The US is a huge and diverse country, and you cannot make ANY generalizations that will apply to everything. You are right that “easy” isn’t the right word, but there are places where it is possible.

I guess my original point was that there are communities that are starting to prioritize mixed use buildings and it IS at least possible now. I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.

It’s not “common” per se, but if you wanted to live above the store you owned, as the poster was talking about, it would be easy to do so in the United States today.

I live in a town in the west that is a population of about 13,000 but is well within the Seattle metropolitan area.

All of the new build in the city is apartment buildings with commerce on the street level. Sure there are miles and miles of suburbs around the city but downtown is all mixed use for new builds.

No sir, I don’t like it.

And hens.

This is it. AI is a tool just like anything else. Before AI people would complain that a photo was ‘shopped and before that it was that the models in magazines were airbrushed.

All of these are tools that are at an artist’s fingertips and a good artist can do something great with if they put the time into it.

Yes, lazy people can create crap with it if they want but you really can’t be blaming the tool for what stupid humans do with it.

The option to run one cable to the monitor, or reversely charge your laptop with one docking cable.

Maybe you could use this to daisy chain monitors and power them all.

I understand how the public key encryption works when you are messaging person to person. Does anyone know how it works with group chats?

Do you have international markets nearby you can go to?

I forget a password I created yesterday but I remember that 7 digit number as if my life depended on it.

I love to say “before the turn of the century” when referring to stuff like 1997.

In Spaceage you can.

American scones are very sweet compared to what they make in Britain. They will put sweet cream or jam on them to sweeten them up.

I feel like there is a real possibility of a federation schism where a bunch of server admins get together and defederate with the rest of the servers. In that case you either need two accounts on both side of the schism or just be blind to whatever is happening over there.

I’m not sure what you were trying, but this works for me:

Never use hardware encoding. That is intended for real time transcoding. There are not many settings that work since it is just sending the file to the video card and letting it do its thing.

Slower is better. If you set the software encoder to very slow it will produce an output that is very high quality per megabyte. I generally don’t care if it takes twice as long to encode it as to watch it. I queue it up and let it run over night.

Choose the right codec. I like 10 bit HEVC, because I know it will work on the clients I play it from. When you rip a DVD using MakeMKV, the video will be MPEG-2, it was designed in the 1990’s and converting the file to a modern codec will save a lot of space. I don’t reencode 4K UHD rips much since I don’t want to mess with losing the hdr or other color features that I like in watching those files.

Audio tracks: I will rip out audio for languages I don’t speak, or desctiptive audio track, but go out of my way to label things like director commentaries. I don’t reencode the audio tracks at all, you won’t save much disk space by messing with them compared to the video tracks.

I would also recommend “To be or not to be” by Ryan North. It is a choose your own adventure version of the play. Well worth your time.

A tariff is a sales tax, pure and simple. Sales taxes hit lower income people harder than the rich because they have to put a higher percentage of their income into it.

Most asbestos is safe, until you need to dispose of it. You could make a glove that is encased in another material so you get the insulation with no health hazard, but once it gets worn or thrown in a landfill it will be a problem.

It doesn’t matter. You check the first of each group and pick the smallest, then compare the one you didn’t pick with the next one of the other group. In your example, you would pick all of the ones from the right side and once it is empty, just add all the ones on the left.

When you merge two sorted lists, you only have to compare the first element of each, since you can trust that all of the other elements are bigger. All the steps before that are there to make sure that is true.