There is zero modern civilian purpose for that level of enrichment, and it doesn’t take much time to refine from 60% to 85% for high yield weapons grade uranium. Days to months, not years.

Assessments have concluded that Iran does not yet have a functional nuclear weapon, but once they do possess one, now your hands are tied. The only winning move is a pre-emptive strike to prevent nuclear proliferation. Talks are meaningless and not in good faith - Iran sees Israel as a mortal enemy that already has nuclear weapons. Like with North Korea, Iran’s nuclear proliferation was used as an indefinite negotiating tool and never intended to be off the table. Iran also does not have a plausible defense purpose for nuclear weapons. If they think the US or Israel would wage war to topple the Iranian state, wouldn’t those countries have done it already over the past 50 years? Iran’s leadership has, over and over, declared their intent to destroy Israel. They provide weapons and support for proxy groups fighting Israel. Who’s to say they wouldn’t deliver a nuclear device to a proxy group that sneaks it into Tel Aviv and detonates it, then denies responsibility?

Should have dunked on North Korea before they completed their bomb too, but I guess unlike Iran, their regional partner China wasn’t already preoccupied losing another war.

At least with social media, you can choose what content to engage with or scroll past. A lot of TV news is fear mongering non-news entertainment. I don’t care that someone got arrested after a high speed chase. I don’t care about someone’s dog charity. What your local Sinclair is peddling, let alone Fox, is just about getting you to come back over and over for the ads, and it’s a continuous feed of trash someone else is deciding to put in your face and dub important.

Feeds also often let you mark content as “not interested” to better personalize for what you consider relevant and newsworthy. So, it’s not necessarily a one-way street there either.

And who’s going to make these arrests?

Make arrests by police that don’t identify themselves or their badge number ineligible for jail time, and their statements should be ineligible in court. Police don’t want detainees getting off free and wasting their time? Guess the body cam needs to be on when you declare their arrest and your badge number.

Tie state and municipal police department bonuses, benefits, and overtime pay to adherence to identification policy. Department has credible reports of violations and fails to properly investigate, discipline, or fire the offending officers? Sorry, your department is ineligible for their usual handouts this quarter. Your department is doing a good job policing themselves in good faith? Looks like someone’s getting all that leftover bonus money.

Try looking for crops to grow that are nutritious but relatively low maintenance. Sweet potatoes, sunchokes, groundcover strawberries, asparagus, cherry tomatoes, etc. Bonus if you can grow excess to sell at local farmers markets for some extra income, though the easiest the grow ones probably won’t fetch a great price and on one acre I doubt you’ll have extra of anything. Also, look for native options. Less maintenance, and local pollinators are more likely to help out.

If you’re not squeamish and can get enough extra space with an enclosure, rabbits breed very quickly and just eat grass. Chickens are good for eggs and meat.

He said he’d gradually been transitioning away for some time now. But I’d like Nexus to be more forthcoming about the current owner who has apparently been increasingly active.

Uh…you can’t spend points to level skills in Oblivion. You pick attributes on level up, which affect your stat pools, but are separate from skills.