I’m so confused. Whose dishwashers are you talking about? I’m in the US, you’re describing every dishwasher I’ve ever had, except that we always hook it up to the hot water line. Our unit takes very little water, it takes hours to run a load due to efficiency features. It has a heating element inside to take whatever water it gets and keep it hot for the cycle.

I don’t really see why it’s any less efficient to use the hot water we are already heating with our water heater (which heats much more efficiently than a small electric heater would). The water originally arrives to my house cold, it has to be heated one way or another. My dishwasher is less than 10 feet away from my water heater, water is not losing appreciable heat on the way to the dishwasher.

Up to* $2k. Just for the sake of clarity.

The tax credit is 30% of the total project price, up to $2k. If the HPWH is over double the cost of NG, you’re still paying quite a bit more even with the tax credit.

Man I haven’t thought about kkrieger in a looooong time. Thanks for that!

I agree though. I think it’s been happening for years. Hardware has gotten so fast compared to where we were a few years ago. But it hasn’t caused rapid innovation like everyone thought it would. It’s just made devs lazy and we get massive unoptimized piles of shit released that take hundreds of gigs of space, require 8gb of vram and 16gb of RAM and still run like trash.

I’d love to see another era where we have game developers truly innovating and really trying to get the most out of hardware but I wonder if things have gotten so complicated that those days are gone.

That’s a good question. If I’m honest I haven’t seen UT in probably 15 years.

I think it was the cornfield chasing parts? I also recall just being super creeped out by E.T. himself. The way he made sounds, the way his fingers move, etc.

The biohazard stuff you’re talking about scared me, but I think just the sounds E.T. was making, not the guys in suits specifically.

E.T.

I saw it when I was probably 4 or 5? I had recurring nightmares for YEARS. Like, well into my mid teens. I’m pretty sure I even had one or two as an adult. I’m recovered now and I’ve watched the movie without incident, but I don’t like it and I don’t really want to willingly watch it again.

I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid and convinced my parents to let me see it in the theater when I was 6. I was so fucking terrified at the opening scene I pretended I needed to pee so I could step out for a minute.

I did come back and loved the movie though, so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

I think colloquially people have begun expanding use of the word to include anything where features or product are removed but the price stays the same.

Maybe there’s a better word for that, but I understand the parallel.

Sounds like you just had a badly made one. Not all franchises are equal.

A well made big Mac tastes good. There’s a reason it’s been around this long.

You know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese??

It’s worth trying if you’re interested, IMO.

Nothing mind-blowing (except the morning crunch wrap, which is mind-blowing). But they are pretty consistent, and have a lot more options than most fast food places when it comes to healthy-ish options.

It’s not Mexican food, it’s not even tex-mex. It’s just taco bell. It’s its own category of food. Go in without preconceived ideas of what it should be and you might find that you enjoy it.

I like McDonald’s. I know, wrong opinion.

Maybe it’s because it was an occasional treat when I was a kid, but there is something nostalgic about it. Sometimes I just want it.

But it’s definitely hard when eating at McDonald’s with our family of 4 is equivalent to eating at a fast casual place, and starting to approach the cost of a sit-down restaurant. The big happy meals are over 6 bucks now, and that’s starting not to be enough food as our kids get older. If we get a value meal it’s $8-10 each for me and my wife. So even if we go minimal, which usually results in people still being hungry, we are already at ~$30. It’s not hard to get up close to $40.

Remember the dollar menu?? I mean if we break each of those meals down to their components of sandwich/fry/drink, if we stayed on the dollar menu what now costs $30 could have been bought for $12. Obviously inflation comes into play a little bit but I’m not sure prices needed to nearly triple.

Sit down restaurants obviously have increased a ton too, but if they have a reasonable kids menu we can do it for $50 or $60 depending on the place. Yes, more than McDonald’s, but McDonald’s also has no business being that close in price.

The movie, despite being unrelentingly bleak, actually isn’t quite as soul crushing as the book. At least it wasn’t for me.

I’ve just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It’s a combo of things prompting me.

First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.

Second, it’s becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don’t want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I’m getting value. I just want actual good content.

I totally get wanting to play the game when it’s fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it’s definitely part of the experience to be on the “in” side of that.

With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don’t hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.

This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.

I don’t think this conversation is happening in good faith. I wish you the best.

But surely some land or homes have more desirable features? Should an acre of beautiful lakefront property command the same value as a dirt lot next to a dirty industrial park?

Either way, let’s say your idea for how land and homes should be valued is executable in the real world. I still don’t understand why acknowledging the way things are in reality as things stand right now is the same as normalizing it. Ignoring something doesn’t get it changed.

So what is your contention? That people should just say that land doesn’t cost what it actually costs? I don’t understand.

Is it normalizing? Or just pointing out how things are today?

It’s possible to describe reality without approving of it.

I don’t like that lakefront property is so expensive, but it surely is. I’ve been casually looking for years and I don’t know if I’ll ever afford it. And the headline is complaining about a shed selling for $225k when it’s pretty obviously the land and lakefront access that comes with it that is selling for that amount. The structure is a throw in and there’s a good chance whoever buys it simply demolishes it to build what they want.

Don’t focus only on reddit users. That unnecessarily narrows the scope of the issue.

Lemmy has significant barriers to joining that other sites or services do not have. And then once people manage to join there are basic usability issues with simple things like finding communities.

Until these core issues are solved it feels pointless to try to target users from a specific site.

Multi comms are a good idea, agreed.

As for weak discoverability encouraging tendency to gather on larger comms…I agree, but I would just add that it does require motivated and proactive users. This isn’t a given. In my hypothetical, those people started their own communities about something they like, and had a few users but not many. Do they at some point decide to give up and search for another community? Or do they just forget about it because there’s never any activity and they don’t go there? How many searches should they do without finding anything?

As a real life example of my own, I’m a Green Bay Packers fan. I wanted to find a place to take part in active discussions about the team. I joined what seemed to be the biggest community and posted a few things, commented in threads. Most would get one or maybe two replies. Often nothing. A month or two later I searched again and found a few more communities that had popped up. All around the same size and activity level. Joined them, also crickets. The members there didn’t congregate around a larger instance, they created more small instances and then all of them ended up largely abandoned.

I don’t know exactly why that is, but I’ve had this experience with other topics too. Maybe instance tagging with a recommendation algorithm that suggests similar communities in the fediverse based on the community you’re in?