Honestly, if you want “quick unprofessional photos” stick with a smartphone.

Standalone cameras don’t have nearly the processing or automated modes of modern phones. So while bigger sensors and better glass can get you a better image it comes along with needing to know how to use the camera and processing the photos afterwards.

That said if you still want something at a decent price I’d be looking at a used Fuji x100 or Sony rx100.

I’ve been to China a number of times and it is a very interesting place with many amazing people. A government doesn’t necessarily represent the people that live there.

That said, it is up to you and your moral system whether to visit a country with a government you disagree with.

Other’s here have covered the why’s of how China became a manufacturing powerhouse, but it is also interesting about how they continue to build things even though China is no longer the cheapest place to make things and hasn’t been for awhile.

One of the most amazing things about manufacturing in China is how extensive their supply chain infrastructure is. This allowes your suppliers to react quickly and do things in days or hours that would take weeks elsewhere in the world. I’ve got suppliers in China that I know will get it right the first time, and will build a brand new product in 6-8 weeks rather than 12 weeks anywhere else in the world. The way the supply chain worldwide revolves around China is both amazing and scary. There are many items today that are nearly impossible to get outside of China at any price.

The other thing is people. Due to the years of experience China is the place where the best tooling and manufacturing engineers are. There are so many people concentrated in the manufacturing centers that if you need to hire 1000 people in a couple days to assemble widgets then you could feasibly do that.

That said, there is definitely a push to diversify manufacturing outside of China and I wouldn’t be surprised if they lose some of these advantages in the coming years. This started with the original US tariffs against China, continued due to how China locked down during the pandemic, as well as the current round of US tariffs.

The issue I have with “leagues” is that by assigning them you are essentially reducing your potential dating pool because of an assumption. The whole point of flirting and getting to know someone is to evaluate your compatibility with each other. You can’t know whether you are someone’s exact type without interacting with them.

I’ve been surprised enough times by which women do and don’t find me attractive that I know better than to make any assumptions.

Yeah, that is the downside of dual booting, you are almost certainly going to end up learning how to chroot to fix the bootloader at some point. But dealing with a VM, especially if you want to pass a GPU also has its own difficulties.

I recommend dual booting, not a VM. It is easy enough to choose which OS to boot into if you need to go back to Windows, while being enough friction that you don’t immediately fallback to going into Windows every time you don’t know how to do something in Linux.

I don’t code, but from the gaming standpoint, things are pretty decent on Linux these days. I’ve been on Linux full time on my laptop for well over a year now, and 6+ months on my main desktop now and find very few reasons to boot into Windows. I think I booted into Windows last weekend for the first time in at least 2 months because I had to upgrade the FW on a device that only had a Windows tool. Otherwise I do have a windows VM on a server that I use relatively frequently, because the state of 3D CAD software on Linux is horrible.

I bought a restaurant sized container of the Chipotle Tabasco a few years ago. Turns out that might be a bit too much for a single person to get through in a reasonable amount of time.

Not sure it counts as hot sauce but a chili oil like Lao Gan Ma is my favourite. Otherwise when I do use hot sauce my favourites are Hot Ones Los Calientes Rojo, Tabasco Chipotle, and Secret Aardvark.

Until I got to the specific shit I thought this was going to end with a punchline about Canada geese.

This has gotten so bad in my city since covid times. I’m constantly having to go around people stopped in the middle of the walking path. Just yesterday I was walking and these two people exactly stopped where the sidewalk narrowed for a bus stop and were blocking 3/4 of the area to walk because of it. They literally could have stepped 2 steps over and been completely out of the way beside the bus stop shelter.

10+ years experience in product design here. There is nothing about a “simple” product that is cheap or easy. Say you hire a design engineering firm to design it, who is going to make the parts? Have you ever worked with manufacturing in Asia? Who is going to assemble it? Who deals with the inevitable issues?

Then you have to think about selling it. What certifications do you have to get?

That is just hardware, now repeat many of these same questions for firmware and app development.

Now you have a product, what are the customers and who do you need to hire to market and sell to them? Assuming someone is interested in purchasing it how much money do you have to pay for all the product up front and warehouse it?

There is a damn good reason why so many Kickstarter projects never actually ship. Hardware is hard even if you know what you are doing.

Obsessive apologizing makes a person appear not confident in themselves. If it is a person I care about I want them to be confident in themselves.

Additionally the more you repeat something the less meaning it has. So if someone apologizes too much for things that really don’t necessitate an apology when they have something they genuinely need to show remorse for and apologize for the apology holds less meaning.

Floorp is what I use and it is pretty decent.

I clean the earwax off/out of them when I see it or the sound is affected (I wear deep insertion IEMs with tri-flange silicone tips), but otherwise just replace the tips when they wear out a couple times a year.

I’d probably just say something non-pressuring but supportive like “I know with everything that is going on recently that things may be challenging for you right now. If you need anything please don’t hesitate to reach out to me and I’ll support you in any way I can.”

Yeah this is pretty much what I’m doing. My subscriptions are pretty much spaces about my interests that post positive content, and even then I filter out keywords for the bullshit that leaks in. Trying to spend more time reading books and unplugging from the internet. It still feels so hard to avoid the depressing bullshit though.

You don’t become a billionaire by pure luck though, you need to seek out situations that could make you rich and then you need to get incredibly lucky (unless you are born into money of course).

Being the type of person that seeks out becoming that rich is going to have to do it at the expense of others.