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speaking of alternatives, what brand do people hate that actually has a decent alternative?

Amazon, sort of. It absolutely cannot be beat for convenience. Ordering something in 15 seconds, then having it shipped within 48 hours is unmatchable.

But if you plan ahead, and aren't an impulse buyer, you can find alternatives with better products and similar prices. Most stuff on Amazon is absolute junk with clickfarm reviews.

Ironically Reddit was really good for finding niche websites for whichever product you were looking for. Hopefully Lemmy will reach that point eventually.

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Question about FOMO in Baldur's Gate 3

There are absolutely irreparable consequences to your actions in this game. You have to "plan ahead" in the sense that you have to be sure what path you want to go down because other paths will become closed or non-existent. It also is sometimes not obvious which path makes the most sense to take, which is by design.

Without trying to spoil anything, I made a mistake with one of my characters which caused them to permanently leave the group and I can't get them back.

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Lemmy, what are your "missed flight" stories?

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I think this is terrible advice for most people. You only need to spend like an hour in the airport to avoid missing a flight. Most people don't fly often enough to get much actual gain from pushing this boundary. The only person I knew who would push the envelope like this was someone who flew every week for work. That makes sense to me, because you're saving two hours every week for years. If you're only flying a few times a year just pack a book and ensure you make your flight on time.

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Teaching Maths!

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This is one of those problems that makes more sense with context. The teacher had the students working on "reasonableness", which is essentially "does the question I'm asking make sense?". The students were probably instructed to ignore actually trying to solve the problem when presented with one, but instead explain why the question either does or doesn't make sense.

In this case the student potentially misunderstood the task. The failure on the teacher's part is wording the question in such a way that it actually has a reasonable solution, and isn't necessarily an unreasonable question.

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Why are there so many stop signs on American streets?

This might be a stupid answer, but I genuinely think Americans couldn't handle that system. We already have problems with people not stopping properly at stop signs. If we had the "give way" system too many people would just ignore it and cause accidents.

I realize this is super pessimistic, but I think it's true. We have a handful of roundabouts and people always screw them up.

I don't think Americans are inherently dumber or anything, I just think our licensing exam is laughably easy. You literally just parallel park, then drive in a square where you encounter one traffic light, and one stop sign. Exam was over in 5 minutes. Here's your license.

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Question about FOMO in Baldur's Gate 3

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It forces replayability if you're the kind of person who needs to do everything.

It's absolutely enjoyable. The choices feel like they have a lot of weight. At the end of the day it's just a video game, so you just have to pick a choice and see what happens. You can also save scum if you're super unhappy with an outcome, but I try to avoid that.

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Blizzard May Be Turning WoW's Trading Post Into An MTX Shop, Suggests New Datamine

I'm gonna go against the grain here a little bit.

I've never been particularly bothered by WoW's approach to microtransactions. It's all cosmetics and transfer/name/race change services.

I understand the fear that even cosmetic transactions can drive game design decisions, but I just don't think it's that bad with WoW. It has certainly never been pay to win, and has never even really been pay for convenience.

If someone wants to spend $20 on a meaningless mount I'm not really sure I care.

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The NFL’s Running Back Market Has Bottomed Out

This is a microcosm of how employment works in the world at large.

You aren't paid based upon how difficult your job is, nor are you paid strictly based on how much value you add. You're paid based on a function of value added, AND how replaceable you are. Essentially supply vs demand. If your job is hard and you add a ton of value, but you're easily replaceable, then you won't make much money. There's just too much supply. It doesn't matter that RBs are important if you can just throw a rock and hit someone who can fill the role.

Likewise if you're difficult to replace, but don't add a ton of value you also won't make a lot of money. My best guess for an example of this would be long snappers.

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Teaching Maths!

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The teacher doesn't need to write all of that to get the point across. They can speak to them on the side and say, "remember when we worked on reasonableness last Tuesday?"

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What are y'all's thoughts on min-maxing?

Guides are really helpful for finding interesting synergies between skills and aspects and whatnot, without having to theorycraft. I find it difficult to enjoy a build unless I understand all those synergies.

So the guides actually enhance my appreciation of the game because they help me discover builds that work, and thus builds that I enjoy.

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[Polygon] D&D’s next iteration needs to keep things simple, too

My friends and I started playing DnD during COVID. We're all at least normal intelligence, college educated people (I even work in a job where I regularly research federal regulations, so I'm used to navigating complex rules). Our biggest complaint was how obtuse and difficult to pin down some of the rules in this game are.

Six of us spent a half hour trying to figure out how darkvision works, and the answers we found online didn't seem to match up with what we were reading in the handbook. You would find something mentioning darkvision, but it wouldn't explain how it worked. Then somewhere else would say something different about darkvision. It seemed like you needed to go to multiple different sections of the handbook to piece everything together. We encountered multiple instances of this.

Our one friend defended it all saying it's deliberately obtuse to allow for DM flexibility, but most of us disagree with that approach. The rules should be explicitly stated, and then a caveat added that all rules are flexible if the DM wants them to be. There should not be a debatable way to play the game, as far as official rules are concerned. How you bend the rules is entirely up to you.

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So, who do we all support then?

I'm ostensibly a Watford fan, having lived near there as a kid before moving to the States, but I don't really support any particular team. I kinda pick new stories each year that I like to follow. I realize this is probably a strange way to watch football, but it works for me.

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Hot take: All you really need is a driver, 7i, 9i, SW, and putter.

I would actually say most people don't even need a driver. I went through a serious struggle with my swing for a while and I didn't even carry a single wood in the bag for about 4 months. I teed off with a 3h or a 4i depending on how I was feeling. My scores were lower without the driver because I couldn't hit the thing straight. For me, 170-180 yards straight was better than 220 yards in the other fairway.