One thing I noticed is that I tended to accumulate a lot of trash in Japan. Connivence stores were plentiful and the food was tasty, but it was all wrapped in plastic.
Where does all the trash go? More often than not, I ended up carrying trash in a backpack to throw away at my hotel.
>> Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative
> What on earth are you talking about? No one, no less Codeberg themselves, would make up such fictitious comparison.
Codeberg's getting started documentation has the line, "Codeberg is not a for-profit corporation but an open community of free software enthusiasts providing a humane, non-commercial and privacy-friendly alternative to commercial services such as GitHub." [1]
There is a brand of creatine manufactured in the US (con-cret) and a brand manufactured in Germany (Creapure). Either of those companies should address the concern around adulterated powder.
> That's why I dropped creatine since I didn't notice any benefits when I tried it for a year.
Some percentage of people (~20%) are creatine non-responders [1]. It's pretty reasonable to try creatine and then drop it if you find no benefit. I personally find the gain very marginal.
I linked both prebuilt and do it yourself builds. Neither resulted in a comparable machine to the PS5 for $600.
Again, I think you are missing how much the price of components has increased.
16GB of DDR5 alone costs approximately $200 [1]. I challenge you to find a new case, motherboard, NVMe SSD, and PSU for the remaining $100 in the budget after $200 for ram and after your assumed $300 for a GPU.
Where can you get a new gaming "beast of a machine" for $600? In the past you could build a reasonable gaming machine for $600 but parts are drastically more expensive today.
If you go to microcenter and look for gaming PCs, their cheapest option is $800 [1]. PC Part Picker's entry level build is $780 [2].
The only option I found with these constraints is this computer from Walmart with a GPU released in 2017 and a CPU released in 2013 [3] (This is not a recommendation for this listing. Please don't buy it).
When buying a gaming console, I imagine folks think more about the upfront cost ($600 for PS5 vs $1,050 for steam machine) as opposed to the total cost of ownership.
The steam machine may be cheaper in the long run once you consider:
* Playing PlayStation games online costs $11/month.
* PlayStation games tend to be more expensive than steam games.
The US spent $2 Trillion dollars on Medicare and Medicaid in 2024 [1][2]. If the US spent this money as efficiently as Japan (or UK [3], ...) it could pay for Healthcare for every single resident with this $2 Trillion dollars.
1) Creatine is safe, "creatine supplementation is safe across a range of doses, durations, and populations according to human trials".
2) Stomach issues are a commonly reported side effect, "Gastrointestinal issues were the most frequently reported side effect... Most notably, gastrointestinal distress is a commonly reported side effect, and those supplementing with creatine may need to divide the dose into smaller boluses to alleviate it; however, it is worth noting that this side effect was not persistent"
3) It is not clear if the side effects are caused by creatine, many of the issues can be explained by baseline issues rather than caused by creatine, "No consistent or clinically meaningful dose-dependent increases in side-effect reporting were observed across models; even at higher doses and prolonged durations, reporting remained low and largely comparable to placebo at the study level"
Where does all the trash go? More often than not, I ended up carrying trash in a backpack to throw away at my hotel.