Crowdstrike completely screwed the pooch with this deploy but ideally, Windows wouldn’t get crashed by a bas 3rd party software update. Although, the crashes may be by design in a way. If you don’t want your machine running without the security software running, and if the security software is buggy and won’t start up, maybe the safest thing is to not start up?

Eric Clapton is wildly overrated

China does have a lot of agricultural and manufacturing workers who aren’t on computers all day. And they have some pretty poor rural areas. But I’m calling bullshit on Japan’s numbers. Tokyo looks like Blade Runner at night but and the office culture is famous for long hours but no one is looking at screens? Get the fuck outta here.

I used to stick to that rule and get a sensible mid sized Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord that’s a few years old as needed. But in 2013 (the last time I needed to get a new car) the cost savings were really low compared to new. I think the used market was particularly hot so you’d save less that 10% of the cost, so I ended up getting my 1st and only (so far) brand new car ever.

Sounds like you’re doing everything you can. It sucks that you’re going through this; I hope the situation improves and you don’t get furloughed.

I’m guessing that if you could get to all your jobs without the car, you would have already done so? Saving on gas and insurance can help, but depending on where you live that might not be realistic.

You could try contacting local food banks and see if they ever make accommodations for people who are working during operating hours. They might not but there’s no harm in asking.

Right now you’re in a serious hole from missing work for a family emergency. I don’t have much advice for getting back onto steady ground aside from being super crazy frugal and working extra hours in the short term (which is fucking exhausting mentally and emotionally and physically). Do you have any long term plans for having more breathing room years from now? If your steady state is “one car repair or illness away from defaulting on payments” then that’s a hard path. Do you or your wife have prospects for better paying jobs in the future? Are there training or educational opportunities that could help? Are there cheaper places you could live (smaller, worse neighborhood?) to save money while working towards better job prospects? Living on not enough money in crappy circumstances sucks but it is definitely more bearable if you know it’s temporary and you’re making progress towards something better.

Good luck.

Anyone who says their smart overestimates themselves. Anyone who says their dumb underestimates themselves. How does anyone even answer this question?

I think it’s possible for someone to know that they are generally pretty smart or not very smart without over or under estimating. A lot of people will over or under estimate but if you’re just looking for a rough placement in a third of the bell curve, there’s a lot of feedback in everyday life to help.

Pedants who choose to make big deals over minor issues are always out to prove something and are objectively not smart.

Some people sincerely have trouble adapting to different precisions of language in different situations. I know some very smart and successful people with autism who struggle with this. It can be super annoying when they are way too pedantic for the context but I don’t think being deficient in this one area makes them dumb.

Up gets me every time.

If no one is allowed to wear any flair then that’s fair. But everyone is allowed (and possibly encouraged?) to wear pride stuff in June as part of the anyway corporate rainbow-washing. So I have to ask why it’s OK to wear “LGBTQ+ folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff but it’s not OK to wear “Black folks deserve life and civil rights” stuff? Why is stating that Black lives have value so offensive that it’s worth fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to ban it?

I’m mad at both. Amazon is trash. The current court is trash. And all the ghouls that got us this shit ass court are trash, from Mcconnell to Trump to every dummy that votes for Trump to the stupid stupid Democrats who didn’t fight tooth and nail when Obama’s pick didn’t get a hearing and didn’t pack the courts at the 1st opportunity. Oh and fuck RGB who should have fucking retired at the start of Obama’s 1st term. Octogenarians who survived multiple bouts of cancer don’t have the luxury of hanging out so the 1st female president gets to appoint their successor. Democrats are so fucking inept it’s hard to believe that they aren’t sandbagging us on purpose

Jumping between Mac and Windows I keep accidentally awakening Cortana when I try to copy and paste. Now that god awful, universally reviled feature if finally getting deprecated but it still brings up the damn window/modal/pice-of-shit just to tell me that it’s gone. If you want to be gone, then go! Don’t make a fuss telling me about it. Just go. No one wanted you in the 1st place. Fuck.

Not the main character but Gus Fring was a remarkably intelligent gangster.

This is actually for a FOX affiliate station not FOX News. I don’t know if there is any relationship between local news on FOX stations and FOX News. I thought that they were supposed to completely separate entities so we can all watch The Simpsons without feeling like we’re supporting Tucker Carlson. But maybe that isn’t true?

Over the air stations are using a limited public resource (slices of the spectrum for the HDTV or radio) so the FCC governs who gets what slices so that we don’t have a noisy mess as competing channels try to broadcast over one another. One of the conditions of a broadcast license is to provide some public good with support for emergency announcements, PSAs and news. So the FCC should have some say in whether the thing you’re doing to meet the “provide news” requirement is actually news.

It’s kinda like, if you want a driver’s license to drive nuclear waste, they may require you to take classes on truck driving and materials safety in order to get and maintain your license. You have the right to drive a bicycle with a box of books wherever you want with no license, but if you want to drive a big rig on public roads with hazardous materials, you need some very specific licenses. And you can’t just say your buddy Jim taught you what you need in his garage last weekend. The licensing body absolutely has the right to say that your buddy popping off on a rant does not meet the qualifications of the required classes.

But with the current Supreme Court, who knows? They could say that the FCC isn’t allowed to make value judgments on “what is news?”. If so, things may get weird. Would they still be allowed to determine “what is obscene?” or would we start getting 24-7 porn on the over the air stations? Would they still be able to require news programs? And if not, what stations would still show news? Would reruns of Three and a Half Men bring in more money than local news? If so, maybe the only stations that would still bother would be ones with owners that want to broadcast specific kinda of news regardless of profit?

It is very hard to get assistance in the US. People with children can get some credits to buy groceries , but it isn’t very much. Depending of where you live, if you have kids you can get some small and limited help with housing or get a monthly check (again, really not much). if you have a serious documented disability you can get similar assistance. Injured or retired veterans also get payments, but that’s really just part of the payment for being a soldier. And a lot of folks come home from our endless wars with serious mental and physical health problems and end up living on the streets.

Having a phone or laptop but living in a car or tent isn’t better than having an actual residence. People in the US can become homeless (lose job, run out of savings) and when they do, they will try to hang onto laptops and phones, since they are portable, valuable and very useful (looking for jobs, housing, social services, etc. ). You can get a cheap pay as you go phone for like $30 and hang onto it for years. Here in Seattle you can get work as a day laborer making around $16 an hour, so a cheap phone is attainable for anyone well enough to show up in the morning and dig ditches for a day. Meanwhile, you’d have a hard time finding even the crappiest little studio apartment with a shared kitchen for less than $1000 per month. And you usually have to have 3 months of rent to move in.