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New Zealand turns to the right | The populist National-led government is undoing many of Jacinda Ardern’s progressive initiatives, including environmental protections.
  • There usually has to be a lever for the far right to use, usually rampant economic inequality. Ardern never really addressed the fucked up housing market in NZ, which was the perfect tax free investment vehicle for those with money. Deny people the right to get their own place and move on with adulthood and you have a pretty big lever that the far right can use to fenagle their corporate sponsored anti environment bullshit with a dash of fascism into power.

  • It's painful to not be able to see everything at once.
  • I went from 3 to 2, as I went from 2x24@1080p + 1x34@1440p to 2x32@4k. I the jump to 4k with such large screens meant I have a massive more amount of usable screen real estate especially as I do not use any scaling on the screens, although I do marginally increase the font size. I can manage six windows per screen all neatly tiled as long as its not my IDE, that I need a good 2/3rd of the screen to actually be useful for me.

    It would be unmanageable if I tried to do this without a proper tiling window manager though, I use Sway. I particularly like how the virtual desktops work on Sway as I have separate virtual desktops per screen, makes them actually useful for me. Typically I have two per screen, IDE/Terminal and Discord/Signal/Music, Multiple Browser windows and Email/Teams/Office.

  • Parents, how do you manage summer breaks, who takes care of your children when there is no school?
  • WFH, summer kid camps that did free or cheap activities during the day, friends who also had kids (returning the favor another day), relatives (mine were extremely unreliable), and all else fails paid child care.

    My relatives were absolutely useless for childcare. Its fine if you don't want to look after your own grand children, just say so. But under no circumstances repeatedly say you will have the grand children then back out on the last day, many many times.

  • Can Biden be replaced as Democrat nominee? Who could replace him?
  • They do far too much of it's their turn in the big chair and not enough who is the best candidate. They cannot see past Trump as an absolutely terrible choice and think anyone else would be the automatic winner like 2016 didn't just happen because of that shit.

    Macron is going through the same bullshit, thinking that the electorate would rather support him than literal racists. Guess what fuck nuts, the electorate is about to call you on that, as dumb a decision as it is.

  • Begging for all the Lemmy Audiophiles recommendations on computer speakers!
  • Normal hifi gear, particularly second hand can sound way way better than generic computer crap. However normal hi-fi speakers are designed to work best a certain distance from the wall **and ** a certain distance from you. These distances vary between speakers but it is important to check this before spending any cash as some speakers need to be many feet from you, which isn't always remotely practical for most pc setups.

    I went with Dali Minutes for this reason, so they can be right on the wall and really close to me. I paired mine with a Rega Brio amp and RME ADI 2 USB DAC, then added a monitor audio sub later.

    Most proper studio monitors are designed for near field listening they also make a good choice although they can be a little clean for some people's taste.

  • How far in advance do you usually plan vacations?
  • So big vacations we typically plan two to three years in advance and book as soon as the booking opens for the parts of that holiday. Usually means flights about 12 months before, accommodation usually a bit before then. Something like Disney or a sailing holiday we can book two years in advance as an entire package, which in the EU means we ATOL protected, far safer that far out than booking separate. I have terrible anxiety when booking lots of individual components like a backpacking holiday in Japan that had us staying in half a dozen hotels/apartments, hiring a couple of cars, getting internal flights, prebooking tickets to Sumo and Ghibli and so on, but its essential to get the best prices.

    We are still paying for a family holiday in a cottage or villa as our kids are still starting their careers. This I book a year in advance, but we plan the locations far in advance of that and scope out where we want to stay.

    As we work from home we can work from our van a fair bit. Earlier in the year we did a tour of wales over three weeks while working part time, later this year we are doing a three week tour of Cornwall/Devon/Somerset. We also get away a few long weekends around the bank holidays. As we stay at adult only sites that are very popular and will sell out quickly around the dates we want to go, these are booked as soon as booking opens for them, usually October the year before.

    Booking early gets us far better pricing and we get to go where we want, stay where we want. Plus the planning and research is a big part of the enjoyment for us, its also essential if you want to make the most of a planning heavy holiday like Japan or Disney and not pay through the nose to use a quality planning service.

  • EU accuses Microsoft of antitrust violations for bundling Teams with O365
  • They used it to give away Teams to existing customers then force through price rises later by adding functionality behind additional licenses. They also leveraged Teams to sell a significant amount of conference room equipment that was running Skype Teams. Its likely Microsoft will start to use the embedded Teams usage to push up prices of their core M365 licenses, E3 and E5.

