“There’s illegal immigrants in prison taking post-birth contraception!”

Camping, traveling, hiking and going places that are enjoyable and accessible with my wife and dogs.

Gardening / homesteading in such a way to live as self-sufficiently as possible.

My way I want to give back in retirement is working as a volunteer urban/wildland canine search and rescue team.

I train my dogs in scent/detection sports and tracking now so I’m prepared to understand how to do the real deal once I have time to volunteer in retirement. My current job is in a related field, so I already have many of the other skills and certifications that would be needed, but I don’t work with dogs for my job.

If I need extra income in retirement, I’ll probably get into offering dog training for detection/tracking.

This article is from January and a quick search didn’t yield anything newer.

https://electrek.co/2024/01/03/tesla-cybertruck-american-made-pickup-truck/

The Cybertruck isn’t instead on the “2024 American Made index,” so we probably can only go on whatever Tesla is claiming at the moment, though it does seem likely that it will be at or near the top of the ranking for most American trucks of next year’s list.

Not completely by my own choice, but I feel like I’ve seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation - at least in part - once or more per holiday season since it was released.

The same is true of Elf, but obviously that movie is quite a bit more recent.

For movies I’ve watched the most by my own choice, it’s probably the Kill Bills or Inglorious Basterds, but those have got to be way behind in raw count. Goonies and the Back to the Future series probably have honorable mentions because of how long they’ve been around and continue to be a fun watch.

How DARE people answer a vague question with their own experiences!! Who’d guess that a question asked in English gets answers from people in predominantly English-speaking areas?! Fuck all these people for not discussing the habits of the Layards’s Palm Squirrel and why Sri Lankan boomers love/hate it!

Huh, interesting. I guess this makes sense - to not take up a massive volume, breathing oxygen would need to be stored in liquid form, which means it would need to be kept exceptionally cold or under huge pressures (or both), and would inevitably boil off and need regular servicing. A chemical reaction seems to be a far lower maintenance (and thus likely much cheaper) option for devices that will hopefully never even need to be used during the service life of an aircraft.

Finished installing a 3.5" lift on my truck - it goes in for an alignment Tuesday, and then it’ll be ready to drive!

This has freed me to start working on my car again - I had pulled the transmission to replace the clutch, upgrade the synchros, and install a limited-slip front differential. That’s going back in, and I also installed upgraded coilovers. Probably have at least a few more weekends of work there to get the car back on the road, but I’m super excited to have two working vehicles on the horizon. The car has been down since around Christmas.

Non-Newtonian fluid would be fun, but the Jesus run would get banned after the first season.

"This warning isn’t just for uBlock Origin users. All extensions built on MV2 will display this warning on the Chrome extensions page if users have updated to Chrome version 127. Users of Chrome’s Beta, Dev, and Canary channels have been seeing these warnings since June 3, 2024.

Although users can temporarily re-enable their MV2 extensions, Google plans to disable these extensions gradually over the next few months. Eventually, users won’t be able to use MV2 extensions at all and will have to switch to MV3 alternatives suggested by the Chrome Web Store."

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/using-ublock-origin-google-chrome-warns-users-it-is-going-to-ban-it/ar-AA1ofsSZ

“Hey Strongbad - check out my creepy pants!”

DELETED / DELORTED

Also US, and largely agree, but I would move Hardee’s/ Carl’s Jr. Down to bottom tier. That’s also where I’d put Jack in the Box. I’d put both In-n-Out and Whataburger as mid tier - I think both are VASTLY overrated.

Though In-n-Out is owned by a Christian Nationalist that’s hell-bent on turning America into (more of) a fascist oligarchy and openly using their wealth to destroy democracy, so they’re on my boycott list, along with Chick-fil-A.

Funny. I primarily used Startpage for the last few years, but have had increasing problems with them providing bad/irrelevant results and frequently straight-up blocking my IP or requiring completion of a CAPTCHA before providing results. I switched to DDG, which has been working pretty well, and seems much better to me than it had when trying it a few years ago.

Takes me about 2 seconds with a 5lb steel mallet.

But. But. But it says “do no evil,” right on the box! ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ

Eh, I think it’s more related to survivorship bias of the movies we remember. Most movies from decades ago were utter trash then too, we mostly remember the good ones while most of the rubbish fades away and is forgotten.

I have no idea on a metric of how frequently an “ordinary” gun jams, much less these modified ones, but I can apply some logic from my knowledge/experiences. The weapons you mention having experience with are designed with appropriate tolerances to not bind up under heavy use, so are a bit different from the ‘consumer-grade’ type we’re talking about in this specific event.

The type of semiautomatic rifles we’re talking about here use recoil to cycle the action. A bump stock allows the whole weapon to oscillate - and can have an effect similar to not securely shouldering the weapon. This prevents the needed energy from being transferred into the action for complete cycling, and that would make the weapon prone to jamming.

I don’t know if I have much of value to add to or reply to your second paragraph, but yeah that fixation is weird.

I mean, he didn’t really have much of a problem with accuracy - he fired a total of 1058 rounds, and those rounds or shrapnel from them injured 413 different people. Of course, many people received more than a single gunshot wound. He killed 58 (later 60) in ten minutes of shooting – effectively one person every 10 seconds. I think it would be difficult for a single person to injure or kill more from where he was standing with any weapon short of an RPG.

He was operating a significant number of his weapons on bump stocks. Bump stocks allow firing at a much higher rate than the weapons were designed for. Operating at a higher rate causes the weapons to overheat. Overheating causes misfires and jams (and inaccuracy and can permanently damage weapons, but I doubt he was particularly concerned about those things). He did have them all set up in a row and many on mounts. He broke out the overlooking windows of his hotel room before he started shooting. It seems he was shooting with one until it jammed and then moving on to the next rather than trying to clear misfires.

I don’t know about the lack of mental health care being the “main issue.” A healthy society wouldn’t be in dire need of such extreme amounts of mental health care. These mass shootings are a single symptom (among many) of a very complicated and interwoven set of factors that have brought us to this place. There is no single solution that will fix the problem, and the only way out of this mess will take significant investment and likely generations to break the cycle. But humans are greedy, and particularly in the USA, we only look for simple simgle-issue solutions that can have a measurable outcome (and be economically viable) within the next couple or fiscal quarters or an election term, at most. The solutions we should be implementing don’t work on that sort of time scale, and many will be very costly (in varying terms of both money and/or freedom)… So, we just don’t do those things.

Do it. I made the switch a few months ago, and it’s gone better than I’d expected. Now running Linux Mint on my desktop and laptop. I set my laptop up with dual boot, just so I can easily and natively run Windows apps if needed.