So much this. I started using it during Covid, and it’s been so great that I prefer Sams over any other shopping experience.

Mostly private and home school in my area. The district is still showing a 10% loss in enrollment despite being the #1 relocation destination in the US in 2023 (according to Uhaul, so take from that what you will). We’re gaining population, and still public school enrollment is going down.

Private and charter schools are all completely full. There are so many homeschoolers that businesses that do extra-curriculars (music lessons, dance programs, sports, etc) are all offering morning and mid-day sessions to keep up with demand. The local little league is talking about having two teams limited to homeschoolers so they can practice mid-day and free up the fields during after school hours.

Meanwhile the public schools struggle to keep their teacher slots, which are allocated based on enrollment.

Yes, but poorly. And even then it took at least 8 years to get caught. With a little creative thinking in the software design, there’s little chance another attempt would ever be discovered.

The shocking part about this is that they installed a dedicated defeat device and expected no one to notice. Come on guys, cars are software, if you want to end run the emissions standards just write more creative code.

Maybe one day many, many years from now when there are far fewer humans and machines have taken over nearly all production. UBI isn’t feasible on this side of the coming demographic boogaloo.

Seconded, can’t imagine life without my family.

My 80 year old dad has been using a XUbuntu for years and never even noticed. The only reason he knows he’s using Linux at all is because he saw a news story about Windows tracking and asked about it. He was quite happy not to be affected.

Didn’t he do this once before, and it affected a whopping 0 people?

Very much this. Four times I’ve accidentally flown with live ammo in my carry on and gotten through the TSA checkpoint unflagged. I can also verify that the hand swab thing they do doesn’t pick up gunpowder.

There’s nothing to be done about it. Legally there’s no such thing as “hate speech” in the US, and there won’t be unless we get around to changing the first amendment.

Continue living my life as if federal shenanigans mostly don’t affect daily life, because they don’t.

You can tell nothing is going to happen because the UN is involved.

Hence people falling back to “I don’t care” as a defense mechanism. The world is too big, and there’s too much awful happening, to emotionally invest in all of it. Not and stay sane. It’s so much easier to narrow focus to your own life and pursuits, and let everything else be what it is.

And so we get these useless platitudes, because “I don’t care about that” can be both true and socially unacceptable at the same time.

Why would you “sell back” actual guns when you can build a functioning 12 gauge shotgun from $20 of parts from the hardware store? Slap a few of those together and turn them in for a solid contribution toward your next gun.

New socially acceptable ways to say “I don’t give a crap”.

Bold of you to assume there’s QA happening on govt UIs.

It’s because UAE volunteered to pay for it all. These things are expensive and no one over age 8 believes a UN event will result in any action, much less international cooperation on climate. Since it’s all just a PR stunt, UAE might as well spend a rounding error of its oil proceeds on having some control over the narrative.

That’s…a good portion of the free email providers on the planet. Even if companies are using this list as a filter for signups, it’s only going to be for a limited time.

Companies want new accounts. They don’t mind very much if those accounts are fake - big numbers get investor attention. It only takes a handful of support cases with “I tried to register but it says my email address isn’t allowed” before the C-suite makes it clear to IT that this filter is no longer in sync with the corporate strategy.

Hosting a climate conference in an OPEC nation, not sure what they thought was going to happen.

Unfortunately DoD is right. PFAS are terrible things, but they’re used everywhere (including consumer goods at an astonishing rate) because they’re really effective. Once there are good alternatives, yes let’s ban them forever, but until then we’d all notice their absence in our goods in a big bad way.