It keeps trying. I keep denying it.

I would far rather pay a fee for an OS, like I did for every computer I built up to Win 7, and not have to deal with M$oft’s BS and ad-pushing.

I thought Edinburgh was two different places because of pronunciation.

I always read it as pronounced like -berg, but there was this other, similar town pronounced -bruh or -boro that people talked about.

Just one of those place names that didn’t come up often at all, so I never compared them in my head and wondered if “hey, these might be the same place…” It came up and bit me in conversation far too recently where my misunderstanding was worth a laugh among friends.

That, and I thought we’d elect basically decent (as far as politicians go) people to the presidency that would at least honor tradition and the institution. Boy, was I wrong about that.

Fuck the private restaurant business. Just tons of fuckery on taxes and wages. From underreporting tips to working off the clock to writing off trips to France as a “business expense”. Glass of wine or 3 at a vineyard and now it’s a wine-buying-and-research trip.

Windows 11? Ads. New outlook program? Ads. Old outlook iOS app? Now injecting ads there too.

Ads are a cancer on the internet.

No. Though I have encountered enthusiasts, they’re generally fun. Had one kid that knew more about the aircraft than we did, asking systems questions that we never even knew existed. Kid was smart.

Foo fighters were the reflection of the sun off ice crystals. See them all the time.

As to the rest of this insanity, I’ve got tens of tens of thousands of hours flying and not seen anything inexplicable.

Thanks for the rec, but unfortunately I’m on iOS.

I loved RSS feeds. But I’ve given up on them. And it would seem so have many of the sites I used to frequent. I read RSS offline, so right there I have a problem as the vast majority of RSS apps expect an internet connection. Sites used to write content in such a manner that it was easily readable in RSS, now they don’t. The decline in popularity of RSS has meant that after I get comfortable with an app it stops being updated and no longer works as the developer decides it’s not worth keeping up. Sites make RSS feeds harder to find, if they even have one.

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I’m curious how they implemented this. The air completely has to be replaced with nitrogen, no breathing in a mix of nitrogen and outside air, no oxygen at all. People that enter confined spaces with no oxygen pretty much just drop and are dead quickly, so this doesn’t sound like they did it right.

I would really need to see the math on this. All of the numbers. Plenty of people bitch and moan about taxes, but there’s no way income tax should result in a continually smaller paycheck because the recipient got a raise, nor should a raise be consumed entirely by taxes. Anyone who tells a story about losing all their raise to tax isn’t telling the whole story most likely, like filing for too many withholding exemptions on the W4, paying less tax, then getting slammed with a tax bill “consuming all their raise” or something.

Now, I have heard of people running into issues with the AMT, but that’s for people already making a pretty good amount of money, and that limits (crudely explained) says even though you made a bunch of money more and have a ton of write offs/deductions, the AMT floor won’t let the filer get all the deductions so they pay more tax. That also might come up if one sells a house or something and brings in a bunch of money. But that’s not a situation most people face, and they shouldn’t see it regularly. It was intended to prevent wealthy people from skipping out on taxes.

“To be fair,” no it can’t, at least not in the US. The top tax bracket for income I think is around 37%. And the next lowest is in the high 20s, but I don’t know what the $ amount is, but I think you gotta clear a half mil + a year before you get to that 37%. So make a mil a year? 37%. 2 mil? 37%. No matter what you’re making you’re not getting to 100%. So I don’t know where you live, but here in the US there’s no way to hit 100% on personal income tax, the tax that’s being discussed.

Then that would have been a good clarification to include in the statement. But when someone said their raises are eaten by taxes, one immediately assumes income tax.

That’s not possible. That’s not how tax brackets work at all.

Doc Martens are now Chinese made IIRC and don’t last.

Solovair is the the company that used to make Martens and you can still buy that style there. I hear they’re much better than Martens, but also occasionally a mixed review that they didn’t last very long.

I’ll offer a mixed review for carhartt…while they used to be strictly workwear, they’ve started putting up retail spaces in designer clothing areas. Prices have shot up. I had a belt from them that fell apart pretty quick with normal wear. Got a work shirt that’s doing pretty good though. IMO they’re headed down the same road as a lot of brands that get popular - price hikes with decreased quality.

It doesn’t matter what you want. What matters is if corporations can extract $ from you, gain an efficiency, or cut their workforce using it.

That’s what the drive for AI is all about.

I’ve used lead quite a bit for various things. It’s “soft” for a metal, but it is nothing like clay and is not “squishy”. It is relatively easily bent and will take a rubber hammer to easily form to shapes. I really can’t think of a material one would encounter in daily use that is comparable to the malleability of lead. So “very soft”, yes, but it is metal.