The best way I've found, which works like 90% of the time, is to knock on it while holding it. It should sound somewhat hollow, but not empty. Too hollow means it's not juicy and not hollow enough means it's under ripe. Tells you nothing about flavor, but it at least allows you to pick one that is decently juicy and ripe. It's all relative but if you knock on a few you'll quickly find one that sounds in the middle. Pick that one and you'll have at least a decent watermelon.
JDubbleu
As one of the resident smart kids who went into CompSci and now works as a software engineer, I haven't touched any of this for a hot minute. I mainly use it for 3D print designs once in a blue moon.
There's a few rough areas such as Boston which is trash for FPS on all systems (I got like 35ish there on Deck), but it's easily remedied with mods. I run ~20 mods when playing "vanilla" and got a locked 50 FPS through an entire playthrough. The game makes sense to be Deck verified.
Places like this are only expensive in the first place because everyone builds single family homes that use up tons of space. Then we run out of land and the price of everything skyrockets and only then do cities start building vertical. This is largely the problem with affordable housing in the US, but we can't have property values go down because real estate has become an alternative stock market I guess.
AFAIK, and I could be wrong, the one for SF is not just purchasing credits, but electricity from local power suppliers. I believe the way it works here is a certain percentage of electricity is supplied by the renewable energy partners and PG&E is responsible for the remaining percentage. This percentage is based on the number of people who have elected to go the green power route. Obviously they can't do this on the fly due to how power generation and grids work, but on a month long scale they have more than enough time to modulate generation sources to get close enough.
So let's say 60% of people are signed up for the program. They'll get roughly 60% of the city's power from the renewable sources they have, and allow PG&E to generate the rest. Sure the transmission of power to my place isn't going to be 100% renewable, but that doesn't matter as someone who is on the non-renewable plan somewhere will receive the renewable generated power anyway, so the net effect is the same, and I still get cheaper electricity generation charges.
My city (San Francisco) has a program where you can elect to get 100% of your power from renewables which are primarily hydro, solar, and wind and it comes out cheaper every month than buying power from PG&E. It's pretty great.
Thanks! The whole street we live on are similar units and they're genuinely awesome. Everyone has balconies for plants, and if you want to chill in some grass there are great parks within a 10 minute walk. They would definitely pose a problem for the less able bodied, but the hills of San Francisco aren't very friendly either. Our unit is one of the two at ground level so groceries aren't a problem, but we don't have a car so grocery trips are frequent and small anyway (we also run a HelloFresh discount scheme). Highly recommend giant concrete buildings. They're a little industrial looking but damn are they great.
We lived in a townhome before actually and it was pretty good as well, but the sound proofing just wasn't there unfortunately. Not awful but nothing compared to our current place.
This doesn't require single family housing on giant lots. Just well built buildings with proper insulation and sound proofing. I used to think apartments were just noisy until my partner and I moved into our current place. I live on the top floor of a 2 building, 6 unit complex of loft apartments cascading down the side of a hill. The buildings had to be built to withstand the extremely strong winds from the bay, and as such they're solid as fuck.
Despite our downstairs being tile floor our neighbors have told us they haven't heard any noise from us at all. My partner and I started being less concerned about noise and began playing somewhat loud music frequently and yell to each other across the unit. Despite this our downstairs neighbors still haven't heard a peep from us. For a while I genuinely thought our neighbors were just trying to be nice as everyone in our complex is super friendly and gets along well.
One day our neighbor in the adjacent building was woodworking in his garage. Normally the noise wouldn't bother me, but I was focused on something so I shut the window facing the courtyard which made me realize just how soundproof this giant concrete building is, both between units and to the outside world. I couldn't hear our neighbors saw unless I opened the curtains and tried to hear it, otherwise it might as well have been very faint background noise. I really wish buildings like this were the norm for apartments because they provide all the privacy of a single family home with all the benefits of apartment buildings.
Similar to ours just not crammed into shoes with tiny toe boxes. If you look at a baby's foot their toes are spread super wide which is how human feet naturally are, but most shoes cream your toes causing you to develop narrowed feet over time.
I started wearing barefoot shoes two years ago and my back no longer hurts when I walk, and I can walk 10+ miles now without my feet killing me. It took a few months to get used to but once my feet adjusted they got much stronger. Now normal shoes are painful to wear and difficult to balance in because I've gotten used to being planted firmly to the ground.
Not that I agree with the person you're responding to but this is unheard of so long as you're simply possessing or growing it, and not doing so in amounts that would be considered intent to distribute. At which point the state government would get you first anyway because it's ultimately their taxes.
The last Californian in prison for federal marijuana charges was released in 2023. I can't even find an article referencing any federal arrests in California, or any data, that weren't giant illegal grow ops or smuggling of ridiculous amounts of weed. The feds don't give a shit and probably want it legalized so they can deal with shit that actually matters. After all 54% of Americans live in recreationally legal states, and 74% in medically legal states.
You can also just mail order hemp-derived delta 8 if you're really concerned because that's legal at the federal level.
There was a demo for a technology put out recently that circumvents this. I don't remember the exact mechanisms, but it obscured DNS such that your ISP couldn't see the DNS record you requested, and then used a proxy to route traffic before it hit the final endpoint eliminating exposing the IP to your ISP. It worked very similar to a VPN, but without the encrypted connection, and had some speed focused optimizations including the proxy being proximate to your ISP. It was pretty interesting.
Ask and ye shall receive