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This is America. Cars, tactical gear, and military vehicles are cheaper than an employee with benefits like healthcare, workers comp insurance, etc. way way way cheaper.

Did you have to send an actual physical photo through the post?

I ask because that was a unique time of tech transformation. I might have had a digital camera then, but being able to email a photo wasn’t yet common enough to be assumed to be possible or convenient for everyone. Just the fact that it was an 800 number and not an email for customer service says a lot. I’m reminded of watching the first Scream movie recently, where cell phones existed, but were rare enough that having one fall out of character’s pocket made them immediately suspicious. A detail that would be totally inconsequential today.

I too liked it better than I thought I would. It felt like a classic Ray Bradbury story.

Late guerilla marketing for The End of Oak Street?

I just wish it was more nuanced than good/up or bad/down. I really miss the old /. style of being able to classify how a comment added to the discussion or not (insightful, troll, offtopic, interesting, etc.). Not sure the implementation ever was perfect on /. either, but it FELT more meaningful, especially because the ability to vote wasn’t given to absolutely everyone on everything all the time. When I got the chance to vote, I tended to put some genuine thought into it. I’d like to think that meant less impulsive and reactionary voting and it was a constant reminder about what that site wanted you to value in a discussion.

His family name was actually Drumpf. His immigrant grandfather Americanized it on or shortly after arriving in America.

Oh that’s all? Really? Have you tried to buy a “Not Smart” TV lately? Not exactly any options that are branded as TVs. I tried. I would have had to sacrifice quality and pay more for the privilege to buy a device intended to be used to display mostly static images as a menu board not be great at playing movies and high FPS video games. As a consumer, I was never really get a choice or a vote in this smart TV switchover decision.

I spent a little more to get the upgraded newest model of the android phone I’m currently typing this on, released in January 2021 and received by me in March. I had to replace my previous phone because the battery started to fail and it was failing behind in Android versions, meaning some newer apps could no longer be installed and some older apps could no longer be updated. Current phone still going strong, no signs of being any slower than it was originally. Mostly have used wireless charging and battery protection schemes in the OS, so USB port still works well and charges just fine either way. I feel like phones hit a performance plateau a few years ago and I see no reason for an “upgrade”. If my current phone needs to be replaced, I fully expect to be forced to pay more for less given the costs of memory these days. Previously I’d been basically forced to upgrade every 2 years because I always bought the contract special “free” phone and updates stopped or the battery pillowed.

I’ve had a tooth extraction or two before. The following advice is based on my memory and experience with that kind of surgery and being poor. I’m not a doctor. It’s highly negligent for the surgeon to abandon you over the weekend after a surgery.

You may not need pain meds beyond ibuprofen (you can take more than the recommended dose on the bottle for a short time). Acetaminophen is useless for treating the swelling and dental pain in my experience. Continue your other after care while you figure this out: rinse with warm salt water regularly, avoid foods with seeds, no drinking through a straw, apply ice packs regularly at intervals to keep the swelling down (ibuprofen will help with this also), whatever else they advised. Keeping the swelling down with ice packs, ibuprofen, and drinking cold water will do way more for your pain than whatever pain meds they prescribed. Sometimes I’d just keep a big glass of ice water nearby and hold the ice cold water in my mouth.

You will absolutely need the antibiotics ASAP though! Call a doctor, any doctor, urgent care, ER, whatever you have to do to get the antibiotics. I wouldn’t even mention the pain meds. When I’ve taken those pain meds, they did nothing for the pain in my mouth, but they did mean I didn’t notice bumping into a table and cutting my leg badly. And there is the non-zero chance that as soon as you mention painkillers, you’ll be labeled as drug seeking. Stay focused on the antibiotics, that’s the important med. Oral infections can go from “Do I have an infection?” to life threatening emergency in a surprisingly short time.

Fun fact, North Dakota (home of the idiot cop and criminally evil prosecutor) has a fewer people than the city of San Francisco in about 150,000 times the acreage. Put another way, there are about 268,000 people per electoral vote in North Dakota compared with about 728,000 people per electoral vote in California and about 670,000 people per electoral vote in Tennessee (home of the grandmother).

Hey now. Hillbillies are a proud Appalachian cultural tradition. The grandmother, being from Tennessee, might have been a hillbilly. And it might not have been an insult for her to self apply that label. The idiot cop and asshole prosecutor were in North Dakota.

Stating directly and unambiguously what you want while asking for consent at the same time is SO FUCKING HOT!

Frankly, even if I wasn’t into someone, they have my respect when they do this.

Wouldn’t be very good at reading if stupid typos and blinders blunders like this tickled my consciousness. Not every language even cares what order you line those words up too much, go ahead and put the important words at the beginning (or the end if you’re an asshole), conjugations will sort it out.

Edit: Fucking autocorrect almost got be again when I tried to fix the typo. I fucking typed blunders both times, a real word that exists and makes sense in context, unlike fucking blinders! Dumbass “AI” autocorrect!

It was a song about thrifting. A song against fast fashion, consumerism, and satirizing displays of wealth. That’s what it was popularizing. It was a line about making the most out of the lot we’re given. It was not a song glorifying the wearing of fur. Fur is poetic shorthand for wealth. You can’t excise a single word or line from a song or poem from it’s context. And if you’d actually listened to the song or watched the video, it’d have been pretty clear that no one wearing gator boots or or mink was cool. It was satire. The line about mink even says that it smells like piss.

That was notably a line about wearing used fur, not sourcing new fur for new clothes. I think that is an important distinction when evaluating the moral arguments against wearing fur. Still totally valid to be against any fur clothing, but that line feels a lot less immoral to me in context.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” —Frank Wilhoit

Not much of a PC gamer, but I have had a need to use a mouse without a desk. I swear by trackball mice. Personally I’ve been happy with the wireless Logitech trackball offerings, particularly the one with Bluetooth and a dongle you can tuck away into the mouse. Even at a regular desk, doing CAD work all day, it has saved my shoulder and wrist from stress and pain. I can basically sit in a relaxed neutral position and use my mouse wherever my hand falls, like on an arm rest. It may take some adjustment learning to use your thumb to navigate around, but for me it has been worth it.

It keeps on autocorrecting words to some totally irrelevant wrong word, much more often than it used to. Previously it would just fix the occasional spelling mistake and ignore most capitalized words. Now it regularly changes proper names to other random words, replaces it’s with its or your for you’re (or the other way round) but it’s almost always wrong even though I typed it correctly. I’ll go back and try to fix it, only to find it’s chosen some other random words to use instead of what I actually typed. It replaces correct words with incorrect words now way more often than it actually helps my spelling.

Fascism is seductive, that’s the biggest problem.