That’s some quality plausible deniability right there. Flared base and everything.

That’s definitely ending up in someone wearing a dog collar…

Yeah, that’s certainly one odd aspect. Also, there’s a ton of other methods to handle labour shortages. Like activating underused groups, such as women. Or offering retraining so people can switch to different jobs. And higher pay for sectors with shortages doesn’t hurt either, considering the already very low pay in Greece.

Running your existing workforce ragged is NOT the way to deal with this.

But hey, maybe we’re missing some cultural or political piece of the puzzle as to why they went this route.

The Greeks are insane for going along with this. Revolutions have started over less. Clearly their politicians no longer have the best interests of the Greek people in mind.

Here’s the way I see it: to most people, that word is not linked to a disability. It’s just a word to describe bewilderment or exasperation at someone, something, some situation. It’s not intended to be hurtful.

I have a disability as well. I see about twenty percent of what normal people see. I’m pretty much blind without my contacts or glasses. I don’t get offended when someone uses terms like ‘short-sighted’ or when someone says ‘are you blind?’ to someone else. We also use seeing metaphors quite a lot if you pay attention to them. I’m not offended by it, because I know the language is not intended to offend me.

I’ve also worked with people who had actual mental disabilities. And trust me, most of them know damn well when something’s intended as an insult or when it’s just metaphorical use.

Airbus is Ableist!

Thankfully i haven’t had any bad experiences like with that chair. Even as kids, we were always very specific with the gifts we wanted. Parents likewise. Mom will straight up just send me 10 items she wants for mother’s day or her birthday. That suits me just fine.

Buying things that fit someone else’s interest is tricky at best. I have very specific hobbies and interests. Usually, if it’s ‘cheap enough for you give as a gift’, it’s certainly cheap enough that I’d have bought it for myself if I wanted or needed it. It’s also difficult for people outside of that interest to judge what is a good value or what an item might cost. I.e. to me, a 50 dollar dildo sounds expensive. It’s a piece of rubber after all, how much can it cost? Most casual people wouldn’t know that a thing like a 250 dollar dildo even exists. So while they think they’re doing you a favor by buying something they consider ‘expensive’, it might not be what you want or need.

Gift cards are just silly. It locks you into a specific store and some cards even expire or are otherwise really inconvenient to use. COMPANIES really love them though - because people just don’t always use them or let them expire. That’s free money for a store, and a wasted gift…

Ironically, personally I do like to give physical gifts. But I only do it when the person has no gift expectation and only with items that I’m personally familiar with. For example, interns at our company always get a really nice pen when they depart. I like to tailor the specific pen to the intern, based on their writing habits, favorite color, etc. Usually I give people Lamy Safari fountain pens or rollerballs, in their favorite color. It’s a way for me to introduce them to a hobby that I like, while also being a meaningful gift. After all, everyone can use a good pen, right? You might not buy one for yourself, but you’ll certainly enjoy using it.

Seriously though, it’s pretty much the best gift you can give if you simply don’t want to pick the wrong thing. Which is much, much more likely to do if the recipient doesn’t outright tell you exactly what they want.

If someone wants to buy me a physical gift, I always give them exact suggestions: buy x, version Y. Shop at this store, pay no more than Z for it. That way it’s pretty much impossible for them to fuck it up. Can’t get it done? Give me cash instead.

If it’s acceptable to give a gift card, it’s acceptable to give money as far as I’m concerned. It’s the universal gift card without the restrictions.

Guess I should stock up while I can huh?

I’ve been a RPI fan since the beginning and have used their boards for all sorts of projects and tinkering. But it’s hard not to feel like it’s losing sight of what made it attractive in the first place: low power and low priced computing. It had its charm in buying a Pi Zero and just chucking emulators on it and handing them out to folks who might want to have a go.

But with the more expensive, more powerful hardware you just can’t really use them for things like that anymore. Just too expensive and too much oomph for the use case.

We’ll see if the company finds its way. But this usually isn’t a good sign…

When you can pack the peak amount of players into a decent sized ballroom, that’s never a good sign for your game’s future.

At this point they’re probably better off just refunding buyers and shuttering the game entirely. Doesn’t feel like this is a salvageable situation.

Fuck ban-happy Reddit and its IPO shenanigans. That place is a dumpster fire that I wouldn’t piss on to put out.

Welcome to Lemmy. It might not be perfect, But At Least We Aren’t Reddit ™

My brother in Buddha… how about we don’t do that.

That’s awesome! I got back into LEGO as an adult in 2012 when they released the first VW camper.

