Yes and no. Historically Bitcoin had no limits on transactions, but someone realized a while back that because transactions were really cheap rich people could flood the network with transactions and that would prevent legitimate people from using the network. Therefore a limit on the size of a block was imposed, which in turn meant that Bitcoin could only process 7 transactions per second in average.

At the time that was great, if someone tried to attack the network they would quickly run out of space in the block and people wanting to do transactions had only to pay a little bit more to ensure their transactions got approved, which in turn made this attack more expensive and eventually useless.

However in 2017 Bitcoin gained popularity, and this caused an issue, actual users were hitting that barrier of 7 transactions per second among themselves, and so users began competing with each other for space on the chain. And when that happens your coffee or VPS payment is going to get a much lower fee than what someone trading hundreds or thousands of dollars can afford. So essentially Bitcoin became only usable for large trading (you needed to pay $50 for a transaction at the time).

Since that became prohibitive for most users, people stopped using it, and because of long confirmation times for people who still tried to use it stores stopped accepting it (some people don’t know this, but Steam and Microsoft used to accept Bitcoin payments).

You might think the solution is simple, just increase the limit like the guy who imposed it originally said it should be done, but that created a shit storm of people claiming that that would bring all hell on earth, and the proper solution was to build a secondary chain on top of Bitcoin so you only needed to pay the high prices once (this is what the other reply to my comment is mentioning). The problem is that for miners small blocks with higher transactions fees are waaaay more profitable, so they sided up with the fuck the user mentality (and some even say that they paid people to promote that solution).

So long story short Bitcoin is not currently usable for day-to-day purchases. Transaction prices fluctuate a lot, currently it’s “cheap” at $1.5 per transaction, but it regularly goes to 10/20 and even got to over 100 this year. So it’s no longer a currency, since no one would pay those prices to use it as currency. Bitcoin is now more of an investment than cash, it’s closer to gold in that you could use it as cash but it’s inconvenient and you’ll end up losing money.

The lighting network is bound to fail because it suffers from the same problem Bitcoin is solving, i.e. it only works in centralized hubs. Think about how a new user would come to Bitcoin if the LN was in full effect, they would need to spend hundreds to open a channel to a centralized hub, the more centralized the better so it can connect to more places, so they can ensure they have the funds and the connectivity to use the network, because channels can’t be increased, if he ever needs more funds than what he has he will need to close the channel and open a new one, and because channels might be used by third parties when routing through the network if he spends double that amount to create two channels to two centralized hubs he risks having their funds go from one channel to the other and having to go the long route for his own transactions.

Also the idea that running a node is more expensive because of larger blocks is mostly nonsense, for starters the only nodes that matter are mining nodes, even if your validating node finds an issue it has no power to do anything about it. Secondly there is such a thing as pruning old blocks to reclaim space. Third the whole point of Bitcoin is that you don’t need to validate transactions because mining nodes have incentive to stay honest, and the regulators are other mining nodes who stand to gain from others dishonesty by mining the same block they did, and again, mining nodes require lots of hardware, some extra HDD for old data is cheap in comparison. Fourth, why don’t you feel the need to validate the LN? Why just validate the on-chain stuff but trust the LN? Surely you’ll want your validator Node to process all of the LN transactions to ensure they’re valid, no? Or do you trust that the LN works? And if you do why not trust that the technology the LN is built on top of also works?. Not to mention that even in poor countries the cost of a hard drive that can hold years of data is lower than a couple of transactions on the main Bitcoin network during peak times, and a lot cheaper than opening one channel on the LN that’s worth using, for example earlier this year the average transaction fee peaked at $123 https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee so of someone wanted to make a transaction that day on the Bitcoin network they would need to spend $123 extra, that is enough to get a used 8TB HDD which should hold all of the BCH Blockchain just with the cost of a single transaction.

Long story short:

• LN has design flaws and doesn’t work
• Even if LN worked, on-chain transactions are better, less limited and more secure
• Even if those design flaws could be addressed, the main chain will still become unusable due to high cost of entry unless blocks get increased
• If blocks never get increased, popularity will be the death of Bitcoin like it happened in 2017, if someone needs to throw away hundreds of dollars just to get into the network, they’ll never do it. And because RBF people that don’t pay whatever the current tx fee is can get scammed.
• Validator nodes serve no purpose
• Even if they did running a validator Node on BCH is cheaper than using BTC
• Even if validator nodes made some difference then the LN would also need one and then the amount of transactions there would increase the need of a node to higher than what would be needed for BCH (since besides regular transactions you would also need to validate on and off channel transactions).

