Enough partial solutions will sum up to a whole. If we treat them all as insignificant, then none will be enacted and no progress will be made.

Doesn’t that pretty much describe DC? At one point, they ha Juaquin Phoenix Joker, DCEU, and the Robert Pattinson Batman all kinda overlapping.

They’re both excellent at being different kinds of evil.

Winn is prideful and ambitious above all else. She sides with good and evil both at different times in service to her own goals. She deludes herself into believing anything that pursuit of personal power is also what serves Bajor.

Winn commits evil in service to her ambitions.

Dukat has the same vices, but with added elements of narcissism and wrath. He briefly tries being good, and almost reaches it when he finds genuine love for and from his daughter, but when his actions lead to her death he lashes out at the universe and becomes entirely consumed by wrath and megalomania.

Dukat’s ambition in the end is to commit evil.

Fuel efficiency rules are idiotic now. The automakers used to classify everything as a truck to get around fuel efficiency regulations. The PT Cruiser being classified as a truck was the last straw, so the regs were changed beginning in 2012 to base fuel economy off of vehicle footprint to keep automakers from reclassifying vehicles. But that change had the consequence of effectively outlawing small trucks. Suddenly a sedan has less-strict economy standards than a compact van or truck.

Notice how the small truck segment disappeared in 2012, and when the Ranger came back in like 2018-ish, there were models of it larger than older F150s? It’s because the manufacturers learned they could just make the trucks bigger to get around standards.

It’s also why around 2021/2022 all the compact cargo vans (NV200, Transit Connect, ProMaste4 City) were discontinued. The regulations essentially outlawed small vans designed to haul heavy loads.

Any way you slice it gold would be less-valuable.

Asteroid mining is good for resource gathering, not accumulation of wealth. And even then it’s much more useful for resource gathering for use in space than on Earth. If you can launch once, then mine, process, and use the resources without having to do more launches and landings it’s much more efficient. Then you’d start manufacturing in space to further reduce the amount of required launches.

He’s not actually one of the 3.

That’s actually the name of a horrible film that’s shot like a mix of a TV pilot for a 3 Musketeers series, but with a bunch of 90s-style Hong Kong fight choreography.

Self-love?

Cable was a shitty service. It was expensive, you had to subscribe to a bunch of shit you didn’t want for just a few programs you did, and was full of ads. People dropped cable for streaming because it was cheaper, centralized, and didn’t have ads.

Now that cable is essentially dead, streaming is bringing back the high prices and the ads, and now you have to sign up for a bunch of shit you don’t want for the few programs you do.

In that case, for a random person I’d still recommend Bambu unless you’re boycotting on ethical grounds.

Their printers run just fine without a network. Just export the g-code to a microSD card, put the card in the printer, and select the model from the card. It also allows you to use whatever slicer you want that way.

It’s really only cloud printing that’s locked behind Bambu Studio.

Once you’re a billionaire, no amount of money will impact your lifestyle, but they keep hoarding wealth anyway.

There are people who become billionaires and it’s not their fault. They inherited money, or their company explodes and is suddenly worth ungodly money, so I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that there’s no way for a moral person to become a billionaire.

But there’s absolutely no moral excuse for remaining a billionaire or seeking additional wealth.

The thing is unless you need the slightly bigger bed size, the A1 mininfrom Bambu is simply a better product. It’s faster, easier, and often cheaper (I got mine for like 150-ish). And the full-size A1 is also bigger.

That’s the thing with Bambu. What’s made them such a disruptor and given them the opportunity to be shitty is that they make a really good product with excellent software at less than half the price of a comparable Prusa.

And with the new SnapMaker U1 slapping back, they dropped their prices again. The new X2D is half the cost of the last-gen X1 and has an extra nozzle.

Exactly. And I think we need to be honest about our criticism of Bambu. A lot of it is legitimate complaints. They stepped into a community that built itself around sharing ideas and group effort. They benefited from the work of the community and made some great innovations, but refused to share those innovations with the community that had shared so much with them. That’s a dick move.

