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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Honestly, I can accept the inflation issue of prices never truly going down, but when seemingly very little is done to help offset them you start having issues. Add to that most economists loudly broadcasting that the economy is reaching new highs while a lot of middle class households have to pay more of their earnings on housing and food, and you are just sowing a lot of discontent. That is largely my issue, as irrational as it might appear at first glance to be angry with an article just saying that inflation has decreased from its highs.


  • Yes, but they don’t even mention the yearly target in the article, just broadly allude to inflation not being an issue anymore, even though it has actively driven prices up significantly for pretty much everything for the last few years. It is absolutely a pain point that is often glossed over when talking about the economy, usually when commenting how good it is.

    As for the job market, I’m in tech. It’s insanely hard to get a job right now, as most places simply aren’t hiring (or worse, put up job ads but have no plan to fill them, as insane as that is). Wages have stagnated for sure, and housing has gone up in price. I haven’t actually seen many high wage growth for a lot of stuff around me either, mostly just adjusting lower end wages so that people can (mostly) afford rent. 2% inflation is better than the last couple of years, but the article linked completely downplayed all of those factors. Which is why I said it was bullshit.








  • Addv4@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlLaptop for Linux use
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    30 days ago

    Dang, you weren’t kidding with the price of a used x220 (I have an x230 that I got for less than I’m currently seeing on ebay a while back, and the only thing that really made me switch to something newer was the screen). Maybe a newer thinkpad or an hp elitebook? I think as long as you have something newer than a 2nd Gen I series chip, there really shouldn’t be an issue if you’re basically just using it for text processing. If you start with models with ddr3 and sata drives you should be able to get very cheap replacement parts for a while yet.






  • Sounds about right. Most of the Japanese manufacturers have had to put a higher amount of effort on reliability, in large part due to Toyota’s amazingly strenuous testing of reliability before they even consider dropping a new product on the market. As a bit of a bonus to that, once reliability was upped, making more sporty cars could be achieved because you had the budget to change around the driving dynamics of a car without making it inherently unreliable. The Miata is probably the best example of this, as while each generations drivetrain usually isn’t too special (outside of being high revving), it manages to handle well and be reliable while doing so.




  • But then you’re just having another system for storing energy, which probably isn’t very easy to implement. An easier solution if you don’t want to use grid batteries is just to improve housing insulation and schedule heating/cooling for non peak hours, so that you are just using less energy overall. The problem in my mind is that that would require a lot of renovation on older homes, which is just more expensive and slower than adding grid batteries. Don’t get me wrong, those changes should be mandated for newer housing, but expecting it to be implemented in older housing probably isn’t gonna happen.


  • There are plenty of alternatives for lithium batteries, chiefly sodium and a redox flow. Heating/cooling is good as well to store, but not every structure is energy efficient enough that it would make much sense. Good thing to work towards, but grid batteries would probably be faster and easier to implement. I have reservations towards pumped hydropower, in part due to watching how hard it is to decommission a lot of hydroelectric dams these days in US as well as the cost to create the areas to hold the water (a lot of the areas that are geographically advantageous for pumped hydropower tend to be nature reserves or national parks, soo…).