Agreed. In the IT industry as a tech since 1997, and even now everything except for my iDevices and one wireless bridge to the far side of the house is hardlined. I absolutely despise WiFi, from long experience.

Find an old 70s Amana Radarange on Marketplace or whatever local selling forum is available to you.

I have both 1972 (analog rotary dials) and 1976 (electrostatic push button) models, and they can bring a cup of water to boil in less than 30 seconds. Most any modern microwave I’ve tried this on needed 2-8 minutes to do the same damn thing.

at 54,

What, your body isn’t sounding like Rice Crispies every time you move? 🤣🤣🤣

Yyyyyyup. Baby back ribs, my absolute favourite.

First time I ever had racks outside of home, was at a local restaurant called Kelly O’Bryans. I was in my mid-20s at the time. Decided to “Irish size” the order to two racks, not aware that they were already running a special that doubled the racks. Entire party stared in shock when four f**king racks came out balanced on a single platter. And I ate them all. Including all of the pachos (cross-cut fries with a house dip sauce).

Second time was when Montanas came to town a few years later. At the time they were still doing six bones a refill, instead of the current 3-4. Had the whole initial rack (something they also stopped doing, only half a rack to start these days) and then did 12 refills. So seven full racks of ribs. I still have that receipt somewhere filed away in my bookkeeping.

I had the “hollow leg” of my youth clear into my 40s. But by 45 I could feel it noticeably collapsing, and by the age of 50 it was almost completely gone.

In my late 20s I polished off 7 full racks of ribs in one sitting. These days I have trouble getting completely through one full rack.

As someone with deep roots in the sciences, and good access to the latest data and evidence surrounding anthropogenic climate change, I seriously doubt that there will be much civilization left by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil. All indications used to point towards widespread economic, societal, and ecological collapse in the latter half of this century, well past my effective lifespan, but recent (and strong!) evidence has moved that up considerably to not much past 2035. So no, I am not worried in the least about “burdening” anyone with my collection. I seriously doubt that there will be anyone left who will care. The few who remain will be too obsessed with surviving another day to give two shits about books. I just want to live long enough to read most of them in relative comfort.

or sees a visible map of time in their head

Like how a day or a year is like a rollercoaster, coming down in the first half to rise back up in the second? It’s like a really odd sine wave for me.

eating hamburgers and hot dogs with flatware instead of on buns.

That sounds so German. I know the bun-less burgers as “frickadellen”, my own parents (both German immigrants who met each other over here) used to make them fairly frequently.

My goodness, I am so much like you.

I’ve been using a book tracker app since the iPhone 4s (2011) just to keep track of what I buy - I don’t track anything else - because even way back then I had trouble remembering if I had a book or if I had just browsed it elsewhere.

In 2018, various functions (search, sort, stats, etc.) took a permanent dirt nap just as I was nearing the 3K number of entries. And these are just the books I own.

The size of the DB backup file has nearly doubled since then.

Now granted, a number of books I get need to go straight into storage before I can even read them, as I have not yet built my library. It’s already gone through several redesigns to stay ahead of the size of my collection, and right now I’m looking at movable library storage stacks - the kind that roll on miniature railway tracks and have wheel-like dogs at their ends that a person turns to easily move them back and forth (opening and closing an access corridor between the stacks for access to the books). I’m hoping to eventually have almost half a linear kilometre of shelving in my library once it’s built.

I cannot imagine the horror of being even semi-illiterate, much less fully illiterate. I absolutely love reading.

I don’t have a problem with actual pedophiles that are caught in these dragnets.

My problem arises from the lack of rigorous and well-documented investigation into the target before shite starts popping off. As the article pointed out, there is nothing wrong with a 22yo dating an 18yo. And the problem here is a sense of vindictiveness trying to manufacture targets where not all targets are guilty of pedophilia.

So: you want to take a pipe wrench to warm over a pedophile? Make sure there is oodles of evidence that clearly and unambiguously makes the person a pedophile, and sure as shite I will look the other way. But the problem is that there is no self-reinforcing framework in place within the vigilante system to ensure and enforce this threshold of evidence. And without this system, innocent people are going to get hurt or killed.

Looks like I’ll finally be migrating my final workstation off of Windows 11.

I mean, I still have a while. The Dell T7910 still meets all of the Windows 11 Workstation 24H2 requirements, so Rufus only needs to modify that one part of the installer. And once I have Windows installed, I can do upgrades over Windows Update.

But once the machine gets too old for that…

At least OpenSUSE meets most of my needs.

plants grown from seed don’t bear the same fruit

Temperate-zone seed fruit like apples and pears rarely look, taste, and feel like their genetic parents.

Temperate-zone stone fruit, on the other hand - think peaches, apricots, cherries, etc. - are quite different. You plant one of those seeds, and it will bear fruit that is (usually) indistinguishable from the parent tree that the seed came from.

Now, Apple and pear trees are grafted for both cloning of the fruiting section as well as good rootstock. But most stone fruit grafting has cloning only as a secondary consideration - they are grafted mostly to be joined onto well-proven, high-quality rootstock that can produce lots of sap and confer resistance to certain diseases.

Source: am orchardist.

Canada might need these sooner rather than later.

With the breakdown of democracy and the rule of law in America, the Constitution just became wholly unenforceable and therefore irrelevant. That means that Trump could make good on his fever dream of invading Canada.

And there are many Americans who would jump at the chance to obey his command to slaughter Canadians. With only 40M against America’s 334M - and 0.097M military personnel against America’s 2.1M - it would be absolutely no contest.

Our only way of making such a fascist act of aggression as painful as possible would be with asymmetrical warfare using tiny, hard-to-defeat drones that could act independently and strike without warning. Deploy 10k of these suckers onto a battlefield, and the only survivors would be those within sealed armour or flying at high altitude. Because even an A10 Warthog loitering low over the field can be taken out if it unexpectedly ingests a half-dozen of the explosive buggers.

If it wasn’t for Marketplace, I would be off Facebook entirely.

But I am not on threads at all, and only get punted over to Instagram with reels that appear on my Facebook account.

“Trickle down economics only occurs when the wealthy bleed.”

Similar, and appropriate. The working class will only benefit once the wealthy are no longer wealthy.

None of that would have happened with a well-educated populace that could employ bullshit detection and critical thinking.

Hell, I doubt even conservatism in any capacity could survive as a going concern in such a society.

The entire American food pyramid and food ecosystem was explicitly designed to create metabolic disorders and enslave the American people to the for-profit medical system. It’s why raw foods with zero processing (and so, zero additional costs) cost several multiples more than highly processed foods (which cost much more to produce).

Y’all all need to largely remove the bottom level of the food pyramid from your diet, and start viciously curating highly-processed foods out of your diet.

Canada has had 4 shootings at elementary and high schools in the better part of a century. To increase that, you would have to include colleges and universities, and that would only increase that number to nine.

Nine.

Meanwhile, America has almost 300 every year. And that’s only elementary and high schools.