    Its also heavily tied into Entra, Exchange, and SharePoint Online as its really three raccoons in a trench coat so its hard to fully use Teams without using those products, which must also be licensed, usually via a E3 or E5.

    The timing of it being coincidentally when COVID hit meant everyone wanted a chat and meeting product, so good fortune paid a part as well. Also a lot of organizations wanted off Skype right around this period, so really fortunate timing.

  • US Olympic and other teams will bring their own AC units to Paris, undercutting environmental plan
  • Greece is too warm now for summer games, it's significantly hotter than Paris right now and can hit a sustained over 40c without much problem. Paris isn't great in the summer but it's better than Greece. If we want one location to host the games during the summer then I pick Bergen, significantly cooler than Paris.

  • What is your favourite shell to use
  • I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It's not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that's way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.

  • Hamilton: Silverstone needs to stop F1 ticket prices rising too much
  • Cost is high due to the high cost to FOM to be on the calendar and a lack of government subsidies, lots of other races get a big hand out. Its rare for this race to do much more than break even. Silverstone relies on the halo effect of the F1 race to improve sales of track days and other events so this is tolerated.

    Ticket prices could come down if they could dramatically increase capacity, but that requires a lot more casual fans wanting to go, which requires a British driver directly challenging for the title and the circuit with its surrounding roads/parking being enlarged. Parking is better than the bad old days but its still not suitable for double the current capacity.

    Lowering prices for anything other than seat fillers means operating at a loss, they cannot afford to do so for more than a handful of seasons.

  • How One Chinese EV Company Made Battery Swapping Work
  • Renault tried leasing the batteries in EV in an effort to lower the initial cost of the car while increasing their tail for future owners. They abandoned it only a few years in as it was a disaster for their used market that got worse the older the car got as nobody wanted the ongoing cost. Only the initial owner saved money, and only if they managed to use PCP finance with a balloon set before Renault realised that the battery leased cars would be worth significantly less.

    Renault also did not like that with older cars they would be liable for the battery replacement far sooner than they planned as they (initially) had a higher percentage unusable before they had to do a free replacement vs. a normal battery warranty, made worse as a leased battery has a warranty as long as you are paying the lease.

    Renault could repossess the car if you stopped paying the battery lease and refused to buy it out. Its like any car finance that puts a lien or similar on the car, you do not own it till its gone.

  • Wells Fargo fires more than a dozen employees for faking work using mouse jigglers and keyboard activity simulation
  • Only downside with teams is that you can't accept direct teams calls while in a meeting and they can see you are in a meeting. You always get the odd person who dials before asking via chat if you are available so you don't get the chance to close your meeting first.

  • The current state of auto insurance: shit that belongs on a shady Kickstarter from 2013
  • UK you have the concept of black box car insurance that offered a substantial discount for having either a dedicated device installed into the car or an app on your phone that tracks a bunch of stats as you drive. It's as shit as it sounds as it marks you down for every little infringement such as driving at peak times because that's more dangerous. Get enough points and you can have your policy cancelled. In the UK there are knock on effects for ever having an insurance policy cancelled and you have to legally declare you did when asked.

    While you can uninstall the app good luck making a claim if you don't have it installed with data for that journey. They'd also be pretty suss with no data over an extended period of a few months.

    Worst part of these is that it's expensive to switch to a non black box policy when you can afford to as you get older and more experienced.

  • www.theguardian.com Scientists claim to have discovered secret to perfect espresso

    Researchers say dash of water added to beans before they are ground creates more consistent, tastier coffee

    Scientists claim to have discovered secret to perfect espresso

    Spoiler, its RDT

    In case people do nto know what RDT is, which they really should if they have been into coffee for a little while as it makes a big difference:

    RDT is Ross Droplet Technique, which is very much adding water to beans. Named after David Ross who came up with it back in 2005

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    New (to me) Grinder Monday

    The postman delivered a new to me DF83 Gen 1 with SSP HU burrs. Just had fun dialing it in over lunch for espresso. It is a huge step up from the Niche Zero it replaces for espresso.

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    Wug2 83a Grinder

    Very interesting grinder for those that like to experiment with different burrs as it supports both conical and flat burrs. I think only the niche zero with a 3rd party kit did that so far?

    Can't say it would replace multiple grinders with just one for me as it still takes too long to switch over but I could definitely see myself switching burrs when I change over bags once or twice a month.

    7
    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)TA
    tankplanker @lemmy.world
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