Don’t bring your phone period. Any and all devices can be broken into by law enforcement. Buy a burner with cash if you need some kind of communication.

You vastly overestimate the intelligence of the average retail customer.

Dried bean mixes and rice can be kept in sealed containers in a cold, dark place for upwards of 5+ years. They are super cheap to buy in bulk. It’s about as close to nutritionally complete as you can get, and only requires boiling water to cook. Dried beans also frequently can be rewetted and sprouted, at least for the first couple years.
Gardening is nice but fresh veggies don’t keep through the dark of winter.

I am especially fond of the soup mixes that North Bay Trading sells. It’s about 4-7$ a pound depending on how much you buy, but it keeps for basically forever, and each pound of beans makes multiple gallons of awesome tasting soup. Sautee up your meat of choice and add it in, it’s great and will not leave you depressed.

With a few acres at your disposal, you have a lot more options. This is drifting out of bulk item territory but it counts.

Learn how to can and get the bulk supplies necessary for it- it doesn’t take much at all to get started. If you are going to have to start living off the land more, canning is critical to surviving winter without suffering from malnutrition. Plus, canned goods are a highly prized barter item.

Get chickens. Chickens are easy to keep, need little space, can be allowed to free-roam around your few acres, and are a great natural pest control. They auto fertilize and aerate your garden, eggs are nutritionally dense for you and can be sold, and chicken meat is a solid protein source. They grow to maturity extremely fast (<6mo) so can produce very quickly from even a small originating flock.

Tools and mechanical knowledge are key. When push comes to shove in rural areas you are going to need to fix all of your own stuff to keep things like electricity, fresh water, heating, your road vehicle, and your farm implements all running. You can outfit yourself with some pretty damn good hand tools at harbor freight for <$150 that will be enough to disassemble an engine, stove, or other house appliance if needed. Start watching youtube videos on basic vehicle/tractor and house appliance maintenance, take notes. Find repair manuals for stuff you own, and buy paper copies of them.

Start collecting spare parts like fuses, electrical wire, common replacement parts for around the house stuff, tractor and car consumables like spark plugs, oil, etc. You don’t realize how dependent you are on the modern industrial supply chain until it is abruptly cut off, and everything around you just stops working in less than 6 months. This won’t last forever of course, but it will least extend the period you can operate normally.

If you have a groundwater well pump on the property and not a public water utility, find an alternative way to get water out of it. Clean water is the key to all life, if you can keep water flowing, you can make everything else work. Grid power can disappear at any time and may or may not ever be restored, so an electric well pump may not be useful. Have someone outfit the well head with a manual hand pump if the well is shallow enough to support it, or have a way to power or replace the electric well pump with a generator or car power.

Winter is a great time to be buying very warm, protective clothing like a balaclava, large winter hats, insulated gloves, and puffy mass produced black jackets!

I had at least a few and they never fucking fired right like 95% of the time. The clack of the hammer was louder than the damn cap itself.

Later I got one of those that takes an orange revolver style cap set and they were so much more reliable. Except you ran out of ammo in like 3 seconds and getting a parent to go buy more of those expensive ass refill things was nearly impossible.

As long as it’s not blocking the travel lane or the sidewalk, pretty sure it passes the smell test.

Wait until Kim finds out a vast majority of public libraries also offer free Internet access…

I pay for Spotify and a VPN. And even Spotify I’m currently questioning because they’ve started replacing some of my liked songs with totally different but similar seeming versions that might be AI generated.

I don’t need anything else.

I paid for a copy of the Torque app on android. It lets you use bluetooth OBD2 adapters to connect to your car’s ECU for reading live engine data and trouble codes. The pro paid version unlocks a lot more customization for data logging screens, allows you to save live data logs to your phone, and enables a wider range of readable codes… Makes a huge difference diagnosing weird engine issues in cars 1996 and newer.

I will take a guess that you won’t have any image lag issues whatsoever.

Pretty much all displays have imperceptible lag on actually displaying an image- a lot of consumer flat screen TV’s are terrible at it because of their controller being shite or intentionally lagging the image to do frame interpolation or some other kind of background processing. Older analog screens don’t do any of that, they get signal, display signal.

It comes with the thigh high socks typically

I do have radio but I’m lazy and haven’t gone to get a retransmitter. I find the act of burning CD’s kinda fun anyway, and they sound better.

I burned an audio CD just last week. My old Chevy truck has some mid 2000’S radio swapped into it and it doesnt have bluetooth or aux (well, has aux but it’s buried in the back of the dash). So I burn a CD once in a while to pop in and enjoy.

Do you happen to work for hallmark movies?

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer person

Its like car racing today- sometimes being the best isn’t being technically perfect, but just knowing how close you can push your machine to the brink of failure without actually disabling it.

AMD has, as far as I understand, been outcompeting Nvidia on value for a good while.

And yet their market share doesn’t increase. Because Nvidia holds a stranglehold on both the software (CUDA, RTX support, frame gen, etc) AND sheer brand recognition- gamers always complain about Nvidia and want better AMD cards, but continue to line up in droves to buy Nvidia cards no matter what.

Nvidia knows they can do whatever the fuck they want right now.

AMD is a puppydog that follows Nvidia around on the open market with 10% or less market share. If Nvidia constricts supply and causes a massive price jump and shortages, AMD will just follow the pricing curve and we will still get no GPU’s.

AMD is also 100% reliant on TSMC and VRAM suppliers, the same exact supply pressures causing Nvidia to turn off the consumer tap will come for AMD too.

Option two is not correct, option one is correct. This announcement is specifically for consumer gaming GPU’s only, it does not affect institutional datacenter customers.

This is Nvidia saying “thanks small fry, you were useful, but we’re leaving you behind now. Fight for the scraps.” Complete cartel behavior.