The problem is that they did not build battery factories quick enough, they sat on their hands waiting for massive hand outs to pay for the factories rather than investing. All while profiting off existing investment in ICE that is high return at this point in its life cycle. So they ended up making more profitable per unit halo models like the F150 that they do not need to sell in high volumes to get a return on.

Batteries are about half the raw cost of an EV, if you paying somebody else to make it for you its going to be more expensive as they will want to make a profit and you are stuck being able to buy ever how many they want to sell you. In practice they have ended up funding a competitor to develop battery tech as well.

Lowering battery cost is the secret to cheap prices, you cannot truly compete until you make your own batteries in high volumes.

Always been a bloke in the pub or car boot or whatever that can supply hooky dvds or games or hacked satellite, FAST always talks tough about busting them.

Early eights it was disk and tape trading, mostly tape trading in the UK. Was a way more social activity.

Late 80s and early 90s, it was all disk, and you really needed a connected friend who could get the menu disks (custom pirated compilation disks). These were often super hoarded, only traded for a lot of games, like certain private trackers today.

Very early web stuff was all usenet and ftp servers, often hosted at a university. If you knew where to look, anything was accessible.

Early 2000s was a golden period of easy access. It would be slow, and the quality would often be low if it was a video or mp3. It’s gotten harder to find the obscure stuff as time has gone on. I

t’s like the scene only remembers out and out classics or the latest thing outside of some niche places.

I use powershell for work as I need the m365 modules for work and its very flexible with decent module availability to plug in all sorts.

However it absolutely sucks for large data handling, anything over 10k rows is just horrendous, I typically work with a few million rows. You can make it work with using .Net to process it within your script but its something to be aware of. Being able to extend with .Net can be extremely useful.

I switched from Pop OS tiling that I had retro bolted onto stock ubuntu to Sway, massive step up and more importantly I get to keep my Ubuntu/Wayland base.

As with most add on WMs I had a bit of a learning curve sorting out the extra bits and pieces that just come stock as part of Ubuntus Gnome implementation such as a launcher (I use dmenu), a menu bar (swaybar for me), and even a lock screen (swayidle). Even doing things like wallpaper needed more effort.

Gravy or curry sauce

I ran Qubes for a while, really enjoyed the way it integrated windows so I could use MS Office (mandatory job requirement) as apps rather than a VM as I normally do. I realise you can do something similar with Winapps for Linux but to have it baked in was rather nice.

Yet Lib Dems gained a ton of seats with over 70, and Reform only 4 at the time of me writing my message. Lib Dem wasn’t that far behind total percentage of the vote vs. Reform, 12% vs, 14%, which considering they are almost opposite platforms means we shouldn’t be talking about Reform in isolation.

Labours total vote percentage is down from 2017 and only a few percent up from 2019, so the Tories collapsed losing about 20% of the vote from 2019. Labour following the center right meant they lost more moderate votes to Lib Dems and were not trusted on right wing issues as Reform picked up those votes.

Normal hifi gear, particularly second hand can sound way way better than generic computer crap. However normal hi-fi speakers are designed to work best a certain distance from the wall **and ** a certain distance from you. These distances vary between speakers but it is important to check this before spending any cash as some speakers need to be many feet from you, which isn’t always remotely practical for most pc setups.

I went with Dali Minutes for this reason, so they can be right on the wall and really close to me. I paired mine with a Rega Brio amp and RME ADI 2 USB DAC, then added a monitor audio sub later.

Most proper studio monitors are designed for near field listening they also make a good choice although they can be a little clean for some people’s taste.

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.

UK you have the concept of black box car insurance that offered a substantial discount for having either a dedicated device installed into the car or an app on your phone that tracks a bunch of stats as you drive. It’s as shit as it sounds as it marks you down for every little infringement such as driving at peak times because that’s more dangerous. Get enough points and you can have your policy cancelled. In the UK there are knock on effects for ever having an insurance policy cancelled and you have to legally declare you did when asked.

