Never been on any Facebook or Instagram video reel, have you? You can’t go 10 reels in before hitting something like this, even if it’s not exactly like this.

Where I live, that could buy a parking space.

In the nearest metro region (about 3 hrs away), ten times that amount might buy a parking space. A very sketchy parking space, at that.

Land prices in British Columbia - even way out in the boonies - is totally f**ked.

Just to point out, many software dev places are trying to replace developers with AI.

I mean, that’s not going to work out well, what with the high rates at which AI hallucinates. But businesses are going to keep trying until they collapse from all the shitty code that’s been created.

I am both anti-Israel and anti-Hamas. Both have gone full evil.

I am pro unarmed civilian.

And yes, invasive settlers are frequently “armed” with machines of destruction like dozers. If only they could be satisfied with what they have already stolen…

I make a meaty spaghetti sauce with various spices, but I cook the ground beef in the pan at a low simmer for about 2hrs before I even add the tomato sauce, in order for those spices to penetrate the meat.

I call it a nuclear time bomb because it tastes totally normal - very delicious, even - but about 10-15 minutes in, you are reaching for a hand towel to wipe away the sweat which is quite literally dripping off of you. And you have felt NONE of the hot spices on your tongue.

A much quicker dish involves Cæsar dressing, which I add copious amounts of garlic powder to (4-5 tablespoons), then prevent the dressing from solidifying by adding lemon juice, then wrapping up with freshly ground garlic. As in, a paste, *not chopped or minced._ For a salad using a single head of Romaine, the paste alone uses 15-30 garlic cloves depending on size. And this is on top of the garlic powder. Tastes amazing, but it can get garlicky enough to be barely edible. Think the same kind of burn when chewing down on a fresh raw clove. I sometimes get an “addictive overwhelming thirst” for this garlicky dish that has me gorging on it almost exclusively for an entire week.

I think you are ascribing to an entire community that which only a few descend to.

I’ve been a mod on forums before, and my only concern was keeping the signal::noise ratio high. In that regard, new “I’ve got the same problem” posts made many months or years after the current thread had gotten wrapped up only increases the noise; a new thread is far more appropriate for the latecomer and anyone who replies to them than continuing to use the old thread.

The difference is temporal, and dependent on the activity level of the forum in question: highly active forums should see new threads spawned after only a few days or weeks, slow forums could see follow-up comments in the original thread still being appropriate many months or even years later.

Being a good mod isn’t about power or control, it is ensuring the forum operates as effectively as possible for it’s users. Sometimes that means spawning new threads, locking old ones, or even banning bad-faith or misbehaving users. Once you moderate, you discover very quickly that moderation is a highly grey zone, with surprisingly little black or white.

This is the attitude that leads us to search results polluted with forum threads with bad, unchallengeable ideas (because they’re locked). Almost all web1 forum are becoming digital flotsam because of these bad moderator opinions.

I thing you replied to the wrong comment, buddy. Nothing in your comment makes any sense in the context of my comment that you replied to. Nowhere did I say anything about locking threads or moderation.

Quote above, reply below was the eMail and Usenet standard from the 70s until Microsoft introduced Outlook, and more importantly, bundled Outlook Express with Windows in the mid to late 90s. Those were the first products that automatically top-posted by default, and especially on Usenet, you could almost always correctly identify an Outlook Express n00b by virtue of them top-posting.

some guy asking your question and being told to start a new thread instead.

If it’s done within a reasonable time period, it’s understandable. Hours or a day or two later depending on the forum.

It’s different when someone saunters in years later with the “I’ve got the same problem!” quip to a post that may or may not actually be the same, and actually expects a response. That, to me, is necroposting.

Bottom-posting eMails and Usenet posts.

Fuck you, Microsoft. Bottom-posting replies is the correct way to reply.

I have a BackBlaze B2 cloud cold storage where I back up everything from my entire family. If they have a computer, I back it up, fully encrypted, via Duplicati. Not the best option for a machine-side client, but I like it and it’s been reliable for me.

As for on-site storage, I have a pair of 4U rack mount cases with 24 hot swap bays in the front. Once I have my server room configured and cooling correctly, it will be the local backup site for everything in-house, and likely serving other duties as well.

Because the average person doesn’t have any real time to think deeply about politics.

Because the economic elites have engineered it that way.

They flooded the workplace with double the workers (both men and women), thereby depressing wages and forcing both parents to become wage earners to survive. Then, with both parents working outside the house, childcare and chores sucked up all available free time, and even more household costs went towards outside help (daycares, etc.).

