When I worked at an MSP I kept running into folks (both businesses and residential customers) using the cheapest PCs they could get and having to work around Home edition limitations. I’m blanking at this moment but there was one limitation that was consistently a righteous pain in the ass… I gotta look up the differences and see if one jogs my memory

Edit: aha! it was the freaking Microsoft account. Its required on Home edition but optional on Pro. A super common issue folks would run into was from Microsoft removing the Windows Mail app and replacing it with Outlook, but the in-place upgrade/replacement would gum up their signed in emails and Outlook would be stuck thinking it’s both signed in and not at the same time. Easiest solution is to simply sign out of all accounts at the device-level and sign back in, because Outlook just looks at and manages the accounts that are signed into at the device-level but you can’t do that on Home edition, so I’d have to spend even more time rooting around until Outlook finally decided that the account that it was failing to sign into wasn’t in fact fully signed in and pop an actual signin prompt

Real talk, on the subject of lasagna, my wife recently found an alternate recipe where instead of layering the lasagna you roll the lasagna in the noodles, so you end up with a pan full of rolls of lasagna and it’s kinda like a calzone or tortilini but not at the same time. Its really good

I knew a family growing up who’d check out movies from the library instead of Blockbuster usually, and as DVDs became more relevant they kept going for VHS tapes because they were less likely to be scratched to unreadability. I can’t remember how much my family went for VHS tapes vs DVDs but it may have been purely based on availability. I do however remember my dad had a strong preference for widescreen despite our setup letterboxing widescreen films (like most home theaters of the day) and quite a few times being sent back to swap the full screen release I grabbed for the wide screen one

For any young’uns reading, in the early 2000s with broadcasters shifting from transmitting a 4:3 image to a 16:9 image, home media soon followed but since many people didn’t yet have hardware supporting widescreen, fullscreen releases typically had the edges chopped off to fit in a 4:3 aspect ratio while widescreen saw less cropping compared to the version seen in theatres, but then for older home theatre hardware that only knows 4:3 video formats it would have black bars on the top and bottom whereas fullscreen would of course fill a 4:3 screen

I mean, you’d lose most of the Appalachian Mountains which as one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world means losing a ton of ancient fossils that helped piece together the biological history of Earth. I’d also be curious how the glaciers would be impacted given how heavily they shaped much of North America

You also lose several major cities including Toronto and St Louis, Canada loses most of its habitable land (assuming the climate isn’t significantly impacted by the existence of a second Mediterranean Sea, which it definitely would be) Chicago is going to be quite different but probably an even more important port city in such a world. Las Vegas is now a port city, so probably less casinos and more just major city. My wife would be sad because the Quad Cities (a metro area on the Iowa/Illinois border) wouldn’t exist and she really likes that area. I’d be sad because the Mississippi River would be much short and therefore way less cool. But it’s a really wild concept that gets crazier the more you think about it

Could be 10 people making 50k a year in a shed with a couple of managers making more. Whether that’s a just a warehouse or actually making widgets or some such that’s easily a profitable business with a million or so in revenue. Or just a small shop with a handful of minimum wage employees. Maybe an office cleaning service? Some business models can be perfectly stable with a million or so per year in revenue

You ever do something and realize you actually kinda enjoy it? I have a feeling that’s the case. He was probably already an avid hiker when he started too since that’s a crazy bet to take on without any real prep

We have ways of making you pronounce the letter O

Would a safety deposit box at a bank be an appropriate option for your off-site backups?

I mean, the Climax was a pretty sweet geared locomotive for usecases where you just need to haul a ton of stuff over rough track with one very light engine. Now they just use trucks and call it a day

Hey you can recreate the experience by simply going to your local library, except most libraries have eliminated late fees and there’s of course no checkout fees either

an end to the looming threat of nuclear annihilation and before the start of the “war on terror”

There’s an underappreciated film that came out during this period called Canadian Bacon, one of John Candy’s last films. Basically the president of the United States is trying to improve his approval rating as the military industrial complex is imploding and sending the nation into a recession, so he drums up a cold war with Canada instead. Its honestly a brilliant time capsule of geopolitical sentiments at the time, as well as funny as hell

So I’ve started really enjoying theatres post-pandemic. It comes down to going to the right theatre and not going to a super packed premier night showing. I’ll usually attend a weekend matinee or a weeknight showing of something that’s about to drop from the theatre cycle when it’s not very busy and you don’t have to fight for seats. Going rate is like $18 per ticket for a nicer theatre which if you only go 2-4 times a year like I do is perfectly agreeable

Now I could see someone who goes weekly or biweekly really not liking the theatre experience these days but that’s not me

Lol I never went to a movie theater in my entire life. Am I missing out on anything?

Honestly going to the movie theatre is an experience best had with friends/family/dates. I regularly check the schedules at a few local and not so local theatres and make plans with friends if there’s something we want to see. Usually it ends up being one of the times they replay some older films (for example many of the Studio Ghibli films get theatre time at least once a year and it’s a wonderful way to see those beautiful films) because there just aren’t many new movies I want to see coming out.

The US is fucking huge…The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin

It is hilarious to imagine if this were real. Like what would European explorers and Settlers have done if they started mapping it out and went “wait a minute…”

For an rail network that runs 24/7 they’re going to have crews specifically to wake up should there be a problem on the busiest sections of mainline as this hoax indicated there were. That’s a significant amount of dollars burned if they close the line due to a citizen reporting heavy damage to the bridge, and just waiting until 8am on the next business day to actually look at anything.

I strongly suspect what happened was they woke up their on-call inspectors (or scrambled an inspector who worked nights, which a rail network may very well have) informed them of photos circulating showing significant structural damage to this 150 year old viaduct, so they roll up and see the exact same viaduct in the exact same shape it’s been in for their entire life and call up their boss and say “oy you wakin me up for this shiv? The bridge is bloody fine! Check your sauces mate!” (And after reporting that it was a hoax probably went and did a more thorough inspection to make sure their bases were covered)

theoretical violent old women

My wife worked in the memory care section of a assisted living facility. She quit primarily because the sheer amount of physical abuse from the residents was taking its toll on her health and she was pregnant at that time so it was risking more than just her own life. Many people become violent once dementia starts setting in. Since they no longer have the mental faculties to handle the situation they lash out and they don’t hold back. Some of these folks are surprisingly strong despite being in their 80s/90s/100s and in their heads they think they’re fighting for their life, when in reality they’re just refusing to take their twice daily heart medication for example, or refusing to let the nurse plug them in for their thrice weekly dialysis (which is extremely deadly if any dialysis sessions are missed)

So it’s honestly something I’ve been noodling about for a while, which is how to manage a soft landing from the current capitalist system given the overall trend of population decline and how capitalism as it’s currently structured can’t handle a sustained decline like we’ll eventually be looking at.

The best vision I can come up with (and this is US-centric since it’s what I know best of course) is to first expand Medicare to all, next expand SNAP/Foodstamps benefits to all, then expand the housing assistance programs to all. Somewhere in there a universal pension and later on a universal income. This would decouple working class folks’ everyday and long-term needs from the wider economy. Basically eliminate the micro-economy so that the macroeconomy can do whatever it will do without too much pain for everyday people

Its a reference to a viral post from reddit

Something something not all boomers. There’s selfish rich people in every age group. In the case of Boomers they happened to be born at the same time as a ton of other people, so they became the most influencial voting block (and later the wealthiest voting block because of the political influence) but of course many boomers are absolutely struggling financially, getting screwed over by the same ladder pulling that younger folks are getting screwed over them

With the projected population decline, the inflationary effects of creating money in order to pay pensions could actually be beneficial