Well, the more light you reflect out the better (I would expect that, for example, darker color curtains would be a problem) and ideally you want that whatever light does get converted into heat does so outside.

As it so happens, were I live the heat has been a problem in the Summer since well before AC was invented, so roll-up external shades are standard for all houses and apartments and that stuff definitely works if used as I described it.

Around here, Portugal, were every Summer the temperature exceeds 40 C for at least some days in August, we have outside rollup shades on every window, so one of the tricks is to keep the shades down and and the windows closed during the hottest and sunniest parts of the day, at the very least the afternoon.

Then at night you open the windows and let the cooler night air in (even better if you do it early morning, around sunrise, which is the coolest time of the day).

Note that this doesn’t work well with curtains or internal shades, because with those any conversion of light into heat when the light heats the shades/curtains (as they’re not mirrors and don’t reflect all light back) happens inside the house and thus that heat gets trapped indoors.

You were supposed to have an antenna.

Generally no, probably because many males when they end up in physicality make it some kind of dominance thing (playfully violence that’s just a little too much, “higher position” touches like hand on top of shoulder or physically leading other people and even the good old “measuring somebody one the firmeness of their handshake”). It’s not casual and friendly when there’s measuring and testing of others involved.

Outside close family, the only environment I’ve been in were things like hugs were normal was the Theatre world.

Almost 30 years into my career as a software engineer, I’m now making a computer game that takes place in Space and were planets and comets follow Orbital Mechanics, so I’m using stuff I learned at Uni all those years ago in Degree-level Physics, since I went to university to study Physics (though later changed to an EE degree and ended up going to work as a software developer after graduating because that’s what I really liked to do).

I’ve also had opportunity to use stuff I learned in the EE degree for software engineering, the most interesting of which was using my knowledge of microprocessor design during the time I was designing high performance distributed systems for Investment Banks.

(I’ve also used that EE knowledge in making Embedded Systems - because I can do both the hardware and the software sides - though that was just for fun)

Also, pretty much through my career, I would often end up using University-level Mathematics, for example in banking it tended to be stuff like statistics, derivatives and integrals (including numerical approach methods) whilst game-making is heavy on trigonometry, vectors and matrices.

So even though I never formally learned Software Engineering at University, the stuff from the actual STEM degrees I attended (the one were I started - Physics - and the one I ended up graduating in - Electronics Engineering) were actually useful in it, sometimes in surprising ways.

At the very least just the Maths will be the difference between being pretty mediocre or actually knowing what you’re doing in more advanced domains that are heavy users of Technology: I would’ve been pretty lost at making software systems for the business of Equity Derivatives Trading if I didn’t know Statistics, Derivatives, Integrals and Numerical Approach Methods and ditto when making GPU shaders for 3D games if I didn’t know Trigonometry, Vectors and Matrices.

And this is without going into just understanding stuff I hear about but are currently not using, such as Neural Networks which are used in things like ChatGPT, and Statistics are invaluable in punching through most of the “common sense” bullshit spouted by politicians and other people played to deceive the general public.

Absolutely, you can be a coder, even a good one, without degree level education, but for the more advanced stuff you’ll need at least the degree level Maths even if a lot of the rest of your degree will likely be far less useful or useless.

Clearly it’s not Infosec!!! ;)

How do you provide value when that value isn’t needed at the moment?

Well, that’s why a lot of people want to change things at a political level - the great “pure competition no safety net” neoliberal take on Society results in most of people, whose job is basically a commodity and who don’t have a “unique value proposition”, to be pretty close to slaves in this system because since they are human beings and naturally need food, water and shelter continously but are in an environment where the access to those is controlled by having unusual amounts of the very thing that people selling commoditized services cannot get enough of via their work - money - are squezed into a position where they de facto don’t have any choices, nor do they even have the necessary space to invest in themselves to change into some other job where they might have a “unique value proposition”.

This situation could be changed if people were guaranteed access to the basic essentials, for example via a Universal Basic Income, since even people doing commoditized work would then have the choice to refuse to “sell” their work if they found the “price” too low or the conditions too bad, which would push the market to improve the jobs offers for those (who are by far the majority if people) plus a lot of those could even chose to improve themselves or their skills, become inventors, or artists, or work in areas with high social value but low “price” because they felt rewarded by it in ways other than money.

In summary, I think there is no solution within the current paradygm since it makes this problem systemic and any viable solution requires changing at least some things in the paradygm, most noteably the part were the basic required essentials of human beings are used to, at the systemic level, force most people into a no-true-choice neo-slavery.

The changes we’ve seen to the paradym in the last decade or two are exactly in the opposite direction: the ever more expensive housing and even destruction of the social safety net are forcing even more people to accept bare-minimum near-slavery work just to survive.

