You have to go at it the other way, now:

As someone of modest means, I fully support and endorse giving billoinaires more money. After all, if they don’t have money, then what will trickle down to me?

Wait no that’s still not funny at all.

I’m sorry, but is that porn or a Tinder profile?

Basically, think ChatGPT

…so I can get all the Pussy in Bio in one place now?

lot of people from the US with gas grid (which we don’t really have around here), is it really so that your Joe Average can’t tell the difference between 1kWh of heat produced by gas compared to electricity

Right, because for most people gas is metered and sold by the CCF, and not converted into kW at any point in the chain.

So I know i used 30ccf last month, but there’s zero indication what that is in kW, because we usually don’t convert between the meter (which is volumetric) and the billing, which could be anything but why bother?

Installed yes, but the OOBE that runs (assuming the OEM didn’t fuck it up) is more or less the same as a retail install: you have to add the account, untick the 300 ‘yes, please spy on me’ boxes, and tell it that you do not want office 14 times.

100% this.

If you did a venn diagram of ‘Worst possible implementation’ and ‘What Mastodon Did’ you’d just have a circle.

Don’t let it connect to the wifi/internet?

I mean, sure, you have to do the SD card shuffle, but it’ll guarantee you don’t end up having to deal with this.

If you have a more advanced set of network hardware (which it doesn’t sound like you do) you could add a firewall rule to block traffic from the LAN IP of the printer, or for something like Unifi, simply block internet access entirely. But, even then, if you screw it up now or in the future, surprise software updates will happen.

And they also had the turn-into-a-zombie plague event when Wrath launched, too.

As I recall, that mostly just made everyone rage because the assholes running around spreading it everywhere were just annoying the crap out of everyone and the general thought is they just needed to fuck off and find something else to do.

Or, basically, Covid.

CU and the lack of federal public funding for elections (by which I mean the state funds the campaigns of those who want federal offices) basically resulted in the US political class ending up fully in the pocket of the corporations.

That’s what absolutely destroyed our ability to elect anyone other than what the corporate doners want, and thus you end up with nothing but corporate-friendly politicians, and thus a whole bunch of people who have no problem with facism and well, here we are.

I seem to clearly remember a story from the Bible about this, but perhaps they’ve simply skipped that part during their reading?

This is also a royal pain if you’re into retro computers and want anything from like 2001-2004, because damn near every single motherboard from those eras need to be recapped, like, without exception. Either they’re dead, or they will be soon.

Super annoying to get a thing you want to play with and the first thing you have to do is replace 20 caps and spend 3 hours doing it before you can even see if it would otherwise even work, lol.

I had a discussion about using the Slashdot style voting rather than the Reddit style.

It not only has the additional tag, it has the max “upvote” display limit of 5, and the display code will expand and promote the best rated comments, while hiding the garbage.

I think comments on most forums would benefit from there being no ‘big upvote’ number to chase, as well as making the highest rated comments in a thread of say, 200, more obvious.

maybe that’s me being overly harsh

That’s actually probably fair: the M-chips are impressive, but they’re just an evolution that’s come out of the A-series stuff for their phones.

Which, of course, Apple bought and did not actually create. (I’ll let someone else argue the merits of buy vs do it yourself, especially when you give your aquisition endless R&D funds to make good shit.)

Seriously, they got so expensive so fast.

At this point, if I want a burger, I’ll go spend $11 at Chili’s and get an actually good burger, some chips, fries, and a drink.

Why would ANYONE who is not literally bereft of any other option go to McDonalds at this point?

affordable thrift store items

This has slowly become less and less true.

The big corpo thrift stores have long since had pricing that exceeds reasonable: a 10 year old shirt with some event printed on it is not $9.99, when I can go to any of a dozen retailers and just… buy a new one, often for less.

Smaller ones aren’t quite there yet, but smaller ones also tend to put more effort into fishing anything good in their donation streams out and posting it on ebay, so you end up with a store full of what is, quite literally, just trash.

The last wardrobe refresh I did I ended up buying almost entirely new or used from like eBay because the pricing at Goodwill, Salvation Army, and a couple of local thrift stores were at best similar and at worse wildly stupid.

The days when you could get a $0.99 shirt and $1.99 pants if you went on the correct color day are pretty much entirely dead, because capitalists going to capital, even if they’re literally profiting directly off stuff people are giving them for free.

He could sell his various parts as they fall off. What’s a trump toe worth you think?

ReactOS is cloning NT, so the 2000 part of that is correct.

95/98/98se/ME are completely different beasts, even if they happen to share the same GUI.

His advice was always bad.

Somehow, and I don’t get how, he got a reputation for “common sense” financial stuff.

He always was the 10%-to-the-church type which is just braindead if you’re financially strapped: the Jeeesus can live without your money, but your family probably can’t.

Also he’s a sexist, homophobic and probably racist piece of shit (since those come in threes) so really, no reason to do anything other than pretend he doesn’t exist and try to save cult members.

If your retirement window is 5 years, you’re probably very very fucked.

If it’s 10 years, as long as you’re assuming social security is going to contribute $0, you’re probably still pretty fucked.

15 years? Maybe, but at that point that whole global climate change thing we’re ignoring is going to start getting more serious, so I’d wager on fucked.

20? Please, you’re already in the trenches of the Water Wars, so your retirement plan is machine gun when you go over the top, sorry.

Basically retirement is going to be you dying once your insurance lapses and someone coming along later to pick your corpse up and billing your family for doing so.

(I’d love to be proven wrong, but ‘What’s the worst most awful thing that could possibly happen’ seems to be the right choice these days.)