• 278 Posts
  • 1.41K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 19th, 2023

help-circle


  • Fossil fuels is kinda a prisoner’s dilemma issue. Everyone cooperating to save the planet is obviously ideal, but realistically there are always going to be companies/countries that won’t. And as long as it’s cheaper to not be environmentally friendly, there’s always going to be someone taking that option.

    For example, lets say country A passes new regulations on manufacturing to be more environmentally friendly. The new regulations take the country’s manufacturing from low pollution to very low pollution. However the increase in cost causes many companies to stop manufacturing locally, and instead outsource their manufacturing to country B with low regulation and moderate pollution during manufacturing. The end result is more money leaving the local economy of country A, and increased global pollution.

    It’s a similar prisoner’s dilemma for the individual companies involved. If your competitor is able to make their product for cheaper because their process is less environmentally friendly, then they can undercut you and put you out of business.





  • Valve is doing a decent job of replacing plugins with stock functionality. Progress is a bit slower there than I would like, but many of my decky plugins have been partially or fully replaced.

    Some replaced plugins off the top of my head

    • Animation changer (although I still recommend the plugin for easier downloads of community boot videos)
    • Vibrant deck
    • Decky Recorder
    • Bluetooth (let you quickly reconnect to BT devices, but the QAM menu now lists BT devices directly)
    • Controller tools (let you see controller battery levels, which is now in QAM)
    • That plugin for managing what BLE devices would wake the deck

    and probably some more I’m probably forgetting.










  • I started working this job after Obama had already been in office one term, so I was mainly comparing the final 4 years. I’m really glad I was still in college for the first term when the economy was really rough.

    Covid did have an undeniable effect on the economy at the start of Biden’s term, and I don’t consider that his fault or anything. It does feel like we generally haven’t really recovered from it though, gas prices finally came back down but everything else is crazy expensive still. For example, I do electrical work, and a 250’ roll of 12/2 wire went from $35 in 2019 to $140 today.


  • Probably unpopular answer, but it’s not some clear cut “this political party has better policies for everyone”. Republican policies usually are better for people living in rural areas, and Democratic policies are usually better for people in cities. I’m sure people will debate this, but this is the reason why people typically vote depending on where they live. At the very least, they believe that their party has better policies for them and their way of life.

    My personal (anecdotal evidence) is that I work for a small business in a rural area, and our main customers are other small business owners (usually self employed or under 5 employees). Over the last 3 presidents, the Obama years were rough for our company, we had explosive growth during the Trump years, and then we’ve had stagnant growth over the past 4 years. Our largest competitor went out of business this past year, which sent us a lot of new customers, but we’ve also had a lot of our customers go out of business as well, so we’ve been pretty stagnant. Being stagnant isn’t terrible, we don’t have shareholders or anything, but the cost of living has increased and company profit/wages haven’t which is a problem. That said I know we’re doing pretty well compared to a lot of people here.

    Another (once again anecdotal) example is that I have a friend who paints murals full time, for the past 30ish years. He told me that he does well with either Republicans or Democrats in office, but that his customers change. During republican presidents, his customer base is usually local businesses wanting to decorate their stores. During democratic presidents, his customer base is usually towns, state buildings, schools, etc.

    But anyways, I’d be very interested to hear from some people living in cities if there’s a visible uptick in income/etc when we have a democratic president, or in general what your personal observations are on how which president affects your local businesses/income/prices/etc.