UPS and American companies in general

But this is USPS, which isn’t an American company, it’s a US independent agency.

Their mandate isn’t (AFAIK…) to make a profit, but rather to serve the mail requirements of a very large country.

Personally, my experiences with USPS have been generally positive, from passports for infants to free change-of-address forwarding service to tracking down quasi-scam products from Amazon. YMMV though.

In English, it’s usually used in a context where there’s some humor, frustration, or irony involved, like in the comic.

Not on Netflix in my region :(

Add to that photo editing (as much as GIMP is great…). I would guess DAW and video editing would fall under that category, too…and good luck finding many AAA open source games.

I’m holding out for Aperture Science, if for no other reason than that their AI has a dry, dark sense of humor.

Same, an R4 with an i5 4670k I built in grad school. It’s my ham radio computer now, as happy running Debian as the day I built it.

My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…

Perhaps microwaving for significantly longer, at a low power level, would be safer and result in higher success/yield?

I think it has a lot to do with disposition and convenience. I’m lazy, and I don’t like to drive if I can help it. But I live near enough to public transportation that we’ll spontaneously decide to hop on the subway and grab dinner on the waterfront.

It’s not the money that’s preventing us from hopping in the car to go to some new beach for dinner, it’s the convenience.

I mean…it depends on the job? I go on walks during working hours all the time to clear my head and think about a problem I’m working on. I don’t try to hide this from my manager.

I think an issue here is that taxonomic and colloquial definitions don’t always agree.

Spiders are colloquially bugs, but they’re not taxonomically “true bugs” (which is itself a colloquialism for Hemiptera). Tomatos are colloquially vegetables but taxonomically fruits…but afaik vegetable is a purely colloquial term anyway.

And as someone else in the thread mentioned, colloquial berries are not always taxonomic berries.

So…colloquially, “plants” sorta means, “macroscopic multicellular living non-animal thing,” but taxonomically it’s something else.

If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.

Isn’t this extremely genre dependent? And regardless, this has been going on for a long time.

The Supremes? Good looking gals (and great music IMHO).

Grateful Dead? Sure, rough around the edges.

The Doors? Um…ever seen a picture of Jim Morrison? Dude would make Derek Zoolander blush.

Out of curiosity, I asked Spotify for modern metal music, and I got The Black Dahlia Murder — frontman looks like a regular dude who I’d grab a beer with.

Yeah, modern pop places a ton of emphasis on looks, sure. But I think this has been pretty prominent in music for a very long time, be it the airbrushed R&B of the sixties, the androgynous glam of the eighties, or the metro sexual (guy)/model-esque looks of modern pop.

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

I’m guessing it wouldn’t work for a variety of reasons, but having cameras digitally sign the image+the metadata could be interesting.

Or go full CW, and just transmit source code in binary as dits and dahs. (So long as you document what you’re doing it should be legal, though I’m not sure if you should use the CE portion of he band since it’s nonstandard…)

I picked up an old HP LaserJet (with the Ethernet option) for free during grad school. It was a great printer — good CUPS/Linux support, reliable, cheap 3rd party toner.

It’s sad how the mighty have fallen. Would never recommend one for someone today.

CrowdStrike incident happened too soon. Could have made serious money…

Not something I have experience with, but have you looked at city/government jobs? You won’t get rich, but afaik a lot of them have stability and pensions — work there long enough and retirement at a reasonable age may even be possible (assuming things don’t go to shit).

USPS comes to mind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_(title)

As a noun yeah it’s more common in the western world to refer to medical doctors. But its origin is that of teachers, not medical practitioners.