My 100% Homeoffice employee contract says different. The moment I step outside my apartment to go to a rare meeting in the office or to a client’s site, I am clocking hours. Any reasonable (so no limo or heli shuttle) travel expense (gas+deterioration as well as parking if I were to use my own vehicle, tickets for public transport otherwise), I note down and hand in to the company at the end of the month so I get reimbursed fully.

If you have to travel to do your work, it makes sense for the company to have to pay for it. On the flip side, companies might prefer hiring people living in more convenient, closer locations to their business than rural farmsteads. Which on the other hand makes sense as well, reducing time and energy waste, imo.

Does step data just mean the number of steps (and timestamp, I assume), or do you actually track the routes walked, which would mean gps coords/ tracks.

Cause the first is much less invasive and problematic than the latter option.

But they might still have some charge left that you might need for that particular remote that can run on low charges longer than others in case you run out of actual fresh batteries because you forgot to stock up on actual ew ones. Maybe. Which probably won’t actually happen in the next decades, but it might, and boy, will you be sad then, having thrown those valuables away!

The high end PC part market, especially GPUs, is heavily controlled by scalpers as well, similar to brand new consoles.

Just a minor correction: the 100$ one time deposit cannot be reclaimed manually. Instead, it gets automatically returned once your game hits 1000$ in sales.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/appfee

The purpose of this fee is to block low effort automated scam games from misusing the shop.

Many successful indie devs have voiced that the 30% is actually impossible to beat for them if they tried other distribution approaches. Some even closed down their existing alternatives including self hosted shops which would grant them 100%, simply because the overhead costs ruin the percentage for them, plus a whole lot of time and effort that have to go into maintaining that.

Yes, steam has a very strong monopoly position on the games distribution market. That is problematic for all the usual reasons with monopolies. What makes steam unique is that the company behind it, Valve, has demonstrated in all their efforts that maximizing short term profits is not necessarily their prime directive. This can obviously change at any time, so being wary is always good, but convenience is simply extremely attractive to everyone involved, devs and customers alike.

The Germans never got even close to where the sphinx is located in WW2. The Allied stopped the Axis advance in North Africa hundreds of kilometres west of there.

Japan had a lot more wood-only city buildings back then compared to the colder climate in Europe, where more massive stone architecture was common. In Europe, cellars are also common/default, unlike in Japan.

During high heat firestorms, most of the wooden material burns up and the ash gets carried away. The photo definitely shows cleanup and very likely was not taken the day after the bombing, but a single firestorm definitely can produce these results, much like other examples in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Würzburg,… Except those had much more stone rubble standing afterwards.

“self-Determination” and “decision-making” are conscious, complex processes. A single cell is incapable of that.

On the other hand, how do we as humans form decisions? We use sensory input from various organs, process those by combining with existing knowledge/memories and form decisions based on that. But in the end, it’s still all based on “chemical and mechanical reactions”.

You quickly get into philosophical territory there: is our conscious self more than the sum of all the processes in our brain? Is there some extra “spark” that allows true self-determination, or are all our decisions a given result of the exact state of our brain and body?

Why do you consider telegram private? It’s a pretty bad option for that. They are only using true end-to-end encryption when using the explicit “secret chat” feature, which is limited to one-on-one still, afaik.

“Normal”/default encryption gets resolved on telegram servers, so your clear text messages are sitting there for them to do whatever they want. Given that telegram is based in UAE and has knownRussian management influence,I’d be extra hesitant.

It also is for-profit and closed-source for the servers ( only clients are open source), so nobody knows what the servers really do.

If you care about privacy, go use Signal or any Matrix-based messenger such as Element. Especially because they lack zero of the comfort and usability that Telegram offer, but are much more secure.

Inherited a Hilti Hammer drill from my dad that was used for basically everything in construction and demolition he ever did since before I was born - around 4 decades ago. It was and is the tool he and now me always go to when cheaper drills can’t deal with the problem. Be it hammering through super massive concrete walls or enduring hours-long destruction sessions, it just does the job.

Nowadays it looks like a utter piece of junk that got tumble dried with rocks, but it’s as reliable as on day one.

But it’s not really true. Switzerland has no naval branch of its armed forces.

It has a dozen or so of 10t patrol boats armed with a single 50cal MG for its lakes, and those are organized in a single motor boat company, which is staffed and manned by the military engineers branch.

Their duties are supporting the border guard (police) on the lakes against trespass/ smugglers and assisting (civilian) search& rescue.

People tend to vastly overestimate the impact of radiation and fallout. Even the by a very large margin worst nuclear disasters, Fukushima and Chernobyl, have not killed more than 100.000 people. And especially Chernobyl, with the reactor core being openly burning while melting down, generated immense amount of highly radioactive ash and dust that was deposited in the area.

Nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear devices which have been the mainstay since the 1950s, excel at using almost the entire nuclear fuel provided to generate raw energy. There simply remains extremely little radioactive material that isn’t fissioned or fused into stable compounds in very short amounts of time during and immediately after the explosion. There’s always gonna be some grams of material with longer half lives, but as others correctly pointed out: the longer the half life, the less radiation per minute it generates. And even this remaining radiation can easily be contained when the weapon is detonated underground, which was the norm after the 1963 partial test ban treaty.

Most of the classic big financial tech mainframes actually run on COBOL, at least in Europe. Though even those are very slowly being replaced, mostly by Java. Still, freelancers with COBOL specialty do rake in huge sums. It’s not only about the rare tech skills ( COBOL isn’t worse or harder than other languages, it’s just old and thus simple), it’s about having those skills combined with a sufficiently high security clearance.

It’s more of a political statement, same as the Soviet missiles on Cuba and Pershings in Germany during the Cold war. As such they carry great strategic value.

Everyone wants cheap cars, but that’s not what this is about. This is about fair and competitive markets and products.

China heavily subsidizes their car industry. Actually everyone had been doing that, but currently China is doing it more.

Subsidies become a problem when they don’t serve to make necessities affordable in-country, but are used to boost sales in foreign countries, while hurting their local industry.

Now you might conclude that “why don’t we just subsidize or own manufacturers more as well so cars get as cheap as China’s?”

Well, where do you think the money for subsidies comes from? Taxes. So in the end, it’s just another scheme to make the general public pay for things that only part of the population needs, and it reduces pressure on manufacturers to innovate, leading to stale products. Which is a big reason why Western car companies are not competitive: the West has done exactly what China is doing now. We have subsidized the car industry massively in order to push or products into the global market. Those subsidies were considered worth it, because it created a trade surplus, effectively meaning wealth is transferred from the global market to mostly the car industry leaders, and a bit of it trickling down to workers as well.

After a while, the subsidies lead to corruption, inefficiency and lack of innovation, and the bubble bursts. That’s how you get histories like Detroit. Equivalents exist in almost any Western country.

A means to protect against subsidized products ruining the local markets is to impose tarrifs. The US has many of those, not only against China, but also against EU companies, especially in the car market. See chicken tax. American car manufacturers were so far behind after decades of heavy subsidies they couldn’t even compete with European cars ( and apparently still can’t, given that the chicken tax and similar tariffs still exist). In the end, tariffs run the same risk as subsidies: over time, a protected market means the industry can get lazy and keep selling the same, because competition is forced out of the market. Tariffs and subsidies are never a viable long term solution. Both can only serve strategic purposes: either providing actual essentials to ones population or nurture change ( eg subsidized regenerative energy build up) that only exist for a limited time. Tarrifs can be used to protect strategically important industry: e.g. military or technological cutting edge tech where you don’t mind paying extra for the privilege of maintaining in-country know how and manufacturing abilities.