Then they began a tradition of kicking children out of the house when they became adults, thereby putting strain on infrastructure and increasing the demand for housing.

Then they began a push for higher education, thereby saddling young adults with ridiculous amounts of debt at the point of their lives when they could least afford to shoulder said debt.

All this makes us extremely time poor and resource poor, such that we cannot afford the head space to consider anything beyond where we put the next step or two that we make. As a society, the common man becomes far too busy just treading water to be concerned about in which direction they should swim.

As such, most people take massive amounts of cognitive shortcuts, relying far too much on things spoon-fed to them from the very news sources that should be unbiased and impartial, but which are nearly always owned by the Parasite Class, which favour deeply regressive conservative policies that benefit only themselves at the expense of the common person.

And most people don’t think deeply not because they cannot be bothered to think for themselves, but rather because they have far too much on their plate to afford to do so. They quite literally would mentally burn out if they were to do so.

Which is why the conservative mandate is to defund education and keep people as ignorant as possible.

I mean, to keep the common man as ignorant as possible – the children of the elites will always go to prohibitively expensive Montessori schools, which will better prepare them for critical thinking and bullshit detection so that they may better rule over and parasitize off the common man.

TBH it’s meant for children, and essentially plays to their sense of humour and simple imaginations. Honestly, I found the first movie - with all of its hand-holding exposé and slavish devotion to the book - to be far more cringe. The original readers - and what person, really, went to see the movie without having read the book first? - could have benefitted from a more subtle and better-presented script.

David Weber, Out of the Dark.

The book has an excellent premise: an alien invasion by technologically superior forces where not even asymmetrical warfare (guerrilla warfare) works. Humanity was getting it’s arrogant arse kicked all over the planet.

I guess David realized he bit off more than he could chew, because the premise was working itself into a multi-book series. So about halfway through that book he employed a Deus ex Machina by pulling the most perfect opponent to the alien invasion out of his arse: vampires.

Yes, vampires. a force that so perfectly neutralized all of the alien’s advantages that the second half of the book amounts to teenage revenge wish fulfilment as the vampires steamroll the aliens back into orbit - and then eliminate them in orbit - by riding on the outside of their escaping shuttles. Because vampires don’t need to breathe.

I got so disgusted at the lame-arse way of avoiding a truly great story that I nearly threw the book across the room. I forced myself to finish the book to see if it got any better. Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

And now, a decade-plus later, he’s released two sequel books.

smh facepalm bridgepinch sigh

The company has a blanket policy against open carrying,

I guess the Omak, WA store didn’t get that particular memo. I did see another guy with a piece on his belt during that same visit, but this dude is the one we got into close proximity to. Scared the bejesus out of my wife, who has never gotten close to any firearm except for those carried by the RCMP.

Canadian here, British Columbia.

Going to a Wal-Mart in a small-ish town and counting 38 CCTV cameras across the outside front of the building. Ours, in a city with 28× the population, has only 6.

Inside that same Wal-Mart, going into a checkout line without first checking out the customers, and the very next guy ahead of us was an open carry: a semi-auto (AR-15 like looking weapon) slung over his shoulders, a handgun in a holster on his waist, and a lump on his right ankle above his boots. And two knives on his belt. Dude looked like he was ready for some urban warfare.

The sheer amount of infrastructure decay. Sure, even Canadian towns that haven’t seen economic good times look run down and dilapidated, but American towns really kick that up a notch. Most small-town buildings look like they haven’t seen a makeover since the Carter administration.

Unusually authentic Mexican food. Up here 90% of Mexican places are run by white dudes who make semi-authentic “fusion” dishes that are mainly just spicy. Cross the border and less than 15 minutes in, there is one family-run chain (Rancho Chico, Rancho Grande) with super-cheap 100% authentic foods run and staffed solely by Mexicans. And like, holy shit, that’s good food.

The sheer number of people who support and vote for a party who will do absolutely nothing for them, and will enact policies that will drive them even further into poverty and destitution just so their Parasite-Class campaign donors can get even more obscenely wealthy. Conservative voters are just weird, man.

And yet, that is its default definition regardless of operating system.

That’s also why almost every IDE out there has tabs auto-set to 4 spaces, and/or gives the user to change it away from 8 spaces.

I am not arguing against tabs. I actually find them a lot cleaner than spaces. But the default definition of a tab has it being eight spaces long, regardless of operating system.

It’s just that “tab = 4 spaces” is either the default in a number of IDEs, and in those which it isn’t, almost everyone changes it to that anyhow.

Insisting that all tabs should be the same length as eight spaces.

Open up notepad, and compare. Eight spaces = 1 tab.