Your first mistake was buying a sh*tty front-loading washing machine in the first place. I dealt with those in the laundromat in our dorms at grad school. Never again.

Front loaders mean that you can't add clothes when you realize "Oh, s**t, I forgot the towels upstairs." And now you're running entire extra wash loads because your washing machine is designed to lock the door and prevent you from opening it.

Add to that the increased risk of flooding, increased mold problems, etc., and you couldn't *pay* me to take a front-loading washing machine unless you let me cannibalize the motor and then haul the rest of it to the junkyard afterwards. It's a fundamentally bad design.

If you can't hear your dryer buzzer, get a louder buzzer, or add a remote buzzer. That's the nice thing about non-digital hardware. You can just replace parts. It just applies a voltage across some kind of buzzer. Measure the voltage with the buzzer removed or look in the wiring diagram. Add a relay with an appropriate switching voltage in parallel across the buzzer. Use your old telephone line that you're not using because nobody has land lines anymore, and wire up a pair from the dryer to a location upstairs. Use low voltage DC through the switched side of the relay, and add a piezo buzzer and a 12V power supply upstairs. Add some connectors to make it look neat, and you're done.

I don't know exactly where you're getting the content, so I can't be completely certain, but when you pull network feeds off satellite, there's often a period of time allocated for local commercial insertion by affiliates. I'm not sure what they put in during that period these days, but that might be what you're seeing. If the downstream affiliate isn't injecting ads correctly (or at all), then you'd have whatever placeholder content filled the gap, which might be national ads for other shows on the network (preemptible spots) or might be nothing at all.

Same. I can't imagine paying $50 a month for any service. I'm currently an extra member on my mom's Netflix account because Netflix decided they didn't want my $11.99 and I wasn't willing to pay them $17.99 a month or endure ads. And that's where 90% of my viewing comes from.

So maybe buck or two a month is about all I'd be willing to spend for the very limited amount of viewing that something like YouTube TV would provide, assuming I could even deal with the commercials from live TV enough to watch it at all, and I'm pretty sure I couldn't, which makes the whole question moot.

Live TV is dead. And streaming live TV won't save it.

It's worse than that. ESPN has massive revenue, but also massive costs. Contrast with Disney, where the cost of production is dirt cheap by comparison, and what you conclude is that Disney/ABC is basically taking advantage of knowing that a lot of folks want sports to force mandated bundling so that all those people who don't watch ESPN end up helping pay for the ones who do, both by paying for the ESPN part and the Disney part, which ends up subsidizing the ESPN part.

The worst thing that can happen to a streaming service is getting sports. We need to keep streaming sports on their own a la carte services. As soon as you start bundling it in, the cost of the service skyrockets while the quality of the content plummets, because sports is such a huge fiscal black hole.

The courts have been pretty mixed about Guantanamo. They agreed with me in Boumediene v. Bush. But then, the farther the court swung to the right, the more bats**t the rulings became, and the more they buried their heads in the sand to avoid following the law.

Anyway, I think the correct argument to make would be that if they are not guaranteed due process, then they must not be criminals subject to prosecution, and must instead be P.O.W.s, which means they are subject to release at the end of the hostilities pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, and the government owes them a lot of money for unlawful detention since 2021.

Surely you're joking. Nixon had his election staffers break into the competing party headquarters.

Under Biden, the FBI, as part of an active criminal investigation into an attempted coup, looked at the phone records of sitting members of the government to see who they called and who called them and when.

No, Nixon did not get impeached for "much less".

Yes and no. The legality depends on what they do with the data. If someone takes pictures of you for a scrapbook, sure, it's fine.

If someone uses them in artwork, that's probably fine.

If someone uses them for primarily commercial purposes, that's a violation of your right to privacy, and illegal.

And there are a *lot* of things that private citizens can do, but government can't. Why? Because the government has disproportionate amounts of power over you, and so our laws and our constitution deliberately shackle the government to limit the harm it can do.

First, that's not true. Nothing in the U.S. Constitution says anything about "citizens" or "lawfully present persons". The Constitution limits what the government can do. People have constitutional rights whether then are citizens or legal or undocumented immigrants.

For that matter, people have constitutional rights whether they are in the United States or Cambodia. This is not to say that the Cambodian government has to respect those rights, but rather that with only a few explicit exceptions, the U.S. government still has to respect the constitution even when not operating on U.S. soil. It cannot, for example, require U.S. citizens in other countries to quarter troops.

Which is really, really stupid. It just makes them some other country's problem, and no other country should be willing to put up with it.

Very few countries do that, actually. A lot of countries do detain them, but not for months or years. The real problem is that the U.S. legal system is horrifically slow.

Haven't you noticed? That's their pattern. They accuse the Democrats of wanting to do something bad because it's what they would do if they were in power. And when they get power, they do it. Want to know the most heinous things the Republicans want to do? Just look at what they accuse Democrats of doing, and you have your answer.

The number of times this has happened even in the last year or two should have been enough to make the pattern obvious to a casual observer. :-)

Close to 100% want it to stop changing. Different states have different opinions about which way.

Does it really, though? Where I am, it gets dark before I get home from work. Permanent DST seems like a big benefit from my POV, because those early morning hours are wasted indoors getting ready for work anyway, but evening hours can be used outdoors.

Pacific time will go away entirely in the U.S. All three states in that time zone adopted laws enacting permanent daylight saving time if Congress authorizes it.

And in general, if the time doesn't change, people can just choose the next zone to the right. No big deal.

Wesley: I see you have six fingers on your left hand. Someone was looking for you.

Count: It's an upscaler hallucination! I swear!

I mean ostensibly, yes, but the reality is that folks have expectations that businesses be open similar hours, and there's a decent amount of momentum involved that you'd have to fight if you changed it. Way easier for regions to pick the time that fits best with those expectations.

Except in the large parts of the country where it at least arguably is, like the bottom half of California, all of middle and western Tennessee and Kentucky, everything to the right of Pennsylvania, etc.

Year of birth?

I find it hilarious that the one time a Republican stands up to the president, it is over something that ~100% of the American public agree with (ending time changes).

The right law to pass is one that gives the states the right to choose permanent DST, and then phases out the changes at the next time change. So at the next time change, if your area chooses permanent DST, you either stay on DST or switch to DST (depending on which time change), and if your area chooses permanent standard time, it either stays on standard time or switches to it, and then you never change again.

And if you pass that right after a time change, it gives the states a narrow window to make the decision, and then you're done with the time change forever.

This is common sense.

Yeah, that's fair. Passing it now would be s**t-for-brains stupid, because a bunch of states have passed laws that say that this will kick in as soon as Congress authorizes it, and if Congress authorizes it a week before the time change, it's going to be pandemonium for the tech industry.

The right time to vote on this is one week AFTER the time change that you're trying to avoid repeating a year from now.

Not really, no. Part of the year, DST feels better, and part of the year, standard time feels better. You have to choose one, but there's no need for it to be standard time.

DST is currently active for roughly eight months out of the year. Standard time is active for roughly four. All things being equal, DST is better for your sleep schedule twice as often as standard time is. So I would argue that permanent standard time is like gluing them at 10 degrees because your house keeps tipping, and you get tired of shifting them to negative five degrees twice a year. It's downright backwards.

DST may not be ideal, but I'd argue standard time sure has h*** isn't.