Monitors are relatively cheap these days, you can get a name brand 32" 4K monitor for around $300 - if someone busts in and steals it, the door/window repair will probably cost more than the monitor.

I guess Europeans have more friends than Americans -- I can't think of 32 people I'd invite to a birthday party, and certainly not 32 people that I'd expect to give me a €50 gift. I haven't received a real birthday present from friends (beyond a cheap gag-gift) in decades.

The biggest reason I wouldn't want a data center next door as opposed to an office building is the noise and pollution from backup generators (that may run more than expected if the datacenter has load shedding agreements with the utility)

The sea of parking lots doesn't seem any worse than the huge featureless datacenter building.

https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2026-04-2...

And others want the green lawn and big bushy shrubs, but don't want to learn all of the surface level things to make their lawn thrive so they hire a service to do it for them. And there's nothing wrong with that - not everyone enjoys the yard work, but they still want the thriving lawn and shrubs... and they are happy to write a check to OpenAI... err...Lawn Doctor every month to get that result since the time they save by not dealing with their lawn, they can pursue things they do want to do.

Not everyone wants to (or needs to) learn every detail along the way of getting the results they want.

And while the names are confusingly similar, Economy Plus is usually a seat with extra legroom (but no additional width) and is a small price bump, but Premium Economy is a larger wider seat with generous recline (but not lay-flat), and is a large price increase, sometimes approaching business class pricing.

I think mostly through placebo effect, people buy a supplement to treat condition X and they think it's getting better, so they keep buying.

I mean, just look at the wide variety of homeopathic "cures" that are often so diluted that there might not be any molecules of the active ingredient left. Yet people keep buying it.

This doesn't sound that useful without a camera unless you're using it in an indoor space where you know animals aren't going to trip it. Otherwise, what do you do when you get an alert at 3am and you don't know if it's a racoon or a burglar?

We just moved away from a condo where my wife was the only friend our elderly neighbor has - she can't drive, has no close family and few friends in the area. There is someone from the senior center that comes a few times a week to bring meals and generally check in on her, but she only stays for 15 minutes.

My wife would visit her a couple times a week and they'd spend a couple hours together. Now that we moved away, they chat mostly via text and about once a month for an in-person visit.

Would an AI chatbot be better than no one at all?

If you write a book and I take it and embed its knowledge into my product that is so pervasive that no one needs to buy your book any more (and I don't even credit you so no one knows where that knowledge came from), to you really still have what was stolen? And I didn't even buy a copy of your book to copy it.

You can, but in practice most people don't. And I can understand why -- it's inconvenient to have to plug in after every short trip, and the short electric range of most PHEV's means you do have to plug in after every short trip.

I plug in my EV around once a week, and it's more convenient than going to the gas station, but I'm not sure I'd want to have to plug it in every time I come home from even a short trip to the supermarket.

Don't those splitters typically have an amplifier, so become a single point of failure?

If you're going through the trouble to have multiple time servers on your network, you probably want to make sure that an amplifier failure doesn't take them all down at the same time.

Some reports are already saying that global warming is progressing faster than predicted... maybe we're on an exponential slope to higher temperatures and don't know it yet.