I have four more years to pay off my house. I just have to survive the Trump administration without losing everything.

Wow, how are you retiring at 55??? I’m 56, and have spent this year re-vamping my IRA accounts with the hope of retiring in 10-12 years without any reliance on the social security that will be gone.

[Edit] I see below you mentioned having a pension. Must be nice!

That’s a shame since literally everyone should distrust Edge, given Microsoft’s history with browsers (and everything else). I don’t think anyone matches Microsoft’s caviler attitude of “We know there are hundreds of gaping security holes that allow attackers to take full admin control of your computer, but we’re just going to mark those bugs as will-not-fix and blame the users when something goes wrong.”

Honestly I’m not really sure about that. What I’ve seen on the idea of damage to children usually has the caveat of “more study is needed”, but of course nobody wants to subject children to such a study on purpose. On the other hand, I haven’t seen any studies yet that concluded long-term use in adults would cause any permanent damage. I suspect there could be outlying cases of extremely heavy usage but in moderation it so far appears to be perfectly safe.

The current belief is that it can affect the brains of growing children, but they’re not sure to what extent. In my state the legal age is 21, the same as for drinking. In adults, straight cannabis will not harm you in any way other than the usual effects of being under the influence and not always making rational choices. Worst case, you sleep it off. Do keep in mind that smoking it can slowly damage your lungs, the same as breathing any find particulates over a long period of time. I personally prefer edibles for long-term use, but the baking process does reduce the potency.

Now, like any drug, the reason you want to take it can be very important. If you need something to escape reality on a permanent basis, obviously you have a larger problem that no drug is ever going to solve. However the occasional evening can be quite entertaining, much like a trip to the water park. Other people (like myself) take it on a regular basis to help with medical problems, usually pain relief or sleep issues, where CBD is the answer rather than the THC component.

For myself, I’ve had sleeping problems for the past 16 years (since a bad car wreck). I worked with my doctor for awhile trying to find something that would help. The problem is, I’m a computer tech and I need my mind sharp for troubleshooting or writing code. All the prescription drugs leave your brain in a fog through much of the next day, and then what use am I? It turns out that marijuana has a fairly quick drop-off, so it can provide help through the night, and is pretty much out of my system by the time I head for work. As with anything, it takes some time to find the right dose. I take it along with other prescription medications to address different issues, but I’ve been getting good restful sleep for the past 9 years and feeling much more like myself again. For these purposes I highly recommend it, but talk to someone knowledgeable to guide you to the right strains and give advice on what to expect.

The immediate problem I see is that the very people these women are protesting against are the same assholes who think women are property that they can take any time they want. How is this not going to increase the number of rapes already occurring?

I’m curious, what part of that do you think will be good for anyone who isn’t a rich which male?

I agree with the wait-and-see approach, but I also know how much damage he did the first time around even without a lot of support. And the amazing thing is that people still think the economy was better under Trump (who barely managed to coast on Obama’s success) than it has been under Biden (who managed to turn around a global economic disaster after COVID). This time it’s all going to be on Trump, and we’re all going to suffer from it.

Unfortunately Trump’s stated plan is to boot out everyone who won’t kiss his ass, shut down “non-essential” services like the education department or national weather service, put someone in control of healthcare who believes all vaccinations need to be immediately banned, and pass national laws against women’s reproductive health care despite his claims of letting each State handle their own business. And yes, on his own he could only do so much, but the Republican party also gained more seats in both houses of representatives which means it will be easier to steamroll through anything he wants. So yeah, we have many many good reasons to be worried.

Seriously. If they wanted to marry a piece of property, I hear Trump’s garbage truck is available.

Wow, the comments in that article pretty much sum up the snowflake dynamic of conservatives. Not telling your husband who you voted for violates the sanctity of marriage? Maybe if you weren’t such a putz and actually listened to the reasons why no woman anywhere should be voting for Trump, your wife wouldn’t need to hide it from you. Maybe if you weren’t such a precious snowflake who was likely to be set off in a rage by the idea that a woman could have a valid reason for casting a vote that wasn’t centered around your manhood somehow being threatened by the idea of voting for a female president, your wife wouldn’t have to hide her vote from you.

This election isn’t about red vs. blue, it’s about women literally dying because of the draconian laws conservatives are passing under the guise of “anti-abortion”. There’s nothing hypothetical about this, it’s already happening, and giving Trump and Vance any ground to move forward with Project 2025 is going to make it so much worse.

Are you sure this is new? I’d swear all the M-series iMacs I’ve ordered for work over the last few years recharged the keyboard and mouse through USB-C

I think I get the idea. It’s bleak and you feel like there’s nothing you can do to change what’s happening. I’m sorry you feel that way and maybe at some point things will change for the better. That’s how I keep pushing forward, just looking forward to what might be in the future. During the Obama administration it felt like we were actually becoming better as a nation, more accepting of others and their differences, more willing to reach out to our neighbors. The only way I see things starting to get better again is to squash this notion that it’s somehow ok to polarize the whole nation to hate each other, and maybe then we’ll be able to start trying to help others again. Hope keeps us going.

I have to ask then, what are your feelings on Trump and Vance’s comments that they want to deport everyone who isn’t blatantly white, regardless of their citizenship status? I understand your frustration with the US Government, and this has been a long-standing issue across both parties to support Israel at all costs when we get pretty much nothing in return, but the Trump party is chomping at the bit to create a white nationalist country and put everyone else in internment camps. If you lose all of your rights as a citizen, how would you be of any help to the Arab and Muslim nations then?

I’m a white guy, the only way Trump’s administration is going to impact me is by the massive increase in cost of everything since his only concept of an economic plan is to tariff everything, but I’m still scared of what he’s threatening to do to everyone else. If we keep him out of office then maybe nothing changes or maybe we have a chance to try and fix things, and that’s the best-case scenario that I can see right now.

Seems like a good opportunity to remind folks about the Kiwix project, which allows you to download local private copies of select information such as Wikipedia. It was originally created to provide offline access to content for countries that were otherwise blocked, but events like this have sparked some recent discussion about archiving older files to preserve history.

Here’s a hot take… maybe stranding farmers in their fields for weeks at a time while the crops were dying had a negative impact on your customer loyalty. Your insistence that a “certified tech” is required to replace that $5 part, and an overall lack in any available techs to do the work, has made people search elsewhere for their purchases.

That’s a shame to hear, but yeah they’ve certainly changed since I signed on. Not that I expect any other to be better at this point.

It’s weird to see T-mobile taking this stance. I switched to them years ago because they were one of the few that supported unlocked phones, and even offered them for sale. Their policies might have changed on this, but I just bought an unlocked phone off Ebay this Summer and all I needed to do was pop my sim card into the new device. Hell I had to specifically install the visual voicemail app because there wasn’t any bloatware on the phone when I got it. So I guess I’m not following what their complaint is about?

“For only $1000 in bitcoin we will decrypt your files until the next time we fsck you over.”

Most of us can’t afford the sort of disk capacity they use, but it would be really cool if there were a project to give volunteers pieces of the archive so that information was spread out. Then volunteers could specify if they want to contribute a few gigabytes to multiple terabytes of drive space towards the project and the software could send out packets any time the content changes. Hmm this description sounds familiar but I can’t think of what else might be doing something similar – anyone know of anything like that that could be applied to the archive?