Right - I wouldn’t benefit from such a thing either. The market exists in China probably due to the density of people living in apartment buildings without access to home based charging.

Battery swapping is common practice in China. Far as I know, these swaps aren’t for huge capacity batteries, and moreso designed for smaller ones. Takes about as long as filling a sedan tank with fuel. We could have this technology, but there’s not really a push for it.

I’m all aboard Spotify alternatives, but this post is an echo chamber of people that are far more likely to know “the difference”. We aren’t representative of Spotify’s customer base.

Most people listening to music probably wouldn’t be able tell the difference from cutting the quality down by double digit percentages. This is exemplified by the number of people using wireless headphones.

Spotify certainly could offer service on par with Tidal and similar, but being beholden to shareholders that only look at the bottom line and never the quality of the service, that executive might not be right, but they’re not exactly wrong.

Funny how a mistake in a single sentence earns vitriol on the entire comment.

Despite what I’d mistakenly wrote, I meant that to overcome inflation and see a return of double to quadruple your investment - which is what the comment starting this thread suggests as the outcome - you’d have to beat the market by around 10%.

Regardless, my point was more to do with whether someone with only $50 to spare a month is truly in a position to invest in anything or whether they might be better off saving it for a rainy day or something like that.

If someone has a few dollars to spare come month’s end, but has found themselves skipping the odd meal, that money would probably be better spent on a small grocery trip than putting it into an ETF that’ll take years to turn a profit.

Taking a step further, if the last thirty five years are any indication, that future $21k would be worth less than today’s $10k.

Besides, to overcome inflation, you’d need to average double digit returns on your investment every year for half a lifetime.

Like you say, it’s a tough decision if there’s anything that can provide you value now. Not to argue against savings, but expecting it to grow exponentially with no effort is folly.

I see your point, but I also saw Juiced Bikes go out of business last month after 15 years in the industry.

We’ve got about 2.5 gigabit up and down in my neighbourhood so we’ll be good in that department. I’m going to see if any of my group are interested. I suppose the limit here will then be how many streams my machine can handle at one time. Guess I’ll find out. I appreciate your insight.

Cheers.

When I read it, I agree with you - but when I say decimate, it sure sounds like it should mean near total destruction.

I feel odd when correcting grammatical issues in documents from my attorney. What am I paying you for?

Ah I completely forgot streaming away from home. My travels tend to have limited internet access, and so my practice is to download things we might watch through Findroid.

Given your friends have access to your library, what do you think would be required (ideally) for streaming to work without transcoding? As simple as a beefy internet connection, a 4k screen and them having a Shield or equivalent?

I only ask because I know a number of my circle use Shields already and I think the ones in my neighbourhood are all on gigabit connections. Might be worth looking into so long as I’m not in for upgrading the machine. I’m more of a set and forget person myself.

Stepping aside from this particular thread for a moment. Could you share why you need hardware transcoding?

Admittedly, I don’t quite understand what components would build a better machine as far as a media server goes, but I turned off hardware transcoding when I first set Jellyfin up on a NUC. The only issues I have are the startup speed of the app, and every now and then it crashes when loading the library and I just relaunch it and it’s fine.

I’ve assumed it’s the Nvidia Shield doing the heavy lifting as far as playback goes, because I’ve never had a recurring problem with playing any particular file. I’m starting to think I don’t really appreciate the benefits of hardware transcoding.

Echoing @Bronzie@sh.itjust.works, I downloaded the first party app right from the Play Store on my Samsung. Though I prefer the third party, Findroid, the first party app is good for the dashboard management.

When we launch Jellyfin, we are shown icons for what user, we select the user, and it opens the associated library. Similar to Netflix.

I started using Jellyfin about two years ago now, and have only encountered a codec issue here and there, but I’ve found it can be worked around by setting playback to another player, like VLC.

I wear a set of these every day, for hours at a time. I started writing what I thought would be a concise comment that turned out to be not concise. I tried to break it up because no one likes a wall of text.

To sum up, I’ll be buying another pair when my current ones kick the bucket, and another after that.

Evil was a stretch, sure. Though while I appreciate the concept of not attributing malice to what incompetence explains, I think that needs to be couched by whether or not a profit is being turned by the action.

Someone? I’m talking about having a corporation admit it’s own wrongdoing, not a specific individual.

While the company admitted no wrongdoing, it must pay $1.7 million in civil penalties, as well as $277,251 to cover investigation costs as well as to “support future enforcement of consumer protection laws.”

Why is it we allow these companies to pretend they did no evil? The penalty should have been a couple orders of magnitude higher, and they should have had to admit what they did. Obviously we don’t live in a world where both those things would happen, but we don’t even get one of them?

They surely made more than two million doing this and so the fine is meaningless. The real way to make it meaningful would be to force the admission of guilt, and then use the admission as justification to stop them from buying out the competition for 18 billion dollars.

Look how they deceived their customers, good thing they can do it to even more customers now!

“Ireland does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers,” stated a spokesperson from the Irish Ministry of Finances.

I wish the media would eviscerate these people like they used to.

Last I heard, there were proposals already put forward that would quintuple the current natural gas supply. Even though it’s more expensive than renewables.

The companies that got natural gas off the ground in the first place might not see a return on that investment for another decade or two. There’s a reason every year demand for natural gas has been going up.

Back around the housing collapse, natural gas was being touted as a “bridge fuel” that could get us away from filthy coal and serve as a temporary energy source until we got renewables up to speed. Funnily enough, what’s been built doesn’t seem like much of a bridge because there’s no plan for ramping down natural gas.

Colour me shocked.

I wrote elsewhere about the infrastructure problem, but I’ll sum up a couple things. There’s around 200,000 gas stations in the United States. If there were an equivalent number of chargers around, having a small battery would be fine. Eventually this will be the case, but you highlight an important factor: closed ecosystems. All these chargers should work for any make of EV car.

As it stands with now, the need for a subscription or specific car or unique payment method is ludicrous. All these chargers should be required to have card readers the same way you can pay at the pump in a gas station. Beyond this, they’d all need to adopt the same charging method so people don’t need a bunch of adapters in their trunk.

That said, there could be regulations established to require newly built housing, apartment buildings included, to have electric vehicle charging infrastructure - and more than just a few plugs. Grants could be made available for retrofitting existing buildings. If these things came to fruition, we wouldn’t need two hundred thousand charging stations all over the place. It’s not out of the question to install an overnight charging spot for every person that has an electric car - it just costs money.

Basically every argument I’ve seen against low range electric cars is founded in a charging infrastructure problem. Going to a bigger battery in a larger vehicle has significant and more costly ramifications on other infrastructure. It’s better to aim for smaller, lighter vehicles with infrastructure in mind.

That obviously isn’t their position. They don’t own the building they live in nor the business they work for.