partial_accumen
@partial_accumen@lemmy.world
- Comment on YSK tricks for one of the cheapest meals: beans and rice 11 hours ago:
or my favorite, steel-cut oats.
If we’re talking about cheap meals steel-cut oats have almost excluded themselves these days. I used to be able to buy organic SCO in bulk for about $1.45/lbs. These days I can’t find any SCO for less than $3.50/lbs and that conventional, not organic.
Where are you getting cheap SCO these days?
- Comment on Ok, boomer 19 hours ago:
Just using the interest rate is an unfair comparison. You have to go get median house prices and median incomes as well to make a proper comparison. Just saying the rate was higher at some point is useless if we don’t also compare the prices and incomes because what really matters is affordability. Not saying your whole comment is wrong, just trying to say that this particular part seems to be biased in favor of the Boomers.
I’d written a big post already, and diving into all the details and nuance was too much to put in the initial post. You’re right that the interest rate alone isn’t a determining factor, but I’d also disagree that its objectively in favor of Boomers, perhaps subjectively though. Another factor to consider is that in the downpayment requirements. Today we talk about the “best practice” of putting 20% down on a home, but that’s today. The alternative of putting less-than 20% down and using PMI didn’t even exist as a concept until 1971. It grew in popularity later, but in the early days it wasn’t common. Further, with higher interest rates it meant that much lower pay down of the principal was occurring in the first few years of the mortgage because of amortization. It was the beginning of the age of moving more frequently for jobs, which meant less equity build up as each house sale cycle robbed them of that benefit of wealth, arguable the most valuable investment asset of the working class.
Median home price to median household income ratio This ratio is a key indicator of housing affordability
I appreciate you doing and sharing that analysis.
I think we both agree that its difficult to do an absolute comparison on the home buying/owning experience between the Boomer era and today’s Millennials (or GenZ) simply because so many conditions are different. We didn’t talk about Stagflation or unemployment rate in 1982 being 10.8% compared to today’s 4.3%. I pointed out the interest rate being higher because most folks approach new information as “all else being equal” conditions. The audience already knew that housing price was less in the Boomer era, additional it was known that income was higher proportionally to living expenses than today’s Millennials (or GenZ), what I doubted was common knowledge was the sky high interest rates compared to today. Thats what I was communicating.
- Comment on A single point of failure triggered the Amazon outage affecting millions 19 hours ago:
There’s a huge gulf between pub clowd and shitty on-prem.
We agree on this.
Redundant everything piped in. Redundant everything set up. We run VMs by terraform. Wheeeeee
For that customer of yours, is that a single datacenter or does is represent multiple datacenters separated by a large distance across a nation, or perhaps even across national borders?
Point is, posing shitty on-prem as the alternative to the clowd is moving the goalposts a bit.
I think ignoring that shitty on-prem represented a large part of IT infrastructure prior cloud providers is ignoring a critical point. Was it possible to have well-run enterprise IT data centers prior to cloud? Sure. Was everyone doing that? Absolutely not, I’d argue the majority had at least a certain level of jank in their infra and that that floor is raised with cloud providers. Just the basic facilities is enterprise grade irrespective of the server or app config.
- Comment on Ok, boomer 20 hours ago:
Lead pipes are less of an issue that it would seem, as the pipes quickly develop a layer of calcium salts on the inside, preventing the water from actually coming into contact with the lead.
This right here.
If people remember the lead in drinking water contamination in Flint Michigan, its because they had lead pipes that were well coated with the protective layers and had no trouble with lead in water. Then the newly elected city manager changed water sources to cut costs against the advice of the water engineers in the city. The other source of water was more acidic and stripped out all that protective coating and suddenly there’s huge amounts of lead in the drinking water from the pipes.
- Comment on Ok, boomer 21 hours ago:
I guess it’s to be expected. Boomers were raised in pure bliss, spent half their lives relatively stress-free. Everything was easy and cheap. When you live an easy life, you get used to being dumb, uninformed and lazy. The same would have probably happened to all zoomers in the same situation.
