They made great fidget toys.

I loved my slider as well. They made texting so much easier. I went from one of those to a blackberry bold.

Long range attacks are about knocking out supplies, the ability to produce new supplies, and the ability to get supplies to the front line.

Say Russia is getting more newly made artillery shells to the front line. The best way to fix this is to blow up the factories.

If you can’t take out the factories directly, take out components that the factories need to operate: ore processing, fuel refineries, electricity grid, etc.

The problem is all the critical targets are a long ways from the front line and Ukraine currently has limited capacity to hit them.

Meanwhile Russia is targeting all of Ukraine’s internal infrastructure constantly.

Long wars are won by the production capabilities of the groups involved as much as the front line troops.

First off, your rheumatologist is the most important doctor you will be dealing with. For some reason the field collects some odd ones with poor people skills. You may get lucky and find a good one right off the bat. However if the doctor seems to not be listening to you, understanding and explaining your symptoms, go for a second opinion or a third or a fourth opinion. It took my wife 5 different ones to finally find a good one. It’s a 3 hour one waytrip to see him but it’s worth it. We will likely be moving up closer to him in a few years.

Second be patient with the meds. It will likely take several tries to find something that works. However not too patient, waiting too long can make the disease progress further. However once the right cocktail is found you’ll feel a bunch better, until you don’t. Changing meds is common and normal no matter how long you have it.

Last, if your in the U.S. and have to deal with our shitty system, get ready to fight insurance. It will be a constant battle if you geton one of the criminally prices drugs. Just don’t give up and eventually you will win. One drug refill took my 2 months of twice weekly calls to push it through.

Medical privacy ends when the condition may cause detrimental effects to other people. It’s not that difficult of a concept to understand.

Somebody who has epilepsy is not allowed to drive vehicles or fly a plane. They might have an episode while operating the vehicle and kill/injure others.

Somebody with a confirmed deadly disease is not allowed to wander around spreading it to others. Their decisions to ignore quarantine restrictions will kill/injure others.

I have been using custom start menus since the whole win8 full screen disaster. Every time I see the default win 10 or Win 11 menu I cringe. So much crap in the way.

Process optimization reaches a point of diminishing returns. Then if tweaked further it degrades the performance. Microsoft reached the close to the optimal OS design at Win7. It’s all been downhill since then.

The mobile OS systems are reaching the same point. Optimization has occured and most of the “new” additions degrade the user experience.

I like to hear the howl of the coyotes and the hoot of the great horned owl nearby at night. We have no issues with cats roaming the neighborhood.

Terms and conditions are NOT copyright law. They are a separate agreement that is the companies “wishlist” of things they want the consumer to agree too. It’s common for them to spell out terms in direct conflict with copyright law.

The reason that an iTunes video purchase is encrypted is because it is illegal to break the encryption in order to make a copy (DMCA). However capturing the playback and transforming it to another medium is for personal use is fair-use.

There is also no time limit to how long a person can save the copy for. As long as they had legal access to the content at the time of making the copy. For example say I recorded a football game from a streaming service. I can save that copy for personal use for the rest of my life even though I purchased a one time only streaming.

Not an expert, but in the U.S. making a copy of a broadcast for personal use is legal under fair-use. Anything that loads up on your computer screen you can make a copy and save it for personal use. So screen captures are by definition legal.

How exactly you copy the material on your screen gets tricky under the DMCA clusterfuck. Breaking encryption to copy the material is illegal unless there is an valid exception for fair-use. What exactly those valid exceptions are is above my paygrade.

Check out the vegetation zones of Washington State. Oceans and mountain ranges have a massive effect on climate zones.

For many religious groups it’s common for teens and even young adults to not have a clue where babies come from. The biological urge to have sex is still there. So teens experiment around and figure it out but often don’t understand the consequences.

Teens are going to have sex whether you teach them anything about or not. Comprehensive sex ed reduces teen birthrates and STD transmission. It also delays the age when they initiate sex.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1525/srsp.2008.5.3.18

I am of the opinion that most “supply” issues are due to investors. Except in certain geographic areas we do not have a shortage of actual physical housing. What we have is a shortage of available housing at a mixed pricepoints for purchase.

All housing that investors purchase for rentals removes it from the supply.

Traditionally investors have sought out entry level housing for rent. They invest in building rental complexes. They make all cash purchases and then rent it out to people who otherwise would have been first-time homebuyers. Investors used to be the low end offer. Blatant price fixing has increased rent outrageously. Now investors are the high end offer and removing supply constantly.

With AirB&B, the middle and even upper range market that traditionally has had less investor competition is now a major target. This has led to price wars for investment purposes on previously safe segments.

The first solution to the housing supply is simple: taxing income from rent so that selling the property is financially more lucrative. It will have to include a prohibition against rental increases to cover the taxes as well.

The second is to mandate zoning and new construction to match the market needs not the needs of the investors.

Last would be to create a program where builders who focus on entry level housing receive incentives from governments (also include hefty penalty for substandard construction).

