A marker of a new era: in my day, as kids, we ran around making race car, aircraft, machine gun, and bomb noises. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a boy running across a lawn, making what seemed to be imitations of electric drive noises.

Nexus 7 was a nice tablet at initial purchase, but one variant (maybe an early 2013 edition) was turned into a very slow near-brick by one of the OS updates.

It is nearly as capable as Tim Conway's Oldest Man character on Carol Burnett: Clock Repair

I have been using Lenovo Tab M9 tablets for a couple of years. They generally work well, but eventually updated with a system application called Tips that started throwing notifications for Temu and some other garbage. The app can be stopped until the next reboot, but not removed (not that I have looked for any elaborate way to remove).

Also, every update brings a non-dismissable app installer notification, that will by default install about a dozen garbage apps every time unless you deselect each of the apps. Everyone involved with this needs to be fed to sharks. Again, the tablet itself is decent, but I paid for something that I do not own.

I would suggest McKinsey, but that is equivalent to declaring nuclear war.

It looks like ITAR, apart from high publicity and political grandstanding now. In the late years of the Cold War era, I worked for a company with an export division, and got called upon to interpret details of e.g. RF transistor data sheets versus performance boundaries established in whichever ITAR categories. Even then, it was necessary to subscribe to the Federal Register to see recent regulatory category and denied entity changes that had not yet made it into CFR.

All the way out in California, my dad and I would stop near Kaiser Steel in Fontana to watch the spectacle of steam coming off the coking ovens. That plant stopped most operations in 1983, and was dismantled and sent to China in 1993.

It's easy to trim this setup. Just install a small faucet into the salt water rheostat tank, open it to a slow drip, and wait for a stable state.

"[T]rusted partners like ... PayPal...": immediate non sequitur.

"My name is Talky Tina, and I'm going to kill you." Living Doll, Twilight Zone S5E6

Does this language require a lexicon, or a decryption key?

Pervitin. Perdition, however, is not far away.

My family lived (1960s) inland from Los Angeles. On car trips to the beach, our eyes would start burning as we entered Los Angeles proper. We took a vacation trip to Hawaii. Amidst the excitement of my first jet flight (707), I noted a distinct brown band in the coastal clouds that we were climbing through.

Years later, in Vietnam turmoil and the rise of an ecology consciousness movement, and calls for "significant, meaningful, and relevant" education, my UCLA freshman chemistry professor (the late Dr. Mario Baur) announced that the day's lecture would be not from the syllabus, but instead on recent findings in smog science. He described photochemical mechanisms in smog formation.

Some years later, I worked in a Los Angeles highrise building that was not very careful about roof access. The air even at 24 stories, smelled nitric like Young Hall (UCLA Chemistry), plus a slug of ozone. Automotive rubber parts turned into glassy garbage after a couple of years: weatherstripping, wipers, radiator and vacuum hoses. Uh, what about my lungs?

Not these Australian animals: Going to Australia

This happened to a Sun 3/280 years ago. I was going on vacation. Upon arrival at my motel room, the room phone message light ominously was on. It was work, down because the engineering server was down. The cleaning crew had a little kid with them, and the server room had trash cans to be emptied. The kid did what comes naturally: flip and push all of the brightly lit switches. Notably the one to the disk drive. I talked someone through fsck for about an hour.