Not immediately relevant to your issue, but fun fact I wanted to share regarding the term “flashing” your BIOS

The term originates from a time when BIOS was stored on an EPROM (Eraseable, Programmable Read-Only Memory) chip (not EEPROM, which later became the norm and stands for Electronically Eraseable, Programmable Read-Only Memory)

So if you think about those terms for a minute, if EPROM was erasable, but not electronically erasable, how did you erase it?

The answer is, you exposed it to UV light, ideally a strong one like a mercury vapor lamp, but other sources could work they’d just take longer.

So you literally were flashing light at the chip.

The chips had a little window built into them to expose the memory array, and they were usually covered with a sticker you would peel off if you needed to erase it.

There’s not really a single robin hood canon, some versions of him are quite violent, others he avoids killing. All depends on who was telling the story and when.

I’m from the Philly area, our roads are pretty shitty, if yours are even worse that’s really saying something. You can just about tell by feel the moment you cross the state border into NJ

There was a guy I knew in high school, he was never the brightest bulb, but he had the rare gift that he realized that he was kind of an idiot and would listen to and try to learn from people that knew more about something than he did. Overall a pretty nice guy, I don’t think anyone really had anything bad to say about him, he leaned a little conservative but if you took the time to explain something from a liberal point of view you could definitely get him to change his mind sometimes.

I mostly lost track of him after I graduated, I heard somewhere through the grapevine that he had died, turns out those rumors were somewhat exaggerated, but he did get a pretty significant brain injury, spent a brief time in a coma, had some surgeries, nice scar on his head.

Next time I ran into him a few years later, he had taken a pretty weird turn into some paranoid bullshit, talking about some apocalypse or civil war that he seemed sure was coming and how he was learning to make his own arrows so he could keep hunting when ammo ran out.

This was a few years before Trump’s first term, I can only imagine he’s spiraled further into crazytown since then.

My dad has a '93 ranger, the modern rangers are almost the size of the f150s of that era, and you can’t even get them like a 7ft bed like he has.

The 4 cylinder manages almost 20mpg which isn’t too shabby even by modern truck standards. If I could get pretty much the exact same truck with a modern engine, maybe a hybrid, it would be a no-brainer.

4wd would be nice too, his is RWD, and that thing doesn’t like rain, snow, loose gravel, pretty much anything but dry asphalt when you don’t have any weight in the bed.

We’ve gotten plenty of use out of that truck, we’re not towing or hauling anything heavy, but we’ve moved a lot of furniture with it, picked up some small loads of bulky lumber and such from the hardware store, hauled camping gear for a bunch of kids back when I was in scouts, etc. I don’t need anything bigger.

I’m kind of crossing my fingers that the maverick adds a mid gate to extend that tiny bed a bit. That would basically check all of the boxes I’m looking for. Ideally that would still be my 2nd vehicle in addition to a small EV for most of my daily commuting but I’d get enough use out of a truck like that to be worth it if I could afford and had parking space for a second car.

We’ve already ran power and phone lines damn-near everywhere, it’s not that much harder to run fiber.

No, it can’t be done overnight, but this is something the government has thrown billions at telecom companies in various way for them to do starting decades ago. We should just about be at the point by now where everyone who wants fiber has it if the telecoms had done what they were supposed to do.

It’s not the first time we’ve had this kind of infrastructure rollout either. In the mid 30s, 9/10 rural areas had no electrical service, by 1953 that had flipped and more than 90% of rural areas were electrified, so about 20 years give or take to build out electrical infrastructure almost from scratch.

Now yes, there’s more people, more homes, etc filling up all of that empty space, but like I said, a lot of the necessary infrastructure is already in place, and we’ve come a long way technologically since the 50s, I’m sure the linemen and laborers setting up the grid almost 100 years ago would’ve killed to have a modern bucket truck and digger derrick at their disposal.

There’s a whole lot of issues you can use the “the us is a big country” for, but it doesn’t hold water on this one for me.

I think that’s kind of the point they’re making

There’s no good reason why they can’t run fiber to your home if you already have power lines and such going to your house. The utility poles, roads, and all the other infrastructure is there already, they mostly just need to send some guys in cherry pickers out to actually go run the fiber and hook it up to your home, and odds are they even already have guys out in the area servicing the old phone and/or cable lines that are probably also running to your house. They just don’t want to spend the money (that the government gave them years ago to do specifically that)

The only good reason not to have at least the option of running fiber to your house is if you’re otherwise off the grid.

Yes, it’s not all black and white, but the MAGA agenda is a big bucket of black paint with a couple tiny drops of white mixed in. You can split hairs about how that technically makes it a very dark shade of charcoal grey, but for all practical purposes it’s fucking black.

I believe they’re owned by Diageo, which is a UK company, and I don’t think that Diageo has an American subsidiary like Suntory does, but otherwise pretty much everything I said applies.

