I guess it will be back to lard, tallow, and butter for my cooking needs.

I'm not even sure it requires that much effort. Since the data is being held by a 3rd party they could always just issue a NSL or given how complacent telecoms were in the past just ask nicely and get the data they want, all without a warrant. Having not read the entire USA FREEDOM Act I don't know if this is the case but it seems the most likely. If someone more knowledgeable that myself chimes in with this info that would be great but until I hear otherwise I will assume this was a shitty deal.

Well computer security like the rest of IT is a cost center and doesn't add to profits. Security gets even less attention as it isn't "profit enabler" (I believe that is the term the ass holes use) and is something that you can't tell if it is working until it doesn't. Even in very heavily regulated industries that supposedly take computer security seriously they usually do the bare minimum to not get fined. Add in that there is a lot of snake oil salesmen out there telling you that if you buy product X and just plug it in it will solve all of your problems and computer security is just a mess.

And if your kids are anything like mine they will still each find a stick and hit each other playing light sabers.

Which is why every opportunity is a chance for them to learn. With the other adults in his den there are very few questions a 6 year old can ask that we can't provide a good answer to as we all have very different careers and knowledge. Add in that the kids are good friends and always want to hang out there are often group trips outside of planned scouting events to go see and do things. Next week a bunch are going on a river tour of one a bridge construction near by. They have also been through a lock and dam, local dual fuel power plant, up to the iron range to see and learn about that, been to a number of the museums, been to a dairy farm and then off to the creamery. The big goal all the parents have it to try to not squash the love in learning and get them exposed to as may different things as possible.

They love learning like this, and besides what 6 year old boy wouldn't want to sit in the cab of a 240 ton dump truck, or see the only remaining prototype of largest steam shovels ever built (one of only 2 of this type of shovel still in existence).

It is a simple way to give back and hopefully if I ever need blood it will be there for me. Having O- blood is great for donating but does limit the options if I happen to need it which is rather unfortunate. Also while I don't have hemochromatosis I don't want to develop it so getting drained periodically is just one thing I do and is less of a pain in the ass than giving up braunschweiger from the meat processor I go to as they really add in the onion and garlic and it was wonderful.

They weren't being replaced because of obsolescence but because of the abuse from the general student body. The standard tragedy of the commons and no one really gave a shit.

I do give regularly and it is actually something that I need to do for my own benefit as well as for the benefit of others. I have O- blood but hemochromatosis runs very strongly in my family and while I do not have it have always had a high level of iron in my blood. To help prevent it I give blood as the treatment if I develop it is similar but they can't use the blood so it would otherwise go to waste. So here I am providing the universal donor blood that always has a high but not too high (almost too high) hemoglobin count and not only benefiting myself but also other people.

The labor isn't a problem as I have done similar things before. Basically I want to take a house with early 70s wiring and make it future proof. The breaker mess is only part of the problem. The 4 rooms on the same circuit are both bathrooms and an upstairs and downstairs bedroom. Yes going wireless for networking would be the cheapest and easiest, but if I have to take the walls down (they were wallpapered when we bought the house and I know why now) anyway why not upgrade the wiring and other cables in conduit and sort out the mess. I plan on running 10 AWG throughout the house and doing it in a logical fashion as well as adding in additional outlets. As far a coax goes there is only one room that has it now and it is not where I would want it as that is where the sun shines in most of the day and evening.

Rich bastard, we never got a proper computer in our house until I was almost out of high school.

After years of nagging my parents broke down and got me one of those cheap computer things that was little more than a keyboard and 1 line LCD display. I think the thing had a z80 or 6502 processor with 32kb ram but you couldn't save things when you turned it off. It was even worse than a TRS-80 model 100, that would have been a nice machine by comparison. It ran off of like 4 D cell batteries and you could buy cartridges that had educational programs but I never got those. I did learn how to program in it's flavor of BASIC and translated a number published programs from other BASIC dialects so I could play those games if I could (lots of text games).

With my two kids what they get in school is pretty wasteful of the time they spend there. they learn the basics of things but don't explore them and as has been pointed out elsewhere they move at a glacial pace to ensure that the slowest kid keeps up all while ensuring that everything on the standardized test is covered. My oldest had a bit on geology where they talked about the different types of rocks. Him and his classmates got the basic definition of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks and where they come from but no real hands on experience. The 5 other boys in he grade that he is in cub scouts with got a very different experience as we went and made some igneous rocks and cooled them at different rates to see what would happen one Sunday afternoon. While they were cooling we examined other types of rocks and pointed out the different minerals in them, cut open a geode (took 2 tries to get one that was a geode), and examined some fossil sea creatures in some limestone. The kids he is in scouts with get lots of this sort of thing which they love because it is something they would never get to see otherwise plus it takes the abstract concept that gets glossed over to meet some standard and brings it to them in a very real way.

Apparently it didn't.

Well that is my plan. There is too much wire in my house and I don't know what it all is controlling. I have a 36 bay breaker box and all 36 bays have a breaker in them yet I only have a 1900 sq. ft. house and there are 4 rooms that are all on the same breaker. Add in that there aren't enough outlets, or they aren't in the right spot, as well as wanting to run coax and network lines into each room and pulling down the sheet rock to put in conduit is looking like the cheapest and quickest solution. What makes it even more worthwhile is that the previous owner should have never been allowed to own tools so there is a lot of stuff than needs to be taken care of anyway that will get solved by this as well. For me at least this won't be the first time I have gutted and redid a house so I have that going for me.

This a thousand times. I had a similar experience when I lived in France. I only lived there for 3 months but got dropped right into it. Before I arrived I had managed to learn a few things so I wouldn't starve, get to lost, and be able to pay for things but I was pretty useless. By the end of the 3 months I could hold a conversation to some degree with the locals even if I was about at a kindergarten level. My only request is that someone teach the French how to pronounce "Häagen-Dazs" as it confused the hell out of me at first when coworkers would ask if I wanted to go get Häagen-Dazs after work. I tried but failed.

You are missing a couple of taxes at the federal level. There is social security and medicare tax (7.65% or 15.3% depending on how you want to look at it) that hits everyone but starts cutting out at higher incomes. And while you point out that you don't live in a state with income tax a lot do. Additionally a lot of states have a sales tax and this ignores local property taxes or local income taxes. When I did my taxes this year I was curious what my overall rate was and it is slightly below 30% and if I included sales tax it would likely be about 2% higher but that is just a rough guess.