I have a shopaholic aunt who is said to wear things she buys once on avg. She could open her own 2nd hand shop (or if she moved her stock to Europe she could open ~6 2nd-hand shops). Many women in my family are inflicted with this disease to varying degrees. It’s a gender-specific disease that I think men are immune to.

IIRC, the only way to get a tax break for owning a car in the US is if you do a hack of not driving straight to work but you stop somewhere for coffee then drive to work. Something about multiple stops being a loophole. But is that loophole being abused on a notable scale?

There’s also a loophole in the US where if you rent a car instead of buy one, there are some shenanigans that enable a simple commuter to write it off. But again, I don’t think that’s being abused on a large scale.

Europe is quite loose with the car write-offs. The car just has to be company-owned and from there it can be used simply for commuting to and from an office. So you have a phenomenon where a majority of cars are company cars being used for personal errands.

A simpler design is an advantage in itself but it doesn’t cover all factors (e.g. pricing).

If your closest power plant burns fossil fuels, then there’s a big inefficiency at the power plant which still has the emissions followed by a considerable inefficiency in the transmission of electricity and still some heat loss from the wall to the food in converting electric back to heat. Electric heat is more efficient if you only measure from the wall to the food. It’s overall less efficient because you have fuel → heat → steam → turbine → electricity → transmission → heat conversion (lossy at every step), when you could simply have fuel → transmission → heat. And as a consequence electric is usually more costly. Exceptionally, some regions manipulate the energy pricing in order to make electric nearly as economical as gas.

So whether gas makes economical sense depends on where you are. The prices can also swing especially in Europe due to the Russian war. Thus having both options is ideal once you consider pricing (esp. fluctuating pricing). Having both options hedges against price swings and at the same time gives you the option to choose the kind of heat you need for what you’re preparing.

power outages

Some folks live out in the sticks and have frequent power losses. Every storm is likely to cause a power outage in some remote areas where the power lines are near trees. And because those communities are small, response time is slow. So the power can be out for days. Several times this happened to someone in my family when they had a cake in their electric oven. The cake would have been ruined had they not had the option to transfer the cake to a propane gas grill.

It’s the oven, not the stovetops, where gas is most useful.

Gas ovens give moist heat which is good for baking moist foods like cakes. Electric ovens give dry heat which is good for foods that should be crispy (pizza crust). Ideally an oven would offer both kinds of fuels. Europe lacks in this regard (no thermostatic gas ovens anymore!).

Energy efficiency aside, the stovetop debate is somewhat silly in comparison because you can cook anything on either stove and adapt to the control.

somewhere that it gets cold and snowy,

Cyclist’s mantra: There is never bad weather, only bad clothes.

Especially if there were no plows.

If only plows existed.

What bug report? There’s no bug single report in particular to speak of. I’ve filed hundreds if not thousands of bug reports over the years. The post is a reflection of a subset of those experiences.

When a developer asks a tester to look at a module in the source code, that is not a consequence of a “half assed bug report”. It’s the contrary. When a dev knows a particular module of code is suspect, the bug report served well in giving a detailed idea of what the issue is.

Did I say incomplete? You’ll have to quote where you get that from.

Compare like with like. You can have incomplete code, and you can have incomplete bug reports. Neither are relevant here.

Why?

1. It’s a big database. It would be a poor design to replicate a db of all links in every single client.
2. Synchronization of the db would not be cheap. When Bob says link X has anti-feature Y, that information must then be shared with 10s of thousands of other users.

Perhaps you have a more absolute idea of centralized. With Mastodon votes, they are centralized on each node but of course overall that’s actually decentralized. My bad. I probably shouldn’t have said centralized. I meant more centralized than a client-by-client basis. It’d be early to pin those details down at this point other than to say it’s crazy for each client to maintain a separate copy of that DB.

And how would guarantee the integrity of the ones holding the metrics?

The server is much better equipped than the user for that. The guarantee would be the same guarantee that you have with Mastodon votes. Good enough to be fit for purpose. For any given Mastodon poll everyone sees a subset of votes. But that’s fine. Perfection is not critical here. You wouldn’t want it to decide a general election, but you don’t need that level of integrity.

A lot less effort than having to deal with the different “features” that each website admin decides to run on their own.

That doesn’t make sense. Either one person upgrades their Lemmy server, or thousands of people have to install, configure, and maintain a dozen different browser plugins ported to a variety of different browsers (nearly impossible enough to call impossible). Then every Lemmy client also has to replicate that complexity.

I mean, does archive.org get away with it, though?

They get blocked by some sites, and some sites have pro-actively opt-out. archive.org respects the opt-outs. AFAICT, archive.org gets away w/archiving non-optout cases where their bot was permitted.

And do I really have to spell out how Google gets away with caching stuff?

You might need to explain why 12ft.io gets away with sharing google’s cache, as Lemmy could theoretically operate the same way.

I’m extremely skeptical fair use could be twisted to our defense in this particular case.

When you say “twisted”, do you mean commentary is not a standard accepted and well-known fair use scenario?

The browser (more appropriately named: client) indeed needs some of the logic here, but it cannot do the full job I’ve outlined. The metrics need to be centralized. And specifically when you say browser, this imposes an inefficient amount of effort & expertise on the end-user. A dedicated client can make it easy on the user. But it’s an incomplete solution nonetheless.

Just like Greenpeace paves the way for smaller activist groups that can’t stand up to challenges, archive.org would serve in the same way. When archive.org (with ALA backing) wins a case, that’s a win for everyone who would do the same. Lemmy would obviously stay behind on the path archive.org paves and not try to lead.