On mine that panel seems pretty secure, though it is a bit finicky to attach. Might want to check if it’s properly attached.

Recommendations are tough; LEGO makes so many awesome sets. It also depends on things like budget and space. For example, the Concorde set is awesome, but also quite large.

Personally, I really like their modular sets. Larger, very detailed buildings like a hotel, jazz club, bank, etc. I’ve collected most of them so far.

There’s also a lot of cool new soace sets, in addition to the galaxy that you’re familiar with. I’m really looking forward to the lunar rover that’s coming out later this year.

A good site to follow for LEGO news is Brickset.com. That way you can get a feeling for any future sets that you might like. Some can sell out pretty quickly; lots of us adults love LEGO ;-)

That’s an awesome set; the Polaroid OneStep SX-70 camera.

https://www.lego.com/en-nl/product/polaroid-onestep-sx-70-camera-21345

It actually has a really neat feature where you can push the red shutter button and it actually pops out a cardboard ‘photo’. They tweaked it to perfection; it doesn’t shoot out fully, but instead sticks out just partly like the real camera. They went through a lot of iterations of that mechanism in order to get it just right.

It’s an awesome set for photography nerds.

That game is dead to me. I really loved it when it was actual humans playing, but I checked out years ago when the bots started taking over. Some days you couldn’t get ANY actual match in, since bots would straight up vote-kick you off.

Valve doesn’t seem to really care or they would’ve fixed it on their own. So I doubt a petition will have much effect.

The best strategy when it comes to expensive niche lenses like this is: save up and buy a good used example of a lens that won’t limit you and will let you grow as a photographer. There’s always people selling gently used lenses because they either don’t use them or they’re switching systems.

I’ve always bought better lenses and gear than I needed at the time and never regretted it. If you buy a cheap lens, it often comes with tradeoffs that the expensive lenses don’t have. If you buy a good lens - especially dumb, manual lenses like a tilt-shift, you can always use them on other cameras down the line or sell them to another eager photographer without losing a lot of money.

Owning niche gear like this is kind of its own joy anyway. It’ll let you do and experiment with things that others can’t do. You might not use it every day, but you’ll be ticked pink to use it when you can. I can’t really tell you what I paid for some of my specialty gear, but I can damn sure tell you about how much I smile when I use it :D

The one in the video is a Canon TS-E 90 - that’s a 1000 bucks USED. And that’s not really what you want if you’re going to be doing landscape stuff. You want the TS-E 24 for a much wider field of view. Those are even more expensive.

You CAN however buy cheaper, new lenses. Brands like Laowa and Samyang produce tilt-shifts that cost less than half of what a Canon costs if you really want a new example.

That said though… anything in photography is expensive anyway, and these are niche lenses. They do some things that other lenses really can’t, like this magic trick. And while you can replicate some of its effect digitally - like the miniature effect - the best way to do things like that is always in camera. If you take a good shot to start with, you’ll alsways have a better end result.

I’m personally looking to buy a TS-E 24 one of these days, assuming I find a gently used - and gently priced - example.

You CAN in fact more or less do this for real: photographing a mirror from a straight on perspective without the camera visible.

https://youtu.be/ZlaeWRMYwGg?feature=shared

Basically, you need a special tilt-shift lens that distorts perspective to where it looks ‘straight on’ while the camera is actually off to the side or down below. If you do it correctly, the viewer won’t even notice anything’s missing.

These lenses are primarily used for architecture photography to prevent ‘leaning buildings’. They can also create really cool miniature effects. It’s quite a useful bit of gear, but also rather expensive because it’s such a niche lens.

Microsoft also had a decent credibility with mobile device OS’s. They made OS’s for PDA’s like Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Pocket PC… those were all on some very capable devices.

God, I miss my Compaq Ipaq Pocket PC. That thing was a fucking beast.

Well that’s certainly one way to kill a game. Heck, I HAVE a PS5, and I still would be annoyed as fuck by that.

Sure, you can offer to link an account for things like progress tracking. But it certainly shouldn’t be forced on anyone.

Well, here in the Netherlands we definitely need far more energy in the near future. We’re moving away from natural gas for heating and fossil fuels are going away in favor of electric vehicles. Add in things like heat pumps, more people getting airconditioning, data centers and other growing energy needs.

Basically, right now we have ‘just about’ enough electricity available, but soon it won’t be. We already import quite a bit of energy from other countries, which makes us inherently vulnerable.

Nuclear plants are expensive and take a long while to build. Which is why I hold politicians responsible for not pushing them through years ago. The best time to build a nuclear plant was ten years ago. The second best time is today.