“Most companies” is not necessarilly the same as “most jobs” since some companies (i.e. large ones) offer many more jobs than others. What counts from how much jobseekers see this kind of practice is “most jobs” so you can have just some companies doing this but if they’re the last ones, that means “most jobs” have this kind of thing. It was probably a needless distinction for me to make in that post.

I don’t dispute the point that people who are in or seeking employment should not reward bad practices like that, I’m explaining what the previous poster meant: that in the present day economic conditions, most job seekers, whilst not not wanting to reward bad practices do not de facto have the choice to do so because they’re under huge pressure to get a job, any job, as soon as possible.

Also your theory of hustling your way upinto valued roles is hilarious in light of my almost 3 decades out in the job place - since pretty much the 90s the main way to progress up the career ladder, requires that people change jobs - at least in expert areas, the average salaries of people that stick to one employer are much lower than the average salaries of people who switch jobs periodically because people negotiating a new job whilst still working in the old job, will only ever accept a better job - so their conditions will improve - whilst people in a job and not looking are seldom offered better conditions unless they at least start simulating that they’re working for a better job. I mean, it’s possible to progress without moving jobs especially early in one’s career and under good management, it’s just generally slower and harder than if just hopping jobs.

I don’t even disagree that being choosy in what jobs you take is how people should behave is they can: I’ve actually successfully done that for all but one of my job transitions, but that’s because I’m a (modesty on the side) well above average senior expert in a high demand area, hence I usually get a lot of offers if I put my CV out and since I’m well paid I have a large pile of savings to rely on during periods between jobs, and thus I can be choosy (and the only time I had to “take a shit job” was exactly early in my career, after the Year-2000 Crash, when after 6 months out of a job and running out of savings I had no other option, and 11 months later after searching for a new job from Day 1 there, I finally found a better job and moved).

Most people in this World aren’t in such a position and casually suggesting that other people act as you suggest, shows a huge level of ignorance of the economic conditions of most people out there nowadays.

The kind of wording you use on this suggests you’re in a position of reasonable properity and power in the market place as a job seeker in your area which while good for you is not representative of the median experience of job seekers out there, just like my own situation is not.

Giving like that “I’m alright Jack” “Everybody should do it just like I can now that I am were I am” suggestions to other people whilst ignoring that most are “Not alright” and not in the same position as you, is at best insensitive and ignorant, at worst insulting, which is probably why you’re getting downvotes.

I think that the point is that if those practices are for most employment places in a domain (i.e. the bad practices need not be done by “most companies”, just the largest ones) and people’s main concern is having to eat, they don’t generally have the time to look for the jobs where this shit doesn’t happen and even if they do, they would be competing for a small number of jobs against everybody else also looking for those jobs.

Or putting things in another way, your idea that somebody can simply “only go for the good jobs” fails at two levels:

• At an individual level, in the absence of clear upfront information about which jobs are good, people who are between jobs and getting squeezed by high money outflows with no inflows (i.e. the one’s genuinelly concerned about their “need to eat”), can only search for and be demanding about the quality of the jobs they apply for until they get to the point were they just have to take whatever job they can before they run out of savings.
• At a systemic level, if everybody is going for the few good jobs, there won’t be enough jobs for everybody. Now in an ideal world were people could hold on for a good job as long as it took - i.e. if people weren’t pressed by the need to eat - the bad jobs would dissapear (because they would never find any takers) and all jobs would become good jobs. Once again “people need to eat” means that idea of yours won’t work at a systemic level.

Your idea to “exclude from consideration companies that do this” only works for some people, not all people, and only those people who have enough savings or low enough money outflows to not have to concede defeat and take one of those not so great jobs because they’re running out of money.

So the previous poster’s comment of “we need to eat” neatly encapsulates in a simple sentence the reason why your idea won’t work as a general practice or even as an individual practice for most people in the present day society and economy in most countries.

Beyond that even: not all Israelis share the way of thinking of the Government of Israel.

Plenty of decent people even in a country which has for decades been heavy in nationalism, delusions of inherent racial superiority and generally Zionist indoctrination.

They’re probably the minority rather than the majority though.

True, it can be a tradeof, depending on the length of one’s legs.

Short-haul: window seat for the view. Long-haul: aisle seat for the comfort.

If you have it in a backpack you can put it under the seat in front of you unless you’re in a front seat or one next to an overwing emergency exit.

This is all officially allowed and I’ve used it plenty of times.

Escargots, i.e. snails.

It’s pretty slimy looking when people pull it out of the shell with a toothpick and eat it.

The flavour is not bad, but also not worth the experience, IMHO.

They’re better than ICE cars so provide a path for improvement on the existing installed base for transportation whilst not requiring people to significantly change their habits or large public investment.

However they’re not the environmentally best solution for transportation in urban and even sub-urban settings: walking, cycling and public transportation (depending on distance) are vastly superior realistic solutions from an environmental point of view in those areas (they’re seldom very realistic in the countryside, hence why I’m being very explicity about it being for urban and sub-urban areas).

