Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

The Las Vegas Fry's is still vacant, too. Best Buy has this market to itself.

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Embrace the power of "and."

What self hosted solutions have you been looking at?

I've used TTRSS ever since Google Reader went away, however long ago that was. Works like a champ, and there are one or two Android clients that talk to it.

I don't think it directly supports remote streaming

It does, but you'll need to route the incoming traffic through manually. For me, that involves having the router forward traffic on port 443 to the server and configuring a reverse proxy on the server to hand off traffic addressed to jellyfin.$HOME_DOMAIN to the Jellyfin daemon. In my case, Jellyfin is one service among many on a Docker host, with Caddy directing incoming traffic to wherever it needs to go.

It's not automated like Plex, but I've streamed movies and TV shows from across the country without any problems.

I recently switched my service plan (with Cox in Las Vegas) from 500 Mbps with a 1.2-TB (IIRC) monthly limit to 250 Mbps with no limit. After a couple of months of overages that basically doubled my bill, it'll be nice to have predictable billing no matter how much we end up using. 250 Mbps has been fast enough so far.

Plex is available on many more devices. Jellyfin has PC, iOS, Android, AppleTV, AndroidTV, Roku, and LG TVs. But Plex also has PlayStation and Xbox, Samsung TVs, Vizio TVs, and many other smaller streaming boxes.

I used to run Plex. I even paid for a lifetime subscription years ago. I now run Jellyfin; it's been less of a hassle to keep it running and it puts less load on my server. I shut off my Plex container last month after switching my parents' Rokus over to Jellyfin. At home, I switched to Chromecasts (the newer ones that run Android TV) after having run OpenELEC on Raspberry Pi 3s for a while.

Plex also has better remote access support. Just enable it and setup a port forward/firewall rule. Jellyfin? Have fun configuring a VPN on each client to access it.

My Jellyfin instance shares a box with a bunch of other services. Caddy routes traffic on port 443 wherever it needs to go: to Jellyfin, to one of the *arrs, to Nextcloud, GitLab, etc. One rule at the router passes inbound port 443 off to Caddy. No VPN is necessary.

By comparison, there were more than a few instances where Plex's "it just works" networking configuration didn't just work.

I think Southwest has a free checked bag and charges for carry on.

They don't charge for a carry-on or up to two checked bags.

The Walmart nearest to me has been putting more and more products in locked cases. Not just laundry detergent (WTF?), but things like razors, most OTC meds, batteries, and liquor come to mind. I went to a larger store a bit further away for some things for the puppy I just got and found they'd even put dog collars and leashes in a locked case. Waiting for someone to come unlock the case (which often takes several minutes) is bad enough. On some occasions, they've even insisted on carrying the item to the checkout instead of just handing it over. For that kind of hassle, I'd just as soon fire off an Amazon order if I don't need it right now.

tl;dr: The way Walmart treats all its customers like would-be criminals isn't exactly endearing.

Bluesky looks set to replace Twitter

Bluesky is an echo chamber for shitlibs who can't cope. If you liked pre-Elon Twatter with its "trust and safety" commissars, you probably will love Bluesky.

Blueanons like rsilvergun have a hard time relating to reality.