While you can uninstall the app good luck making a claim if you don’t have it installed with data for that journey. They’d also be pretty suss with no data over an extended period of a few months.

Worst part of these is that it’s expensive to switch to a non black box policy when you can afford to as you get older and more experienced.

Not the OP but having got rid of my Flair as it was too painful to get great coffee out of at 6am every morning, the learning curve is very steep unless you are already familiar with making espresso.

Many possible reasons, such as the off chance Trump gets blocked from running. I realise its unlikely he will get blocked but there is still a chance it could happen and would have looked slightly more likely at the start.

Also to force concessions from Trump. Not because she would have posed an actual risk to him in the primaries but because he had to spend money defending his position. If there is one thing Trump is always short of, its money.

She also acts as a blocker to other candidates, who may leverage a stronger position if she wasn’t funded properly into lucrative positions in a Trump dictatorship in exchange for standing down.

Everything Dies by Spirted Adrift, its a cover of the Type O Negative song

You could set it to only manually download the shows, then you would go into the interface and click the manual search button. It will then aggregate the results for you into a single list and give you a single click to download, rename, and import the file to your library. You can even download a temporary lower quality version and then replace it later when a better one comes out if you wish.

I particularly like it for shows that often have a week or more of downtime as I often forget when they coming back and this saves me having to check when they back.

It’s a decent machine for the money but compared to its competitors from gaggia and rancilio what they lose in fancy programming or the pid or the easy steaming (which is still way off mine) they gain in actually having an opv (depending which one you have), build quality and self service.

I’ve seen far too many people have issues with breville stuff and then problems returning it. It’s not that good ones don’t exist it’s just that more reliable does.

To put your seven years into perspective I should be getting 30 to 40 years out of mine with some regular servicing.

They nice machines but I wanted more consistent with its pressure and water flow, better steaming, not made by breville,and made with industry standard components that can last decades.

There is a few steps before then. We are currently at the stage of privatising previously state ran services within the NHS such as radiology and buying extra capacity from private business This is being done at a local level using existing budgets so it means money for actual services gets reduced or quality of service drops as no outsourcer works at a loss for very long.

Other step that happens is you can pay to jump the queue by paying the heavily subsidised private offerings in the UK. This is often the same person you would have seen via the NHS. There isnt this huge magical pool of extra doctors in the UK who only work private (outside cosmetic) so anybody you see privately will almost certainly have a NHS case load. More work private, less work NHS as there is only so many hours they can and will work.

Next stage is national privatisation of some of the bigger services, for example the recent agreement with Palantir that sells off our data for far less than its worth and without explicit patient permission.

I would imagine as that will increase costs it will then become optional to pay for the NHS and instead you can pay for private cover (rather than paying for both as we do currently if you want private cover). Once this happens its only a matter of time before the NHS becomes an empty shell as the middle earners who pay the most tax towards the NHS will simply stop paying. Then at that point does private start getting way more expensive and the exclusions start.

Usually some privatisation apologist will appear and say that we do not have to follow the American model, to which I always say what exactly about this government has ever given you the complete confidence that anything other than the shitest option will happen. Its nice to wish for unicorns but they are not going to happen here.

No, its a smart thing switch as I have the hub, so its z wave. However I have a lot of smart home switches, lights and so on so that makes sense for me. Plenty of options if you do not want a hub now.

The espresso machine has a proper on off button so I just leave it in on position and the switch turns the power on and off

Majority of any e61 espresso machine is like that, pretty much par for the course for anything other than budget non e61 or some of the new high end espresso machines that use some variation of electrically heated groups.

Mine will be “ready” after about 15 minutes but as an e61 group head is a heavy block it takes along time to get good thermal stability. Difference is I can steam and extract shots at the same time with 2bar steam and 9bar espresso, shot after shot.

My espresso machine has a proper on/off switch, so I just leave that set to on and control the power from the smart switch.