I have a friend who used to work for a big time tech company with lots of defense department contacts, one of the sorts of companies where if he talked about his company helping the government read peoples emails and track you online and such, you couldn’t really be sure if he was joking or not.

He no longer works for that company, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t joking by the way.

I’ve been fortunate to know a lot of really smart people in my life, and I like to think I’m not an idiot myself, but this guy is hands down the smartest person I’ve ever met and it’s not even close, he is scary smart.

And he made insanely good money while he worked for them, and the kind of shit they did on the company (and by extension, the taxpayers’ dime,) was insane, they were regularly flying out to Vegas and putting it all on the company credit card.

So yeah for a talented person, there is really damn good money to be made if you can get security clearance.

Depends a bit on what you’re doing with them

For hard-wearing work pants, I think Duluth firehouse pants are pretty hard to beat

Dickies or Carhartt are solid, more-readily-available options

If you’re looking more for lightweight hiking pants, I used to have a pair of north face zip-off pants I really liked, but I’m not sure if they still make the same or similar model, but I’d take a look at their offerings. They were a bit pricey but not outrageous.

Barring that, a lot of my outdoors clothes tend to be Columbia.

For sort of a middle-of-the-road that can kind of fill either role, I’d probably go for BDUs. No specific brand recommendation, there’s a lot of companies making them, and while I haven’t tried them all, the ones I have have been pretty much the same. Just kind of get whatever you can get a good deal on online or whatever your local military surplus place stocks.

V for Vendetta

Things got changed a bit for the movie if you’re only familiar with that

The man is Adam Susan (renamed Adam Sutler in the movie, played by John Hurt) the leader of the ruling Norsefire party, he falls in love with the “Fate” supercomputer that runs the government surveillance system

I think “millionaires” is probably a bit too broad depending on exactly how you define it. A million dollars doesn’t go nearly as far as it used to.

Most insanely wealthy people don’t necessarily have millions or billions of dollars sitting around in cash or in their bank accounts, that worth includes things like investments and real estate.

So going by that most people who own a house are probably around halfway to being a millionaire just due to that, add in a retirement account and some savings and odds are theres probably a lot more “millionaires” walking around than you’d think.

I have a relative who retired a few years ago, he worked as a bricklayer his entire life, and don’t get me wrong, that’s a solid job, and he was very good at it, so he made good money, but he wasn’t his own boss, or anyone else’s for that matter, wasn’t actively playing the stock market or anything, just a guy who worked his whole life, lived within his means, saved money, put it into safe retirement accounts and such, etc.

He retired with about 1.5 million. I’m not totally clear if that includes the value of his house or not, if it does that would still put him at around 1 million in savings and investrents, and if it doesn’t you can bump him up to around 2 if we measure him like we do the really wealthy people.

And there’s a good chance that medical bills and such will eat up a good amount of that from him in the coming years…

Mines a 16 cup model, so that could be the difference.

I don’t think mine has ever moved at all when I’m using it, and I’ve done just about everything you could ever want to do with a food processor.

The only time I’ve seen it struggle with anything was when I had it almost full of ground beef to make homemade hot dogs. It got it done, but it wasn’t happy about it, and I’m pretty sure that emulsifying that sort of quantity of meat would be a struggle for any machine that could reasonably fit on a countertop.

I honestly can’t say I’ve experienced that.

It might be that newer or different models are lighter, like I said, mine is over 10 years old.

Or it could be down to something goofy like your countertops being smoother than mine (not unlikely, I have some shitty laminate counters that are pretty beat to hell)

Yeah, ours works great as a dehydrator, I just wish it came with more dehydrator racks. You can order more I’ve just never gotten around to doing it

We do also have a breville toaster oven/air fryer (slightly different model though) and do love it. Probably use it more and get better results from it than our regular oven.

It is not, however, the greatest air fryer out there. It’s certainly passably but we definitely get better results from the crispi, and the Ninja is much easier to clean.

I whole-heartedly recommend their toaster ovens without reservation. And if you lack the storage/counter space for a dedicated air fryer o it will certainly do.

My one wish is that they’d make a toaster oven with a rotisserie.

My wife worked at a fancy kitchen store for a long time. She tested out a whole lot of small appliances, demo’d them for customers, saw what people returned and exchanged, etc. and generally knows what’s what.

And her general advice is to go breville for basically every small kitchen appliances. I can really only think of 4 exceptions- KitchenAid for stand mixers, Vitamix for blenders, croquade for waffle makers, and the Ninja Crispi for countertop air fryers.

I’ve really put our breville sous chef through it’s pages over the years, Shen had it since before we started dating to easily more than 10 years, and it’s still going strong.

I’ve had frog, it’s practically the original “tastes like chicken” food. They have maybe the slightest bit of fishiness to them, but nothing a little bit of seasoning won’t almost totally cover up.

Similarly gator is also almost a dead-ringer for chicken, just chewier (not surprising, I’m pretty sure just need to look at a gator to be able to tell it was gonna be tough and chewy)

So I’m thinking odds are that dino tastes like chicken.

