When Vita-mixes are criminalized, only criminals will have Vita-mixes.

AT&T are trash. Took us far too long to dump them. Glad we did. Found much better service at a quarter the cost.

And I’m cracking up at the scammers phoning up my 85 year old father telling him his Windows has been compromised on his Linux desktop.

Koo-Koo, Katchoo.

Appalachian here. No doubt curbing demand for coal and doing little to take up the slack in viable livelihood has dropped an economic bomb on an already historically depressed region. All of the programs you hear about teaching coal miners to code and such are superficial window dressing and often non-profit grifts that fold in a short time leaving executives to float away on golden parachutes. Whichever way you turn it, people here are exploited and propagandized. Most often attributing their woes to the wrong sources. Folks that are for sure feeling the effects of a changing climate with frequent severe storms, 1000 year floods, etc.

Sadly, the sociopath/idiotic formula does seem to resonate with the algorithms and/or the public. There is a local creator that I know to be a thoughtful, well-rounded person, yet they had to reduce themselves to a cartoon caricature in order to get traction. But that approach seems to have worked out for them, at least initially through Tik Tok and YouTube. Now I see them taking on increasingly sketchy sponsorships as their 15 minutes fades. And of course audience capture indisputably steers media makers into conspiratorial niches they can’t escape without sacrificing views/payout. Authenticity be damned.

Whoa. “Going to Hell in a handbasket” just got literal.

Picard’s alternate life on that doomed world inspires some deja vu bumping up against current events.

Just assumed he was incognito at a “wizards only fools” sort of place.

I’ve been getting ads for Henson razors -Not an endorsement! I know nothing about safety razors- . But the idea of not buying razor cartridges anymore is attractive, provided I’m not cutting myself all the time. But supposedly this sort is less likely to cut me, even if I’m a klutz?

Started really paying attention when my health imploded some years back. Would add that food content literacy tends to drive me to the outer edges of the grocery, and out of the middle where there’s more junky, processed crap.

Heard someone assert that MBA’s have ruined the world. Seemed a hyperbolic statement at the time. Though casting my eyes around an ever more enpoopified landscape, it’s tough to disagree.

No macrame? Or string-art?

Though there are worse lawns to have.

I like this interpretation. Also would note that for those with chronic illness debility can frequently wax and wane.

That sounds very cool. I’m totally ignorant of the hardware requirements. What sort of minimum setup would such an install take?

Do you mean a general calorie restriction to lose weight or compositional change in diet to maximize satiety? Either is difficult without a strong impetus. For me the latter is far easier than the former. It seems to me that both are made a lot more difficult now than 24 years ago by the level of distraction and focus disrupting technologies we have to use on the daily. Not to mention economic material conditions are broadly worse for most people than they were two decades ago. Folks seem more harried and stressed with less discretionary time. Additionally, to my eye, food culture is getting worse. What is regarded as staple food is junkier and seemingly designed to circumvent the “fixed stomach problem”.

I hit a wall with my health and felt I could either break my problem into manageable pieces I could maybe find a way to live with and possibly enjoy sustainably, or else suffer a declining quality of life that was already unacceptable. At that point it was worth it for me to do all kinds of trial and error about what worked personally. And it still is. I have no super willpower. Just an understanding of what is at stake. And a willingness to sorta game my drives.

I could never sustain a restriction like this without modifying what I ate. It would have a profound effect of how soon and how much I was compelled to eat next. Once this was very clear to me after dozens of attempts at weight loss, I began to cook and eat for satiety. A low-glycemic, minimally processed diet free of added sugar is what worked best for me long-term. I lost 115 lbs, resolved diabetes, hypertension and non alcoholic fatty liver disease. Also vastly improved some other chronic problems. I’ve remained at a healthy weight now for 23 years with little variation. A lot of effort really and likely not possible for everyone -especially now. I can say it was worthwhile for me.

The steely resolve of CICO will only take a person so far. In my view that’s why it’s so unsustainable for most.

Some of both columns if I think about it. You go though enough that the volume on trivial crap gets turned way down and you don’t sweat so many of the things you really can’t affect substantively. While at the same time you’re likely to be dismissive and not wish to waste time on folks that have demonstrated they’re willfully ignorant dillweeds.

It’s also sometimes used as shorthand for crypto-orchidism -undescended testicles.