My personal desktop machine is a Linux box I assembled from $500 worth of parts about 14 years ago. I’ve increased RAM and added about 8TB of storage for an Emby instance.

It still manages to get the job done, but it is obviously way, way, WAY overdue for replacement. We’ve been struggling financially for about 25 years.

Now I’m thinking I need to finally pull the trigger and get it done before January.

If the electoral college had worked as intended, Trump would not have won in 2016*.

So, yeah, get rid of it. It’s not working anyway.

• You could, of course, consider the attitudes and biases of the founding fathers and come to the conclusion that they would have preferred to see a man win instead of a woman. However, I don’t think that’s fair. Even in their lifetimes they were shifting their views based on their experiences. If you are going to ask them what they would do today, then you have to give them the benefit of having experienced the events of the last 248 years. You have to assume they would have continued to grow.

As long as the store isn’t a 24x7 operation, at some point they will want to close. If you’re still there, they’ll ask you what you want.

At that point, you panic and run home.

Ridiculous. If your number is skipped, you pick another number and keep waiting.

If you don’t have a car that can drive in snow, don’t drive in snow.

Last blizzard I was in, I had to pull over to try to help two people get up a small hill.

The first woman was afraid to steer while me and and a tow truck driver pushed her up. She wanted one of us to steer her car, but that just couldn’t happen. She ended up paying the tow truck driver more than $300 to tow her.

While that was going on, a Honda Civic ended up sliding backwards down the hill. I pushed that one about 100ft along the road until it leveled out enough to move on its own.

We have a Civic, but it sits in the driveway for blizzards.

If you get serious snow where you’re moving, and you have to drive, get something with all wheel drive. Just remember that all wheel drive doesn’t mean you can stop. You still need to drive like a Granny in Sunday church traffic.

Yes, just what we need! Finally there’s one source of news without that left wing bias!

/s

I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the aftermath. A small car was crushed between two large trucks in the left lane of the highway. When I drove by, the crushed car was completely unrecognizable as a car. Just a pile of compacted metal and plastic. You couldn’t even tell what was the front or the back.

When I got to work, I checked the news to see what happened to the driver of the car.

No significant injuries, just some scratches. She laid down across the front seat and slid down under the dashboard and managed to find the one space that wasn’t completely compacted.

Most people tend to buy the imperfect cheap product rather than the better, more expensive product.

If we refused to buy crap, they wouldn’t make it. If we refused to buy it, they couldn’t make it.

They sell us crap because collectively we prefer it.

Whenever anyone talks about how high interest rates are now, I remember when my wife and I bought our house in 1997. We were pre-approved for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage at 7.5%, and we were told to take it.

What we were actually told was, "you’ll never see a rate this low again.

Neither did my grandparents. Likewise, my parents didn’t update their will when my children and nieces were born.

The attitude among all generations has been: your own kids inherit, and they distribute to their kids as they see fit.

I wasn’t in my grandparents wills, but I ended up with some of their furniture.

When people ask me why I like Linux, my go-to reason is my main personal machine. I use it for everything I do outside of work, including running my Emby server.

I built it from $500 worth of parts 13 years ago. I’ve kept updating the os and applications. It’s starting to slow down a bit after the last os upgrade, but it’s still plenty usable.

I am getting concerned about the spinning platters. As far as I am aware, Linux won’t prevent an ancient hard disk drive from reaching the natural end of is life.

It’s probably time to move on to a new machine. Well, new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and disks at least.

Pong.

I work at a large, private university health system.

Annual up front cost for insurance is $4967 for medical insurance and $609 for dental. Those cover me, my wife, and two of my three children. The insurance is a plan funded by my employer, but managed by Independence Blue Cross, AKA “Personal Choice”.

There are three “tiers” of coverage.

First tier is for facilities that are part of my employer. Generally, for procedures performed at my employer’s facility there is no additional charge. For a primary care provider who is part of my health system, there would be a $20 copay per visit. Specialist would also be $20, and an ER visit would be $200.

There is an “in network” tier, made up of external providers that accept personal choice. Primary care copay is $35, specialist is $50, ER $200.

The third tier is “out of network”. If we see someone out of network, we would have to pay them directly, then try to get partial reimbursement from insurance.

There’s also a prescription plan, but we get a discount by using the hospital’s outpatient pharmacy.

Everyone always talks about the cost to give birth. All three of my kids were born at the hospital where I work, and none of the births cost us any additional money.

https://youtu.be/PZbqAMEwtOE

Edit: if it were actually a commercial, it would be the best commercial ever created.

You see how ignorant they are.

Whoever shoots last wins.

No certainly not, but I didn’t see it on the list yet.

It’s it too soon to say, “letting Crowdstrike push updates to all your windows workstations and servers”

It’s $16 now.

My mom often used two:

“Useless as tits on a bull” (often referencing her husband, my dad)

And also, “shit fire and save matches”, which I never understood to actually have a meaning, it was more like just an exclamation of surprise.

the 1950s. This was a high water mark for conservatism in the U.S., and in order to go on any date at least one parent, usually the girl’s dad, had to be present.

Perhaps this was a regional thing.

I was born in 1970, but from what my parents have described, dates were not chaperoned in the 50s unless you happened to have particularly strict parents. Like maybe if you were Amish or something.

Here’s the only thing I was able to find online about dating in the 50’s

https://www.plosin.com/beatbegins/projects/sombat.html