Not really exeptional except it is commercial grade. It’s not the random stuff you get from the local brand. The local brand is whatever. Sometimes it’s really good, other times it’s pretty poor.

The most common difference is in a test called “falling number”. Falling number is a fast easy way to figure out if an enzyme that degrades starch has been activated (alpha-amylase). Intact starch in flour creates a matrix in solution and thickens it. When alpha-amylase is activated it degrades the starch and makes it thinner.

For baking you want a thicker dough that holds together. It’s how you get light and fluffy breads. The thicker dough traps CO2 produced by yeast or an acid/base reaction better.

Well it does correlate with my estimated percentage of people who are assholes. So there is that…

Timeshares are written up as if they were property. Property that she shares with other people and is contractually required to pay for the upkeep. It’s basically a never ending money generator for the owners. Think of it a hotel where all the rooms are rented out to people who agreed to pay for them no matter if they use it or not.

As the owner of “property” she has a few choices. First off read the contract.

The management company sometimes reserves the right to buy the property back. Usually a good option - the “Owner” loses money but gets out of the never-ending bills.

She can also sell/give the timeshare to somebody else on the timeshare selling site. This transfers the ownership to somebody else who might like it.

If the property has degraded in value because of lack of maintenance from the management she might be able to get out by civil lawsuit. This is unlikely as most timeshare companies do exactly the bare minimum to meet their contractual obligations.

I have a Dyson. It’s really quite terrible with weak suction. I got it free from my sister-in-law when it “broke”. It took me an hour to disassemble it and clear out all the clogged sections. In order to keep it working it needs a full disassemble and cleaning around once a year. It’s an excellent example of a shitty design.

My other vacuum is one I got 18 years ago that still works well. The brand has since gone to shit so I can’t recommend them now.

What to look for:

First look at the amps on the bottom. Amps = suction power. The more amps it draws the stronger the motor is.

Second you want a beater bar. This is the belt driven part that spins. This makes the vacuum much more effective on carpet. It gets pet hair a lot better.

Third you want something with common easily replaced air filters. These clog easily and need to be replaced constantly. Look for machines with oversized filters.

And last, look for something simple to break apart and fix that you can find affordable replacement parts for online. Fixing a broken vacuum is generally pretty simple.

These are generally midrange machines not the cheapest but not the most expensive. In the long-term these tend to be the most economical in terms of performance/cost.

Iceland produces most of their cucumbers in high tech greenhouses using geothermal energy for heat and light.

Greenhouse cucumbers grow best in temps around 25-35c. Since the ambient temp in Iceland is usually cooler than this, venting the greenhouse is uncommon.

As the plants use CO2 in photosynthesis the levels of CO2 in the air decline and the O2 levels increase. The lower levels of CO2 drastically slow down the cucumbers growth. The growers often supplement the plants with CO2 from tanks.

I have been attempting to use Linux for 20 years now. It has found its niche used for me over the years. For example when my kids were toddlers they had a old machine that defaulted to PBSkids. Before that I used it to run a gaming server.

Currently I have a old laptop that I dual boot with win 10 and whatever Linux distro I feel like trying at the moment.

The win 10 on the laptop barely meets the minimum hardware requirements and takes 10 minutes to load.

I have tried a few different distros and always had a few issues with the setup. All sorts of different ones - screen orientation, WiFi connection, printer hell, keyboard layout etc. Takes me days to fix the bugs or give up.

Mint takes 2 minutes to load and so far is working seamlessly. It’s apt manager is the easiest I have used in a Linux distro. It found my network printer automatically. It runs smoother than windows 7 did on my laptop.

With Microsoft ending win 10 for the shitty win 11, I imagine many people are looking for alternatives. If Mint continues to work to make setup and usage easy, it will gain market share rapidly. It’s not all the way there yet, but it’s a hell of a lot better than before.

Evaluating products based upon quality not being loyal to a brand ca save you a ton of money.

Brand loyalty is taking advantage of the brain being lazy. It doesn’t want to reprocess every little thing. So when something has worked well in the past, people tend to grab the same brand. It takes a lot for people to reconsider their choices again.

Once companies break the brand loyalty due to shit performance, it is extremely difficult to get it back. This is why mismanaged brands that have gone to shit, always attempt to rebrand themselves.

The most memorable example of this for me was a long time ago. I was newly married and very poor. I was just starting to build my tool collection in the apartment.

I needed a circular saw to repair some craigslist furniture. So I carefully went around to the hardware stores looking at the prices. They were all more than I was willing to spend.

Then in Walmart one day I took a look at what they offered. It was pretty much an exact replica of the top of the line model at 1/4 of the price. The box was a bit dusty and next to another saw with the same name and UPC. It was obviously a newer box of the same item. It was the cheapest looking thing I could imagine. Completely different from the older one. It looked like a great way to lose some fingers and toes.

I grabbed the solid looking one and walked happily out of the store. It’s had a lot of use since then, and it’s still working flawlessly. I am still the proud owner of all my fingers and toes.