Like - what do I write in the card?

“Congratulations on surviving another circuit around the sun.”

What the hell do I get them?

I usually rely on them giving me a list.

Soft-oily. Avacado anything is right out for me. Mayo on almost everything is gag-inducing. Tripe has a deeply unpleasant texture, even when it’s in something that’s otherwise enjoyable (like tripe congee).

It’s taken a while, but I’ve managed to expand the foods that I enjoy fairly widely, but I still mostly live off plain yogurt, frozen berries, raw oats, and almonds. Any time I go out to an ‘ethnic’ restaurant, I try to have something new and different. So far, one of the best choices has been zurek (a sour/fermented rye-based Polish soup with uncured sausage and egg.).

I think that holding the executives and BoD in criminal contempt of court is a good place to start.

EDIT: AFAIK Telegram doesn’t use warrant canaries.

Good. They shouldn’t.

Unencrypted channels are the ones that are easiest to trace, and the easiest ones to successfully base a prosecution on.

The most correct response is to report them to law enforcement. Unencrypted channels make amazingly effective honeypots. It’s fairly easy to bust people using unencrypted channels, esp. because people think they’re anonymous and safe. It’s much, much harder to bust people once they move to .onion sites and the real dark net away from their phone. When you shut down all the easy channels, you push people into areas where it’s much harder, almost impossible, to root them out.

Speeding.

I’m usually late anyways.

I, involuntarily, learned control myself and put some safeties in place before a meltdown so it doesn’t happen.

Can you expand on this?

Laws will persuade people that care about the risks of their actions to not take certain actions. If you know that there’s heavy speeding enforcement in an area, and you can’t afford a ticket, you are less likely to speed. Likewise, if you worry about going to prison for a few years, then laws prohibiting the carrying of weapons is likely to persuade you not to unless you feel like your life would be in more danger if you were unarmed. People that don’t care if they go to prison are unlikely to be persuaded by laws prohibiting their criminal behavior.

I believe that all states have now repealed their bans on owning gravity knives, switchblades, and butterfly knives. However, carrying them in public–depending on blade length, may still be illegal. Some states only prohibit them from being carried if you intend to use them in a crime, and actually using them in a crime is used to prove intent; i.e., it just ends up being an additional charge.

Modern sporting rifles–AKA assault style rifles–are usually not okay to carry openly in the same states that used to ban certain types of knives.

Where I live, someone that openly carries a belt knife is taken as prima facie evidence that they’ve been permanently prohibited from owning a firearm. Open carry is unusual, but not incredibly rare. Conceal carry is fairly common.

I am not a construction expert, so check your sources on this.

My understanding is that, for new construction, spray foam is most often used in areas that aren’t likely going to be damaged by condensation, such as against concrete, or metal. I had looked into spray foam for my home, because my home was built in the early 80s–before building codes existed in my area–and there’s no cladding on the house and just fiberglass bats between the studs. Because there’s no cladding, there’s much more air incursion through the bats, esp. since the interior walls are lapped wood paneling rather than wall board. Spray foam would have been a total air barrier, but it would end up being applied directly to the inside of the exterior siding, which would be a nightmare when siding needs to be replaced, and would probably cause moisture issues.

The best solution appears to be to use 3" EPS foam cut to fit between the studs, and then use spray foam to fill any gap between the studs and the EPS. That still allows an air gap between the foam and the exterior siding so that moisture can evaporate.

In the case that’s being cited here, I’m not sure why they opted for spray foam over EPS or fiberglass bats. If their home is well sealed, then bats should have been perfectly sufficient, although they have a lower R-value per inch than EPS. Oh, and the difference between polyisocyanurate and EPS/XPS is about R1.5/inch, but that difference drops to about R.25/inch after a decade. That meanst that you don’t gain much in the long term when you use faced polyisocyanurate board. I’m not sure what blowing agents are used for polyiso; it might be more environmentally friendly to manufacture.

The 575k number is dead and wounded though, many of those will heal fine,

Much like soldiers did after WWI, right?

The reality is that many people have lost limbs, eyes, hearing, and so on. That means that many of these people are not going to end up being productive workers once they’re released from service; they’re going to be less-capable than their abled-bodied counterparts, and in a functional country, would end up being a drain on the coffers due to disability pensions (I strongly doubt that Russia is going to give the wounded conscripts any kind of disability payments).

Any way you slice it, Russia is destroying their own future. This kind of war, in a time where people aren’t having children even at replacement level, simply isn’t sustainable.

Eh. It’ll probably go back up. There have been crashes before, and every time it’s jumped up after a few weeks or even months. It’s mildly annoying, that all.

Uh, you know that the information is right there, right? It even says where their sources of funding are: ads that are based on your browser history (e.g., shit like AdSense), individual donations, and individual memberships.

