Load up an app? REVIEW THIS APP! (YES/NOT NOW)…

Want to pay your utility bill? RATE OUR SERVICE! (OK/REMIND ME LATER)

My policy is: Apps that interrupt me to ask for a review will get a 1 star review. I’ll add comments about wanting to be left the fuck alone and please sthaaap with the thirsty pop ups and emails - if it is convenient to do so. Hulu keeps bugging me on my XBox and I’m not entering an explanation with a fucking remote control (WTF ARE THEY THINKING?) so they just get 1 star with no explanation. Fuck’em. They asked for my opinion so they’re getting it.

I used to stick to that rule and get a sensible mid sized Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord that’s a few years old as needed. But in 2013 (the last time I needed to get a new car) the cost savings were really low compared to new. I think the used market was particularly hot so you’d save less that 10% of the cost, so I ended up getting my 1st and only (so far) brand new car ever.

Owning your data is seeming less and less possible. Even paying in cash isn’t an option in some places now

Some municipalities had passed laws saying that retail businesses had to accept cash since going 100% electronic is discriminatory towards the poor. But covid fucked that up

Sounds like you’re doing everything you can. It sucks that you’re going through this; I hope the situation improves and you don’t get furloughed.

I’m guessing that if you could get to all your jobs without the car, you would have already done so? Saving on gas and insurance can help, but depending on where you live that might not be realistic.

You could try contacting local food banks and see if they ever make accommodations for people who are working during operating hours. They might not but there’s no harm in asking.

Right now you’re in a serious hole from missing work for a family emergency. I don’t have much advice for getting back onto steady ground aside from being super crazy frugal and working extra hours in the short term (which is fucking exhausting mentally and emotionally and physically). Do you have any long term plans for having more breathing room years from now? If your steady state is “one car repair or illness away from defaulting on payments” then that’s a hard path. Do you or your wife have prospects for better paying jobs in the future? Are there training or educational opportunities that could help? Are there cheaper places you could live (smaller, worse neighborhood?) to save money while working towards better job prospects? Living on not enough money in crappy circumstances sucks but it is definitely more bearable if you know it’s temporary and you’re making progress towards something better.

Good luck.

And is that amount of money enough to replace the item that’s been taken away? Like if the DVD were widely available at the same price at the time of the digital purchase, but you got the Amazon “purchase” instead (for convenience?) then what are the odds that you can still get the DVD for that price today?

Growing up in New England we called them “egg with a hat”

Anyone who says their smart overestimates themselves. Anyone who says their dumb underestimates themselves. How does anyone even answer this question?

I think it’s possible for someone to know that they are generally pretty smart or not very smart without over or under estimating. A lot of people will over or under estimate but if you’re just looking for a rough placement in a third of the bell curve, there’s a lot of feedback in everyday life to help.

Pedants who choose to make big deals over minor issues are always out to prove something and are objectively not smart.

Some people sincerely have trouble adapting to different precisions of language in different situations. I know some very smart and successful people with autism who struggle with this. It can be super annoying when they are way too pedantic for the context but I don’t think being deficient in this one area makes them dumb.

Up gets me every time.

If no one is allowed to wear any flair then that’s fair. But everyone is allowed (and possibly encouraged?) to wear pride stuff in June as part of the anyway corporate rainbow-washing. So I have to ask why it’s OK to wear “LGBTQ+ folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff but it’s not OK to wear “Black folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff? Why is stating that Black lives have value so offensive that it’s worth fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to ban it?

I’m mad at both. Amazon is trash. The current court is trash. And all the ghouls that got us this shit ass court are trash, from Mcconnell to Trump to every dummy that votes for Trump to the stupid stupid Democrats who didn’t fight tooth and nail when Obama’s pick didn’t get a hearing and didn’t pack the courts at the 1st opportunity. Oh and fuck RGB who should have fucking retired at the start of Obama’s 1st term. Octogenarians who survived multiple bouts of cancer don’t have the luxury of hanging out so the 1st female president gets to appoint their successor. Democrats are so fucking inept it’s hard to believe that they aren’t sandbagging us on purpose

There are some web apps that only support chrome on windows (or chrome and edge). An app from my doctor’s office refused to run on FF for a while. Thankfully it now has a “try running on unsupported browser “ link so I’m not blocked. (Let’s not get into why I’m running windows)

Cool. I’ll be able to breathe during the water wars :) Do you happen to know if we would still get good oceanic photosynthesis levels with increased ocean temperature and decreased ocean ph levels?

If all the places with forests become desert, what are we supposed to breathe while we wait for trees to grow in the new green regions? How exactly is global food production supposed to make an efficient and orderly transition to completely different continents? Is 90% of the world’s population supposed just pick up and move to the yet to be built futuristic cities in different countries?

This is some fairy tale magical bullshit thinking. This looks like almost everyone in the yellow regions die (exceptions are those wealthy and politically connected enough or lucky and useful enough to be taken into a green region). There will be wars over food, water and habitable land. The global refugee crisis will be unfathomable. What happens when hundreds of millions or even billions of people need to get into a neighboring country to live? What if those people are in a country with a sophisticated modern military and are a nuclear power? Dude. We are so fucked.

Not the main character but Gus Fring was a remarkably intelligent gangster.

I only do tinctures and mints now. Nothing that I could ever find yummy. Too many “surely one little bite of that rice crispy treat won’t get me high” or “another piece of that chocolate won’t get me too high “.

This is actually for a FOX affiliate station not FOX News. I don’t know if there is any relationship between local news on FOX stations and FOX News. I thought that they were supposed to completely separate entities so we can all watch The Simpsons without feeling like we’re supporting Tucker Carlson. But maybe that isn’t true?

Over the air stations are using a limited public resource (slices of the spectrum for the HDTV or radio) so the FCC governs who gets what slices so that we don’t have a noisy mess as competing channels try to broadcast over one another. One of the conditions of a broadcast license is to provide some public good with support for emergency announcements, PSAs and news. So the FCC should have some say in whether the thing you’re doing to meet the “provide news” requirement is actually news.

It’s kinda like, if you want a driver’s license to drive nuclear waste, they may require you to take classes on truck driving and materials safety in order to get and maintain your license. You have the right to drive a bicycle with a box of books wherever you want with no license, but if you want to drive a big rig on public roads with hazardous materials, you need some very specific licenses. And you can’t just say your buddy Jim taught you what you need in his garage last weekend. The licensing body absolutely has the right to say that your buddy popping off on a rant does not meet the qualifications of the required classes.

But with the current Supreme Court, who knows? They could say that the FCC isn’t allowed to make value judgments on “what is news?”. If so, things may get weird. Would they still be allowed to determine “what is obscene?” or would we start getting 24-7 porn on the over the air stations? Would they still be able to require news programs? And if not, what stations would still show news? Would reruns of Three and a Half Men bring in more money than local news? If so, maybe the only stations that would still bother would be ones with owners that want to broadcast specific kinda of news regardless of profit?

I’m in the US and was planning on bugging out to the EU if shit gets worse here. So I guess I need a new plan B as well. But if the US and a large part of the EU go full fash, will anywhere be safe?

Becoming a billionaire requires winning so many dice rolls that it’s difficult (impossible?) to really understand that you can lose sometimes.

Yeah. Anything over 2 hours, I’s rather watch it at home so I don’t have to sprint to the bathroom and miss part of the movie.