Due to how TV, monitor, laptop, phone and loudspeaker manufacturers specify things, most europeans operate quite freely with inches. 15" laptops are still marketed as 15" laptops here, not 38cm laptops. We just got used to it.
Just dont start speaking to europeans about fluid ounces, bushels of wheat and other such weird things🙃
Have you seen Renault Master, one of the most popular work vans in Europe? Shit's huuuge inside😉 You can fit a 3-seat coach, 2 armchairs, coffee table and a floor lamp inside, along with a 100" TV.
I think Ridley Scott did it best in his Alien. The bugger is quite vulnerable to bullets and blades, but you really, really don't want to put a hole in it if you're either close range or trapped in a spaceship with one. And all the arsenal in the world still doesn't guarantee success if they're swarming you and using the environment to their advantage.
Making something invulnerable to weapons is an easy way out, making something so that you don't want to use weapons on it is much harder, but much more rewarding.
A vastly overrated movie in my opinion. Not to mention the questionable actions and decisions made by the main characters at pretty much every step, the premise of some creatures being totally immune to modern weapons (even if one is able to suspend their disbelief enough to accept the whole "surviving 20+ km/s atmosperic re-entry on an interstellar asteroid" thing) is just silly.
I mean, we've got munitions meant to penetrate the armor of a modern MBT, no organics will stand a chance, and if they do, tactical nukes are a very real thing. Although I think LORAD-s would have sufficed to deal with the bloody things. Or just set up a few Tom Danley's J5-4015 playing grindcore.
The fridge logic was strong with this one, and I didn't even make it to the fridge.
While the picture of the PCB is just blurry enough to be virtually illegible, it should also be a black-and-white photocopy of 13th generation for maximum effect.
Honestly, the best platform to play Bethesda games is PC anyway. What makes Bethesda special is their embracing of modding, and PC being an open platform allows for much, much more in that respect. IIRC, on Playstation one couldn't even use custom assets in mods, and console makers will never allow script extenders, .NET frameworks and ENB series that allow for amazing stuff on PC.
Skyrim players: "The mannequins are haunted!"
Bethesda: "Hold my beer and watch this!"
Didn't have time to go into details in my last post. I think the most important traits of technofeudalism are regulatory capture of the government and ubiquitous rent-seeking—"you'll own nothing" (I highly doubt in the "...and be happy" part).
The big corpos have realised that extracting value is easier and more profitable than creating value. Hence subscription everything including heated seats and better acceleration in cars, platform economy (Uber, Air BnB et al.). The latest Unity fiasco is also an example of a company trying to extract as much value from the game developers as possible, and it will not be the last attempt at this.
What makes technofeudalism possible is the IT infrastructure of the world (hence "techno"). Uber-like platforms and subscription services for hardware were not practical half a century ago, but ubiquitous Internet access, smartphones and DRM makes it easy today.
In short, just like the peasants in the old feudal ages had to pay to the lord to have a place to live and make a living off the land (and realistically had nowhere to go to where this was not the case), in technofeudalism you have to pay for your techno-lord corporate middlemen to have a place to live and be able to use the tools (software or hardware) you need to make a living with no realistic alternatives due to regulatory capture.
Technofeudalism is the logical evolution (I'd say end stage, but I'm not sure it can't get even worse) of capitalism. That's what happens when the 0.1% own 90% and decide to turn it up to eleven.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/09/with-nothing-on-joe-biden-republicans-move-toward-impeaching-him-anyway/ a pretty good overview of what's been going on with Hunter Biden (who, frankly, has done some shady things) and why and how republicans have nothing on Joe Biden.
It's a grift, pure and simple.
Home Assistant. If you ever want to do home automation properly, this is the way. Works with pretty much anything—Zigbee, zWave, BT LE, MQTT—while keeping things manufacturer agnostic, local, private and highly responsive (your commands don't need to go through some server 3000 km away and won't have ugly 1 second latency as a result).
DAVx⁵ and Radicale to sync contacts and calendars between devices without snooping middle-men.
Syncthing to sync any files between devices. Works remotely, too, thanks to Syncthing relays.
Navidrome for your personal music streaming service.
Debian, Docker, Docker Compose and Portainer as the backbone to run all your services.
And many others.
I think you mean social democracy. Democratic socialism is a form of socialism.