While I love the idea, I KNOW that there are certain groups that will refuse to accept that factual information. Tankies, for instance, will refuse to accept any criticism of their preferred sources. (As will Russian-asset Jimmy Dore.) Far-right conservatives will do the same, only on the other end of the spectrum.

rescue helicopters

That, in particular, is especially fucked in the US. Life Flights/medevac helicopters are almost always private companies, and each insurance company has to negotiate with every medevac company separately. You can easily end up with a $100,000 bill from a helicopter ride to a trauma center because your insurer didn’t negotiate rates with the one company that was operating in your area, and you have no legal recourse aside from declaring bankruptcy.

Should we have socialized or otherwise single-payer medicine in the US? Absolutely. But are we realistically going to do that before some id10t decides to legislate ‘smart’ cars that prevent you from exceeding what the car believes to be the speed limit? Nope. (For reference, I’ve driven a car with driver assist; it tried to jerk the wheel out of my hands a few times because it thought the road was turning when it wasn’t, because it was misreading the lines on the road and the signs.)

The ambulance could also have been two houses down and there in 3 minutes.

That’s significantly less likely than the ambulance being either at the hospital or being farther away than the hospital. Let’s say that 33% of the time the ambulance is at the hospital, 33% of the time it’s farther away, and 33% of the time it’s closer. That means that 66% of the time it’s going to take you less time to get to the hospital on your own than it would to wait for an ambulance.

…And that’s only one specific type of medical emergency. What about uncontrolled bleeding? You want a real world example? Look at Kentucky Ballistics; he had a gun explode, and a piece of shrapnel went into his neck. If he had waited for an ambulance, he would have bled out before he made it to the hospital, and he was only about ten minutes away.

…If–and this is a big “if” in very rural areas–the ambulance has someone on it that can legally administer drugs, and the ambulance isn’t on the other side of the county dealing with another medical emergency at the same time. (In my state, you need to be a paramedic to administer drugs; there are different classes of EMTs in my state, and most of them are not paramedics. There’s a severe shortage of paramedics, largely due to the god-awful pay, and so not all ambulances will have a paramedic on them at all times.)

This was literally a best-case scenario: a doctor that had medications on-hand and could administer them, and able to get to the hospital faster than an ambulance could get to their home in the first place. And he still came very close to needing to be intubated.

Presumably ambulances and other such emergency vehicles would be exempt from such devices?

Okay, but that misses the point.

This doctor was driving at the speeds that an ambulance would have been driving, but only had to make the trip in one direction. It took them 20 minutes, from stings, to pulling into the ER (15 minutes of that being driving time). If they had called an ambulance, it would have been a minimum of 30-40 minutes, because the ambulance would have to get to them first.

And again - 20 minutes for an ambulance to get to you is not all that bad, relative to even more rural areas, and counties that don’t even have a hospital or doctors.

“Hard to argue against”

No, it’s really quite easy to argue against them.

I live in a rural area. If I call an ambulance, that’s a minimum–minimum–of 20 minutes for any ambulance to get to me. Then it’s another 20 minutes to get to an emergency room. I know someone who is a doctor that lives close to me, and their husband got stung by a bunch of yellow jackets. Their husband is allergic. They gave their husband a shit ton of meds, and made it to the ER in under 15 minutes. As it was, he barely avoided getting put on a ventilator, and that was with perfect care and driving 90+ mph on two lane mountain roads to get to a hospital. (He has an epinephrine pen now.) With a “smart” speed limiter on their car? He wouldn’t have been breathing by the time they got to the ER.

When you live in a rural area, and emergency help is a long way away (honestly, 20 min ain’t that bad compared to other parts of the state where it can be more like 45+ minutes just to get an ambulance out), it’s really, really easy to argue against that kind of nanny state nonsense.

He wasn’t the president when the crime was committed, ipso facto he didn’t have presidential immunity.

Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably get an Apple device.

Sadly, I also don’t like spending money. :P You used to be able to make Hackintoshes, but Apple tends to break them with every software update.

I had been thinking about getting an IoT Enterprise LTSC release of Windows and manually adding the components that I needed. Might still do that with dual boot.

There are a lot of ways to get around that, such as:

I’m doing all of that except the last one already. As has been noted in many other places, Windows itself is now in the business of serving ads directly, and it looks like that’s getting harder and harder to disable. I managed to mostly lock down the Pro release of Win 10 that I’m on right now, but Win 11 will make that much, much harder. If it weren’t for security issues surrounding end of product life, I wouldn’t switch versions at all.

C’est la mort.

But yeah, I’ll def. look for a user-friendly version of Linux when I build my next system in a few months.