It's a 19 minute / 2.4 mile trip. But your point still stands - you're not covering wear and tear.
IMALlama
You're going to have a hard time beating $2/mo unless you roll it into something else like blackblaze ($100/year for unlimited storage), Microsoft office 365 ($100/year with 1 TB of OneDrive), etc. If your space is going to photos, the speed and responsiveness of Google photos far outpaces some of the alternatives (cough cough OneDrive).
Self hosting is a viable alternative if you're interested in having more control/local storage or if you are interested in this kind of thing and want to do it/dabble in it as a hobby.
I personally built a NAS, which will take far too long to amortize vs just paying $2/mo. I chose this route because I value a local backup and because a NAS can a bit of a lifestyle product. "It can double as a server!". Sounds fun, but I would want to build the thing I host which will also take time so... You could potentially build a NAS that will average out to $2 or less a month if you have spare parts or score some used parts cheap. Odds are that route could also be used for self hosting.
Caramelization is a mix of dehydration and sugar conversion. I've found that slicing thinner helps the dehydration process go quite a bit faster. Sugar conversion seems to depend on batch size (more onions = more time).
I suspect two things are going on.
The first is temperature. You can start low and go slow or you can start hotter and decrease the temp as you go to avoid charring. Actively controlling the temperature is faster, but increases the risk of accidental charring.
The second is your target state. You and the prior poster might just have different stopping targets. I personally keep going until it's nearly impossible to avoid charring and that takes me... quite a bit of time. By this point sugar content and flavor is maximized and highly concentrated. There's also a very substantial mass reduction thanks to evaporation.

How big? Potentially huge if you can get people to abandon car ownership by having a super convenient offering. Owning/leasing/maintaining a car is already expensive. We seem to be running at a situation where lower priced new cars become the thing of the past.
I generally agree with activite communities being a self reinforcing feedback loop. That said, one of the challenges federation creates is fragmentation for "the same" community across multiple instances. As a result, each community appears relatively inactive as they're all vying for engagement with each other.
Oh man, I hadn't thought about that game in at least a decade. Thanks.
For anyone else looking for the source text: https://www.ganssle.com/articles/toastallessons.htm
This is the first time I've encountered it and rings way too real, even though it was likely written a while ago.
We moved into a house about 10 years ago. Our garden current consists of 4x 3m^2^(4' x 8' for fellow Yanks) raised beds separate by 1ish meter (4') paths. We've also spilled into a fifth in ground bed for things that are more deer resistant like onions. I added DIY drip irrigation, also use a hose timer, etc and the four raised beds are pretty dense thanks to leaning on things that climb to get more garden volume.
We could expand the garden more if we want to, and likely will in the future, but it sounds like your garden is larger currently.
I am pretty jealous of your setup from an everything else perspective. We have to have a fence around our garden to keep deer out, but it can't block sunlight for the plants. This means the fence is pretty lightweight and that makes it easier for the kids to break. The space between the garden beds has always been a struggle to maintain. Mowing grass was annoying, so I mulched between the beds two years ago. Now I have another area to weed. Not using containers also means that if we plant... borderline invasive things like raspberries they try to escape the raised beds. I might pull them all out after the harvest this season as they're getting more ambitious with their escape attempts each season.
Not that I can really complain, I'm happy to have a reasonable veg garden :)
Very cool setup! When my partner and I moved out on our own our first garden was on an apartment balcony, but our balcony was quite a bit smaller. We still had it covered in pots. Watering was a bit of a chore, but IMO it was worth it.
Fellow senior developer. Initially I was worried about exactly what you're worried about with juniors. Now I'm also worried that management layers are simply pushing for higher velocity without giving anyone time to think about a problem. We're in this nasty loop where one person defers more decisions to a LLM to push their individual velocity up. They then get rewarded. Who care if they don't know how the code works, it works! The tests pass. More people on the team should do the same or else. Then someone takes it a step further.
It will be very interesting to see how maintainable, or not, corporate code will be in a few years. There could well be a booming industry for people to come in and clean up the mess.
Not likely under Trump sadly
Isn't Mitsubishi still around and kicking? I have no idea how that brand solders on with such low volume and price points.