Was thinking of getting one just to do that a few weeks ago.

Learn to test for things like lead and other contaminants that one can test for at home, as another method.

Not particularly great for the cat, either.

Corollary: Indiana has no mountains. (Snowstorms in the midwest can trap you in the middle of BFE fairly easily on flat ground, however, with the wet sticky snow they tend to have.)

Local communications being reduced to social media posts is the sign to just dissolve the community, it’s over.

Did you know that your newspaper is owned by an Alabama retirement fund?

They own CNHI, which owns that paper.

Literally not how it works at all. The body knows the amount of nicotine it wants and the smoker will smoke until that “need” is fulfilled. Weaning off nicotine is easiest in tiny amounts over time, or a few weeks of cold turkey hell.

The US has been gutting vaping as an alternative too, which forced more back on analogs. The US doesn’t want to stop smokers from smoking anyway. Lots of tax revenue.

Best thing too, the “quit” stuff like lozenges, patches, and gum, are often higher nicotine levels than a smoker is used to. The “low” dose products are for pack-a-day smokers and the “high” dose products are for 2-pack-a-day smokers. So smoker tries to quit, can’t, and ends up smoking more cigs when they return.

It’s a vicious cycle, and it seems also a natural method to combat ADHD, so it’s completely possible some people get on cigarettes, suddenly their brain is functioning correctly, and they’re addicted for life twice over.

Feel free to use your favorite internet search engine for further info. That’s what they are there for. (The last bit with ADHD is new-ish? So not sure what data is available there.)

There’s a reason it was Ünderland in Venture Bros.

Let’s work the problem.

In the race to the bottom, we’re taking the charge! USA! USA!

So thank you Luigi. Somewhere out there in the world right now is someone getting their care approved, whereas without you, it would have been denied.

Literally saving lives by killing a mass murderer.

And public utilities commissions just exist so people can think they have a voice while their meetings are just a big circlejerk.

Municipal power is so the way to go, much like everything else, especially because home town service will be run by home town people that care. You think PG&E or Verizon or Comcast cares about your town? Nope.

Yet it is so surprisingly easy to not use any of them.

People thought underground coal fires burned forever.

There is no high speed, it’s not a hyperloop, it’s just some Teslas bumbling through tunnels, sometimes successfully.

Positive spin, ish:

He had to, he waited until the last minute hoping our government would function. Every other tech company already jumped the orange bone weeks ago.

Every tech company is paying the Mafia Don (lovingly called Orange Big Mac) their protection money as the uneducated MAGAts are terrified of technology and will be gunning to gut them.

That he waited until the last minute shows it was not a decision he contemplated lightly.

I’ve not been fond of how he’s run the fruit company since SJ passed, but, his behavior has been nothing if not predictable and thematic. I know in that position I’d be worried about me and mine, while also contemplating how that will ripple down to millions of humans being tracked and controlled by my technology.

A tale as old as America. Some 1963 history for y’all:

The Fugitive s1e7

Kimble and a group of farm workers are surrounded in the hills by a huge fire and he must reveal that he’s a doctor in order to save the life of a pregnant, illegal immigrant.

More plot details from that page:

Dr. Kimble, harvesting onions at an onion field, faces hostility from the other farm workers. A number of them are Mexican laborers who are suspicious about his presence - after all, he doesn’t look like one of them. The workers are recruited to help fight a forest fire. When a pregnant woman starts to feel labor pains, the nurse discovers she can’t have a natural delivery. They need an obstetrician to perform a cesarean section. But with fire all around them, and the roads blocked, it’s impossible to get to a hospital in time.

Edit: It’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

2020 proved it out for many US jobs these days. Nobody doing a desk job goes into the office anymore. Remaining road traffic is people that have physical jobs. Desk people are plugging up the road, because their employers would rather see a body in an expensive office chair than the effective reality they already had proved out by force.

But yeah, also public transport would sure be nice.

Right now, people are being told to imagine a world without certain groups of people

You hit the nail on the head right there. It always boils down to focusing large groups of people against something, and for something, and often that something is people.

We need to fix the core concept of being against people. I actually like the concept of H1-B for example, it gives people in worse economic standing a leg-up.

However, setting up a system to game domestic work against foreign work, with the main focus being allowing the corpos to lie, and not pay fair wages, in exchange for slave labor isn’t a system.

How about MANS.

Make America Not Suck.

Their whole shtick would jive with a thing called MANS too.