I think a lot of people here have it too black/white.

Earning money by owning property doesn’t automatically make someone a leech. Sometimes, people want the option to live somewhere without needing to take on the responsibility/risk of tying down assets in a house. Often, it’s because you’re new in town and haven’t decided where to settle, or because you’re in a situation where you’re moving a lot, and don’t want to have to deal with buying/selling something worth a lot of money every time you move.

In these kinds of situations, you can see renting as a situation where you’re paying someone for taking on the risk, responsibility, and maintenance costs of owning the infrastructure. At a proper price, this can be an absolutely fair deal, that doesn’t involve anyone being exploited.

Note that I’m not defending the scalping assholes that exploit people who can’t afford to get into the housing market here. I’m simply pointing out that, even for someone who can afford to buy, there are legitimate reasons to rent, and renting out property at a fair price can absolutely be a decent practice that leaves everyone happy.

I don’t agree. It’s not always optimal to own the place you live. There have been periods in my life where I was happy to pay a fair price to live in an apartment without having responsibility for repairing stuff or upgrading the kitchen. But most importantly, I didn’t want to be tied down, and having a place I could leave, no strings attached, on three months notice, was perfect.

No matter how you twist it, the capital investment needed to build/buy a home will be orders of magnitude larger than what is needed for monthly maintenance. Also, the fact that a lot of value is tied to the building is not something everyone wants.

Of course, there are landlords who are essentially scalpers. But saying that any landlord is per definition a “leech” is just going way too far.

OP here was able to provide a home for someone on short notice, and with zero investment costs on their part. For someone who doesn’t know how long they will be living in the area, and with an uncertain immediate future, having the option of “zero investment cost + zero responsibility” can be valuable. As such, OP is providing a valuable service.

Exactly! It’s choosing not to do so which makes some companies special!

I never said “our” Government wouldn’t lie to us (unless you’re Chinese, in which case they definitely will). I just said that the Chinese government constantly lies, which is easily seen by anyone with eyes.

China: Spews blatant and obvious lies about everything that does or does not cast a shadow. Heavily censors any source.

Some guy: I don’t trust information coming from China.

China (and shills): That’s sinophobic!!

Would have been much better if they just pasted the (probably quite short) script into the readme so that I can just paste it into my terminal. I have no issue running commands I can have a quick look at.

I would never blindly pipe a script to be executed on my machine though. That’s just next level “asking to get pwned”.

At this point I have a hard time believing that anyone can buy a Chinese product and then talk about there being a “secret backdoor” in seriousness.

Come on: We all should know by now that if it’s Chinese, there is more likely than not some way for Xi to use it for something other than what you want the product to do. There’s nothing “secret” or “back” about this door. It’s more like an open front gate with landing strips and a “welcome home Pooh bear” sign.

I dont use Klarna myself, but from what I’ve heard from people that do use it, it’s a decent company.

For one, their business model isn’t based on trapping people I debt, but is more akin to PayPal, in that what they do is offer a transaction service. Most people I’ve heard of just use it to handle online transactions, without using the “split up payment” version. I’ve been told one reason (besides protecting their payment information from third parties) is that if they return something, they just forward confirmation that it was returned to Klarna, and the payment is cancelled. That way, they can buy stuff and only pay if they actually keep it, rather than having to go after some company to get their money back.

On general grounds though, I’m sceptical of any “buy now, pay later” service.

The transformer is dimensioned based on the max capacity of the houses in the neighbourhood, which are standardised.

100 houses with 200 A main fuse each? Supplied by a 20 000 A transformer (plus safety margin obviously).

If cryptoboy wants a non-standard main fuse size that requires an upgrade of the transformer, he has to pay for that.

This is definitely a simplification, which is why I pointed out the possibility of distributing costs among the consumers based on how much of the total consumption each consumer is responsible for.

I think the major point still stands though: In order to take advantage of production at scale, you need to build some minimal size production facility. For stuff like hydropower, that minimum can be quite high, depending on available geography.

If marginal cost is zero, it makes most sense to charge some form of flat rate to have access to power, rather than a consumption-based price, because it’s not necessarily feasible to downscale the facility, even if there’s low demand (in that sense, hydro or nuclear would be better examples than solar).

The details of how this more or less flat rate should be distributed among consumers is a discussion in itself (should those living further away pay more since they require more power lines? etc.)

You’re making the argument yourself here:

A 1000 A transformer costs more than a 10 A transformer

Yes. And that is true regardless of how heavily it is used, which means you should pay a flat rate for maintenance of the infrastructure you use, and another rate for the power you draw.

Residential buildings use standardised infrastructure, which then leads to the same standard fee for everyone. Industry that needs heavier equipment pays a different fee, because they require different infrastructure.