Because Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized peer-to-peer cash solution, which is impossible with Bitcoin with the scalability issues it has currently.

Spiritually Bitcoin’s original idea still lives on Bitcoin Cash. But it doesn’t have the popularity nor the name brand to be able to make the huge impact that Bitcoin could have made if it was usable by end users when it gained popularity.

Twinings mostly

But also as a general rule places don’t let you spend over 30% of your income in rent, 60K that you mentioned for a couple is £4186 per month, so the maximum rent of that hypothetical person is £1256. Which wouldn’t also allow you to rent a house like the one you showed, so it’s pointless. The house where a couple that earns 60k lives can absolutely be bought for close to 1 million (if not less). Whoever is living in a 4 bedroom house like the one you pointed out earns a lot more than 60k and so they can finance the rest.

That’s still a 50% down payment on that house, your mortgage payments will be a lot less than your rent. So you’ll have a place of your own and more money every month, plus be investing in your capital instead of pissing money away. If that’s not life changing for you then nothing is.

I have slack in it, because I don’t like walking around with two phones, but I have it configured to stop notifying after hours. Also worth noting that I do have a phone from the company, it’s just that I find it cumbersome to walk around with two phones.

I feel people still don’t understand how much a billion is. One Million dollars would still be life changing for most people here, but consider that 1 million seconds ago was 11 days ago, 1 Billion seconds ago was 31 years ago.

To put it in another perspective, a very bad investment would yield you 0.1% monthly. This means that if a billionaire was to invest money the worst way possible, he would have to spend over 1 Million dollars per month to ever decrease his fortune.

If you had an infinite money machine, that as long as you don’t spend more than a million per month it just keeps on growing, would you ever work? Yeah, thought so, billionaires are the same, they might have hobbies, and those hobbies might be something others consider work, but they’re not working.

I personally believe that if a person ever gets 1 Billion dollars he should receive a letter congratulating them for winning capitalism, and informing them that any cent above 1 Billion will be taxed at 99.9999% (including investments).

While I agree it’s infuriating the use of -punk for non-rebellious things, there were several other -punks before 2000s. The main one that comes to mind is Gothic-punk, which has been used in Vampire the masquerade since 91 to express the game’s gothic and rebellious influences.

Thanks, I’m checking that out, but can’t find any “add services” button. Alsp someone mentioned IONOS, which is local to me and doesn’t seem to have bandwidth limits… I was trying to find the poop and they require lots of personal info just to get the account setup, still a bit torn there.

That would be awesome, currently it’s 500GB for their cheaper option which starts at 23/year. I didn’t find an option to increase the bandwidth before completing the order. Also it needs to be deployed in NY (which would be possibly slow for me in Europe). Finally their isos are somewhat old, the latest Ubuntu they have is 20.04 (which has an EoL next year).

All that being said, 23/year is very cheap for a VPS, and for people in the US that use less than 500GB/month that’s the best deal I’ve ever seen.

Do you have an alternative to cloudflare tunnels? I’d love to hear it, because I’m also not really happy about relying on them either, but tailscale only works up to an extent because not all devices can connect to it and it’s a pain in the ass to get random family members to connect to it as well.

In the past my wrists used to hurt, my father had carpal tunnel and I didn’t want to risk it, so I switched to a keyboard centric WM and switched to a trackball. I haven’t experienced wrist pain in years, although I think it might be mostly related to the keyboard centric WM since I went back to a mouse for gaming a while back and when my trackball broke I didn’t bother getting a new one.

That being said trackballs are amazing for working on limited spaces or soft surfaces (e.g. a couch or bed), once I’ve gotten used to it I could work on the sofa just as efficiently as I would on a desk without extra monitors, but now my desk has two large monitors and plenty of space for the mouse, so it’s less of an issue.

There are a few misconceptions in your logic.

1. Force is required to rape
2. Erections are controllable

Both of them are easy to disprove, but not obvious at first sight.

For 1 consider any case where a woman might have power (not physical) over a man, e.g. blackmail, teacher, parole officer, boss, etc. Another possibility to remember are weapons or physical threats to a third party. Also you should remember that humans have a fight/flight/freeze response, so a third of humans would just freeze regardless of being able to overpower their attacker. Finally there’s also the possibility of even without any threat, even being able to think properly, and knowing that he could physically overpower a female attacker, a man might not do it for fear of legal or moral repercussions, e.g. being thought not to hit girls or believing that no one would believe that he was defending himself. In fact lots of women who get raped don’t try to fight back or escape, believing (sometimes accurately) that their attacker would worsen the offense if they did that, e.g. by killing them (even if no threat was made), it’s not uncommon for rape victims to feel ashamed and guilt about not having fought back, and by saying that men can’t get raped because they could theoretically overpower their attacker you’re indirectly saying that any woman who doesn’t fight back with all her might is not being raped either, because they could have overpowered their attacker of they tried.

