The city I grew up in is home to the “world’s largest” Bratfest. The sell close to 300k brats every year (and it’s hosted in a city with a population of about 280k!)

I spent a full week on a semester book report in college the second time I went to college, and ended with a term paper I was super proud of. I got a B on that paper but the important part was I learned a ton from that book and it was super interesting.

The first time I went to college I completed a term paper in a couple of hours the night before after largely blowing the class off and got both a B on the paper and a C in the class for it. I didn’t remember until I was turning it in that it was supposed to take me the whole semester to write and be a big project to stress over

I don’t know what the takeaway is exactly here but I think it’s interesting nonetheless

Is this the secret to how you save 66% on everything?

Or is the real secret that you’ll never remember to mail in the rebate card until it’s long past the due date and just stuck with the 11% higher price?

Public transit never turns a profit, not because it’s bad business but simply down to the economics of providing affordable transit. In fact, fares recover such a small percentage of a public transit agency’s budget that there’s good arguments being made for making public transit fare free. Public transit is a net good for communities so making it as accessible to those who want or need it is important

MTG seems to be in the minority of elected Republican representatives in that she actually seems to believe the things she says

These lists make the most sense if you just imagine the stereotype the hobby exudes. Woodworkers are rugged, work with their hands, have a bushy beard and smell like fresh cut wood all the time, meanwhile someone who’s hobby is watching porn is overweight, hasn’t showered in a week and will have unrealistic expectations of you while struggling to perform in bed himself. But someone who makes porn is buff, squeaky clean and knows his way around a women’s body.

From talking to my female friends the bar for men is incredibly low. Basically have good hygiene and be able to take care of yourself and you’re already in the top 60-70%

Problem is it’s showrunner Butch Hartman is a POS. His self insert character was Doctor Rip Studwell if that isn’t telling enough.

Why you have to call me out? Also being so focused on being financially responsible means I don’t spend the couple hundred bucks to get into a new hobby for way too long, especially given how I tend to circle back to my hobbies and interests rather than abandon them forever

One of my online friends tracked it down, and simply said they’re unsurprised that it was a teaboot post

you can use it to watch linear TV if you don’t feel like making a selection.

These days that’s through a box the cable company provides that plugs into the HDMI more often than anything else. If you happen to have actual towers in range maybe you can actually plug an antenna into the antenna port but that’s what TV Tuner cards that you plug into your Jellyfin/Plex box are for. Basically for folks looking for a dumb TV chances are they have no need for any of the actual TV features except for maybe the remote

If the room is small enough room with the seating closet enough to the screen, a large computer monitor could do the job pretty well. You’d have to be fine with doing all input switching and audio control on a receiver or only ever use a single device as the input.

I’ve seen some interesting speculation that the Republican party’s embrace of Trump will be the death of the party once Trump passes on, and I’ve wondered what will happen. The US has always had 2 parties since the country’s conception, so I genuinely wonder if the Democratic Party will flip conservative again and either the Republicans will attack from the left as “New Republicans” or a new party will fill in the left-leaning gap they’ve left.

This makes sense at a macro scale but I simply can’t imagine a scenario at the micro scale that makes that happen. Most realistic scenario I can think of is that the Republicans fail to elect anyone (might get a seat or two still but not enough to be a viable party) for a cycle of two, the Democratic party stops trying as more career politicians move over from the Republican party and some popular Democrats splinter off to form a new party. But the things that have to happen for each of those steps to occur are pretty insurmountable.

Idk it’s an interesting thought experiment especially when trying to stay realistic and not just be a wet dream

I think it’s more trying to win political favor by spending big with the company owned by a member of the incoming presidential administration.

Or it’s just wanting to market their ads on that platform and as you said, not having the balls to stick to their boycott

Credit balances don’t negatively impact credit scores as much as one would think. It’s ultimately a combination of factors that go into an overall credit score with the heaviest hitter being payment history. If one makes all of their payments they can have a decent credit score despite carrying a 10k balance. Carrying a balance of greater than 30% of the limit will detract significantly from the overall score, but it won’t knock it below “decent” range on its own.

I’m honestly not even sure how one actually gets their score below 500. My wife got a head injury and physically could not remember whether or not she’d paid her credit cards a couple of years ago, so they ended up becoming delinquent and going to collections. Ultimately it dropped her credit score to about 500 but then it started climbing back up from the car loan and mortgage that are in both of our names and is almost up to 700 again. I seriously want to know how people manage to get their scores down to the 300s (the floor is 300) because you basically have to try in order to get your score that low. A friend of a colleague managed such a feet and then had some identity theft which actually improved his credit score because it looked more like normal credit activity than his real credit activity

A friend showed me their workflow for piracy and it’s really incredible just how easy it all is. Literally just download an OVPN config from whatever VPN provider you subscribe to, connect to the VPN and search in qbittorrent (and use the link in qbittorrent to download the necessary search plugins)

Like obviously this is a few decades of software refinement, legal battles plus a fair amount of large companies turning a blind eye to the obvious. So it’s shoulders of giants and all but it’s still kinda jarring

You know what’s better than the bare minimum? Give your work more than they expect, but keep some of your potential to yourself. Only give work 70% and keep that other 30% of yourself for yourself. You get all of the benefits of being an overachiever with none of the drawbacks.

You know your job is as safe as it can be because you’re exceeding expectations, and you can reap the bonuses and pride that brings but you still have remaining capacity to do more in your personal time. Plus if you’re not completely applying yourself every day you can hit the grindstone on a really bad day when SHTF and really come out looking like a hero

I have personal goals in life I want to reach and I’m going to do whatever it takes to do so. Try laying out your life goals… What do I want to do 5, 10, 20 years in the future?

As a relatively young person but older than OP myself, this is exactly what I did to get out of the slump of knowing how the system is stacked against us all. I set myself goals, and kept updating my goals. I had a 6 month, 1 year and 3 year plan at any point. Longer than 3 years it’s hard to set specific goals because too much can change in that time frame. I always had goals to work towards and make myself a better version of me. If you can continually be a better version of yourself than you were before then you’ve won the game of life

Good question! I can’t remember.

I think I read a Microsoft blog or something like a decade ago that said they shifted from a Hyper-V based solution to Linux to improve stability, but honestly it’s been so long I wouldn’t be shocked if I just saw it in a reddit comment on a related article that I didn’t yet have the technical knowhow to fully comprehend and took it as gospel.

At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between