In my younger days I threw 100 person parties in a San Francisco apartment - it's standing room only for sure, but so is going to a crowded bar. And I've cooked for 15 without a dining table - you eat on the floor wherever you can find space.
Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
> Of course, not counting those who just trace 16-th century font without paying a compensation
I can't tell which way you mean this, but that sounds similar to the situation with most public domain musical compositions - the manuscripts may be completely open but a specific typesetting can still under copyright. And like that case, "just" tracing a font / typesetting a composition is still a fair amount of work.
Well-made leather shoes and boots can be repaired though. With regular oil/polish and a new sole on every couple of years you can keep a good pair for decades.
Roon handles metadata and relationships between entities the least bad of anything I’ve tried. It’ll do things like link covers and live performances of the same song together, or let you group multiple issues of the same album and switch between them.
It’s not cheap, and it takes some effort to fix some bad source data, but I’ve found it very rewarding and get a ton of enjoyment exploring my library now.
Roon provides the best classical music experience I've seen (better than when I tried primephonic previously) - there are still some papercuts, but generally it handles normalizing classical metadata well
I can see a need for cookies to mitigate against things like DDoS attacks, session management for paywalled content or just to leave comments on articles, favoriting certain sections. There are several reasons why as a reader you would want the site to be stateful.
Another option for sport equipment is to rent before you buy. You can rent skis and boots for a week for less than a cheap kit, learn, and then choose to invest. More difficult with some items (shoes), though.
I had a homework problem in some math class about the optimal online algorithm for deciding when to rent vs. buy. It works out to "rent until you've spent as much as you would spend to buy, then buy," and I think that applies well here. You may spend up to double the cost, but you avoid spending _a lot more_ on incremental upgrades before getting gear that actually fits your needs.
Blind testing is good for the first two questions, but it's next to impossible to blind test headphones.
The question of preference, though, is what matters, and that's where I am now firmly convinced lossy compression is fine for me: the sort of differences that I could hear made zero difference to my enjoyment of actual music.
I've conducted several A/B tests back when I had nothing better to do and it was a very education experience. I used a recording of a harpsichord, using lame V5 mp3s, and came away with a statistically significant result (I remember taking 14 trials, though I don't remember what my actual true positive rate was)
After all of that, though I had double blind evidence I could hear a difference, I knew I didn't really care about that difference. I couldn't even describe the difference - it was almost subliminal. And that was with a harpsichord, which is a known difficult sound to encode. I've been a lot more comfortable knowing lossy encoding isn't destroying my music enjoyment since those tests.
Presumably, though, once someone offered you more than $10 a month, you could just pay for another streaming music service. I think the whole idea here is that paying someone to not use a service means they then use that money on some alternative - whether it is a social network, music streaming app, or anything else you can spend money on to pass the time.
I wouldn't spend money on a replacement social network if you paid me not to use facebook, but I certainly would put that money towards something else I found fun and entertaining.
I love that Google Photos is able to add location information to my old photos and pictures I take on my actual camera without manually mapping everything. It's surprisingly accurate and really enjoy seeing where all I've been over time.
I've attempted to keep whitelists working, but now I just use a separate chrome profile with javascript+cookies disabled that is for random blogs/news sites/etc. If you have 2+ chrome profiles open, there is a menu item for "Open link as > No Javascript" that does wonders.
Limiting FOMO was a large part of the appeal for a smartwatch to me. I could easily triage notification and dismiss from my wrist without the ability to get lost in an infinite scrolling list of whatever. The few times when it was an actionable notification, the phone came out to respond, but for most notifications, they are read and ignored.
Now that I don't wear my android watch daily, I find myself with my phone on my desk or table more. The fear of missing important notifications makes me more obsessed with all notifications.