Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

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Thad
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Thad » Thu Jun 03, 2021 5:09 pm

Ars had an article called How to buy a gaming PC in 2021 back in March, but its focus is on pricier machines (the cheap ones are USD$1000). No help if you're looking for something low-to-mid-range.

I'm pretty solidly in the "guess I'll have to hang on to my 2013-vintage i7 for awhile longer but I should really do something about that horrible sound the fan keeps making" mode.

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pacobird
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby pacobird » Thu Jun 03, 2021 5:55 pm

My issue is that my personal PC was a laptop that has started completely falling apart because I am a terrible oaf, and for the past few months I've just been using my work-issued laptop as my personal. Seems untenable!

I have the money to burn on this kind of bullshit; it can just be my 2021 Present To Myself. But even then, uhhhhhh, everybody wish me luck at the craps tables in Vegas next week! ^__________^
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Niku » Thu Jun 03, 2021 6:37 pm

Check MicroCenter for open box deals if you've got one local; that's how we got our current PC late last year when we were trying to grab a dead-box replacement ourselves.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby pacobird » Thu Jun 03, 2021 6:55 pm

Oh shit good call
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Mongrel
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Fri Jun 11, 2021 8:38 pm



(also apparently the drug in question hasn't even been proved to be efficacious in any way)
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Grath
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Grath » Sat Jun 12, 2021 12:42 am

Maybe it's like my recent hospital stay, where the hospital billed my insurance $10,000 and the insurance company paid them $170

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Sat Jun 12, 2021 2:10 pm

Grath wrote:Maybe it's like my recent hospital stay, where the hospital billed my insurance $10,000 and the insurance company paid them $170

My first take reading that is to actually just assume you got stuck with the rest of that bill.
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Grath
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Grath » Sun Jun 13, 2021 1:06 am

"Luckily" my out of pocket maximum is $3,000, so I believe my healthcare is free for the rest of the year actually?

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jun 13, 2021 1:18 am

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Mon Jun 28, 2021 7:48 pm

Apparently Toyota has been supporting 147 pro-insurrection Republican Congressdorks and Senators because all their plants are in the South and of course are famously union-free, and these are the same Republicans they've already bought and paid for for years. Toyota ended up getting pressed on it... so they just issued a statement where they reaffirmed their unqualified support for a gaggle of shitheels guilty of High Treason.

Wheeeeeeee.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Mon Jun 28, 2021 7:55 pm

By the way, how did the craps tables go, paco?
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby KingRoyal » Tue Jun 29, 2021 4:58 pm

Mongrel wrote:Apparently Toyota has been supporting 147 pro-insurrection Republican Congressdorks and Senators because all their plants are in the South and of course are famously union-free, and these are the same Republicans they've already bought and paid for for years. Toyota ended up getting pressed on it... so they just issued a statement where they reaffirmed their unqualified support for a gaggle of shitheels guilty of High Treason.

Wheeeeeeee.


Not surprising. The auto industry (and cars in general) have a long history with fascism. With roots back to the Futurism movement in Italy to Henry Ford being a supporter of Hitler, to modern instances of cars being used as murder weapons against protestors and cyclists and the GOP attempts to legalize vehicular homicide.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby pacobird » Thu Jul 01, 2021 2:29 pm

Mongrel wrote:By the way, how did the craps tables go, paco?


Eh, nothing special. I was breaking even until the last day when I was getting bored - going to Vegas without Kris is just fucking lame, no matter how good the other company - so I finished the trip down a hundred after making a few stupid bets. The whole trip wasn't that expensive, so it doesn't really matter; I was more annoyed at how hard it's gotten to score a free drink while gambling. Generally advising to avoid the strip and hang out downtown if you go in the near future, as surprised as I'd have been to hear myself say that a month ago.

I ended up getting a serviceable HP for about 900 + 50 more for a SSD upgrade (250 GB is basically a filing cabinet these days and even 500 is pushing it; Mass Effect Remaster is 120 GB), so the whole nook ended up being about 1600. The last purchase arrived yesterday so I was finally able to set up and I'm pretty satisfied with it.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jul 01, 2021 2:41 pm

Haha, when I was doing computer work yesterday (new power supply came, yay), I actually added back my secondary HDD from my previous computer, which I'd removed thinking it was superfluous. Turns out having the pagefile on a different, fully dedicated, hard drive actually does make a very noticeable performance difference (I originally moved it just to save disk space).

