I don’t think trust is at issue here. If the game sucks, don’t buy it! There’s millions of other games to play.

There is reason to hope Blizzard will turn around. Bobby Kotick is gone. Microsoft owns the company now. Say what you will about Windows but Microsoft tends to take pretty good care of the gaming franchises they own. I think a lot of AoE fans are pretty happy with how that’s going. I could be wrong though?

Here’s the thing: if you change the thickness of the layer then the colour will change along with it, but the material is otherwise the same. This occurs because the layers produce a phenomenon known as thin film interference. So it’s not the material of the coating layer that produces the colour, it’s the interaction between two layers.

Anyway, you can see all of the colours of a light’s spectrum through a prism but you wouldn’t say the prism itself is any of those colours. It’s transparent and refractive. That’s all we have here with the glasses: refraction and reflection, with interference of certain wavelengths due to the exact thickness of the layers.

Oh, for some reason I thought this was a driver to turn your Linux machine into a software-defined shortwave radio.

Heir apparent is one way to put it. I would argue that he used the Moscow Apartment Bombings as a false flag to install himself, just as Hitler did with the Reichstag Fire.

Both leaders (Putin and Hitler) already had a lot of power prior to the false flags but those attacks cemented their rule as dictators.

The Moscow apartment bombings were carried out in 1999. Putin used them, along with the invasion of Dagestan, to launch the Second Chechen War.

Alexander Litvinenko blamed Putin and the FSB for the bombings. For that he was infamously assassinated with radioactive polonium.

If Putin were a “good guy” then none of that would’ve happened either, so he might not have won the 2000 election.

And GhostScript!

Pandoc and LaTeX as an alternative to InDesign for book and paper publishing. Obviously not a direct replacement since they are macro languages and not GUI tools, but they are free and open source and capable of creating great looking output if you put in the time. There’s tons of free learning resources out there too.

Right, but I hope we’re able to see the difference between a working person who has investments and someone who earns the bulk of their income from investments. Similarly for real estate.

Because calling someone who works and has investment savings for retirement (such as a pension) “not a working person” is not just plain wrong, it’s extremely offensive, especially coming from a career politician like Starmer.

Sure, class is the big issue on everyone’s minds. But the remedies people often throw around are here indiscriminate enough to target the room-letter and the building ownership company alike. The tycoon and the pensioner alike.

Are you a landlord if you let a room to help you pay bills at the end of a month? Are you a shareholder if you have a pension?

Judging by the answers here, the answer is no. But then we’re talking about millions of people who work everyday factory jobs, retail jobs, or low level office jobs.

For those playing at home, try this:

Heat up a frying pan on low heat and throw some water in there. It sizzles and bubbles weakly but evaporates quite quickly.

Now heat up the pan over medium-high heat. Throw water in there and watch it turn into little marbles that dance around the pan. It seems much more violent but notice that the water marbles last way longer because they’re actually floating on a cushion of steam. This is also why they seem to fly around pan so rapidly: the steam cushion removes almost all of the friction.

This is called the Leidenfrost effect. Very high temperature frying pans actually conduct heat into the water more slowly than lower temperature ones because the steam cushion acts as an insulator.

Well it turns out if you put your hand in molten metal the same thing happens! The moisture on your skin flashes to steam and creates a barrier which slows down the conduction of heat into your skin. Of course, if you fall into molten metal you may not be able to get out. The Leidenfrost effect also doesn’t do anything to protect you from the intense thermal radiation being emitted by the molten metal!

Funnily enough, this also happens if you pour some liquid nitrogen into your hands. It dances around just like the water does in the hot frying pan. Your skin is like a hot frying pan compared to liquid nitrogen and the nitrogen gas produced is like steam in this case.

Fair enough, though calling this stuff art is a bit much. Most TV shows and movies are better described as visual junk food than art. I think a bare minimum standard is for the work to stick with you longer than 5 minutes after you finish watching it.

The McDonald’s business model is to own all the land their restaurants are on. Real estate!