I’m not a boomer, but this isn’t quite a fair characterization. Yes, they had cheap college, affordable cars, housing, lots of upward mobility that most of us would love to have today, but they lived through some shit too. Boomers were in their youth when humanity had its closest brush with global nuclear war when the bombers were in the air flying during the Cuban Missile Crisis. They lived everyday with a really good chance the world was going to end in nuclear war. They were the last generation to see a compulsory military draft and many know high school friends that were drafted and died in Vietnam. We think interest rates are bad these days making borrowing expensive. No shit they were having to get mortgages with a minimum of 18% and 19%:
This says nothing about the many racial and sexual discrimination issues that those groups faced making basic life even harder. In Canada it wasn’t until 1964 that a woman could open her own bank account without her husband’s consent. In the USA, redlining preventing people of color from buying homes in better areas denying them untold billions of dollars of generational wealth from real estate appreciation.
Absolutely give the out-of-touch boomers that are dismissive of the problems young people are facing today the shit boomers deserve. They did so much to harvest the benefits of the last century and leave the bill to the younger generations while simultaneously destroying environment for the later generations to thrive the way they did. Just don’t forget that each generation has its problems too and there hasn’t been a generation yet that has been entirely carefree.
- Comment on A single point of failure triggered the Amazon outage affecting millions 1 day ago:
That work is still being done by someone in a data centre. But all these jobs went from in-house positions to the centres.
The difference is scale. When in-house, the person responsible for managing the glycol loop is also responsible for the other CRACs, possibly the power rails, and likely the fire suppression. In a giant provider, each one of those is its own team with dozens or hundreds of people that specialize in only their area. They can spend 100% on their one area of responsibilty instead of having to wear multiple hats. The small the company, the more hats people have to wear, and the worse to overall result is because of being spread to thin.
- Comment on A single point of failure triggered the Amazon outage affecting millions 1 day ago:
We need to ditch cloud entirety and go in house again.
For many many companies that would be returning to the bad-old-days.
I don’t miss getting an emergency page during the Thanksgiving meal because there’s excessive temperature being reported in the in-house datacenter. Going into the office and finding the CRAC failed and its now 105 degree F. And you knew the CRAC preventive maintenance was overdue and management wouldn’t approve the cost to get it serviced even though you’ve been asking for it for more than 6 months. You also know with this high temp event, you’re going to have an increased rate of hard drive failures over the next year.
No thank you.
- Comment on The Console That Wasn’t: How the Commodore 64 Outsold Game Consoles 6 days ago:
I love everything about the c64 and still have my vintage one from childhood. The article skips one absolutely vital component of c64’s success over consoles: software piracy
An Atari 2600 cartridge or even later a NES cartridge would set you back $20-$50. On the other hand, a box of 5.25" single density diskettes you could buy for under $10 and fit 5 to 30 games on by copying them with your friends. That was impossible with cartridges.
- Comment on How gamers were nickel and dimed in 80s and 90s (besides arcades) 1 week ago:
When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about “TIPS”, both P and S are on 7, so it’d be 8477?
You got it!
- Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright 1 week ago:
- Comment on Superman/Clark Kent is actually worse than Light Yagami/Kira when it comes to lying. 1 week ago:
the story is illustrating “book smart” from “street smart”.
who’s who? I thought Light and L were fairly similar in their types of intelligence and both felt book smart.
Light = Book Smart Light’s Father = Street Smart
Death Note is a variation on the Hero’s Journey trope
how? It just seemed like a typical “antagonist and protagonist are mirrors” with a villain protagonist in Light.
Hero’s Journey is so common, I too, would consider it “typical”.
Combine L, Near, and Mello all as one entity “the hero”. How that composite travels through the story I see it well mapping against the hero’s journey. Another portion of the variation is that the story primarily follows Light/Kira, which is the antagonist, not the hero.
