It’s pretty much the same strategy Trump used to avoid serious penalties from his New York cases: just move to Florida.

Going to be a beautiful, sunny day here. Nothing better to do than go hang out with some like minded humans.

I don’t spend any time, awake, in my bedroom. TV is in the living room, where I spend my idle time. I can hear through the walls, though, that my neighbors spend a lot of time just hanging out in their bedroom, and that there’s a TV there. So, I suspect, if you’re in a home with multiple people, that having a TV or entertainment in each bedroom is more common. Essentially treating the bedroom as a private apartment within the larger space.

Gitmo is expensive, like $10M/prisoner/year expensive, and still at least nominally subject to US laws, though watered down by being a military facility. Outsourcing to El Salvador gets them massive cost savings and complete liberation from judicial oversight. They may still work on Gitmo, but I expect El Salvador to be the go-to camp now. Discount Gitmo. All they have to do is get you there - get you in the air to there - and you become a stateless, rights-less slave.

The whole reason you put concentration camps in a foreign nation is to remove them from SCOTUS jurisdiction. Then you get to sit back and say, “We can’t compel a sovereign state,” while the sovereign state gets to sit back and say, “We’d gladly return these people, if only POTUS would ask.” Just one capo doing a favor for a fellow capo, somehow neither one of them able to do the right thing.

I think OP is talking about a single building with single-family occupancy and commercial storefront. At least in the US, a lot of single-family residential zones exclude commercial use.

Also check that the switch is rated for motors. A lot of the switches I’ve seen have separate power ratings for resistive (lights) and inductive (motors) load, because of the power-factor or inrush spikes. https://www.getzooz.com/zooz-zen15-power-switch/ is Z-wave, but specifically for high-current motors.

Average spending is not a good metric for addictive behaviors - spending/consumption tends to be extremely concentrated in a small fraction. My go-to example for this is alcohol where, in the US, 10 drinks/week is the population average, but also enough to get you into the “top 10%” or “heavy drinker” bin, where the average consumption of that bin is 74 drinks/week. In both alcohol and gacha, a huge fraction of the population don’t pay anything.

I mean, even if the article’s $30/month average spend is entirely within their 20% “problem” spenders, it would only be $150, but it’s a little easier (for me) to see where $150/month gacha habit could be a problem for young people already on the financial edge. Not the fundamental problem that skyrocketing rent and stagnant wages are, but more in the last-straw sense.

There are still “favors” to be done.

That penetration is super exaggerated. Ever cut through a stained (i.e. pigment-stained) board? Board painted with a water-based paint? Those paint pigment particles are same scale as microbes, so you should expect them to penetrate to similar depth. Surface cleaning and routine abrasion get rid of most of it. Go over the surface with a scraper - take off 20-50 microns - and you’re pretty much down to virgin wood.

Stationary rowing, 5 days/week. It’s a good whole-body exercise, heavy on cardiovascular & low impact, but not particularly strengthening. Can sit in front of a movie and just go. Got a tracker to record performance & heart rate, and I really like seeing new bouts appear in the graph. That may be more motivating than the nebulous protection from future cardiovascular disease.

Gotta admit, I only went looking for the dragon because everyone in game said it’d be super helpful, and there’s a quest called “Gather your allies.” My talker had like 20 charisma and expertise in all the charisma skills…I resolved a lot of conflicts without violence. Disappointed to be forced into combat with the dragon by our guardian angel.

Kind of disappointed with all the interactions with our ‘guardian angel’ once their true nature was revealed. Maybe I made wrong choices, but their guidance just seemed…off. Not wrong. Not evil. Just somehow not quite right. Maybe somehow inconsistent with their revealed nature, and pushing towards ex machina, like a number of things I don’t see how I’d have discovered if they hadn’t outright told me. The dragon interaction is part of that not-quite-rightness.

I definitely found the ending to be the least satisfying part of the game. I went straight from the dragon to the final battle, and I think that sequence intensified the less-than-satisfying feeling.

1. They’re not going to show you completely routine stops that involve nothing more than exchange of paperwork
2. They’re not going to show you minimally confrontational stops where people politely comply
3. Often, such commands are preceded by a series of events that’s elevated everyone’s stress level and reduced rational thinking
4. Fear of abuse/arrest
5. Drugs
6. Mental health
7. A bunch of stuff that other helpful lemmings will point out.

You can do a lot with a hand saw, chisel, mallet, utility knife and hand plane. Check out https://www.youtube.com/@Paul.Sellers/playlists starting with making a workbench

The absence of a running karma total is a surprisingly powerful difference. I do still look back at old posts, and it’s nice when there’s votes, but without the little number next to a name or when I mouse-over a profile, there’s no motivation to be the first in a thread to repost a cliche joke or to ragebait for fake internet points.

I was alive for the Columbia explosion, 9/11, the Challenger explosion, and Reagan’s attempted assassination. I saw them all as highlight reels on TV hours after the facts. I saw OJ’s glove escapade on the evening news. I expect there to be a Trump trial moment like that, but I don’t need to see it live, and I definitely don’t need to sit through hour after hour of courtroom procedure waiting to see that one moment.

I’m glad the trial will be recorded for posterity. That seems like the best way to answer claims of shenanigans in any trial. Actually watching the trial, all the way through, seems a little too much like watching Nascar hoping to see a big crash.

Own 8/10 - assuming you count Phantom Liberty different from CP; finished 7/10 (likewise PL), mostly before this decade. Some of them before 2010. I wonder if I can still find my Baldur’s Gate CDs…

I’m old.

When I was working:

• Credit card closes on the 25th
• Utility bills arrive between 20th & 2nd
• Mortgage due 30th
• Paycheck arrives 30th
• Estimate bills for the month & transfer the rest to mutual funds

Expenses all paid by credit card, so I’m always ‘budgeting’ for the previous month and there’s no guesswork. Emergency expenses larger than a paycheck might require selling some mutual funds, but in 20 years that never happened.

Now I’m not working, budgeting is basically the same, except that interest and dividends appear at random intervals in brokerage, are no longer automatically reinvested, but transferred to checking to cover bills, usually around the same time as the paycheck used to appear.

I don’t automate anything, because I want to notice if a bill is larger than expected and address whatever caused that to happen.

It’s a lot easier to accept criticism when it has no power over your job, salary, perks, or lifestyle. SCOTUS sure wasn’t “comfortable” when the public scrutiny was camped at their driveways.

A lot of Bethesda content is quasi-procedural. TES and FO maps are littered dungeons/encampments that are pretty formulaic. Re-used passage & room artwork, generic antagonists, just little opportunities to engage in combat mechanics. And they respawn periodically, so you can go back and get your mechanics fix.

Everything in BG3 is scripted. There are no random encounters, wandering mobs, or replayable dungeons. Everything in the game is there intentionally, and everything in the game has been hand crafted.