Anyway, that old HDD is 250 GB and it's from a computer I built in 2006. I can't imagine using a current computer with either a HDD OR a SSD that small these days. At least not one I'd game with.

Though funny enough, my progression was 80 GB in 2003*, 250 GB in 2006*, and the current 1.5 TB in 2011. And 1.5 TB is actually... still just fine? I did a little cleaning and have like 500 GB free. If I bought a new computer today I'd get a 2 TB (SSD obv), but that's a long way off the exponential storage growth I needed in the aughts.

*Both the 80 GB and 250 GB HDDs still run perfectly fine all these years later. I got no idea what the company's like today or even if they're still around, but man, Maxtor don't owe me shit.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby pacobird » Thu Jul 01, 2021 2:48 pm

I don't typically have a ton stored on my PC so I should be fine: I was getting by with 250 on laptops for the past decade, I still have a PS4 and a Switch so there's no burning need to get every ginormous game for the PC, etc.

Bottom line is the only game I leave on my hard drive full time is FFXI and that's like 12 gigs, and my streaming subscriptions are such that piracy isn't really a pressing need for me, so I can get by pretty well with less.
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jul 01, 2021 2:54 pm

pacobird wrote:I don't typically have a ton stored on my PC so I should be fine; I was getting by with 250 on laptops for the past decade, I still have a PS4 and a Switch so there's no burning need to get every ginormous game for the PC, etc.

Bottom line is the only game I leave on my hard drive full time is FFXI and that's like 12 gigs, and my streaming subscriptions are such that piracy isn't really a pressing need for me, so I can get by pretty well with less.

Yeah, I think the big jumps in storage requirements were first music, then videos. Games have also grown steadily, but not as explosively.

Most people just stream their music and videos these days as you do. So if you're not keeping much installed game-wise, then there's really not much else that takes up big chunks of space.

I still have/grow my .mp3 collection because I'm paranoid reasonably concerned about much of the music I like disappearing or not being on streaming services in the first place, but I'm in the wacky minority there these days.
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Thad
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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Thad » Thu Jul 01, 2021 3:22 pm

I've never used a laptop as my primary. My current laptop can't run much in the way of games, so 120GB is Good Enough.

My desktops (my main PC and my HTPC) are messes of multiple hard drives, though. Typically a 250GB SSD to boot from, with at least one HDD for media and an SSD for games.

Like, I'm looking for a smaller case for whenever I get a chance to rebuild my HTPC (ideally something that will fit landscape-style in a rack; doesn't have to be rack-mountable, just something that'll fit in a 19" bay), but one of the things I have to keep in mind in buying a case is "will it hold all my hard drives?" It's got, I wanna say, 2 SSDs and 5 HDDs?

Course, I could also just consolidate some of those. 4 of those HDDs are 2TB drives smashed together into a single logical volume. I don't remember why I did it like that -- probably some combination of cost and already having a couple of 2TB drives lying around -- but there's not really any technical reason I couldn't just copy all that stuff over to a single 8TB drive now.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby Mongrel » Sun Jul 11, 2021 11:14 pm


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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby mharr » Mon Jul 12, 2021 3:44 am

"This Dystopian Biker Airbag Crash Vest Only Saves Your Ass If Your Subscription Is Paid Up"
https://jalopnik.com/this-dystopian-bik ... 1846823791

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Apparently there's a one week grace period, but this thing still relies on a stack of wireless network technologies and internet servers to decide when to deploy. A perfect poster child for the necessity of right to repair. Like, maybe use an embedded system chip for the airbag logic and work out the other shit after the event? Holy fuckballs.

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Re: Inspirational tales of Glorious Unfettered Capitalism

Postby beatbandito » Mon Jul 12, 2021 7:53 am

If Second Life has taught me anything, we'll finally get people selling +modify items when we can figure out how to make them -transfer.
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