- Comment on Superman/Clark Kent is actually worse than Light Yagami/Kira when it comes to lying. 1 week ago:
sure thing. It’s just combining that with the “I smelt the onion in his farts, that breed of onion only grows in the nagasaki region” style writing of “smart, observant people” makes the show kinda silly , while the tone is suuuuper serious about everything.
I don’t think that’s out-of-place either for the story. Much like the difference between Light and his father, the story is illustrating “book smart” from “street smart”.
Like so much other modern fiction, Death Note is a variation on the Hero’s Journey trope. In this case, the hero is a composite between L, Near, and Mello.
- Comment on Superman/Clark Kent is actually worse than Light Yagami/Kira when it comes to lying. 1 week ago:
You’re making conclusions based on “good/bad” or “evil/just”. This means there are moral or philosophical definitions.
Light Yagami lies and manipulates people to get away with killing people. Clark Kent lies and possibly manipulates people to save or protect people.
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Kant, I think, might say you’re wrong because as long as each of these people is doing what is true to themselves in their own moral code, they are equally “good”.
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Bentham, I think, would say you’re wrong these are not the same because the outcome from Light’s actions is mass murder, while the outcome of Clark’s actions is safety, peace, and protection.
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- Comment on Superman/Clark Kent is actually worse than Light Yagami/Kira when it comes to lying. 1 week ago:
he uses the deathnote in an infantile manner and his sense of justice is juvenile.
Light was a teenager. He’s always lived an easy sheltered life under the care of his parents. He’s lacking any real life experience. In my mind, his juvenile sense of justice is right in line with someone of that immaturity especially given the power he got from the Death Note. We get to see a great contrast when Light’s father is given the power of the Death Note, and immediately chooses to cut his own life in half to get the eyes. The father understands self sacrifice and paying the price to protect those he loves.
- Comment on Trump Administration Buys 2 New Private Jets for Kristi Noem To Use 1 week ago:
Hang on, I think I’ve seen this happen once before:
- Comment on tiny tot engineering 1 week ago:
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
And all it cost the government of Qatar was a 747 they didn’t even want and the pride of America with a treasonous President in office.
- Comment on wish 2 weeks ago:
Is she the one with the superpower to make things slightly warm? Like heating up a cup of tea?
- Comment on I'm tired of teen superheroes! 3 weeks ago:
Green Lantern Hal Jordan was 23 when we got the power ring from Abin Sur. While even he was rebooted many times to keep him in that 20s-30s age range, there were a couple of decades of real passage of time when they allowed him to age into his 50s and 60s including gray hair:
Bruce Wayne was an old man in The Dark Knight returns. There’s even the Batman Beyond storyline that is a old Bruce Wayne coaching a new younger man to be batman.
The Justice Society has golden age heroes with natural aging making them senior citizens.
- Submitted 4 weeks ago to retrogaming@lemmy.world | 4 comments
- Comment on Not rule 4 weeks ago:
As you get older, something else happens. The people that were present at that cringy moment of yours die off. You may find yourself the only living person witness to the event. It helps. Not as much as it should but it does help.
- Comment on Gen Z job crisis: Maybe there are just too many college graduates now 4 weeks ago:
I like what you posted here and agree with about 95% of it. I’m also at the high end of tech and frequently get asked by juniors which is the most important knowledge:
- Experience
- Certifications (Education from a vendor/profession)
- Degree (Education from academia)
I agree with you that, of those 3, experience is the most important, where we might diverge is that experience alone has limits. Someone that has experience, but no certs or degree will eventually likely hit a ceiling in their career where they can advance no further, and worse, it could eventually (after decades) be the reason they are fired.
The best answer is “Get all three!” However, I agree with you that if you have the opportunity for experience, seize it. Use it. Make mistakes. Learn from it, but don’t stop with just experience. Expand your knowledge through education (certs) and seemingly unrelated subjects (business, accounting, marketing, etc) because these are ultimately what the technologies we support are driving. . If you know what your organization is trying to accomplish (via college education) you can bring the best solutions to bear (via industry certs), and be able to communicate that to the organization effectively (via college education) to be able to implement them (via experience).
