This 100%

There is a limit to how much I can excel under high pressure environments until everything falls apart and I spiral into what seems like incompetence.

It’s actually that fall that caused me to finally get diagnosed. It took a couple years, a pandemic, and multiple people at my job retiring in short order, but I finally couldn’t balance all the spinning plates any more.

Add in the congress critters from both houses need to run their own campaigns at some point, in many cases they can’t afford to just kiss the ring. This is especially true in the house where seats are up for grabs “soon” and the voter base is relatively small. If you’re a Representative and won your seat on a small margin, you clearly don’t have a mandate and need to act more moderate. Some senate seats are in the same boat (McCormick in PA, assuming the recount still favors him, is in this boat; he’s run three times now and barely beat out Casey this time, it’s a fair bet he doesn’t have solid footing for his first term and can only toe the party line so far). The only thing we should all bet on is at the end of the day everyone in politics is going to lookout for themselves first. It’s going to be a shitshow for at least the next two years, probably the full four and maybe beyond.

Kagi doesn’t hide that they use API calls to multiple sources for each search, they are fairly upfront about honestly. The benefits of use Jagi IME are the results are great, the site is fast and gets out of the way, it’s fairly affordable for what it provides, and the goals of the company is in line with mine (namely to find a thing I’m searching for). They are well funded enough to give me confidence that I’m not going to have to configure yet another search engine, and the integrate into pretty much all my access points easily as a default search engine.

I have seen no reason to think they abuse their position to impact my privacy, and bring closed source does not automatically make them evil. You included no alternatives that are open source, and the ones I explored were either difficult to get setup, required me to run something on my own infrastructure, or didn’t provide the integrations or results I expect. Kagi does.

Kagi isn’t perfect, and there are a ton of suggestions on their feature tracker that users rightly want implemented (including open sourcing more of their code-base). But as a paid search engine that makes me not the product, it does that job well.

The Enbrighten Zigbee switches I installed in some rooms work exactly as you note, if the zigbee network collapses for some reason, they still control the outlet or light they are hard wired to like any other dumb switch. I think for hardwired switches this is the normal behavior. For anything like Hue or Ikea Tradfri switches that are battery powered I think it highly depends on what they are connected to.

I don’t think so, tips are for service and moving my bag of food from the shelf behind you to the counter in front of you isn’t service, that’s just your job. I tip waiters, bar tenders, and drivers (delivery, ride share, cab). That said I’d love to get to a point where we can largely get rid of tipping by forcing full wages for all jobs and not tipped wages.

I do this for our water company, it’s like $3 to pay it online via any method, but free for my bank to print a check and mail it to their office. I’m sure it costs more than that $3 to open the check, deposit it, and credit my account for it.

But as you pointed out above, children were (and are) being pushed into colleges whether it’s right for them or not. Hugh schools are measured by college admissions rates of their students, and so are pushing kids into this debt without any real voice on the other side telling the students they have other options.

Colleges are pushing new students towards financial aid without spelling out the true costs of those loans. All of this to people who often have almost no financial literacy or experience to understand the impacts. They are exactly like the soldiers you just mentioned. So by all means student debt is predatory.

Its clear you are not open to considering some debts as beneficial to discharge, so I won’t waste the time explaining the vast net benefits of infusing our younger and middle aged generation with cash flow that they would by every measure largely reinvest in their communities, making everyone better off. But can we at least agree that student debt is at least as predatory as shitty car loans to young enlisted recruits near bases?

So we did exactly this when we dropped our Prime membership a few years ago as part of working against Amazon building a massive warehouse in our fully residential borough (we won if anyone was wondering, they chose not to continue fighting it in court). We shop mostly in store at Target and other brick and mortar stores. We will also shop online still, but almost always directly from the manufacturer. This usually means paying shipping, but I figure our UPS driver and mail person need a paycheck too so we are fine with that. We will occasionally use Amazon for things that are just hard to find elsewhere but only order once our cart is in the free shipping price range. It turns out, Amazon is not only a shit company the uses dark patterns to push a mostly superfluous subscription, most things we buy are cheaper elsewhere. Combined with not buying nearly as much random crap, we have saved a butt load since quitting Amazon.

In theory at least it’s because you pay for a specific bandwidth for home internet (the size of the pipe) but a specific amount of data for cellular (how much stuff you can get through a fixed sized pipe).

Home internet is a little unique in that way, almost all other utilities are consumption based with no real tiers in terms of how it’s delivered (you pay for the volume of water or gas you use, electricity is the same, just different units).

Networking equipment gets more expensive based on the bandwidth it supports, but it doesn’t much care how many bits you push through it. So ISPs charge based on their capacity to deliver those bits, and provide tiers at different price points. Cellular though is much more bandwidth constrained due to the technologies (and it used to be much more so before LTE and 5G), so it didn’t makes sense to charge you for slow or slower tiers. Instead the limiting factor is the capacity of a tower so by limiting data to small amounts it naturally discourages use. That model carried forward even now that the technologies support broadband speeds in some cases. As such and ISP could provide the biggest pipe (highest speed) to all homes and just charge based on consumption (they used to in the days of dial up, and satellite before starlink always has). Many ISPs instead are now double dipping though and charging for both.

