For home use (and small uses at work) I’ve found cyberpower to be cheaper than APC and yet work as well. You’d likely need to get a model with a network card option, and that’ll cost more I think. I’m not in EU though, so IDK what model would meet your needs and price point (which seems pretty low to me for a network enabled UPS).

Dells IME just suck. YMMV. Compared to the T480 it’s more portable and lighter.

The Carbox X1 Gen7 is probably a decent choice, but it will depend on the specs - get at least an i5, and max out the RAM to 16GB - you can’t add it later, so make sure to buy one with the 16GB.

I guess not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good would be a fundamental different value. I used to think just pay for what you want because being a customer should lead to better results. The last 10 or so years has disabused me of the notion - so many companies are plenty willing to lie to us or treat us horribly and charge for the “privilege”.

My main point is you seem to be saying “Advertising driven journalism is worse than pay for access journalism.” I’m saying “citation needed” - given how cable news and online sites are such echo chambers now (and widely accepted and studied to be so). Even more concerning is the drift of podcasts, substacks, and youtube channels that rely on donations or subscriptions to ever more extreme areas in “audience capture” where advertising has been less a direct driver than broadcast news. This leaves me wondering if the traditional broadcast media like ABC/NBC/CBS isn’t less prone to conspiracy theories, outright lies, and also more likely to be willing to show me something I don’t want to hear because I’m not directly paying them.

Also sites like https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/ and https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ tend to rank traditional “boring” sources as most factual and least biased, especially local broadcast affiliates local newscasts. I.e. pretty traditional advertising driven news a la the 1980s.

Maybe you dispute factuality rankings and bias rankings. Maybe you think conspiracy theories or shows like “The Daily Show” or Tuckers twitter show are better than choosing not to cover some topics that you feel they should have covered.

I just think today it’s far harder to bury a story - if you want to hear about it, someone is commenting. But it’s far easier to flood the zone with bullshit, and the incentives with pay for access media seem to encourage being like Joe Rogan and not Barbara Walters for instance.

And maybe your entire point is there’s no good solution and news was worse in broadcast times vs today. I might agree with the first except for that means giving up on getting any news at all and I disagree on the second. It’s also why I think having both currently known workable models as alternatives may help - the paid news sources will not be able to as easily be pressured by advertisers or the government funding to not cover topics and the advertiser sources will be more incentivised to report mainstream and boring news than the pay sites.

The sales people are cons, but the idea has merit but not to make money. You’re probably not going to rent it out for a profit.

Where it has merit is if you do the research and understand specifically that the concept can work for you, and take the timeshare off someone else in the secondary market it can save you a lot of money, but only in specific situations.

There are good and bad systems and locations. You want to optimize on those.

You also have to be someone who will go on week long trips multiple times a year and have a life that let’s you either lock the dates in firm 9 months to 13 months out (depending on system) or can go in 30 days or less to what opens up last minute.

And you have to want to go to resort locations like Myrtle Beach, Orlando, Las Vegas, Smoky Mountains, Hawaii, Breckenridge, Branson, Williamsburg or California.

Oh, and you’ll want to be ok with 3 star locations without daily maid service.

The upside is you can often stay in 2 bedroom suites with full kitchen and laundry with pools and hot tubs and arcades and mini golf in various amazing locations for about 1,800 dollars a week or less. Sometimes much less. If you’re comparing 2 hotel rooms at today’s prices that can be very cheap for 7 days. The average say Hampton Inn is close to 200 a night per room, so at the higher end of 1,800 you’re still 1k less for the week.

And I’ve hit sales in the less demanding seasons for as little as $550 for the week. But of course if you’re looking at Hawaii in season you might be at the higher end of 4k for a week cash, and technically the sky is the limit. This is where knowledge and planning comes in because you can pay for a week in say Florida for 1,600 every year, but trade that week with one that in Hawaii that goes for 4,000 much of the time. You just have to beat everyone else to the trade which is what the planning is for.

