The ship was built as simply as possible and fueled with the precise amount needed for it’s weight, there was nothing else to jettison besides the young woman. The plot was intentionally structured around an impossible scenario because the editor of the magazine the story originally appeared in wanted to subvert the “engineer action hero saves the day with a clever idea” trope that was common when it was written. The heavily contrived scenario is the weak point by most people’s estimation, but overall the writing is well done and characterizations are very good.

The story bugs a lot of people due to the total lack of any safety margin for such an important mission as delivering emergency medical supplies. A guy named Don Sakers even wrote a rebuttal called The Cold Solution that was meant to point out a few things the original story overlooked without the idea of a bare minimum ship being changed.

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Seconded.

I’ve got a pair of Skullcandy Mods. The sound quality is decent but not stellar, battery life is good, charge time is good and they feel pretty solidly made. Pretty good deal for $40 on Amazon.

I previously had some of their ANC overears that while not spectacular, were much better than I expected given the price point.

I have a few servers that I’ve put together, both towers and rack mount, that are fairly old in IT terms but would still sell for thousands used.

I pulled most of the parts out of the trash.

I don’t, I stopped buying AAA games a long time ago. I stopped buying a lot of games in general, because this kind of greed and enshittification has sucked a lot of joy out of something that I used to enjoy. But that isn’t a fix for the problem.

A relative handful of boycots won’t do much in the face of manufactured demand and market dominance.

Just stop buying games is essentially the “don’t like it, leave it” argument. And if you simply leave quietly, little changes. This is a discussion that should be had, and not just about games. This business model is bad for consumers, it’s pervasive across many industries, and far too many people just swallow the bullshit most corps spew about it’s supposed advantages.

These issues need to be pointed out, this needs to be a subject of public discourse. It should remain in the public eye until consumer rights are respected. It’s not about just not buying games, we should be pushing for better options.