This really is a situation where you have to do a little research and make your own value judgement on these things. I’m honestly not too sure where I land on it, I want to support Canada in this but I also want to give as little money to the US government as possible, and they’re somewhat at odds so I need to make the call which is more important for me with every item I might buy that has to cross the border.

Black market just makes it even harder to figure out where your money’s going.

Are the people smuggling liquor across the border only smuggling liquor, or are they involved in other crimes that you’re supporting from buying from them?

When is the liquor being diverted from legitimate channels into the black market? Has it already crossed the border and the tariffs been paid? Kind of defeats the purpose then, doesn’t it? Is it happening before it crosses the border and possibly fucking over the Canadians you’re trying to support?

Unless you’re traveling to Canada and buying it legitimately to smuggle back you’re probably not accomplishing what you hope to.

Or I suppose you could start moonshining.

I think this recommendation is a good segue into how important it is to think about where your money is going.

First of all, it seems obvious to buy Canadian whisky to support Canada. However we’re slapping big tariffs on them. That means that when you buy them that’s giving that tariff money to the US government, which I think we want to avoid.

Further, we’re in a very global economy. Damn-near every brand you’ve ever heard of is owned by the subsidiary of a subsidiary or some other company.

Canadian club is now owned by Suntory Global Spirits (Formerly Beam-Suntory, as in Jim Beam, they actually consider it to be a part of the Jim Beam brand portfolio) an American company, that is itself a subsidiary of Suntory, a Japanese company.

So an American company is getting a good slice of the profits from Canadian club.

And of course Suntory owns a lot of American brands (like Jim Beam since I already mentioned them) and they might well decide to take some of that Canadian Club money they take in and use it to prop up one of their Kentucky Bourbon brands which ends up funneling money towards whatever crazy right wing nut jobs there stand to profit from that.

So yes, Canadian Club is in fact made in Canada, presumably by Canadian employees, and contributing to the Canadian economy, paying Canadian taxes, etc. but a lot of it is also going to other places, and not necessarily places you want it to go, so it would be wise to weigh that into your decision-making here.

And I’m not trying to badmouth Suntory in particular, in the scheme of terrible megacorps I don’t think they’re the worst by a longshot (not that they’re necessarily at all good either) that’s just where I found a jumping off point. I enjoy a lot of their brands, and at least the handful of them that I make some effort to follow still seem to at least be paying lip service to some half decent ideas about things like DEI and sustainability, where some other companies have totally bent the knee to Krasnov.

EDIT: Out of curiosity I just spent a little time researching a few different Canadian whisky brands to see if any of the names I recognize are actually wholly Canadian-owned. It doesn’t look like it, it’s all huge multinational corporations based in other countries when you dig into them. The only thing I could personally come up with is Glen Breton, which is a Canadian single malt, not a Rye, so it fits the bill as a whisky made in Canada, but it’s a totally different style than what most people think of as a “Canadian Whisky.” I’m certain there are some smaller craft distillers that are fully owned by Canadians, but I couldn’t come up with any big brands that fit the bill. Do what you will with that information. I’m not trying to suggest that anyone should or should not buy Canadian whisky, just that if they want to be mindful about which companies and countries are getting their money, it’s a complicated web.

I think there’s a few factors at play here

Yes, depression is a big one

There’s also a lack of places to go and things to do for young people. Some parents are weird about their kids going anywhere these days, and no one really wants to bring their boyfriend/girlfriend over to hang out with their parents.

And even if you don’t have obnoxious helicopter parents, where do you go? Malls are dying, restaurants and movies are expensive, and if you go hang out in a park some Karen will call the police on you.

Neighborhoods aren’t walkable, public transit is broken, and cars are unaffordable so even if you find somewhere to go on a date, how do you get there?

And at least in heterosexual dating, we’ve also had a bit of a cultural shift that might throw things off. A lot of things that used to be accepted we now rightly understand are problematic, I think a lot of men and boys are hesitant to make the first move now because we don’t want to be seen as creeps, but at the same time I think most girls still kind of expect the guys to make the first move, and while a lot of us are a bit more enlightened and could be cool with that (my wife of 5 years made the first move, she’d probably still be waiting if she left it to me) there’s still plenty of guys with toxic fragile masculinity out there who could react poorly to a girl making the first move and I don’t blame girls for not wanting to take on that risk (for the record, I also choose the bear)

So the dynamics have shifted a bit, and I don’t think we’ve really figured out how things are supposed to work yet, and honestly things probably need to shift a whole hell of a lot more before things can normalize there and people can just feel comfortable asking other people out on dates without worrying about it being weird.

And in a similar vein, it’s also I think become a lot more normal to just have platonic friends of the opposite gender. Personally some of my best friends are women who have no desire to date or fuck.

And people are also a lot more willing to have some sort of casual sex, friends with benefits, hookup culture, etc.

So there’s probably a lot of physical and emotional needs that are now being met outside of the context of a romantic relationship when in the past that was pretty much the only way to meet them.

