This is like 30 years ago, before electric cars were really a thing. Some friends and I were hanging out in the Pine Barrens one night. It was an area we knew pretty well, and we’d walked down this long sandy road with no turnoffs to get to where we happened to be hanging out.

Suddenly, all of nature around us went silent - and I mean all of it. Sound carries at night, especially with the lakes to echo off of. We looked up the road we were walking back along, and there was a pair of headlights coming our way. We could tell they were headlights because they were lower than a person would carry a flashlight, they were moving in that peculiar synchronization that headlights have, and they’d do several quick bounces when they hit a rut in the road.

So anyway, we’re in this road in the ass-end of the Barrens, everything’s turned absolutely deadly silent, and there’s this car coming down the road toward us. And the three of us suddenly realize that it’s absolutely silent. Not only is nature silent, but the car isn’t making any noise either.

We watch the headlights of this car headed down the road toward us - it’s a couple hundred yards away now, the Pine Barrens are still dead silent, and the car isn’t making any noise either.

My nerve broke first. I bolted off the road and partially vaulted over a couple shrubs, my friends close behind me. We turned around, and the car was still coming toward us - and then suddenly the headlights went out. We waited, but nothing happened - no car headlights, no interior lights, no car doors opening, no voices - nothing. We waited, and still nothing.

We dithered and talked over what to do and we eventually grabbed a couple branches and headed back up the road. We reached the area where the headlights turned off - and there was no car. We turned our flashlight on the (very) sandy road, and we could see our tracks heading down, but there weren’t any recent car tracks. We checked the road and the verge all the way back to our car, and - nothing. The forest went dead silent, there were headlights, the car didn’t make a sound, and then it just … disappeared. We went back the next day, and there still was no sign of anyone on that road that night except us.

.

There’s also a rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike heading into New Jersey. Like two miles before the rest stop, there’s a sign saying something like “New Jersey - 25 miles”. We pull into the rest stop, get some gas, relieve ourselves, grab a snack, get back on the road. Go maybe two or three more miles, and there’s another sign saying “New Jersey - 5 miles”. Like, wtf? If there a space warp at that rest stop or something?

Do you have insurance that covers it?

The article only talks about the war with Iran. But Ukraine has taken out more of Russia’s processing facilities and Russia has announced that they’re no longer going to export [?gas ?petroleum? can’t remember offhand]. Whatever it is, the loss of the additional fuel is also going to drive up the cost of fuel.

It’s also going to drive to the cost of food - not only in transporting seed and fertilizer to the farm, tractors and combines on the farms, and trucks away from the farms, but also because gas and oil and their byproducts are critical components of several types of fertilizer. Food insecure nations are going to be struggling, and even nations who are comparatively food stable will see rising prices.

Again: if trump never raped her, and he’s promising revenge on the people who trafficked her and who did rape her? After years of no justice, no peace, she sees this as a possibility and she grabs it with both hands. Just like someone with cancer and no hope left from traditional medicine might go into alternative treatments, just for the chance - I can see her doing that.

I’ll get downvotes for this, but this is one case where I can understand her position. She was trafficked, raped and traumatized as a kid, was likely fed drugs as a kid as well. She’s lived with that trauma her entire life, spoken up and was dismissed, and she’s still angry, frustrated, terrified and traumatized.

And no one does anything. For years, for decades, no one does anything.

And trump comes along and says he’ll prosecute the people on the list. Maybe she thinks he’s not on the list, maybe she knows he is but if he’s not the one who raped her she doesn’t cares, she just wants everyone else taken down.

No one else is promising to go after the Epstein list, but trump is. And she’s hoping that if she can see some justice get done, that she’ll finally be able to put some of her trauma behind her.

She’s not racist, she’s not a brainwashed Fox News addict, she doesn’t want to ‘stick it to the libs’. She is legitimately a one-issue voter. She just wants free of her pain, and she casts the one vote that’s promising her that.

This is the one vote that I don’t think is LAMF material, it’s just a tragedy for this poor woman.

Aside from what everyone else’s already mentioned, there’s the whole hassle of setting up a new device - debloating, tweaking the settings, etc. Why go through the pain of adjusting to a new device when the old one works just fine?

Yes, and no. You should be able to do many things using keyboard shortcuts - alt-tab to switch windows, shift-tab for previous field, alt-space to move a window, etc. Much of this has been standard in Windows for decades, and I can’t imagine them deliberately going out of their way to handicap that capability, especially with ADA accommodations.

However, companies making programs and applications, and people designing webpages, are not as aware of these accommodations and frequently overlook things when designing their programs and pages. I should fully expect you to run across a badly designed page at some point that’s going to leave you frustrated.

I’d suggest printing out a list of keyboard shortcuts (both for the O/S and whatever programs you’re likely to use) but expect to run into poor design decisions at some point.

Is this a temporary situation (“I’m just setting up this PC, I’ll grab a mouse later”), or a permanent one? If the latter, is there someone you know who might have a spare mouse?

QAnon people would go absolutely rabid conspiracy minded.

Uh, how 'bout No.

Edit: you just know that anyone who comes in, is just going to get blamed by Trump and the Trumpettes for anything that goes wrong - which will be everything.

