count_dongulus

Sure, but I don't think the price balance was historically close to today. Appliances may have been, relatively speaking, a much bigger investment to the point where paying a repair technician for a service call was usually the better option. Today, not so much.

I have a ten year old Samsung washer. It started leaking badly a couple years ago. I opened it up and replaced one small rubber tube for $5. If I had to pay someone $500 to fix it, I'd have been better off buying a whole new appliance. I won't be surprised if this is the only repair I have to do for many more years.

I suspect this is actually what's changed - labor is so expensive compared to the cost of the machine that people replace their appliance with a new one because it's only a little more than fixing their old one. And when they replace, they tend to think of the old brand as bad, and look for a new brand.

So everyone has negative stories about their appliances across just about every brand, except Speed Queen because those are so expensive, you'll actually pay a repair person to fix it instead of replacing it. It's like how some sports car brands are notoriously high maintenance, but what Ferrari owner cares about maintenance costs?

Decades ago the relative cost of a washer or dryer was much higher compared to repair labor. You'd pay the Maytag man to come fix your dryer if it had a problem.

But, it takes a lot of work by designers to get the fake lighting to look natural. Raytracing would help avoid that toil if the game is forced RT.

It's like a gambling addiction. "Just one more prompt, it'll definitely do all the work for me correctly if I just tweak this verbiage."

don't understand what they've written

Well first of all, they didn't write it.

It is not expensive, assuming you don't mind giving someone else your microplastics. In fact, you can get paid about $100 to do it in most places. How? Apharesis is exactly what is performed when donating plasma.

Someone wearing a mask tries to kidnap you, draw your handgun and put a hole in their face. I'm surprised this exact situation hasn't landed in the supreme court yet. Pretty sure it won't be favorable to the masked goons.

This shows that the way to get rid of landmines is not to have countries sign a piece of paper. It's to give them a better alternative, whether it's literally peace, or another dirt-cheap area denial defensive weapon that isn't indiscriminate. Because the paper is worthless once real stakes are on the line.

I think autonomous drones will eventually supplant landmines. Whether that's better or worse, I don't know.

Kerrygold

Kroger diet cola. It's better than diet coke. Always fucking out of stock though around me.

No, this changed: https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/analysis-of-iaea-iran-verification-and-monitoring-report-may-2025/

No, days to months away from weapons grade enriched uranium if they so chose. If you don't trust what the International Atomic Energy Agency has to say about nuclear proliferation from on-site assessments, I guess there's no convincing you of anything else.