Removed by mod

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These network transactions cost between 2 to 4 % for merchants, which is a cost passed to consumers by businesses raising prices. That’s a fairly large “inflation”, and certainly it seems out of line with the effort they out into it. It’s anticompetitive practices that keep it in place.

The Windows start menu is inexplicably a huge mess. Like all MS products, they cram their interface with as much as possible.

Is the implication here that you don’t use any other programs?

So you use your mouse to click on the start menu button, scroll through the menu and click again on the program? That sounds awful. I click the Windows button and type the program name.

Every state should allocate its delegates proportionally to how its citizens voted. It’s the most democratic approach. If just a few (5 to 8 key states) states did this, it would be very unlikely for mismatches between the electoral college and popular vote.

All insurance is paying to reduce risk, which is why I said it would be borderline crazy to not have general health coverege - that’s a lot of risk. Dental insurance for the most part covers routine costs, not high risk scenarios. Things like oral cancer are covered by more general plans. So I think largely I agree that dental insurance is a racket. However, I’m sure it makes sense for at least some people so it’s hard to make a blanket statement that no one shoud have it.

The fact that insurance is provided through employers in the US is strange. Other products are purchased directly. Presumably there’s some advantage a sort of collective bargaining, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way for this, in part because the employees aren’t really part of the bargaining and in many places employees needs are too diverse to reach am agreement that works well for everyone.

Better solutions aren’t coming any time soon. You can possibly make some better choices though. Although, not participating in the health insurance is borderline line crazy, dental and vision plans don’t make sense for a lot of people. I would pay more for my dental plan than I pay to visit a dentist, including two annual cleanings, periodic x-rays, and infrequent work like cavities - basically the care you need to maintain tooth health. I don’t get the dental plan. You can figure out your own out of pocket costs and see if a dental plan works for you. Going to a dentist that is not in an insurance network is the way to go when doing this. Offices in network are required by the insurance company to charge exorbitant fees to out-of-network customers (the dentists don’t get the same pay from the insurance company though). So say a normal dentist charges $200 for a cleaning. A dentist in a network would be required to charge $400 or something nuts. If a patient is in network, it will say $400 on the EOB, and that the customer is responsible for $50, making it look like the customer saved $350. The insurance company only gives the dentist $150 though, so the dentist gets $200 anyway, the customer really only saved $150. The insurance company gets a bunch of money in annual fees from the employer.

You can see if it makes sense for you. Not everyone will be in the same situation, and maybe it doesn’t eork out. If you have an option for an FSA or something similar, this option is even more attractive, since all those expenses can be paid from untaxed income, whereas the money taken out of your paycheck to cover insurance is after tax I believe.

If I were to create an assignment, I would make a learning goal the purpose. Learning critical thinking is a good goal, but I wouldn’t peg it to Lemmy. If the point is thinking critically about social media sites, then you could offer suggestions of places to look, including Lemmy.

I’m throwing out a guess, but the force required to stop an object is related to the square of velocity. You’d need to integrate force over the stopping distance to know for sure, but with that squared term going downhill it’s almost certainly better to apply even force over a longer time. You’re going to speed up otherwise, requiring more total force.

For a flat surface, the force is proportional to stopping distance, so the total force is the same regardless of distance, but you need to apply that total force in a smaller time, which for extremely short stoppimg distances surely results in different wear. In that case, it’s probably much more complicated and there’s some optimal braking distance or optimal braking curve, rather than some simple way to figure it out. I’d say simple advice is that if it’s not comfortable for you, that’s a good indicator that its causing more wear.

The best thing to do is to anticipate when you’ll need to stop, and stop accelarating. Then you’ll need far less force to brake. Every day I see people speed up to a light that just turned red, so there’s no chance it will be green when they get there. Then they brake and wait 3 minutes. Just let off the gas as soon as you can tell you’ll be waiting at the light. Of course be aware of people turning or whatever, but mostly there’s no reason to quickly arrive at a light you’re sure you’ll be sitting at.

I have no evidence of her motives. Campaign donations are public record, and she receives funding from oil companies. The idea that politicians are not swayed by finance is absurdly naive. They don’t need to accept that money. And, regardless whether convincing swing voters is a part of the campaign’s consideration, it should be clear that influence from corporations is not an influence. Then we could sit here an take them at their word. As it is, it’s impossible to think that millions of dollars from oil companies is not affecting the decision to make a complete u turn on supporting fracking.

Also people who touch monitors.

And people who push the glass part of a door.

They do according to the US supreme court. The court ruled in Citizens United that restricting donations from corporations was a violation of corporations’ first amendment rights.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

It corporations weren’t given the same rights as people, then we’d need to wonder less about what politicians’ real motives were.

That does sound better doesn’t it? If I were a presidential candidate, I would definitely say “We support fracking because we need Pennsylvania” instead of “We support fracking because our campaign has accepted millions of dollars from the oil industry”.

There are a lot of things that try to replace FancyZones but I don’t know that any do well. There are gTiles and Linux PowerToys if you haven’t seem those already. I’ve never searched for alternatives to VS or Teams.

I don’t know about games. Steam stuff is supposed to work but it’s something I do much anymore. I was referring more to casual use, Web browsing, streaming, emails. Ironically Linux now seems more suited than Windows to people who use computers for simple stuff.

It seemed odd to me that a Web site could write to or read from the clipboard without the user approving it. That would be a pretty obvious security and privacy issue. From what I gather, on Chrome sites can write to the clipboard without approval, but they need approval to read. On Firefox and others any access requires permission. Thus this exploit seems limited to Chrome users.

@SkaveRat pointed out that it doesn’t require permission, only interaction. So likely there’s a button that’s clicked that writes to the clipboard, and most browsers are susceptible to this.

I had an old computer and Linux is all that I installed. Not everyone is going to have an extra computer to do that with. However, this computer is more than 10 years old. It was quite good at the time, but it’s junk compared to modern ones. Yet, it is more responsive than my very nice modern laptop that’s running Windows 10. It’s not going to beat a new computer in a race to solve a computational model, but for streaming, browsing, and day-to-day stuff, the lack of bloat means things open quickly and UI elements respond immediately. There is probably a fair number of people with computers they think are useless that would actually work very well with Linux.