Kind of with you there. We used to shop for virtually everything at Jeff's Books & More.

First, they had everything, and in the early days of shopping on the internet they were a known reliable broker, often an umbrella corporation for all these little specialty merchants. They offered the Next- and 2nd-day shipping without tripling the cost of something we needed immediately.

Unfortunately, the umbrella corporation used their increasing market dominance to squeeze their venders, crush competition, and gradually replace value with price hikes....much as Uncle Wally Mart had done decades before. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

A good rule of thumb is to be careful underestimating an apparently inconsequential political action on the heels of an earth-shattering affair.

Some nonzero percentage of the time, the seemingly inconsequential action was the cleverly disguised end game all along.

That is a part of the problem that folks in the present political mix too often miss. Sonoma County is certainly not a hotbed of Conservatism. All forms of government By The People, even those disguised as For The People, eventually grow tired of the pesky freedoms their citizens have that make their jobs even a little bit more difficult.

It may not be the job of those in power to nibble away at your personal freedoms, it is their tendency. If you'd like to see these uniquely 20th Century protections for the common man wither away, do nothing. That's what most folks are doing.

If you'd like to see them persist, guard against these travesties jealously with all your might.

The arrival of our kinder, gentler AI overlord.

A warm and fuzzy Welcome, then.

Stories have power.

But then, so do Studio bottom lines. Great show. Happy for the three seasons.

Years From now, trapped but conscious inside a collapsed structure, I'll stand a much better chance of recognizing this as a rescue attempt, and not a fever dream.

In order to achieve peak inability to maintain impulse control, I typically add a little ethanol to the ambient air pollution.

Ants are collectively unselfish. Ants act in the interest of the greater good.

Humans? The attributes that selected for homo sapiens domination of competitors seems to have limited our propensity to prosper beyond a certain point.

If the outage affects 10 towers, and it was over 60 minutes, and you were using ATT Gateway while juggling on a unicycle...

Now. Imagine how much goodwill a blanket proclamation might generate with no word salad qualifications.

If your service goes out again, at all, for any reason, you get a days credit on your bill. We're AT&T and we're trying to earn the privilege of your continued business.

An outpost on the moon, outside the Earth's gravity well, could be quite useful staging and resupplying a Mars mission.

If the end game is human colonization, it makes great good sense... so maybe, they won't go that way at all.

Well, I presume they lacked a wealthy regional country willing to help bolster their burgeoning economy in order to strengthen the region.

What if? the United States had used their great wealth and geopolitical power helped transform Caribbean and Central and South American nations into self-sufficient partners instead of meddling in petty political elections for the last ciento cincuenta años?

Refugees don't flee in large numbers from successful economies. Hmm. No flood of immigrants from failed Nation States. Who will do my yard work, pick my vegetables, and rankle my ire at election time?