Competition between insurance providers won’t help us here since

the insurance firms are a cartel anyway and the price variance is more a consequence of your region and your vehicle than your carrier.

You can be the best defensive driver in the world but sometimes you’re just going to have to brake hard to avoid an object that may jump on you, dinging your driving score and raising your premiums.

If you’re the best driver in the world, you don’t need to carry insurance because the lifetime expected spending on premiums is below the lifetime insurance payments. The only reason you carry insurance is if you’re not sure whether you’re the best driver in the world.

Once your insurance knows (better than you) where you rank as a driver, they will either refuse to cover you (because costs > revenues) or raise your rates until you fall into a high risk of changing carriers (because that’s where they maximize profits). The initial discount is simply a teaser rate, while the company collects more data. The real determination of your max tolerable premium is your personal income, which is set by the value of your vehicle. All the telematics is hand-wavy bullshit. You really might be the best driver in the world, but they’ll still raise your rates if they think you’ll pay it.

The real secret to getting a lower insurance premium is to own a cheaper car (and therefore signal to your insurer that you have less money to spend on insurance).

Me, on the phone with my insurance company: “No, you don’t understand! It wasn’t me driving, we just have very similar telematics!”

The insurance company: “Beep boop! I am a computer! Talking to me automatically raises your insurance premium another 5%”

Carving my soul into seven unholy partitions in order to maintain my unnatural existence as a Windows Guy whose shit still works.

Was that game any good? The mobile version had a Gacha mechanic that scared me off, but it otherwise looked like a really smooth SNES style JRPG.

Most of the abstractions, frameworks, “bloats”, etc. are there to make development easier and therefore cheaper

That’s true to an extent. But I’ve been on the back side of this kind of development, and the frameworks can quickly become their own arcane esoteric beasts. One guy implements the “quick and easy” framework (with 16 gb of bloat) and then fucks off to do other things without letting anyone else know how to best use it. Then half-dozen coders that come in behind have no idea how to do anything and end up making these bizarre hacks and spaghetti code patches to do what the framework was already doing, but slower and worse.

The end result is a program that needs top of the line hardware to execute an oversized pile of javascripts.

I think it’s given us a big wave of “Return to pixelated tradition” style games. When you see 16-bit sprites in the teaser, you can feel reasonably confident your computer will run it.

emerge

I agree that this is bullshit and Linux is better. But as someone with a Windows work computer, this was a huge help.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Unironically the future of capitalism, as it devolves into feudalism with more killer robots.

You’ve got the CEO (Absolute Monarch) who owns all the shit and you work on it in exchange for not being killed or deported. Maybe you get some treats from time to time. More likely, you just get someone from the PMC to tell you to pray more.

Humans in power are too egocentric to not be kept in check.

A handful of humans with the power to deliver unlimited genocide on their neighbors are hard to keep in check.

The idea that you could trust a corporation, any corporation, at its word is laughable on its face

We’re surrounded by corporate entities all trying to leech profit out of us.

It’s less a question of trust and more of information alternatives. When all you can hear is the din of advertisement, it’s difficult to chart a path through the racket.

You’re bound to get suckered by someone, eventually.

My whole library is wipped out

I assumed this was about an actual library and not some shmuck who got suckered into a thinly veiled rental service.

the beginning of the master plan to monetize our communities.

I think it was closer to the middle of the plan.

do a barrel roll to continue

Reddit hasn’t been that fun in a long time.

Easy fix is to update the url to use “old.reddit.com” rather than the base “www.reddit.com”.

That sends you to a version of the site without a bunch of the crap.

Pretty much everything built with dimensional lumber in the last century has been done with undersized 2x4s, and it’s fine.

It’s fine, folks. Nothing to see here.

I’d have to check the specs, but I believe its an M1 or M2.

I’ve never tried to install linux on an Apple before.

https://finalfantasyxv.fandom.com/wiki/Cup_Noodles

They also had a bunch of Coleman camping gear as a major feature of the game.

As ad placement went, I thought it was kinda charming and cute. More like a goofy Superbowl ad than an obnoxious “BUY ME NOW!!!” splash screen or pop-up insert. But I’m glad the latest FF7 Remakes didn’t continue this trend.