For 2, erections (and even ejaculation) are physical responses, in fact you can make a corpse get a hard on and cum (some wives do it to preserve their husbands sperm). This is no different from women getting wet or having orgasms while being raped (both of which are common), it means nothing, it’s just a physical reaction to a physical stimulus. In fact lots of victims (both men and women), especially those in abusive relationships think they deserve that because of those physiological reactions. To put it in simpler terms, saying a men can’t be raped because if they got an erection it means they wanted it is like saying that people can’t be stabbed because if they bled is because they wanted the knife.

The mouse is Logitech, which afaik doesn’t have any issues (at least all of my Logitech mice have always just worked).

The drivers can impact performance worse on some games and cause glitches in others. I remember a while back getting some texture issues on Nvidia but not on nouveau (even though the performance was worse).

First of all nothing to apologize, no one should be forcing anyone to use any OS.

Secondly, you shouldn’t start with Arch, it’s a very manual process that has several small things that can be done wrong. I recommend you try Mint, Pop or any other beginner friendly distro, you can still tinker and customize them as much as you want, but you will be starting from something that works instead of having to build a working system from the ground up without knowing what that looks like.

That’s exactly the reason you shouldn’t recommend Arch for new users. New users, even those who like to tinker, don’t want to read pages upon pages of wikis to get basic shit working. They want something that works that they can tinker with.

90% sure OP installed the wrong drivers, probably because he missed some note on which to install or a configuration to switch them. Also very likely the mouse issue is related to some random udev rule or package he installed trying to solve something, Logitech mouses just work out of the box.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Arch, have been using it as my main distro for over 15 years, but it’s definitely NOT for new users, even those who like to tinker with their system, Ubuntu is just as tinkerable, but Arch you need to build up. Imagine someone saying they are interested in decorating their home and you recommend them to build their house from scratch while having nowhere to live. This is why it’s important that new users have a comfortable place they can go back if things don’t work, and if you don’t give it to them they’ll obviously return to Windows.

Linux at work and Linux for gaming are two very different beasts. For example, you didn’t mention which drivers and DE (or WM) you’re using which are the most crucial part to how games run, and both of which need to be manually configured on Arch but come pre-configured or are a couple clicks away in other distros.

There are two important quotes I would like to point out from that paper:

It is certainly clear that hand washing can reduce the risk of infections (39). However, the deposition of potentially pathogenic bacteria on the hands after hand washing to remove transient floras reduces the effectiveness of hand washing

Note the wording: “reduces effectiveness” means you should still do it, it is still effective, just less so.

These results did not differ significantly from those for bacterial colonies deposited by hand dryers from the same bathrooms when calculations of the colonies deposited by hand dryers and small fans were corrected for the times for air exposure and rates of airflow from these two sources

In other words: moving the air around is the cause, so a bathroom with paper towels that also has an air conditioner or fan will produce similar results. You know what else moves air around similar to a small fan? You when walking around, your hands are moving air and contacting lots of it.

I could reply with a study that finds air dryers to be safer and filter more bacteria, and we could go back and forth until one of us grows tired. Instead I’ll leave you with a review of several papers published on the matter where you can see that it’s not so clear cut, there is discussion around it and it doesn’t help that the vast majority of papers out there are financed by either paper companies or air drying companies (btw, kudos for citing one of the independently financed studies)

https://academic.oup.com/jambio/article/130/1/25/6726080

If you don’t want to read this, the long story short is that we don’t have enough evidence to conclude whether they are more or less hygienic:

The second question we sought to answer is ‘Are PT safer than hand dryers relative to human infection risks?’ We found no data to support any human health claims relative to hand dryers vs PT use.

And finally I leave you with another quote from this paper:

Of notable importance is the need to evaluate risks from hand‐drying activities in consideration of handwashing scenarios, given that the greatest uncertainty in hand contamination is associated with the handwashing method, and not the drying method.

In short: not washing your hands is worse than any drying method.

So you only trust science sometimes? There are contradictions on whether air dryers are more or less hygienic than paper towels. But there’s no contradictions on whether you should wash your hands.