I have my own espresso machine and make various drinks for myself as a hobby. That’s actually the easy part of being a barista. The hard part is keeping up with a high pace of orders during rush hour. I would not want to be a barista either, specifically because of the stress of that work.

The other commenter is right about the good coffee though. Making really good espresso from fancy light roasted single origin coffee is extremely difficult.

None of those preserve the shape of Antarctica!

Electrician? I do my own electrical work! This issue is pretty low priority for me though. I have a ton of other things to fix around the house!

There’s no driver. These are bulbs designed for traditional halogen fixtures which connect directly to 120V mains AC.

I prefer to think of beer as liquid bread. Delicious and nutritious!

I live in Canada (60Hz here) and I just installed a new range hood above my stove. It came with standard recessed halogen light fixtures with LED bulbs. Rather than being fully dimmable, the switch has high and low settings. When set to low, I can definitely see visible flicker.

I also have this same style of lights above my bathroom mirror and a dimmer switch there. They also display more and more flicker when dimmed.

50Hz is what you’ll find in the UK and Europe.

LEDs aren’t 50Hz or 60Hz or anything else. They’re DC devices and they don’t flicker at all if you run them on a clean DC power supply.

The issue with LED bulbs is that they don’t have clean power supplies. They have very simple AC to DC, usually a capacitive dropper. Without filtering, this type of cheap power supply produces a lot of ripple which manifests in visible flicker at the same frequency of the input AC mains power.

Oh okay. That’s really interesting! I love cucumbers, both fresh and pickled! I like the smell too. Nice and fresh!

Cucumbers naturally produce very bitter compounds known as cucurbitacins. These cytotoxins are bred out of the cucumbers by hybridization but they can always re-occur in plants that were cross-pollinated (usually unintentionally). Perhaps at one point you ate a cucumber containing some and you now have strongly aversive reactions to them?

Oil is a force multiplier, definitely. But any nation that declined to pursue an oil-based economy during the oil boom years would’ve been swept aside or doomed to irrelevance. It’s like someone throwing a loaded gun into the middle of a prison riot. You either grab for the gun and start shooting or you take cover and try not to get shot.

I don’t think it’s unique in that. Before oil, we fought over land, food, spices, tea, steel, gold, and silver.

Recall that the modern nation state came out of the Peace of Westphalia that followed the Thirty Years’ War. Just over 2 centuries before that was the Hundred Years’ War.

Think of all the wars Romans fought trying to colonize and subjugate everyone. As well all the wars trying to defend themselves from the Carthaginians and the Persians and even the many uprisings of their slaves.

Let’s not forget all the wars in Asia! The Warring States period of Chinese history lasted over 250 years. The Sengoku period of Japan was also marked by over a century of frequent warfare.

The Egyptians and their many wars against the Nubians. The Zulu Empire of Shaka. The Aztecs and their wars to obtain sacrificial victims. The Mongolian Empire. The Comanche Empire. The Inca Empire. The Babylonian Empires. The Assyrian Empires.

On and on and on and on it goes. Empires and wars all the way back to the beginning of organized society (even before agriculture). Humans fight. It’s why we form gangs and get visceral thrills from violence. Violence is taboo in modern society for a reason: it’s not just dangerous and damaging to social order, it’s addictive.

My microwave boils a cup of water in less than 2 minutes.

Wow thanks for this! It’s so helpful to learn about and have a language for describing why these new movies feel so wrong to me. I’m going to watch this after work and share it with my film club!

I have the opposite issue. I tend to only enjoy older films. Recent films tend to have this digital colour-graded look and a style of editing (millions of 1 second cuts) that make them pretty much unwatchable for me.

I really love films that take their time, both in plot and character development, as well as in how shots develop to establish the scenes. I also have a passion for photography and for me that’s a really big part of films. I want to see beautiful photographs that took a lot of time and experience to set up (and wait for the right moment, in the case of outdoor scenes). I love practical effects that were built and painted by hand, explosions rigged with real explosives, much more than CGI.

I think there is an issue with attention spans though. The modern films that I mentioned above seem to be ideal for people with short attention spans, whereas older films tend to be boring for these folks. This makes it hard for films to appeal to both audiences!

Nowadays I use a trackpad for almost everything. I do use a mouse at work but then I mostly use keyboard shortcuts for everything I can (Excel really flies when you know some keyboard shortcuts).

Ahhh. I use command-click to open in new tabs.

I haven’t played a game that uses the mouse in several years. I mostly play Roguelikes such as NetHack, DCSS, or Caves of Qud using keyboard controls only, or console games with a controller.

I have never used a CAD program though sometimes I’ve thought about it.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve ever wanted to click the middle mouse button. The experience of having done so once or twice was bad enough to get me to rebind the action to something else.

Middle mouse paste was great on true 3 button mice. It became a liability with the invention of the mouse wheel, which made it a total crapshoot to try to click that damn button without rolling the wheel at the same time. It’s a classic case of overloaded functionality.

Like imagine if cars put the accelerator into the steering wheel, so you had to press the steering wheel down to accelerate. Everyone would hate it and it would be a safety nightmare. We put up with things on computers that we never would in other areas of life.

No, that’s the thumb of the guy on the left. He has his hand over the other guy’s mouth to shut him up.

It’s from the movie Predator. Watch it. Fantastic movie!

But also there’s a trick to how police holsters work that makes it difficult to remove the gun. An untrained amateur going for the gun is likely to mess up and wind up pulling the gun unsuccessfully without actually removing it from the holster, alerting the cop.