That really doesn’t need to be said. Countless restaurants go out of business every day! The staff still end up having to find new jobs all the time.

The prices are going up now because all of the following are getting more expensive:

• ingredients
• energy
• rent
• delivery fees (for delivery of ingredients to the restaurant)
• laundry
• maintenance

Raising the wages of staff is another expense to add on. To the list.

Restaurants are not a lucrative business. Most barely break even or lose money. They can’t afford to pay staff more without raising prices.

A higher minimum wage for restaurant staff is going straight onto the menu prices anyway. But then customers weary of expensive restaurant food stop showing up.

Restaurants are pretty much the toughest industry to be in. The vast majority of them fail. And the ones that really succeed (fast food) don’t have tipping anyway.

The ones who are making all the money are the landlords who own the land the restaurants lease from. They don’t care if 7 tenants restaurants go out of business in 5 years. They can always find more.

My question is: why?

I’ve tried shrooms but not LSD. It was a weird experience but not unpleasant. I don’t feel any desire to repeat it though.

To me it just seems like something people try once or twice and then move on from.

How deep is that pot? To me it looks way too large for a tiny plant. I assume by first time grower you mean you’ve never grown any plants, cannabis or otherwise.

The worst thing you can do to any plant is to overwater it. When a plant is in a pot full of soil and its root system is very small it cannot absorb water quickly enough from the soil to prevent anaerobic conditions developing in the root zone. Anaerobic conditions cause root rot which will stunt and eventually kill a plant.

It’s much better to have a small plant in a tiny pot than a small plant in a giant pot. A plant that has overgrown its pot will demand more frequent watering but is not in danger of root rot. Plus it’s much easier to transplant a plant with a dense root ball than one with a ton of soil but sparse roots.

Anyway you should check the bottom of the pot to see if the soil is waterlogged. If there are any bad smells emanating from the soil at the bottom then you might need to do an emergency transplant into fresh soil in a smaller container, ideally with lots of perlite in the mix to promote drainage and aeration. During the transplant you’d want to remove all the soil from the roots and even rinse them off to get them relatively clean. Any roots that feel soft, dark brown and slimy should be pruned off so that only firm, light/white roots remain.

I thought drug testing was only done once, during the hiring process. If they’re drug testing on a regular basis that’s something entirely different. I would not support that unless the job actually required operating heavy equipment (including cars) or dangerous tools etc.

My former roommate is a drywall taper contractor and he’s told me many stories of people showing up to a job site high on meth and making a huge mess, causing dangerous accidents with tools, dropping heavy objects off unfinished upper floors etc. They definitely should be drug testing these workers regularly but they aren’t. He himself smokes cannabis but never when he’s at work. I would be fine if they tested for harder drugs but not cannabis. They should be conducting sobriety tests at work too though, as he’s also seen people show up to work drunk (though the foreman often notices this and sends them home if he’s any good).

And I’m sure the discount varies based on how much of a risk there is with each work environment. Low risk workplaces like software companies are going to have much less of a difference in risk between drug-using and non.

The thing is, it’s almost never going to be zero. And if employers and insurance companies can save a few bucks by getting everyone to pee in a cup, they will!

Personally, I don’t have an issue with cannabis use. It’s legal here in Canada and I’ve even grown it myself. But I don’t think people should be getting high at work, just as I don’t think people should drink at work (despite how amusing it is on Mad Men).

Having said that, I’ve never had a drug test in my life. Maybe it’s not a thing for most jobs in Canada.

I for one wouldn’t want to shop at a Home Depot with employees operating tow motors and other heavy equipment while high. If a customer gets killed by falling equipment while shopping then the lawsuit would be enormous. It would make the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit look like chump change.

When insurance companies aren’t allowed to mandate drug tests then they’re going to charge the store premiums commensurate with the assumption that all employees are on drugs. This would make it extremely expensive to run these stores and they’d pass the costs on to employees. This would paradoxically create an incentive for only drug-test-positive (drug using) people to work there! This phenomenon is known as adverse selection.