- Comment on BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said America could dodge a ‘retirement crisis’ by encouraging people to work longer 4 weeks ago:
I don’t see many pure sysadmin roles listed anymore. Companies seem to want to squish two or more roles together so we have DevOps roles or SREs.
- Comment on Gen Z job crisis: Maybe there are just too many college graduates now 5 weeks ago:
Since we’re plugging community college more, I’d also like to add that quite a few community colleges offer bachelors degrees now! Many of these are a small fraction of the cost of a traditional 4 year school (even far cheaper than 4 year state schools from what I’ve seen).
I wish these were a thing when I got my Bachelors degree.
Here’s an example of a Bachelor of Applied Science, Electrical Engineering Technology for less than $12,000 in tuition! (tack on another $2k for books I’d guess for 4 years), but $14k for a bachelors is damn cheap!
Search your state to see what schools near you offer these and in what programs:
- Comment on Gen Z job crisis: Maybe there are just too many college graduates now 5 weeks ago:
There were entire generations told diplomas were the only path to success and only “stupid people or drop outs” would do trades or jobs without a degree.
I wouldn’t go as extreme as saying “diplomas are the only path to success” but even today, over time, a college degree is a better predictor of being employed than non-degree. The graph in the article shows this:
That dark orange line at the lowest measurement of unemployment is folks that have had a college degree and older than 27 years old. Keep in mind, the graph is covering about 35 years, so those earlier on the chart, in say the beginning in 1990 as the blue line with higher unemployment than older college grads join the older college grad statistic in 1997.
Further, the article is focusing on recent college grads being unemployed, but the graph shows that even this group has a significantly lower unemployment than “all young workers” which presupposes that group doesn’t have a degree.
So even today “get a college degree instead of not” is good advice if you’re looking for future employment. The extra advice I’d give on top of that is “don’t go crazy into debt to get that degree”. Folks graduating with a six figure student loan debt with only their bachelors are likely decades behind their peers that didn’t take on such a large debt load. Community College people! Use it!
Trades can also be good, and I don’t want to discourage that, but recognize the physical toll on the body it takes over a career and make sure to plan accordingly to transitioning to leadership or a lighter desk role as you advance in your trade career.
- Comment on Sump Pump - Part 2 5 weeks ago:
While thats true, a digital meter is at about 5x the cost of a one-time disposable test. I didn’t want to scare him off (or delay the test) because of cost. If the disposable test shows a positive reading for radon, I’d recommend skipping the digital meter anyway and hiring a company that does professional readings as well as installation of mitigation systems.
- Comment on Sump Pump - Part 2 5 weeks ago:
One thing to check for your health and family: Radon
Since you’ve now got a pit, you also have the prime location for a mitigation system. At a minimum, you can get a Radon test kit at the hardware store (I know Menards carries these) for about $20 that has a sticky card that you mail away for analysis after a set time.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
This photo was clearly taken around the time Arnold was shooting the movie Commando. Though there’s not world tie in between the movie and game of the same name, its a nice historical piece to see they recognized the similarity and memorialized it in this picture.
- Comment on I baked eye ball cookies for Halloween 5 weeks ago:
“eye ball” cookies
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
It’s also important to check whether solar overcacity is worthwhile in the UsA. Her3 it is not( anymore).
I’ll say generally speaking in most places it isn’t, however, once you go solar, you may increase your electricity usage as you move away from carbon based energy. Before solar we had natural gas furnace heating and two gasoline cars. Now we have two EVs and a cold climate heat pump with zero natural gas and zero gasoline consumption. So I wanted the larger solar capacity to cover the increases in electricity we knew we’d have.
Its worked out pretty well. We have fairly large electricity bills ($400ish) in Jan and Feb, a small bill in March, and usually a tiny bill (under $10) in April. Then no bills for the rest of the year. Also keep in mind that is TOTAL energy costs, no gas or gasoline bought anymore.
