I'm 64 and have never owned a TV. Had a tuner card in a PC once hooked to a dish for a few months. Just never interested in watching stuff. Mom was a librarian so that was an early influence for reading books. From the little TV I've seen, can't see as how I'm missing much. Follow a few YouTube channels (Cleetus, Demo Ranch, Engels Coaches, etc) and a FacePlace account to keep in touch with old workmates is all.

Hrumph. Been writin' code for decades now. Still use a text editor (jed, np++). Even for the Arduino IDE, I prefer to write outside and just debug inside. Don't like/need tooltips, autofill, or any of the other stuff that interrupts my mental flow. I'll keep track of the braces and parens for myself, thank you. We had to learn positions and parens coding rpg and lisp. Grateful we don't have to do that anymore.

Back when I started in '81 in industry I was coding bal360 on paper forms. These would go to a Data Entry clerk to be typed in. All I got back was a 15lb hex dump of paper or a few sheets of output. These forms, btw, had a series of boxen at the top to show how I made 2, 7, z, I, i L, l, etc. (even in this font upper i and lower L are the same.)

But you can get the internet over ham. I use a Pactor 3 modem tied to an Icom 802 ham radio. USB plug into an old Toughbook CF-C1 running navigatrix version of Ubuntu. Batch download of pages (no surfing), weather files, emails, etc are slower than one is used to at home but doable.

Michael was also the last man to be alone. Truly alone - out of touch with all humanity, swinging around the back side of the Moon in a little tin can. Wow! A sailor on a boat at Point Nemo (looking at you Tania Aebi) probably has a radio, a mountain climber probably has one too. Anyone in an airplane is seen on somebodies radar. All the cameras on our houses and roads. But Mr. Collins? Nope, none of that. Even back in his day (1969), we had very good satellites and unless you really tried to hide, humanity was only miles away.

So Amazon made ~386billion in revenue in 2020 alone. But they have paid only 2.6billion in taxes for the past 4 years? I like their maths that they are paying their fair share. They'd have paid 81billion just last year if they didn't have a great staff of accountants, etc. to work the numbers. Go ahead and raise the tax rates. Amazon and their ilk ain't paying that rate anyway. But for the guys who can't afford to find the loopholes or make the limits of them, they are screwed. Good way to reduce the competition by the big guys. Buy local!!

Naw, it's another corporation that wants the government to take your money so they don't have to put out or be blamed for it.

Corporations don't pay taxes. They pass the expense off to their customers.

Oh wait, we're already there. Dang.

Is this an add for Iphones? It's obvious after a very few thousand votes that the preponderance of us don't use these phones. Please don't wait for 20k votes before changing the poll.

One of those warehouses is 50 miles away. 2 folks I know bid on the pallets and then sell, fix and sell, or trash what's on them. One quit her day job to do this full time. They're both doing quite well.

Not what I saw at WalMart, though. Returns are collected and catalogued. Food stuffs are mostly thrown out. A small percentage is given to food banks - cans and boxed foods. Critter foods are donated to the local shelters. And other stuff is palleted and sent back to a central warehouse. A lot of it is sold by the pallet to resellers. I know a couple of them locally. They put the stuff on fleabay, et.al. Bicycles, though, are crushed and forgotten...

Yes you can put a large box in a smaller one if you can make it smaller than the small box. Gotta think outside the boxes for this. Simplify the complexity and work back out from there. Break it into little pieces and the big box will fit..

Yea, it does belong here. This is what Slapdash is about. Stuff that matters is important most of the time. Flights of fancy are important, too. Interesting question and a few takes on that are interesting to the nerd in me. Twere I able, I'd vote you down. Instead I'll try to nullify your comment with mine...

Not my place to opine any of the options. I don't know what the evidence is nor can I predict the future. Doubtful that we'll ever know the truth in any case. The media has some of the evidence but, I'm sure, not all of it. Treason is a tricky subject particularly with the new whistleblower exceptions and all.