/me casually plugs controller into port #2

It’s so under-done, I’d have to list it on the menu as ‘Early Access’ and ask the diners to finish cooking it for me.

Hrm… People do act strangely when I drone on for long enough. You might be on to something there.

Wait, you guys are getting eldrich powers? All I got were dodgy knees and a moving hairline.

Besides, it’s a really bad form of ID. The numbers aren’t even unique, and up until 2011, a few digits are reserved for geographical information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Structure

If I had to reach for a hasty solution, it would be to use the IRS taxpayer ID instead. Of course, that might weaken the SSA’s importance overall, so that wouldn’t be without consequences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Taxpayer_Identification_Number

A few things to unpack here.

• That chicken is roasted nicely, but I completely understand if that was bought in that condition at the grocer’s.
• Plain bread is a travesty. it needs to be either toasted and/or you need some melted butter or gravy to sop up.
• Pair this with some fruit or pan seared/roasted vegetables. Even microwaved beans would make this nutritious. Takes very little effort, very easy to do.
• Even peasants had access to beer, ale, or home-made short-beer/kvass. Gotta calorie-max so you can work in the field tomorrow. Plus, the alcohol helps with the constant muscle-aches and fatigue from endless labor.

There are innumerable ways to elevate this meal, but I’ll keep this comment short. Anyone, feel free to message me or reply here if you want tips for that.

Just don’t drink out of it and you’ll be okay.

The yogurt is also very ketogenic and full of vitamins and macros.

I can’t speak for GP, but “pipes” was always a solid watch.

Then there’s this thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytKVGtJ5yng

• a short story by the Critically Acclaimed author of “The Torment Nexus”.

But it’s a 16-ring barrel plug.

Thanks. Now I can’t get the image of a time-traveling DeLorian, with an iPhone plugged in where the MrFusion was, out of my head.

The content inside the notepad edit window should probably be universally sandboxed from your local box

Sadly, this was already the case when Notepad stayed in its lane and only handled plain text unicode.

The problem here is the for-profit model that drives mass (over-)production and planned obsolescence.

We can do away with this if a company embraces a completely different model. Instead of doing the usual thing, go 100% on-demand with pre-orders, and only build what people want to buy. Then, keep moving horizontally into other product lines, following the demand and manufacturing need. Once pre-orders hit a given theshold, manufacturing starts for a given product. This eliminates all kinds of overhead and allows the company to survive by investing in multiple revenue streams. As a bonus: it’s a lot less wasteful since you never make more units than you can sell.

Subscriptions are like insurance and gym memberships. They’re profitable only if they represent value that is never fully realized by the consumer. They’re a really bad tax, and people dislike them for good reason. I want to buy a thing from a company, and that’s all; it’s not my responsibility to keep them afloat after that transaction.

If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price.

There’s another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it’s an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn’t be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.

So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new “buy for life” economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.

Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.

This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it “realizing the actual cost of things.” Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you’re going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.

Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we’ve been saying “buy nice or buy twice” for a long time now.

or my son.

I kid you not, when the realtor showed the house they brought their rambunctious 7-year-old with them. Kiddo wasted zero time and did a running full-gainer into the conversation pit, tucked into a roll on landing, and sprawled out flat to stop in the middle of the room. Realtor/mom was NOT amused. Frankly, I was impressed but also relieved that there was no staged furniture in that particular room.

I hosted a few house-parties over the years and always had to keep a watchful eye on guest’s alcohol intake and all the steps and railings. It was kind of exhausting.

I had a house with something like the first one, although it had a railing installed.

At first I hated the railing and considered removing it. Then I slipped on the hardwood steps on my way down into the pit. A whole 20 inches doesn’t seem like a lot, but let me tell you that hitting my ass halfway down was enough to make me re-think all of it.

Aesthetically, conversation pits are amazing. That said, they are absolutely built to fuck up someone’s day the very moment they’re not being careful.

As someone who is inside the IT industry, and has been for a while, I have some insight here. Yes, it’s stupidity alright, but a weird focused kind of stupidity like having a blind-spot. Money and ethics, IMO, are the only divisions that explain it.

We like to think of tech as being this rebellious, counter-cultural place. And that tracks when you start talking about “information wants to be free” and “the internet circumvents censorship”, but also “market disruption” and “move fast and break things.” But there’s this problem where that rebellion is actually multiple groups moving in a similar direction. If you look at the decisions people make, there’s a clear tradeoff of ethics in line with freedom and liberty, for cold, hard cash. The people we’re talking about went for the money. It took me a long time to reconcile this, and I’m now comfortable concluding that the rebellious spirit here is less “damn the man” and more “fuck you, got mine.” Nevermind that it’s not sustainable and always ends in a death-spiral of everything they built.

To put it another way, technohippies and conservatives agree about the broad strokes of personal liberty and rebelliousness right up until things like empathy all others get involved. Once you surrender those kinds of ethics, or figure out that having few/none is seen as an asset, bigger paychecks are on offer; its too good to pass up for some folks. It should come as no surprise that aligning one’s self with authoritarianism and even fascism is a small step from there.

And my personal experience - take with salt - there’s also a lot of people in security that are just VERY pessimistic, if not outright fearful, of their fellow man. A lot of them vote to the right, despite depending on an industry mostly fueled by left-thinking labor. They’re highly skilled, competent, and intelligent people in every other way. Once again, I think the fat paycheck smooths a lot of this over.

I want to see someone try this, get some steamy ankle pics in reply, and then hit it off since they’re on the same (ridiculous) wavelength.

Exactly. We need to build these muscles and demonstrate to other would-be protesters that acting en masse is possible. Otherwise, everyone new to this just feels like they’re sticking their neck out.