I’m admittedly biased being a US American, but the only time I ever see anyone refer to any part of the Americas except the US as “America” is when they’re trying to make this point. It never comes up in conversation otherwise.

I’m not saying that some people/places don’t use it that way, but those people have never made it to the same parts of the internet that I inhabit.

Careful, when the couple bottles I already have kicking around run out I might try to take you up on that offer.

Assuming you’re Canadian, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting a few different parts of your country a handful of times, and each one was of the most memorable trips of my life, so I’m always happy for an excuse to return.

Depending on where you are, it may not even be the longest drive I’ve taken to get some whiskey (current record is about 12 hours)

I’m not much of a JD fan in general, it’s an OK whiskey but it doesn’t do anything that plenty of other whiskeys don’t do better.

I had a personal boycott of JD going for a few years, my wife and I are both whiskey drinkers and we visited TN for the 2017 eclipse. We decided while we were there we might as well make a detour to the distillery. I’m sure with the eclipse it was probably one of the busiest tourism weeks they’ve had there, so we weren’t surprised to find a long line waiting for us. We made the most of it, it took us about 45 minutes to get to the front of the line, it snaked through a little mini museum, and it gave us some time to decide which tour we wanted to do.

But when we got to the front of the line we were informed that all of the tours we were interested in were sold out, and the only one available was the one that didn’t allow you to try any whiskey at the end.

At no point during the 45 minutes we were standing around did they make any sort of announcement or put a sign up or anything to let us know that the other tours were sold out, if they had we probably would have decided to just go on that tour, but that really pissed us off, so we left.

I decided that I wouldn’t give Jack any of my money after that, not that I was buying a whole lot of it anyway.

A year or two ago they ran an ad campaign with some drag queens. I decided that my personal boycott had gone on long enough and I could reward that little bit of token wokeness, although I have to admit that I still haven’t bought any JD since then.

And like too many other companies it looks like they’ve now rolled back their DEI initiatives, so fuck 'em, back on the boycott list they go.

Now as a whisky drinker in the US, I’m disappointed that there’s going to be tariffs affecting Canadian whisky, I’m a little torn as to whether I should support my favorite Canadian brands or avoid them since the tariffs are going to be funneling money to the trump administration.

I’m certainly going to be cutting back on my American whiskeys and many other American products in protest. I encourage my fellow whiskey drinkers to the north to do the same, you guys make some fine rye, I’ll gladly take some Alberta Premium over almost anything made in the States.

I suspect I’m going to find myself drinking a lot of Scotch, Irish, and Japanese whisk(e)ys for the next few years, but I look forward to the day when I can hopefully enjoy some Canadian rye again without Trump’s tariffs.

Tangential to this, but I’ve always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn’t in the loop

Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.

The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet

Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he’d be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he’d be out of office and we’d be about half a year into Dubya’s first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.

Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.

Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we’re getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.

We receive their reply about a year into Obama’s first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.

Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn’t even get to take part in this particular conversation.

We won’t get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn’t croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)

So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president’s hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.

Sort of a tangential example to how this kind of law works

Interstate highways (the ones that start with an I in front of the number) receive federal funding for upkeep.

As part of that, they generally can’t be toll roads, and rest stops can’t be commercialized- so no stores, restaurants, or gas stations (the idea being that the highways are supposed to be for everyone to use and rest stops shouldn’t be competing with local businesses)

There are exceptions for cases like the PA turnpike (I76) which was originally built before the interstate highway act and then later integrated into the interstate system. So they’re grandfathered in so they have tolls and commercialized rest stops because they already had them. (The tolls were also supposed to be temporary until the construction was paid off but that’s neither here nor there)

Funny thing I noticed today when I did some grocery shopping.

For most of my life I’ve always just purchased store brand large eggs. I’ve never really looked at the price, I need eggs and they’re cheap, but of course I took notice today that my usual eggs are now something like $5.49/dozen.

Then I look next to them to the fancier organic cage-free eggs and they’re 4.99/dozen.

Almost like if you don’t keep thousands of chickens crammed together in cages they’re less likely to pass bird flu around.

There’s no reason to arrest him, he didn’t break any laws.

However, the NFL isn’t the government, they’re a private organization, they can tell someone that they’re banned from their properties and events just about as easily as you can tell someone that they’re not welcome at your back yard BBQ (as long as they’re not banning them because they belong to a protected class)

They’re probably well within their rights here to ban them just because they don’t like what he did.

However, I can almost guarantee you that with an organization as lawyered-up as the NFL he signed some sort of contact to be a part of the performance where he agreed to some policy or code of conduct or something that says in some way that performers aren’t permitted to go off-script like that, and not only can they decide to ban him for that but they may be able to sue him for breach of contract or something.

Not quite, it’s an international sign that a vessel is in distress.

Then mostly right wing lunatics co-opted it to mean that our country is in distress.