jwx48

...that use gasoline, and come from a dealership that is actively hostile. I'd rather take my chances on the Slate to replace my 13 year old car.

That strikes me as a forced correlation. Something along the lines of "some people are willing to pay more for British racing green, so let's charge $X for it".

editing is thinking.

I hadn’t realized until just now how accurate that is for me as well. Thank you.

I’d love to know how Mercer County, West Virginia was chosen. I grew up there.

There was, I believe, a hairdresser rounded up by ICE and sent to CECOT with images/video of his head getting shaved and audio of him crying for his mother. I think about him all the time, and wonder what happened to him because it's so horrific. He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would survive a situation like that, and yet nothing on his status, or his family, has noticably trickled out as information in the last nine or 10 months. My short little comment here will do nothing to encompass the context of the situation, but to have this humiliating experience documented and highlighted only to have it disappear so quickly and easily it's downright depressing.

It is. Pretty much anyone who actually believes the “millions of illegal immigrants” line is detached from reality.

Bingo. Therein lies the difference between a “client” and a “customer”.

This is the best example of documentation I’ve seen posted here in a very long time.

I think of this every single time I see or read about a cybertruck.

Good one. I’m going to add that to my list of metaphors and analogies. Some people just don’t understand the experience, and this seems helpful.

Because corporate blogs are predominantly nothing but marketing fluff that dominates search results so thoroughly that they drown out any actual useful information.

Now imagine for a second, that the whole universe was a big cycle, and that you are going to be repeating this very same life in a “future” cycle, and maybe infinitely many times

I've heard this called 'Eternal recurrence of the same' in a past life (pun not intended). It fascinates and terrifies me at the same time.

Litter box cleaner: A kinect, a digital weight scale, a couple of cameras, a robot arm, a litter box, an internet connection and I would pay 25c for people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to manipulate the robot arm and clean the litter box for me. And people would wait in line to take the job.

This blows my mind, and I love it. What sort of limits did you put on the Mechanical Turk service to keep people from farming the... you know... turds.

I need hearing aids. I even want hearing aids. After finally getting to see an audiologist I looked at the $5000US price offered by the in-house shop and could not stomach it (in part because they were not covered by my insurance). This was back in February of this year, so OTC hearing aids were officially a thing, and I'd hoped against hope that the prices would reflect that. After surveying the OTC hearing aid landscape for the past 10/11 months I may just go ahead and get them, because I've not found any good sources of information on them. Just lots and lots of marketing copy.

Could you expand on this? I'm genuinely curious because I'm a former academic librarian, emphasis on 'former'.

I believe he did, but I'm not convinced it went as well as he'd hoped. I'd read something to that effect, but am unable to recall what and where.

Yep. 3 x 0.5mg a day for over ten years. Started my taper in 2018 and it took 3 1/2 years. In retrospect even that was probably too fast, because things started to go very wrong in 2020 and went catastrophically wrong at the end of 2021.

Send me a DM (email in profile) if you have specific questions. I'm more or less an open book.

If you've been on these long-term, I cannot stress enough how slowly you need to taper.

Edited to add that I wish I could contribute more to this conversation than lived experience, but saying that benzodiazepines "...are associated with an increased risk of suicide due to aggression, impulsivity, and negative withdrawal effects"[0] is like describing the sinking of the Titanic as a fender-bender.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzodiazepine

Now this is something I would love to learn more about. I feel like I'm always tinkering with audio hardware, and if I can bring a Teensy into the picture, then even better.

Mitchell's translation of part 50, in particular, has long resonated with me:

The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings. He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body. He doesn't think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being. He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day's work.

He admits (in the end notes, If I remember correctly) that this is not a literal translation; but comparing it to translations that do stick more closely to the original text I find that there's a lot here I prefer.

I've pretty much given up trying to recycle plastic, and instead throw it in the trash. It's toxic to make (I think?), contaminates food and water when you heat it, and--apparently--can not be recycled safely or efficiently. I realize I can't remove it from life entirely, but I'm actively avoiding it where I can and replacing it as opportunity permits.

Lol. I loved Calvin and Hobbes for many reasons, but one of them was definitely because I could relate. I need to read them again...

Whoa, this takes me back to 2nd grade when I did almost nothing but daydream during class. My daydreams were elaborate science fiction. I got in a lot of trouble for it, both with my parents and the (substitute) teacher. The teacher ended up paddling me for doing it, which was a terrible punishment for being so far ahead of my peers[0] that I had to find a way to compensate.

--- [0] I need to be very specific here: I do not think I was smarter than my classmates, or some special genius. I had just been afforded more of an educational foundation by that point in time.

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that aluminum Macbook (sans pro). I was working in a multimedia lab at the time and we were pretty dependent on firewire for student projects and putting the Macs into targeted disk mode.

I am not a lawyer, just a Sysadmin; but with that said, the linked pdf of the complaint is absolutely fascinating to me. It's worth it (to me) for the list of resources it cites.

My 2009 Macbook Pro 13 (5,5) had firewire. Could you be referring to a different model?

As a native English speaker, my brain has a strange habit of processing foreign-language films with subtitles seamlessly, while viewing subtitled English-language films/shows feels much more cumbersome. Now that I think about it, the English-language subtitles are more often than not closed-captioning, so there are descriptions of sounds in addition to the transcribed dialog. Maybe that's what throws me off.

I've seen many on the campus of Elon University.

Then you have my apologies.

Gotta be. I've never flagged anything before now, but I think this merits it.