No, they’re arguing that the price of power should be split:

• A fee for grid maintenance (equal for all)
• A fee per unit of consumed power (scales linearly with consumption)

This makes sense, because regardless of you much power someone uses, the costs associated with maintaining the infrastructure that allows them to draw any power at all remain the same. This also happens to be the model used in Norway, so it’s not an untested concept.

Another option, relevant when the cost of building the power plant is large and the cost of energy production is negligible, is that everyone connected to the grid pays a near-flat fee in total, which is distributed among consumers depending on how much power they use. I’ve never heard of that option being used before.

I’m all for eating the rich, but I’m still going to point out why exactly this can make sense.

Let’s say you have an energy company that owns a solar farm, you’re not looking to turn a profit, just provide clean energy to the world: You produce electricity at effectively zero cost.

However, your solar farm needs to be paid down within its lifetime of ≈30 years, which is independent of energy consumption. So you decide to charge a rate that ensures 1/30th of your production costs are paid back each year, so that you can replace the solar farm after 30 years.

This effectively means you are charging a constant rate for access to energy supply, independent of consumption. This again means that the rate per kWh goes up if average consumption goes down.

Individual customers can still save money by reducing consumption relative to the other customers, but nobody saves money if everyone reduces consumption. This makes complete sense when your “marginal cost” (i.e. the cost of producing energy) is negligible compared to the initial investment of building the power plant, and also applies more or less to nuclear, hydropower, and wind power as well.

Given that this is not an ideal organisation though, I wouldn’t put it past them to increase the rate such that it more than offsets the decrease in consumption, thereby increasing their profit. In that case: Fuck them.

I just think we should be aware that our current understanding of energy prices as linked to day-to-day consumption (because the primary expense for a thermal power plant is the cost of fuel), will become outdated as we move to clean energy sources. At some point, we should be paying a near-flat rate for “access to power”, rather than a rate for each unit of power consumed.

Not running any LLMs, but I do a lot of mathematical modelling, and my 32 GB RAM, M1 Pro MacBook is compiling code and crunching numbers like an absolute champ! After about a year, most of my colleagues ditched their old laptops for a MacBook themselves after just noticing that my machine out-performed theirs every day, and that it saved me a bunch of time day-to-day.

Of course, be a bit careful when buying one: Apple cranks up the price like hell if you start specing out the machine a lot. Especially for RAM.

To back you up: In Norway (and quite a few other countries I assume), job training and/or education are typically included in a prison sentence as a way to re-integrate inmates into society. Norway also happens to have one of the lowest repeat offender rates in the world.

Of course, this has to be voluntary on the inmates part, and they have to be paid some compensation for the work they do. I believe a part of the system involves inmates being placed for job training in some company that’s willing to employ them, but the government pays their salary, because the employing company is expected to spend resources training them. This also incentivises the company to hire them once they finish doing time, as they’ve now been trained in the job.

Inmates that are regarded as too dangerous to be outside the prison can typically get jobs within the walls. In Norways highest-security prison, there’s a Gardening businesses, where inmates grow all kinds of flowers, and inmates run a shop where people from outside can buy them. It’s regarded as a huge success in helping the inmates prepare for an ordinary job.

Looking at the general quality of YouTube videos, and the expected demographic of people that would select this option, this looks like a recipe for creating the most conspiracy-theory-oriented AI ever created.

Fair enough, git clean does exist. However, if the button saying “discard all changes” is really a button that runs git clean, that’s just a plain terrible design choice. git clean is “delete all untracked files”, which is specifically not discarding changes, because there can be no changes to discard on an untracked file. Even talking about “changes” to an untracked file in VC context makes little sense, because the VC system doesn’t know anything about any changes to the file, only whether it exists or not.

That’s not even mentioning the fact that the option to “git clean” shows up as one of the easily accessible options in relation to a staging process. Especially if you’re coming from the git CLI, you’re likely to associate “discard changes” with “git restore”.

Yeah, I guess I’ve got to leave it like that now…

Got will not delete untracked files though, which is what happened here. If you want to discard changes to a file with git, you first have to commit the file to the index at some point, which means there’s only ever so much damage an erroneous “git restore” or “git reset” can do. Specifically, neither of them will delete all the files in an existing project where VC has just been added.

If you have set up your staging area for a commit you may want to discard (unstage) changes from the staging area, as opposed to discarding changes in the working directory.

Of course, the difference between the two is obvious if you’re using git CLI, but I can easily see someone using a GUI (and that maybe isn’t too familiar with git) misunderstanding “discard” as “unstage”.

Either way, what happened here indicates that all the files were somehow added to the VC, without having been committed first, or something like that, because git will not let you discard a file that is untracked, because that wouldn’t make any sense. The fact that the GUI let this person delete a bunch of files without first committing them to the index is what makes this a terrible design choice, and also what makes the use of the word “discard” misleading.