I am not a salesman just a so far happy “owner” going on a lot of trips this way by “sams clubbing” my vacations and paying ahead for some.

If you do want to learn realistic costs and nuts and bolts - tugbbs.com can teach you a lot for free.

And the direct pay model has plenty of audience capture or the well known yellow journalism issues. IDK it seems to me like ABC of the 1980s was more trustworthy than cable news or social media of the 21st century. Lies of omission are better than straight up lies imo - no documentation is better than wrong documentation.

I mean people also say you’ll grow up from being a liberal so lol. I presume it has a lot to do with why you have a particular political position and if you’ve actually thought it out at all.

I find it fascinating that you have no preference between the candidates. Do you really think it won’t matter which wins?

I hoped so in 2016,but then we saw what happened after that.

You should worry about audience capture / gifting from the patreon model for journalists. And the government control from public funded.

Idk the answer, but ads did give us more less biased news in broadcast news for a few decades.

I think we all have some things that we either don’t talk about to maintain relationships. Of course usually thats respected by both sides.

Do they care that you call them out? Do you dislike doing it? If neither happens it can be useful for people to realize they’re not necessarily holding a position that “everyone does”. It’s useful to be taken out of your bubble I think, and to see “regular people” can have different positions, and maybe try and understand why they do. It might change someone’s mind.

If course if they or you get worked up by the discussion and no one is getting anything out of it, no one is even ‘agree to disagree’ and it’s just causing everyone stress… Then you need to clearly lay out that you don’t like those sorts of comments.

If they ignore you, then you need to decide how much you want the relationship. You could say “I’m serious about these comments. If you don’t want to stop then you need to decide how much you want to see or interact with me. Because I am willing to just avoid these discussions, but I will not keep hearing these comments, and will stop coming.”

Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.

I don’t know how important this is to users of Vivaldi, and I don’t know how good Vivaldi can make their blocker by middle of next year, but this may force me to Firefox. Or maybe someone makes a local proxy like in the old days to do ad blocking Idk.

Probably just so you don’t accidentally waste time unknowingly rereading a book.

Ehh. That’s like accident billboards. I maintain that most people don’t know they can block ads, and a large part of the masses who have heard of it think it’s complicated or too hard for them.

With ad blocking I have a small tension that if I know a sort of thing exists, I presumably will find it when I search for it. So I don’t want another vacuum ad.

If I don’t know something exists then I have to stumble on it somehow.

The bigger problem would be if they didn’t block their own ads. I honestly didn’t even know they did ads so my blocking, of which they’re a part, apparently is working.

Usenet is hurt a lot by takedown notices unfortunately. So lots of older popular stuff doesn’t work. That said, things like Anime or something that isn’t given a takedown seem to be on there about forever. The server speed is a benefit for sure.

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.

I have found that you usually have to go to a specialist forum or the like and spend a few months reading it and asking questions etc. Rarely has a community steered me wrong. However they also usually point to expensive or specialty products. Mass market is usually mediocre at best.

Sometimes though there are deals like Harbor Freight hand tools or their higher end power tools.

I am in NY upstate but travel around the east coast semi frequently, and was kinda thinking about online options too.

Not so much chrome, but many browsers (like my favorite Vivaldi) are chromium based. I wish they’d just keep uBlock going in the chromium rebuilds, but IDK if that’s possible. Seems like it should be to me though.

Also, we switched at work from Firefox because somehow they broke system level updates a few years ago, and nothing I could do was able to figure out why their installer stopped working without first having someone run the uninstall graphically to update to the new version. It would just say Firefox wasn’t a valid windows exe till I manually removed it. And even the Mozilla Enterprise list seemed flummoxed. Honestly, I think they should have reverted the installer change, or even just use a standard installer that doesn’t have this problem, but hey.

Really only if you eat a lot of rice. For once a year or so, a pot on the stove works just fine. The actual benefit I’ve see for ricecookers is how well they can hold the rice for hours ready to go, but that’s more of a commercial benefit I think.