I am also from Germany and get payed for donating thrombocytes at my university hospital. The compensation is actually quite substantial imo at (up to) 75€ per session, which can be done every two weeks. The money is however mean to offset the time required, not the thrombocytes donated. So it is correlated to how long it takes.

You get 15€ (?) for up to 15min (if they have to abort very early for some reason or at your first visit where they just draw blood to test), 50€ for up to 1h (which equals to 1 instead of 2 pack of thrombocytes, usually done at your first real donation or if you maybe dont have enough for 2 on this particular day), and 75€ for anything over 1h (which is the norm).

Timewise the hospital is on the outskirts of the city, so most will have to travel a bit, then you have to fill out forms, have a quick talk with the doctor, and finally depending on your parameters it takes anywhere from ~55-70min to extract, during which you are tethered to a machine (which takes out some blood, then seperates out the thrombocytes with a centrifuge, pumps back the rest, and repeat).

One could get philosophical about the topic, but from a practical perspective the money makes a lot of sense imo:

• It costs them a lot of money to investigate new prospects, so you want reliable repeat donors

• Each donation already has other costs associated with it. Like for example the kit used during extraction, the staff handling everything and so on. So even those 75€ are just one more expense among many, and from donation to usage probably vanish in the overall costs.

• For the donor it is quite a substantial time commitment, especially when done regularly every two weeks. Unlike for example full blood donations you’d maybe do twice a year. And you should be reliable and not randomly cancel at the last second, so ideally it also has priority over some other things in your life.

• the small amount of blood that remains inside the machine is sometimes used for other research (if you agree to it, which i do)

From my own experience i can say that i might still do it without, but certainly not at the same frequency. And considering the time and effort required i don’t think anyone could be blamed for doing it less frequently without the incentive. So at least in this case it imo is a fair trade and net positive. Although it does also help that this is a university hospital that directly uses it themselves, rather than a for profit company.

Agreed. The difference is that the prequels were a failure in execution, whereas the sequels failed on a conceptual level.

Kind of late, since i just came around to seeing it. Some thoughts:

• I really liked the visuals and i’m glad i got to see it in the cinema on a really good screen, so more or less the best possible experience. But i agree that the Rook animatronic looked a bit off (i’d have to rewatch it again).

• As someone else already mentioned i also liked the dystopian setting of the first act.

• I liked that they were leaning more into the horror, rather than action genre. But imo unlike the first Alien movie it had a few too many jump scares and overused the xenomorphs. Where the original was able to build tension with what you can’t see, here you had a whole pack of them. And somehow they get mowed down way too easily.

• Agreed that there were too many callbacks and easter eggs, rather than letting the movie stand on its own. Especially the Ripley line was just too obvious and imo breaks the immersion into the movie.

• Not a huge fan of the third act

(also no telephone booths)

Speaking of telephone booths: With their disappearance the 2001 movie “Phone Booth” also lost its location.

I think in reality I would milk it for personal gain, but in this hypothetical thought experiment I’d also like to imagine putting it into public domain.

Yes we would certainly see a lot of trash, but I’d imagine that it would also lead to a lot of creativity. We really are hampered by the insanely long copyright durations.

Sherlock Holmes for example has been part of general culture for a long time, and yet the last novel only became public domain 2023. Considering how much the world changed between now and 1927 (when it was published) it really doesn’t make sense. And the argument for copyright that invention needs to pay also falls flat, when it extends so long even after the authors death.

I’ve had two USB C ports fail on HMD phones.

Yeah, that’s what got my HMD made, Nokia branded, 7 plus. And from a search at the time this was a common problem

Yeah it’s pretty insane, for that kind of money it better be fantastic. Although I think nowadays the link between money and quality (to whatever degree it ever existed) is weaker than it’s ever been.

I’ve always wondered, how do streaming movies make money at all? Does Netflix really make enough money to justify spending this much on a movie?

Well they certainly make enough money, last quarters revenue was roughly 9.5 billion dollar. Sure you got server costs, salaries and licensing for old content that eat up a lot, but if you are getting over 3 billion per month from your subscribers you should be able to find some budget for expensive content.

I don’t think a movie like this will be efficient in $/h watched, those will go to cheap series and people putting on their favorite comfort show in the background for the 10th rerun. But they probably still need those big tent pole movies for psychological reasons. It’s good for marketing towards new subscribers and for user retention you will need the occasional blockbuster movie. Don’t need to be that many per year, since as said the vast majority of time will be spend watching some simple stuff, but you do need fresh content for the occasional movie night. Or people will start looking at the competition that offers those and which also has plenty of mindless entertainment.

The issue is that I bet modifying the firmware will have consequences on insurance and liability in case of an accident. Regardless of whether or not one is at fault or not, and that it didn’t have any effect

Definitely not an obvious choice and it might fail spectacularly. But imo this seems like the right choice in some ways.

