Funny enough duct tape ceiling guy is playing on an LCD monitor.

I’ve been curious about that myself. On one hand, it still seems far away. On the other hand, it’s a bit over 13 years away now and I have gear actively in use that’s older than that today.

1 can also fill up if the flow from the faucet is higher than what can exit through the pipe connecting to 2.

And what, have twice the fridge space for slightly less than twice the energy cost?

Depends on how old it is. Mine’s a 1995 model. I’ve measured its energy usage and a new fridge would pay for itself at around 9-10 years if I bought a basic model*. That’s around the lifespan I’d expect from a new fridge. So I’ll just keep using the old one until it dies.

(*) Current fridge is a basic, low end model, so assuming I replace with a similar basic, lower end model. Payback would be much longer if I upgraded.

Other than hoarding up the houses, everything is pretty general Monopoly strategy I figured out a long time ago. Basically try to get a monopoly ASAP and then develop it ASAP. I’ve found that strategy to be good, but it depends a lot on luck. Sometimes despite everything you try, the only monopoly you can get are those horrid green properties and you’re pretty much doomed.

I don’t really see it as a conspiracy. What seems to happen is Apple does something like remove the headphone jack. Apple users essentially have to accept it as they are locked in and don’t have any choice in the matter. Plus you have the fanboys that have an amazing ability to rationalize anything Apple does. Everyone else sees that Apple got away with something, and they follow suit.

Losing the SD slot would still be annoying but not as big of a deal with everyone wasn’t also copying Apple’s model of massively overcharging for storage upgrades.

When covid hit they cut my hours to 32 a week. They wouldn’t let us do a four day work week which was kind of lame, but instead we got four 7-hour days then a 4-hour half-day on Friday. It doesn’t sound like a lot but even an extra hour in the evenings and an early start to the weekend turned out to be really refreshing. When things went back to normal, I asked if I could keep that schedule even with the 20% pay cut, but they said no.

Unfortunately, it seems that there simply aren’t a lot of white collar type office jobs where you can work for less than the standard 40 hours a week while keeping the same hourly rate and similar benefits.

There’s always the centrally managed corporate Windows desktops. My workplace is better about this now, but previously they’d just push down updates and with some of them you’d have little other choice but to let it proceed no matter how inconvenient the timing.