Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.
The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.
Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.
The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.
I’ve just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It’s a combo of things prompting me.
First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.
Second, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don’t want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I’m getting value. I just want actual good content.
I totally get wanting to play the game when it’s fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it’s definitely part of the experience to be on the “in” side of that.
With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don’t hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.
This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.
Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.
As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms…I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn’t a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there’s never any activity and they don’t go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?
As a real life example of my own, I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn’t congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.
I don’t know exactly why that is, but I’ve had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you’re in?
The problem really is that lemmy doesn’t have the critical mass of users to support many small communities that are all self sustaining. And discoverability is so bad for communities it’s entirely likely that if there are 8 people out there that want to discuss X in the fediverse, 3 are in one community, 2 in another, and 3 in a third, and none of them ever finds the others. The lack of users causes a lack of content and they all the up not engaging at all.
If you have enough users the idea of multiple communities holds water a little better. But I think it’s a significant barrier to actually gaining those users.
Fully agree with you on artists not getting their fair share, and I would argue that the issue is sadly endemic across the entire music industry and was that way long before streaming services even existed. Spotify is merely the most visible representation of a long festering issue that spans generations.
I can only speak for myself but I do actually still buy CDs for bands I really like. I will also occasionally buy merch or go to shows. Some of these bands I very certainly would never have discovered without Spotify (or a service like it).
Ultimately I agree that I’d like people to understand their options. I think the biggest likely barrier is convenience. I have a NAS server, and a virtual host set up that runs a Linux server with Plex on it, and I have that open so I can use Plexamp to play live albums or any other stuff I own that isn’t on Spotify. But like… That’s a massive barrier to entry to simply create something close to the experience Spotify offers out of the box. And it’s definitely not as polished. I do it because I’m a hobbyist, but most people aren’t like that. So then if you want to buy music individually, you’re stuck listening to actual physical CDs, or ripping them and loading them on your phone or mp3 player. Old school cool for sure, but new school convenience is sure hard to beat once you’ve had a taste.
This is your rationale and that is ok for you. Ownership is important to you. That is ok. But people who make the point you are making never understand the point those of us who like Spotify are making.
We do not care that we don’t own anything after paying. I am not paying to own it. Never felt like I was, never felt like I needed to. In fact, it’s almost a perk that I don’t because then I am not sitting amidst towers of CDs (something that was definitely possible if I had continued my pre-spotify trajectory). Anyway, I pay for access. No more, no less. I pay for access to Spotify’s library, which is many orders of magnitude larger than anything I could ever hope to amass myself, even if I was pirating shit.
I want to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, instantly. I don’t want to go pirate it, I don’t want to go find it at a store, if someone suggests me a song or album or artist I want to go listen to it right now. Spotify enables that. I have discovered so much music I would absolutely never have tried without Spotify.
And again, I am 100% comfortable paying for access to something not owned by me. I’m a member at our local zoo. I don’t expect to own the animals, I pay to just to get in. I’m a member at our museum. I don’t feel like I should own the artifacts, I pay for the privilege of seeing them. I am a member at a community pool. I don’t own the water, I pay to get in, and have someone else handle all the hassle of maintaining that pool.
Spotify is the exact same for me.
Which of course is stupid, because USPS is actually great and provides a much better and more reliable service than any private competitor even in its current underfunded state.
If we are trying to dig into the root cause? Then yes, honestly. It is Google. And don’t call them the “search engine guys”, that’s not what they are about. They are the “mass aggregation and correlation of user data guys”. Search has been a means to an end for Google for a very long time.
All those other things didn’t exist when google was developing their model. Google paved the way for the internet no longer being free, but being “free” with payment rendered in the form of user data. That in turn directly led to all those other evils you referred to. It is not an exaggeration to imply that Google is ultimately at fault for the way the internet functions today.
There’s already been a new flavor of coke developed and allegedly chosen by AI. If that’s not some kind of singularity moment, I don’t know what is.
“The postal service is losing money!”
No, the postal service costs money. It’s a service. It doesn’t aim to make a profit. It costs money, and we are in turn rendered a service that is useful.
I swear people are delusional.
From a pure graphical fidelity point we’re there now.
From an animation standpoint we are light years away. The absolute best animations or facial expression renders I have seen are nowhere near good enough to actually pass for real. And honestly I am not sure I’ve even seen meaningful improvement in this area in a long time. Even in this demo videos the cars don’t look quite right as they move, and cars are much easier than people, or the way cloth moves when on someone who is moving.
I’d like to think this is the next big focus for graphics, but animations are a lot harder to get right than pure visual fidelity. I hope studios start focusing on it because it will take take us to that next step.
He’s saying we would never have an oil spill equivalent to the amount of oil that is used because we try very hard not to spill oil. It is expensive and damaging.
If you are asking a hypothetical question comparing the amount of oil in a spill and its damage to the environment vs simply using that oil normally, I think the oil spill wins in a landslide for being the most damaging.
I like to do this but it’s much cheaper to buy bags in the giant packs. Those don’t fit in my drawer because they aren’t the normal size/shape. Or sometimes if I mix/match brands the boxes don’t fit together in the drawer. Uncommon, but happens.
Not saying this is 100% needed, but it’s not without use.
That is my assumption as well. That’s kind of the trend with most new flavors of soda it seems. Very few actually stick. This one is just so much more obnoxious in origin than most that I want it to die quicker lol.
It’s really true. I’m actually annoyed that MS is starting to feel this way, particularly with some Azure related services. MS was always the one you could count on to at least be stable, well tested internally, and predictable. At least in comparison to Google and Amazon. But it feels like they have been leaving some of that behind with their cloud stuff as CI/CD becomes more prevalent.
I was really hoping this was an article with early sales numbers showing it’s a flop. I already assumed it was going to taste bad, that feels like a given to me. I want it to be a failure in sales so this kind of thing stops happening.
I don’t know if you’re in IT at all, but the really crazy thing is that as half baked as Alexa stuff feels…a ton of AWS’s offerings feel the exact same way. Their marketing material is great, and I do believe their engineers are passionate and have the right intentions. But none of it feels “finished”. It all feels like an elaborate beta test. Things don’t work, documentation is out of date or just plain wrong, it’s impossible to get actual expert support from Amazon directly.
AWS is their biggest money maker and even that is a cobbled together, confusing pile half the time. Sometimes feels like everything is a house of cards.
This is the killer for all this shit right now as far as I’m concerned. All of it lives squarely in “huh…neat” territory. I have yet to see anything I felt was truly necessary. Until that happens, paying is a non starter for me.
I’m so confused. Whose dishwashers are you talking about? I’m in the US, you’re describing every dishwasher I’ve ever had, except that we always hook it up to the hot water line. Our unit takes very little water, it takes hours to run a load due to efficiency features. It has a heating element inside to take whatever water it gets and keep it hot for the cycle.
I don’t really see why it’s any less efficient to use the hot water we are already heating with our water heater (which heats much more efficiently than a small electric heater would). The water originally arrives to my house cold, it has to be heated one way or another. My dishwasher is less than 10 feet away from my water heater, water is not losing appreciable heat on the way to the dishwasher.