Among other reasons you’ve been given:

• The figured MN folks would be peaceable and lay down.
• No open carry of weapons.
• Didn’t think they’d show out in deep winter. (HAH!)

I bought one! Not that brand, forget what I have, but I can’t afford to replace the carpet so I need it.

Could not have written my exact take as closely as yours.

Only thing I’d add is using it to screw around with personal photos. ChatGPT is cleaning up some 80s pics of my wife that were atrocious. I have rudimentary PhotoShop skills, but we’d never have these clean pics without AI. OTOH, I’d gladly drop that ability to reclaim all the negatives.

Very few laymen have noticed or give a shit about RAM prices. My young friend across the street and I are likely the only people on the block who know what RAM does, let alone are able to build a PC.

Business purchasing is where we might see some backlash soon. I’ve bought all the IT goods, hardware and software, for my last two companies, and I’d be screaming.

Boss: What the hell? Weren’t we getting these laptops for $1,200 last year?!

Skill in Excel is wholly different than skills in other Office products. But if Excel is on your resume, your better expand and show what real use you’ve made of it. Otherwise it comes off just as you said.

I do. Got a free license from my last job and Excel blows the doors off Calc, or anything else. For business, Excel is moat of the reason they’re so tied into Office.

I often wonder if the General Staff isn’t cooking something behind the scenes. You know they’ve gamed scenarios to defy Trump launching nukes.

Maybe that’s just hopium. 🤷🏻‍♂️ I’m having a hard time seeing the leaders going in for a strike against NATO. Also, I can’t believe I just typed that sentence.

Anyway, as I told my little kids last Christmas, the 80s and 90s were pretty fucking cool, sorry.

That’s rather my point! What are we to replace a free market with? Everyone screams SOCIALISM, but no one seems to agree on what that actually means.

Shall we do the literal, textbook definition? State ownership of the means of production? That’s been a complete failure.

What we need is a capitalist economic system, reigned in by:

• Unions, to protect the workers
• Breaking and disallowing monopolies, so they never get so large as to control the government
• Democratic governments who protect us, voted in by an educated electorate

But I repeat myself. I guess the Nordic countries, and most of Europe, who act exactly as I outlined, are failures.

Spell it out then. I am willing to listen, willing to be wrong.

For all the bitching about capitalism, which basically every country on Earth uses for an economic system, we’re missing 3 key things.

• We can have unions under capitalism.
• We can break, or prevent, monopolies under capitalism.
• Our governments can protect us under capitalism.

Everything works fucking great with those 3 ingredients. Imagine that.

Everyone reads books? Over half of Americans read at a 6th-grade level, at best.

Not sure what you mean. We talking about the two slightly different creation myths?

Pretty hilarious reading along and the book just starts repeating as if the first couple of chapters didn’t happen. 😁

Squint real hard and take the beginning of Genesis as a tale of solar/planetary formation followed by evolution, closest origin myth I know of.

“Let there be light.” Solar ignition. Let’s go!

They got the order of life mixed here and there, but at least it started in the sea. Adam and Eve’s curse is by far the most interesting bit.

They eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Let’s say they were apes before that event and look at the curses laid down.

• Now we know good from evil. Bit hard to argue animals are terribly moral, having a concept of good and evil. Other mammals are close, especially emotionally, but nothing like humans.

• Now our heads are swole with brains, painful childbirth follows. Don’t know of any mammals that have such painful, risky births.

• We’re cursed to labor all our days to bring food forth from the ground, when before we were swinging from trees, eating fruit and the occasional howler monkey baby. The invention of agriculture anyone?

• Cast out of the Garden, we can never get any of the above back.

If you really want to confound Christians, point out there’s a second creation myth 3 or 4 pages later, which disagrees with the first.

I’ve seen 100 shitty job postings for rating AI results. It’s rather complicated and pays pennies.

That’s on the university admins for poor setup. SOURCE: I’ve setup such machines.

There are sites where you just plug in the URL and the video downloads.

Florida here, gotta use my VPN anyway to get to PH. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Imgur bans my IP from a Digital Ocean droplet of my own build. Just sayin’, they’re not only operating from known IP ranges.

Edge of town in a poor(ish), redneck, American suburb. Like I said, people don’t usually bike unless they have to, just no demand I guess.

I should note, not talking about the nice sorts of bikes like you probably have. Anyone with a truly nice bike is parking it in their garage. But I can’t imagine someone trying to break a lock for anything short of an e-bike.

If you need a pair of wheels that goes? They’re everywhere. Bet I could find one on the curb (as trash) right now, nothing wrong but a busted tube, if that. We’ve hauled home loads of kid’s bikes, had people come out and ask us to take them when we stop and look.

My wife and I are continually astonished at the things people toss, even in this lower-middleclass hood. I could show you our house and all the things we found/repurposed/recycled, for an hour straight without repeating myself.

Must depend on the place. Biking isn’t a big thing here. About the only bikers are people who can’t afford a car. This is a pretty poor town, but again, bikes are so cheap no one cares. Both my wife and a neighbor have bikes in the front yard as decorations.