However making cities and, worse, suburbia, appropriate for those better alternatives requires public investment (and we’re in the late ultra-capitalist max-tax-evasion neoliberal era, so it’s very much “screw collecting taxes and spending that public money for the public good”), time and even changes in housing density in many places (US-style suburbia is pretty shit at the population density and travel distance levels for realistic commuting by bicycle or public transport).

So Electric Cars are a pragmatic environmental improvement in such areas (and pretty much the only realistic solution outside them) and one where the economic elites don’t have to pay taxes like everybody else since unlike for public transportation the cost of upgrading is entirelly born by consumers.

Doing bad things (“evildoing” if we want to express it in a morally absolutist way) is generally not for the pleasure of it, but it’s simply doing what’s good for oneself with little or no limits (if one can get away with it) on how bad the consequences for others are of one’s personal upside maximization actions.

Whilst “malice” is per the dictionary a specific kind of doing bad things were one actually wants to harm or hurt others, hence that saying with that word specifically can’t be easilly turned around (especially as actual malice is pretty rare), if you use “calous selfishness” instead the reverse saying (“don’t attribute to stupidity what can be explained by calous selfishness”) is often true, especially when it comes to people intelligent enough to be able to figure out the broader consequences of their actions.

Put the seat of your toiled down before you flush if you don’t want to end up with shit microparticles on your toothbrush.

12 Years A Slave.

I was so overwhelmed with revulsion about what was happenning to the main character that I couldn’t watch any more of it.

Whilst a 100W delta seems unlikelly, a 50W delta seems realistic as the kind of stuff you have in a NAS will use maybe 5W (about the same as a Raspberry PI, possibly less) whilst the typical desktop PC uses significantly more even outside graphics mode (part of the reason to use Linux in text mode only is exactly to try and save power there). It mainly depends on what the desktop was used for before: a “gaming PC” with a dedicated graphics card from an old enough generation (i.e. with HW from back before the manufactures of GPUs started competing on power usage) will use signiificantly more power than integrated graphics even in idle mode.

That said, making it a “home server” as you suggest makes a lot of sense - if that thing is an “All In One” server (media server, NAS, print server, torrent download server and so on) loaded with software of your choice (and hence stuff that respects your privacy and doesn’t shove Ads in your face) it’s probably a superior solution to getting those things as separate standalone devices, especially in the current era of enshittification.

A NAS is basically some software running on a computer, so you can use a desktop as that computer, ideally with a light operating system (for example, Linux in text only mode).

HOWEVER: desktops are designed for far higher computational loads than needed by a NAS, plus things like graphical user interfaces and direct connection of user peripherals such as mice, so even when idle they consume a lot more power than the kind of hardware used in a typical NAS.

Also the hardware in a good NAS will have things like extra higher speed connectors for HDDs/SDDs (such as SATA) rather than you having to use slower stuff like USB.

So keep in mind that a desktop as NAS will consume significantly more power than a dedicated NAS (as the latter will probably be running on something like an ARM and have a power source dimensioned for a couple of HDDs, not to run a dedicate graphics card like a desktop has) and probably won’t fit as many disks.

If you’re ok with having most disks be accessed a bit slower and USB3 work for you (and, for example, if your NAS is on 100 Mbit Ethernet, it’s the network that’s the slowest thing, not USB3) then it’s usually better to use an old notebook rather than desktop because notebooks were designed for running of batteries hence consume significantly less power.

Frankly I would advise against using an old desktop as NAS mainly because in a year or two of continued use you’ll have paid enough in extra electricity costs vs using a NAS to pay for a simple but decent dedicated NAS.

I woukd say it’s even worse than that: Free Market only works if humans behaved in a certain way (the so called homo economicus) which has long be disproven by Behavioural Economics and in Markets with low barriers to entry (i.e. teddy bears or soap, not railways or internet service provision) and even then it can’t deal will systemic problems (basically any Negative Externality such as Polution or Greenhouse Gas emissions, or over consumption of share resources - a.k.a. Tragedy of the Commons - such as with overfishing or in depletion of mineral resources).

People have been fed by politicians and think-tanks with shaddy funding an oversimplified theory that sounds amazing if you do not at all dig into the details, whilst not actually working in reality, not even close, but of course you’re never be told that by the people who win the most from the system built on top of this theory.

(It’s actually funny how this is the Capitalist mirror of Communism: beautiful high-level theory, never worked and can’t work in practice - because people are as they are, the physical world is as it is and human systems work as they work - and the people whose priviledges come from the system created to implement said theories will never ever tell you they don’t work and never will even after a half a century experiment: in fact they’ll just tell you it’s only not working as expected because it has not been done with enough “purity” and hence we need to double-down to make it work)