The majority have moved away from cold calls and on to email and texting where they aim to trick folks into calling them. This is a better return on their investment since it’s cheaper and there’s way more chance to actually get a victim than cold calling.

That said, most of the folks on the phone are either barely scraping by or are literal prisoners of violent gangs. They aren’t the ones to target (though they are the easiest to dislike since that’s who you end up dealing with). Take a browse of channels like scammer payback and kitboga who work to get to those actually in charge and to get the scam rings taken down.

Looks from the article like it was stolen by infecting the PC of a third party analytics firm user who had privileged access to Hot Topics snowflake data warehouses and didn’t have MFA enabled. That is just inexcusable in this day and age and $100k is a small price for Hot Topics snowflake to pay for that fuck up (assuming the bad actor actually follows through and doesn’t sell the data if HT pays the price set). Pro tip (or really amateur tip), MFA all the things. Even SMS based MFA is better than no MFA even though it’s not ideal.

My wife and I both switched to barefoot shoes (we were mostly shoes from Xero but I also like Vivobarefoot) and I can say that being able to feel the ground you walk on is kind of the point. Obviously you don’t want to feel the sharp edges of rocks or hurt your feet on broken glass or something, but the outsoles are tough enough to smooth out the really sharp edges while still allowing your foot to move and feel the features you are walking in. It takes getting used to (it’s recommended to take at least a month or so of slowly increasing the proportion of time you wear them) but I have never had shoes that are as comfortable as my barefoot shoes. Did multiple days of 10+ km on tours around Italy in the summer and my feet never hurt (only were tired, like the rest of me).

Solid wood is generally understood to be lumber or timber, that is pieces of wood sawn from a tree. This is distinct from engineered wood or manufactured wood products which include MDF, plywood, and OSB. Engineered wood is made of fibers or strands that are pressed or glued, there is more in the final stock than just wood (I.e., glue, lignin separated via heating and pressing).

You already can from within each community, it’s under the three dot menu at the top.

Our cat will put us to bed. When we turn the light off she will lay on my hip for 5-15 minutes then once she’s convinced I’m asleep (I’m not) she will hop off the bed and go do cat things (she tells us it’s catslified and we can’t know she does these cat things). She sometimes will lay on my wife for 30 seconds, maybe a minute but always lays on me. She’ll pace around too until I lay on my side so she can put me to bed.

In the winter she’ll come back and snuggle up with one of us because she likes the warmth and we keep it cooler at night. In the summer she’ll lays a bit further away near one of us (usually pinning the blanket down so I can’t get up). She is truly a creature of habit.

In addition, all the secured loans they take make them look on paper as though they are deeply in debt and that debt then is a tax write off. This further lowers their tax brackets so they pay even less. Add to this that in the US at least only income is taxed, all of the stocks, options, and other assets they hold are non-taxable since they aren’t cash; technically their value can (and does) change regularly and they can become worthless just as easily as they can gain value and so it was determined they aren’t income since nothing is realized until they are sold.

It’s exactly this. I read an editorial the other day (I’ll see if I can find it) from a canvasser that boiled down to Trump supporters are driven by hate and bigotry and you can’t fight that (at least not easily, or using tools politicians have fir campaigning). The facts don’t matter to people like this, only that someone in power validates and supports their hate for out-groups.

The creativity is in how the photo was shot; the camera settings, framing, when the photographer chose to take the photo, etc. To say that anyone could have taken this exact photo is both incorrect and doesn’t matter. Anyone could have written any book, play, or script but they didn’t. Anyone could have painted pretty much any particular painting, but they didn’t. I don’t disagree that many aspects of US copyright law are ridiculous, but to say there’s no artistic vision in taking a photograph like this is ignorant.

No, because no one intends to hit a pedestrian with the car they are buying. That’s why we need to mandate safer vehicles, not trust people to factor that in as they look for a car.

In case you’re looking for something more white collar, I have found working for government prime contractors to be a sweet spot. I know, it feels gross to work for “the man” or to be the ones taking in those tax dollars, but hear me out.

The work is well defined, they are very often unionized, even the office staff, and it’s essentially guaranteed employment as long as you want to work there. I’ve also found that putting in what I consider pretty normal levels of effort is highly rewarded because often the bar is pretty low by those that have been in the various companies for decades that no longer care. As long as you guard against professional apathy and keep driving yourself to do the best you can, it’s can be a great sector to work in.

I would suggest looking for ones you don’t already know the names of though (often small subsidiaries of the larger companies are fine). Battelle for instance operates almost all of the DoE national labs and I hear from colleagues they are a good company with labs all over the country that need scientists, engineers, accountants, IT pros, facility folks, etc.