And that’s just if they’re lucky. At some point Trump will fuck off and leave them holding the bag - and a bunch of the blame - on occupation-or-evacuation, face some kind of moral depression on rebuilding (you know the US isn’t going to do it, those days are over), and also likely terror attacks on their home soil and infrastructure. So yeah - no thanks. We used up whatever goodwill we had in the voluntary military operation department when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan.

I don’t know if it would work in Canada, but I just buy a Visa gift card and use that.

Yeah, there was another site I checked with a couple months ago, and it was showing one local company supplying office equipment and another one selling training munitions; neither of those are listed here.

“The point of AI is to allow the wealthy to access the benefits of the talented, while preventing the talented to access the benefit of wealth.”

he goes on about how people speak English in America and in Germany and Norway, they speak other languages

They do speak other languages. However, 88% of Norwegians seem to be fluent in English. The percentage is less in Germany, I think about 25%, but that’s still enough people that you could get by, particularly in the tourist areas.

Initial thoughts, which shouldn’t cost much if any money:

Check your hard drive: how full is it? Clear out caches and programs you never use. Maybe run a check for bad sectors. Way back in the day, I’d suggest defragging the drive, lol.

Update your definitions and run a virus check on your laptop: you may have picked up a virus or PUP that’s slowing you down.

Take a look at Task Manager at various times: are you close to maxing out RAM, processor, or disk cache? Figure out if there are processes running that you can kill.

Go through everything that’s set up for Quick Start and set it to non-Quick Start if you’re not using it regularly. [I just set everything to non-Quick Start.]

If your browser supports it, install Ublock Origin. If you can do it, install a pi-hole.

While you’re at it, check your router. This is a laptop, so I’m assuming it’s not wired to the internet, but if it is, try switching out the wire in case it’s worn. Check the cables between the router and the wall while you’re at it.

Unplug your router for at least a minute, then start it up again.

Are you running a lot of different devices that may be interfering with your connection, or running against potential high-bandwidth applications (streaming, livestreaming, torrenting)?

Is this problem specific to one or more areas? It’s possible that you’re too far from the router or there are things obstructing the signal.

Are there times that you get better speed (either times of day or times of the month)? Your ISP may be congested or they may be throttling your connection.

Did you leave your wifi open and other people are piggybacking off it? Is it running recent firmware?

Consider contacting your ISP and asking them to run a line test to see if there are issues external to your home. (Be prepared for them to try to upsell you.)

Switch to a lightweight browser like Firefox, Vivaldi, or Cromite.

Things that you can do that will cost money: increase the memory in your laptop (you have 4gb, it can take up to 12gb). If it’s not already on an SSD, switch to an SSD.

What I miss most are the (physically) local communities. On reddit, there was a subreddit for my general locality, and the nearby big city, and several subreddits on different aspects of life (the music scene, the food scene, etc). I miss that - randomly finding an event or something interesting simply because I came across a random post.

I know it’s a function of the fact that it’s still (comparatively) early days, but I do miss it.

You know how there’s always this one lingering childhood resentment that’s hard to let go of? Here’s mine:

I don’t remember exactly how old I was, just that it was some age when candy and presents were really important. But however old I was at the time, I got chicken pox as a kid (no vaccines for it back then).

I got it around Halloween, and my parents wouldn’t let me go out trick-or-treating. I objected strongly because, you know, candy! So they sent my sisters out with a spare pillowcase to collect candy for me, which they dutifully did.

When they got back, instead of coming into the house, they sat down on the sidewalk a couple houses away and dumped each pillowcase into it’s own separate pile. Then they traded out all of my chocolate for all of their Mary Janes and Bit o’ Honeys. I had literally no chocolate or other preferred candy in my bag, it was all the crap candy no one ever wanted. I complained to my parents and was told that I should be grateful just to be getting any candy at all.

Two months later, both my sisters got chicken pox. My grandparents, saying how awful it must be to have chicken pox over the holidays, gave them extra Christmas presents. This is my lingering childhood resentment, and the injustice of it still stings.

I mean, you can, but the cases in the US were imported from elsewhere: the ones in the Northeast are generally from heavily Orthodox Jews traveling to or from Israel; the cases in the southwest started among the Mennonite community and was imported from Mennonites in Mexico. Unfortunately, vaccine resistance is pretty high among both groups.

The better way to handle it would be to require that travelers to your country have been vaccinated, and that refugees and asylum seekers are kept in quarantine and given vaccinations before they’re paroled to the general public. There’ll still be people who slip through the cracks - immigrants who manage to avoid processing, people traveling on small boats or small planes, etc - but it would be a start. Unfortunately, I don’t know how well that plays with all the various “free travel” rules.

And they kept on telling me they wish they’d known beforehand how bad measles was, so that they could have protected their family

We’ve been trying to tell you, but you stuck your fingers in your ears and insisted you knew better. And once you’re over the measles, instead of using this newly-acquired realization to revisit some of your positions, you’ll stick your fingers right back in your ears and refuse to listen to us about anything else you’re wrong about. So enjoy your measles, and all of the diseases you’re going to catch again because measles reset your immune system, and I fucking hope you get shingles.

Hungary has parliamentary elections in six weeks. Right now his party controls parliament, but polls show the other party is likely to win. He’s trying to preserve his control over the country.

It must be scary, living in a world where you’re constantly confronted by the fact that people exist who are “not like you”.