Instead of trying to will a fomularic cinematic universe into existence, make a variety of unique movies (hopefully good), and then slowly tie them together.

Agreed. I remember when lightbulbs got banned here in the EU starting from 2009 to 2012 in steps. Here in Germany plenty of people were mad and hoarding them.

Nowadays with the larger focus on energy prices, especially in light of the russia-ukraine war, it seems insane that not even that long ago to light a room one or multiple lightbulbs using 65-100 watts were used. That’s like the equivalent of an office PC running just for some light.

The chart also doesn’t specify what hardware the calculation is based on. If it’s “1 year to crack for your average desktop PC”, then a server farm will do so in minutes.

I think you’ll need to give some more information to receive good advice:

• What’s your budget

• What’s your use case? Just web browsing, light office work or something more demanding like gaming or editing?

• What form factor? Want a larger screen or something lighter and more compact? Touch screen/convertible yes or no?

I’m nowhere near tech-savvy so it has to be easy to use,

Easy to use or easy to repair? As far as use goes pretty much every windows laptop will be feel the same to use, same as with apple. I mean it is the same operating system, just depends on what you are used to, but neither are complicated. It’s only Linux where you have a larger variety of variants, some easier to use, others geared more towards advanced users. Bur you haven’t indicated that you specifically want to run Linux.

I want something that is built to last, as opposed to certain (looking at you, Apple) devices that are desinged to become unusable within a next couple of years.

Generally laptops aimed at businesses are more durable than consumer lines. Don’t go too cheap unless you are buying used business laptops. And if something is heavilu leaning towards thin and light, then usually it is at the expense of some durability.

Apple is actually decently durable and I’ve seen quite a few MacBooks running for over a decade while still being ok. Where they fall short is repairability, when something does break and their lowest specs paired with no real way to upgrade later (especially with the newer models that don’t even have SSDs that can be swapped) is bad for future proofing, if demands change. And they make you pay through your nose for reasonable configurations.

Sometimes it doesn’t work, especially when it is a particularly weird colour palette, but it gets it right most of the time. In that case it does have the options to make some adjustments or just turn it of for that particular site.

Dark Reader: Especially late at night white page background just burns out my retinas, no idea how I ever managed before.

Right, totally forgot about that step.

Haven’t used it myself, but similar to casa os there is also cosmos os, which looking here seems to offer some build in storage management options. Maybe this could be worth looking into?

openmediavault is ok for raid, but the containers aren’t one click wonder like in other NAS OSes

Since OMV also uses docker compose with a build in GUI to manage them, I don’t assume this would be what OP is looking for either? Unless trueNAS also comes with some repository of preconfigured compose files.

I am currently using Openmediavault for my NAS and can confirm that with an official plugin so far I havent had any issue with my ZFS pool (that I migrated from trueNAS scale since I didn’t like their kubernetes use and truecharts, but as someone mentions they seem to switch to docker).

Otherwise I am happy as well, but I am far from a poweruser.

I’ll go based on letterboxd release year. Often times it’s hard for me to judge towards which year I should count a film that might have had a limited release in the previous year, but then a wider cinema run later.

So far I’ve enjoyed:

• Dune part 2: epic sci-fi and that is exactly my jam, so thus far my favorite movie of the year.

• Civil war: Imo flawed in some ways and not quite what I expected (expected it to be more social commentary and less about war photograpy), but overall still very much a recommendation and good movie. Alex Garland has made some of my favorite films of all times (ex machina and Dredd, also enjoyed annihilation), but it didn’t reach those heights, so I’d rank it below those.

• Exhuma: usually not a horror fan, but I guess I very much enjoy the Korean ones. More direct compared to “The wailing”, which it somewhat reminded me of, but that had more of a mystery aspect.

Movies that don’t yet have a wide release, but that I already saw at a film festival:

• Black box diaries: Documentary by the journalist Shiori Itō about her own sexual assault case and her battle against the outdated judicial system and social views in Japan. Sadly I missed the screening with q&a afterwards. I found it interesting and overall well made, definitely gets a recommendation for whenever it gets a wider release later this year.

• All we imagine as light: Drama set in india. Feels like comparatively I’ve seen less movies set in India, so it’s always nice to get a view into other cultures. Overall I enjoyed it and can also recommend it to people that like this type of movie.

Also watched “the substance” (body horror) during the festival, but while decent that just isn’t quite my cup of tea.

Some movies that I found “meh” so far include Furiosa and monkey man, but there is also a lot that I haven’t seen so far.

Yeah the cast looks pretty solid, my only uncertainty in that regard is to what degree Denzel/Pedro Pascal disappear into their respective role vs me seeing them as these familiar actors. But that might be a subjective problem

Besides that any mention of Aftersun automatically gets an upvote from me, such a great movie and performance by Paul Mescal.