But there’s also an uncomfortable element of the Bambu hatred coming from people who have been part of the community for a long time. They tinkered and toiled using weed-eater line through modified hot glue guns and spent years buulding up shitty machines into something serviceable. They did awesome things, and they should be proud if it. But they can also be gatekeepers who are hostile to those who just want to print something without needing to understand g-code or what pressure advance is.

They don’t want new users who haven’t made the tinkering and fiddling the hobby. They see the confusion and technical knowledge required as a rite of passage all users need to experience. They were a huge part of making 3D printing what it is today, but (just like Bambu) hey don’t want the next guys to benefit from it.

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The problem with Bambu is they are not trash at all. Their printers are high-quality, and the way they integrate with their proprietary slicer (that they totally stole from the community before locking it down) and MakerWorld is genuinely excellent.

I have 3 Bambu printers. I don’t buy their products anymore (my newest printer is an SV-08 max), but I still use the ones I have and they’re excellent, easy machines. And if someone new comes to me wanting a starter “just click print and it works” solution, I’m still likely to point them towards an A1 mini. They’re cheap and work great out of the box with zero handholding from me required.

And that’s why I kinda hate them. They don’t have to be dickheads, but choose to be. Their products are fantastic, and I’d honestly be using Bambu Studio for them instead of Orca anyway.

As a municipal planner, I love the solution. We get warm fuzzies when we can use our talent for bureaucracy to do something good. It helps make up for the politicians trying to get us to bend rules for developers.

That’s how taxation works, but it doesn’t solve government finance by itself.

The US government has always paid interest on the debt. It’s never missed a payment. That makes it a very stable investment, and until recently it was considered the most stable, predictable investment that could be made.

That also means the US could have stupidly-low interest on its debts. And because the investment is so safe, it also creates a bottom for interest rates. No other investment is safer, so any time the fed rate goes up, all other loan rates go up as well - otherwise investors would just put their money in the US instead of on a home or business loan.

That and other factors result in inflation generally being higher than the interest on loans made to the US, which results in a situation where paying cash up front is actually more expensive than getting a loan and paying with future tax revenue, because future tax revenue grows with inflation that outpaces the interest on the loan.

Federal government deficit spending works because interest is often higher than return on federal bonds, so it’s literally cheaper for the government to go into debt and pay over a long period than to pay cash.

Local government can’t do that, but they do have other tools. The one I deal with the most often is Public Improvement Districts where we’ll cut a deal to waive municipal property tax or the city’s sales tax for like 20 years on a big development in return for the developers building the public infrastructure required to support that development, then transferring it to the City. For really big projects, we may even redirect the tax to the developer, which we actually kinda prefer when that 20-year clock times out and you don’t have business owners and residents suddenly getting new taxes they aren’t used to and freaking ALL the way out.

It’s a deal for the developer because they need that infrastructure anyway, and the only “extra” cost to them is oversizing stuff like wastewater lines beyond what they need, and it’s a deal for the city because those road, water, sidewalk, and wastewater extensions they install with the project end up serving more than just that development.

I used to be a gun salesman.

One day I’m in the back mounting scopes and a customer’s rifle gets delivered to me with the rings and scope. First thing I do it go back out front and have the customer shoulder the rifle so I can see where his eye sits.

I then spend time carefully mounting and leveling the scope, use the bore-sighter to get it zero-ish at 100 yards (enough to hit paper - then the customer finishes at the range), and it’s looking real good.

Last thing I do it work the action to make sure everything still has clearance, and a chrome-plated 300 Win Mag cartidge comes out of the gun.

That gun made it through the firearms check-in, at least 1 other sales guy, to me, back to the customer, and back to me again. We’re supposed to check the rifle every time, and that round made it into the gun. Closest I can figure is people weren’t working the action all the way, and at some point one of us did after seeing the silver color thinking it was the mag follower, and in the process loaded the chamber.

My asshole was puckered for a solid day, but it also spoke to how effective the rules are. Even though multiple people fucked up, following the rest of the rules kept it from actually being dangerous.

I feel like I had one installed over my garage door.