“yea, i know brandy. she lives two trailers over”

and i wouldn’t want to see diaper don on the cover of sports illustrated swimsuit edition.

the news on regular tv last night was totally lopsided. tons of ‘reaction’ from the right and far-right, hardly anything from anyone else.

the only one within an hour of here has very high prices. they basically feed off of walmart hate, and charge those customers a premium for the convenience of not having to drive an hour (each way) to get to the next nearest store that isn’t them or walmart.

ya. basically they hit that ‘tipping point’ where the increased profit margins from the higher prices is no longer keeping up with the decrease in sales volume resulting from those ever-increasing prices.

10 years, double the prices? ain’t that far off.

at our mcd, at least that much for many, if not most, things on their menu. everything i (used to) buy there, anyway. and way more than that for the former ‘dollar menu’ items. beverages the least affected, although it’s now probably double, too (the large cup shrunk on top of the ~ 90% increase since then).

and that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

they ain’t gonna shut it down… not before some shenanigans involving new corporate entities, loads of debt, and a bankruptcy that ends up with the feds (taxpayers) with the clean-up bill.

also 13 original colonies… 13 stripes on the flag.

some magahead: so that means 1.2…3…4…7 republicans… and 1…2…6 confederates?

at the office we have the ones you have to push down–and hold for the water to run. i’ve encountered them elsewhere and you get 10-20 seconds before the water shuts off… ours doesn’t. by the time you get your hand down to the water, it’s shut off.

i’ve seen two of these things around here. they’ve both been on the flatbed of a local towing service.

i half expect a hung jury. there’s bound to be one maga on the jury that won’t budge.

ad-skip to present day. encryption and drm is being introduced into the new atsc 3.0 broadcast standard, and some stations are already using it.

i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that’s not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.

i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.

i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse… a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could ‘shuck’ it because i’m short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven’t. hell, i haven’t even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.

you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.

these clowns have shifted so far to the right, they’re in danger of falling off the edge of the earth.

tmobile (and sprint when it existed) and att suck around here. they are only built-up along the interstate. verizon (through acquisitions) and uscc were the legacy cellular providers. towers everywhere, in every small town and every other farm field in between. it’ll make tmobile better here, but at the expense of higher prices across-the-board with one less player in a game with far too few left.

ting hasn’t been the same since dish bought it from tucows.

on my arch-based systems, i use repos first, aur second. appimages third. i do also have a couple minor things (that are self-contained with no dependencies) that were just ‘unzipped’ into their own directories and links added to menus where appropriate. note that i don’t game on these systems. i don’t have a lot of aur packages installed, so updates and subsequent recompile time isn’t an issue.

i have yet to run into anything i want or need that isn’t available in those. so no flatpaks or snaps.

i kinda expect google to go all ‘new coke’ here and unveil a ‘classic’ search experience as their experiment in ‘new google’ to be more like pepsi bing continues to fail spectacularly. they’ve already got the ‘web’ tab, it just has to be rebranded and made the default on a clean page with a link to ‘google ii’ which will quietly vanish from existence in a few years and nobody will notice.