Per an adjacent discussion on NPR, California is considered a “petrol-island”. Conventional shipping over land is both difficult and inefficient because they’re tucked on the other side of a mountain chain. Coming from Texas, willing or not, seems to have it’s own additional expense.

I generally agree that science reporting treats everyone like children, but I really don’t have a problem with this analogy. Stars are the only naturally occurring fusion we have to observe and compare it to. To me that makes sense.

Coke and Skittles, duh.

Woah! This is the second best tech support I’ve had this year. Thank you for 1. Identifying a bug, and 2. Offering a workaround same day!

You have my gratitude.

Hey! Thanks for stepping in. This is what Uname -A gets me:

Linux winux 6.14.0-33-generic #33~24.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Sep 19 17:02:30 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

And my Info Center says this:

Operating System: KDE neon User Edition KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.19.0 Qt Version: 6.9.2 Kernel Version: 6.14.0-33-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 8 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i3-1315U Memory: 8 GiB of RAM (7.5 GiB usable) Graphics Processor: Intel® Graphics Manufacturer: LENOVO Product Name: 82X7 System Version: IdeaPad Slim 3 15IRU8

And this is my configuration page for the night light setting, which appears to be set for specific times:

What did they do to you?

In car nav systems are nowhere near as up to date and useful as maps or Waze. And updating them is often as clunky as a new windows install. Some can only be updated by the dealer. It feels 20 years behind to use the systems offered by a lot of car companies.

Check out Nile Red on Nebula, (or YT if that’s your bag). He makes American Cheese from the ground cheddar up and you can watch. Having done so, I agree with you.

Balatro high contrast mode is a godsend.

FWIW, my last phone (until 3 weeks ago) was a OnePlus Nord N20. Absolutely stellar budget phone with a solid mid-range experience and features. It had a headphone jack AND an SD card slot, as well as dual SIM tray if that’s useful. I think it’s actually higher spec than the N30. You can still find those. OnePlus is pretty good about including a lot of that stuff, except on their flagship phones. Hope that’s helpful.

Ah, so I’m guessing you’re fully behind the Uyghur genocide that Xinping is committing.

When we switch to DST, we "Fall Back. ". We set the clocks one hour back, at 2:00am Sunday, so basically we get an extra hour of sleep just on that night. Then we lose one when we set the clocks forward in the spring.

To be fair, I don’t think that extra hour, once in the Fall, is used as a reason for Daylight Savings in any debates.

So, just sword and sandal Sims? Jesus, it sounds so plausible now.

Sadly there is no loss for him real or on paper. He only donated his name and usage rights to the company, any actual value came from suckers, and other REP. grifters. Even if each share is a cent by the time he sells, it’s still just profit for him.

Now, if other shareholders could come together and agree that he acted against their interests, THEN he could conceivably lose money in a resulting suit.

Hah! Good one. They’ll just fight to make it impossible to send a cop to prison no matter how many people they murder.

Look at it this way, Google stopped caring about their viewers as anything more than wallets to empty years ago. Now they’re going through the same cycle with advertisers. They don’t care if the ads land, or the targeting works, just that they can convince them to keep buying ad space.

Eventually the ROI will show as not worth it to the advertisers, but by then Pichai and the rest of the C-suite will be pulling the same scam at another company whose investors are more greedy and stupid than saavy.

Because the horrible truth of America now, is that CEOs and their ilk have stopped caring about creating value, or building a sustainable business model with long term revenue. Now they just look at witless investors as wallets to be emptied too.

First, You rock. You changed the context of your actions based on new information and have decided to change your approach going forward, and you’re honest about it. All political discourse should occur at this level of self-awareness and transparency.

And just so you know I commiserate…I volunteered for Blegojevich.

Anachronox. Ion Storm at it’s best. Engaging plot and characters, humor well ahead of its time for a game script, and party members and environments that I’ve still never seen many games match to this day. I don’t know why it didn’t become huge, I think the rpg crowd back then was still pretty married to sword and sandal conventions. If you like old games, I can’t recommend it enough.