PuddleOfKittens

There are currently more empty homes in the US than there are homeless people. There are roughly 30 empty units for each homeless person.

There are plenty of entire ghost towns they can move into for free right now, but nobody will because the housing needs to be near the jobs.

Some of those units are being renovated, some are in the process of being sold or leased, some are being lived in but the owners are on vacation. The latter is especially true for summer homes, which are empty most of the year but wouldn't be useful to homeless people because they're nowhere near the jobs - that's the point of a holiday home!

Seriously, if it were just homes then you can get something really basic for $20k. The real problem is the land and the permission to build.

They disrupted the status quo back in 2003 (2001?), then in 2009 they were doing Linux ports, then in ~2015 they were doing HTPC stuff (and also funding Linux graphic driver dev the entire time, Linux gaming in its current state would not exist without Valve), there was their Steam Machine experiment somewhere in there (it flopped but that doesn't make it cost any less), then they were doing Steam Deck stuff. They're still paying Linux graphic devs BTW.

Yeah, Steam is a monopoly, but 1) they've been a monopoly since forever and there hasn't been a Comcast-ish disaster, and 2) more competition doesn't seem to actually benefit us here but could potentially make things a lot worse.

In principle, Steam is a Sword Of Damocles just like any other Monopoly. In practice, the alternatives are EA and Epic, no thank you (I know itch.io is a good competitor, but they don't have any pull on AAA publishers so I don't expect them to take the market if Steam implodes).

Also, Valve is innovating in ways that nobody else seems willing to - not just their Linux ports (represent!), but also their attempts on HTPC gaming (which was unnecessarily a huge pain in the ass on PC, for no good reason) and their steam controller. And their portable PC gaming with the Steam deck (which to be fair GPD probably did first).

All in all, I'm happy to pay the Steam tax for what they're doing. I have no illusions that Epic Games Store would provide serious competition in terms of the goodies I want, because they already aren't, and they're still in their sweetheart phase.

It's useful because (besides displacing fossil methane) it's a stepping-stone to producing methanol, which can be used to produce propane, which has a lower greenhouse coefficient per gram than CO2 (and also displaces fossil propane).

Or “my town is small that’s why everything is far apart”

Everything is far apart because the streets are too wide. This dates back to the 1780s, it's actually older than cars, and it was what made people adopt cars in the first place - for instance, Manhattan already had its car-sized streets of their current size way, way before cars were invented.

In the long term, the problem is the street grid itself - squish everything closer together and everything will be nicer to walk to (because it's human-scale), closer to walk to in the first place, and cheaper to maintain.

The electric trams were bad, because they were never actually intended as transport - the electric companies just wanted an excuse to hook the neighbourhoods up to electricity, and electric trams were just their excuse for doing so. It wasn't cohesively designed, they didn't necessarily think it was better than cars.

Note that saying they were bad is not the same as saying they had to be bad - they were just poorly executed because they didn't give a shit.

Most Nazis predated the Nazis, the Nazis were only around 20ish years or so.

Putin will kill those dissidents, handing over the list is murder. Anyone who hands over a list of dissidents to an authoritarian dictator deserves to be Luigi'd.

100% correct. If AI somehow replaces junior devs, someone will have to train them in substitute for paid real-world experience.

The PineNote. Depending on your definition of "proper", since it ships with GNOME and AFAICT only supports Wayland, and Wayland doesn't have many compositors that work well on a device with no keyboard.

Do any of the DOGE kids play War Thunder?

My 150 mile commute

Is that 150 miles each way, or is it 150 miles roundtrip?