“Can we get a show show of hands just to confirm we’re ready to move forward?”

Me Everyone, who wasn’t listening and doesn’t have a clue what they were just talking about: ✋

Didn’t some cable companies get all butthurt that you could fast forward through the recorded commercials?

They could even provide an electronic box (for a nominal fee, or course) that shows me a menu of all the shows and movies that are available and what times they are going to play. That way I wouldn’t have to search through a bunch of streaming services. It could all just be in one place.

And the persistent tiredness.

If you had a 1974 Dodge Monaco, preferably the police cruiser version, you could jump that drawbridge with no problem.

Just an expensive timer.

No, the real one is standing up.

Door opener fluid. It’s a canister of fluid that you have to pump into the door to open it in an emergency. Then you get a replacement canister from the dealer for $150. I recently found out that that’s what passes for a “spare tire” anymore.

During WWII the United States government rounded up tens of thousands of people, including many US citizens, and put them in internment camps because they looked sort of similar to the people who bombed pearl harbor. Why? Because fear is a powerful drug and when people are afraid, logic tends to go out the window, if there was any logic to begin with. If you pay attention to conservative rhetoric, you’ll notice that much of it is intended to stoke fear, while inserting themselves as the solution. They do it because it works.

Way out in the Arkansas Delta, in a soybean field 50 miles from anywhere, there is a memorial where one of these internment camps stood. If you aren’t looking for it, you’d probably drive right by it unnoticed. All around the camp there are these little voice boxes that you push a button on and it explains what you’re looking at. The voice providing the narration is none other than George Takei who was held there with his family as a child. Spend a little time at a place like this and it will quickly disabuse you of the notion that America has always rejected fanaticism.

At a former job, there was one – and only one – lady in customer service who would actually reboot and do all the basic troubleshooting steps before calling IT. If we heard from her, we knew something was legitimately broken. Oddly enough, I’m married to her now. Best decision I ever made.

“I’m going to get so much done today.” or “If I clean the house, it’s going to stay that way for more than ten minutes.” are just some of the lies I tell myself to help me stay motivated

Try having O Negative. They’ll practically chase you down the street.

I subscribe to two newspapers. My local weekly paper (which is actually owned by our large statewide newspaper), and the state “business” paper. They both cover topics I’m interested in although the quality of reporting in the business paper is better.

On a separate note, if you don’t support your local print media, it will go away. The demise of local news outlets, throughout the US anyway, has been ongoing for a long time now. That has not been a positive development.

My personal experience essentially echoes what you’ve said. I’ve usually found that when I actually ask Trump supporters, which is probably most of the people I know, what they think and why, they are pretty candid about it. They will also voice frustrations, many of which I can understand or even agree with them on. There is a lot more common ground there than you might think.

The problem is that most of the issues are complex and nuanced. Not that surprising. Issues that impact the population of an entire country, or even a sizeable chunk of it, are bound to be pretty complex. Here’s where things go off the rails.

Kind of like you said, Joe Blow from Louisiana is often uneducated at best or a complete moron at worst. Joe Blow does not understand all the complexity surrounding the issues he’s upset about and figures that if he doesn’t understand it, neither does anyone else. He’s also a little too proud to admit he doesn’t understand it.

This is why Republican party completely abandoned an issues bases platform, aside from completely fabricated pearl clutching social issues like those scary tRaNs PeOpLe or AboRtIoN. They know full well that they have nothing when it comes to meaningful solutions to actual problems and if they did, the few supporters they have with functioning brain cells would start to ask to many pesky questions. A divide and conquer strategy is much simpler and more effective; albeit incredibly destructive.

And August.

Shoot it?

Don’t give the rednecks any ideas.

They do maintain an x86 build. I haven’t used pfSense but I have used OpnSense so that’s that closest thing I have to compare it to. I think the upside and downside to RouterOS/Mikrotik is the same thing: it allows very granular control over almost everything. Maybe to a fault. It’s probably overkill for most home networks.

Set up a VPS. Create a VPN tunnel from you local network to the VPS. Use the VPS as the edge router by opening ports on the VPS firewall and routing incoming traffic on those ports through the VPN tunnel to servers on your local network.

I used to do this to get around CGNAT. I ran RouterOS in a Digital Ocean droplet and setting up a wire guard tunnel between it and my local Mikrotik router.

It will obscure your local WAN IP and give you a static IP but that’s about the only benefit. And you have to be pretty network savvy to configure it correctly.

It does not make you immune to DDoS attacks and is honestly more headache to maintain (albeit just a small headache).

I’m a [primarily] C# turned JavaScript dev. I miss C#.