You know what works even better? Being a friendly and nice person. It has the added bonus that when they greet you and "treat you better" (whatever you mean by that) next time you’ll know it’s not just because of your wallet.
I have other things to do with my day than vibe-coding yet another stupid chat app with fewer features than one I can just download and get running in minutes. It’s not helplessness or misery, it’s just the finite number of hours I have in a day and the fact that other things are more interesting than that. I don’t grow my own wheat or maintain my own OS, either.
Yeah, ok, don't do it then. That doesn't mean because you do not want to bother, the suggestion is invalid for everyone here. There are a lot of people who just love to do their own thing, tinker with whatever they have on hand and then use the stuff they have created themselves.
its ok to let other people have fun programming and code dumb tools. you can decide yourself what you want to or not to work on, doesn't mean you should be so negative towards the idea of people who do want to code these things
It’s an eternal war and I agree with your points. However, I found that for people without much experience with acrylics Citadel paints are much more consistent and forgiving, and are generally of very good quality (there are problematic colours, but then Vallejo or Army Painter are not immune either). They are also easy to source. And honestly if all you paint is a couple of models, the price difference is not that much (not all of us are painting several different armies).
I use personally a mix of Citadel, AK and Vallejo, but for newbies or light uses I still generally recommend GW, or Army Painter for the rattle cans.
There is a market for that, if they manage to design their devices properly and avoid safety issues in the future. A brand that people could trust would have value, if the customers were reasonable confident to get well-designed batteries, PV panels or adaptors without worrying too much about the quality of the components inside.
I know I’d rather pay a small premium to get good hardware than gamble with bargain bin no-names on Amazon. That being said I am not sure they are quite there. I’ve never had any issue with their chargers but the string of batteries recalls is not encouraging.
> Take Truth Social as an example. It started because people wanted a place they get out of the larger group to dedicate to like minded.
Not at all. It started because Trump was banned from Twitter. That’s it. The whole point was to give Trump a platform. There is nothing organic or natural about Truth Social and if it is the symptom of anything, it’s that some people just have too much money.
I kind of disagree in that the giving him a platform is just the cover for the actual purpose which is a way for anyone to shovel him money through a "legitimate" means to avoid any sense of bribe or quid pro quo. Very similar into how certain countries that wanted to curry favor made long term rental agreements for property owned by Trump. It was only slightly less obvious than dropping of bags in the oval office with $ marked on them.
It is one of the better studied ones. What makes you think this sort of things does not happen elsewhere? Yellowstone has the advantage of being in the US, where there are a lot of people studying these things.
> But there is something about diamonds that makes them divine: carbon atoms crystallizing and bonding over millions to billions of years to form structures
It does not take millions of years to form a diamond. It takes hours. The million years are atoms sitting around doing nothing before that, and then diamonds sitting around doing nothing while some of them are eventually pushed to the surface.
You can say the same thing about any mineral. There is nothing special about carbon or the diamond structure. If anything, zircons are much more significant, being the oldest minerals we can find.
> rated on a scale of color, clarity, cut, and weight.
This is nothing special. The colour of lab-grown stones can be varied almost at will, and the rest is still an issue with synthetic stones.
> Naaaaah let's just make it in a lab it looks the same.
That’s the thing, though: it does (yes, some synthetic stones have specific defects related to how they were made and they tent to be too perfect if anything, but they still have the exact same property). It’s like complaining that the meat you are eating comes from a farm instead of being hunted.
> People are being priced out of art and beauty and it's a shame economics and corruption make real diamonds dirty.
Quite the contrary. Gemstones become more accessible to more people. The diamond industry made its bed, being completely corrupted from extraction to distribution. When stones are cheap we can have discussion about their beauty instead of their prices.
> What I find most interesting is the weight put on the ethical side. I think it’s overstated. When the issue became big, the Blood Diamond movie, sales of lab grown did not markedly increase.
It was not a switch that was pushed the moment the movie went out. In the grand scheme of things, the movie was not even that popular. But there definitely was a realisation that diamond prices were completely artificially inflated by an oligopoly, and that there were many issues with how they were sourced.
Just because demand did not follow a step function when the file was released does not imply that ethics are not relevant.
That makes it popular for a movie. It also means that most people didn't watch it, at least not in theaters. (I guess that would be true even for the most popular movie of all time. The most popular thing in some category is rarely more popular than the entire rest of the category combined.)
Even if every viewer paid $1, that would be 171 millions people, which really is not that much compared to even the population of North America and Europe combined.
Most people don't watch films in the theater run exclusively. It has been viewed by many hundreds of millions of people after it left the box office. Also, network effects account for a lot. One person seeing the film and talking about blood diamonds to their friends and family leads to 2 others who look into it, which leads to 4 more, etc. That's how ideas spread.
It does not exist in a vacuum. I am not even arguing that the movie was irrelevant, but it was not that huge a deal and it was not the only voice in the discussion. The point in the parent was that ethics was not a driver because there was no inflection point when the movie was released, which to me is fallacious.
He’s also just got his timing wrong. The movie came out when artificial diamonds were scarce and pricey. The technology accelerated after that, and the shifting mores could definitely have played a part.
That is the right way of doing it. It does not make any sense to have 3 companies building last-mile infrastructure in a neighbourhood, but you can have multiple service providers competing and using the same cables. But then, public oversight on the de-facto infrastructure monopoly is critical.
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