I just looked up my parent's house. The phone company's local DSLAM is filled with no ports, so no DSL for them. No cable access either. Right now their only choice is Wildblue, and I have a pre-order for Starlink.

Sure enough, the new map shows their neighborhood as having broadband. Nope. Hell, if ISDN was an option I'd take it.

Thank God the local electric co-op has been allowed to get into the fiber game. They should have fiber by 2023.

As a former black hole physicist, this is the only correct answer.

I went to see him at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville in 2019 when he decided to branch into country music. I thought his spoken-word albums were crazy enough to be interesting, so I wanted to see how he'd do.

I've seen him before a few times at cons, but that was the first time I've ever seen him nervous before. He belted out one or two songs, and it went about how you might expect.

I give him props for trying something new, especially given his age.

"This is the number one problem in the United States. You guys are always polarized about everything because you only have two political parties, you tend to see everything as being black/white, with us/against us. There's never a middle ground, because from your point of view that would mean giving up and making compromises to the other side."

That's true, but it's a highly asymmetrical problem.

When one side thinks "cap and trade" is the correct solution to climate change, and the other side thinks carbon taxes are the solution, you can come to a compromise.

When one side thinks climate change is a liberal conspiracy or is caused by gay marriage, there's not a lot you can do...

As a prepper, the most important thing you can have on your side, isn't food or water or ammo. It's people. It's the crazy loner living in a bunker that'll die when the shit hits the fan. People can rebuild a community and help each other survive a lot better than a pile of ammo.

And if you want them to take care of you, you have to take care of them too. That behooves you to think of others. Not is doing so the moral and decent thing to do, it's also happens to be the correct thing to do from the viewpoint of enlightened self-interest.

I refurbish laptops for poor kids in local schools, and my cousin mentioned that she'd like some for her 4 kids. So for Christmas I bought some used Thinkpad T430's and refurbished them with 8 GB ram, SSD, new battery/bios battery, power supply. Basically a new computer as far as a bunch of 4-12 year old kids care. And then I tried installing Windows 10, and almost pulled my hair out.

If anyone at Microsoft is reading, let me be as crystal clear as I can: If you ever remove the option for local accounts on *any* version of Windows, that future generation of "Windows users" will grow up learning Ubuntu instead.

The economy currently has an asset bubble, similar to the ones that caused the Dot.Com recession in 2001 and the Great Recession in 2008. Except the current bubble is larger in real terms than the one in 2008.

https://i.imgur.com/GVgzPF7.pn...

The fundamental problem is that for 25 years, government has using loose money policies and deficit spending to paper over shortfalls in economic growth. And it looks like we're approaching the endgame. The bubble is bigger this time, but government's response is much more constrained. The Fed can't drop rates by ~5% like they usually due as rates are already 1.5-1.75%. Unconventional monetary policy fuels inequality and makes the next recession bigger. And fiscal stimulus is likely to be constrained due to record government deficits as well as increased partisanship in Congress.

And like Twain said, history doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. In 2008, we had a financial crises because banks didn't trust the mortgage-backed securities they were lending as collateral. Today, the repo market is having a similar crises because banks don't trust the collateral that they are using for overnight loans.

Unless there are multiple "before" photos showing the star, I suspect the explanation is more boring. Perhaps the "before" photo of the star captured a much more distant background star that was being gravitationally lensed by a foreground object and doesn't show in the "after" picture because the lensing object in the foreground is no longer on our line-of-sight. It would still be an interesting result, but no Dyson spheres.

Yes, there is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

My brother died from brain cancer last year, three months after he was diagnosed. I was cradling him in my arms when he died. That fucked me up in ways I cannot describe.

I tried cannabis to deal with the depression, and while it helped, I had to take it every night, and I hated the foggy brain it gave me. I contemplated prescription antidepressants, but they have a long list of serious side-effects that I didn't want to touch with a stick.

So I decided "What the hell...", got some shrooms, and took a 600 mg microdose. Holy shit. An hour later, I was wrapped in the sort of joy that had eluded me for over a year. And that was the only side-effect. I didn't spend hours talking to the space iguanas that live in my microwave or anything like that.

And the next day, I felt *much* better. I took a few more doses every few weeks after that until I ran out. I'm not 100% again, and I may not ever be. But I'm a functional human being again thanks to psilocybin.

Psilocybin is a pharmaceutical company's worst nightmare. It can't be patented, it's easily growable (if the law would allow), it doesn't have horrible side-effects, and it starts working in minutes instead of weeks.

Given that it has a safety profile better than marijuana, which itself is an order of magnitude safer than *coffee*, there's no reason we shouldn't sell this OTC at Wal-mart. There are lots of depressed, suicidal, and hurting folks. It's a fucking crime against humanity that psilocybin is illegal.

I'm tired of having to stack multiple ad block/flashblock/autoplay blocks, only for web devs to work around them and autoplay videos anyway, burning up my mobile bandwidth or annoying me with sound.

I would be willing to pay hard money for a web browser that had the hooks for playing audio and video stripped out, such that it was physically impossible for it to play a video.

If I see an autoplay videos, I will go out of my way to *not* buy your product ever again.

The "Collapse OS" thing is one of those ideas that sounds sorta nifty until you think about it a bit. How many folks can build their own computer now, with NewEgg and Amazon and YouTube vids and a million Google search results showing you how to do it?

Now how many think they're going to disassemble a radioactive cash register with your wood-fired soldering gun and build a Z80 computer?

Either just buy a Raspberry Pi and accessories and store it in an ammo can (redneck EM shield) until Doomsday, or if you're going full steampunk, just buy a Commodore 64 or two so you have spare parts.

If the person hadn't been so consistently antagonistic towards me, I wouldn't have cared so much. :-)

No, one week isn't "statistically significant".

There are three ironclad rules to know if a recession is coming:

1) The yield curve will invert. This doesn't *predict* recessions, it actually *causes* them by reducing bank profitability, causing them to tighten lending and reducing available credit..

2) The Fed will start lowering rates.

3) The "This Time Is Different!!!!!" folks come crawling out of the woodwork to explain how the first two are completely innocent in this instance and things are actually going swimmingly.

As all three are here, I have moved my investments to 100% bonds. A Trumpster who works as an investment advisor pilloried me for this. A week later, and I'm up 3.5% while he's down 4.5%.

SirAstral, can I suggest that you go read a fucking economics book, before you start preaching how economics works?

Voss is completely correct in pointing out the difference between Japan/USA and Greece is that the former have control of their currency, while Greece doesn't. Since Greece can't control the value of the Euro, they can't inflate away debt like other countries which *do* control their currency, and so Greece suffered more than other countries.

Greece was also hamstrung by the fact that the European Union is a monetary union without a corresponding fiscal union. Nevada and several other states here could have crashed and burned when the Great Recession hit, except fiscal transfers from wealthier states helped their economies recover more quickly than they otherwise would.