This feels like a wonderful gift, this video needs to be projected behind every speaker at the next round of protests, with an accompanying message flashing at the bottom saying “Trump posted this himself” à la South Park’s “this what scientologists actually believe”

It’s him literally labeling himself as a king, complete with a crown

Shitting all over America.

What possible angle could you look at this from and say "yes, that is a mature, mentally stable person who should be in charge of anything?

And since most of the media is kind of dropping the ball on this, we need to be sharing this around as something like “Trump posts AI-slop video of himself as a king shitting on America” instead of the bullshit headlines I’m seeing about it.

Growing up, my uncle ended up with 2 freakishly large rottweilers. The first one he had was I believe up around 150lbs, the second one I believe was pushing 200, and it seemed like every ounce of it was bone and muscle. If a brick wall could be a dog, it would have been those two. In fact, when the second one was a puppy, his favorite thing to teeth on was my uncle’s brick fireplace, so that one at least might have actually been part brick.

They were very well-trained and even gentle dogs, but absolutely intimidating to look at. The only time I can ever say one of them “hurt” anyone was when my sister was little, one day she was wearing overalls, and was having trouble getting them buttoned after coming out of the bathroom. She went over to my mom to telp, and as little kids tend to she was fussing about it as my mom helped pull the overalls up.

This dog absolutely adored my sister (who I might add, stands less than 5ft tall as an adult, this dog absolutely dwarfed her, but hung onto her every word, I’m sure if she told him to do a cartwheel the dog would have figured it out) and was afraid my mom was hurting her.

But of course he didn’t want to hurt my mom either.

So he zeroed in on the problem- the overalls, and took swift and decisive action- he ran over, grabbed the pants, and took off, removing the threat from the situation.

Of course, a huge dog in full sprint pulling the pants off my sister sent her flying a bit, and she whacked her head pretty good on that brick fireplace

And dogs that size have a bit of a way of causing accidental destruction

One time my uncle was letting the second one in from the back yard just as someone happened to ring the doorbell. His house has basically a straight shot from the back door to the front, so the dog ran into the house excited to greet whoever was at the door.

Unfortunately, after picking up some speed, he tried to stop on a rug on the hardwood floor, but 200lbs of dog has a lot of inertia, so he instead went sliding on the rug face-first into a wall, leaving a fist-sized dent in the drywall where his muzzle embedded in the wall, and 2 paw prints a bit below it where he put his paws on the wall to help pull his nose out.

Crates for dogs that size aren’t exactly easy to come by so while he was still young my uncle would put him in the basement while he went out.

One day my uncle came home and as he turned around the corner to go down the basement stairs, there was this dogs head poking through the wall excited to see him.

We of course don’t know exactly how that happened, but we suspect it was a similar situation- running around the basement playing with a ball or something and accidentally ran into the wall. We don’t think he was trying to bust out of the basement because, let’s face it, if he made it that far a dog that size could have pretty much just walked through the drywall like it was made of wet tissue paper.

When he was a small puppy o he like to hang out under my uncle’s coffee table. That persisted for a while as he grew bigger. Then one day, when he wasn’t yet quite full-grown, he stood up suddenly underneath the table. Unfortunately the table was made of glass and kind of exploded around him. Luckily he didn’t get cut, but he got the message that he was too big for the coffee table after that.

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It’s become a new years tradition to just play a bunch of random asylum movies just to have something on while we’re hanging out and so we have something to occasionally point to the TV and comment on.

We usually try to pick a known movie that we can start at a specific time so that something cool happens at midnight. A favorite is Hitler getting punched in the balls in Kung Fury

Shitty b movies. Anything by the asylum, anything that may have once appeared on an episode of MST3K, any weird VHS your parent brought home for you one day back in the 90s by some obscure polish director that you half-remember and now that you think about it where the hell did your parents even find that movie?

I wish sunny did well with other dogs. Unfortunately before we got her she had gotten into a fight with another dog and it kind of ruined other dogs for her.

The one dog she does kind of alright with (coincidentally another male mix) actually belongs to the friends who own this property, but unfortunately that dog hates camping, so no chance to work on their friendship this weekend.

I’m hopefully a long way off from it, but I tell my wife pretty regularly that if I ever fall and can’t get up to just leave me on the floor. Gravity will have made it’s decision, I’m to be a floor-person, no sense in trying to fight it. Let me crawl.

I work in 911 dispatch, I get calls all night, every night for lift-assists, sometimes we’re sending help out to the same place every night or even multiple times a night.

I don’t want that for myself.

I don’t think I get recognized, but I’ve had a handful of people say that they like the way I write, so maybe I have a group of dedicated followers somewhere.

Funnily enough, I just earlier messaged some random lemming that I had tagged for a while as “this guy seems cool” to let him know that. I figure everyone likes to get a little compliment like that from a stranger now and then. Just some random dude whose username kind of stood out to me and I noticed every time it popped up he seemed like a nice guy. So some of you are probably out there like him being recognized for just being a decent person.

Just gonna chime in to say check with your local libraries to see what they do have available, and also check with surrounding libraries,

My local library is a small branch of a countywide network of libraries, so I can go check things out from any library in the county.

I was a little surprised to learn that my local branch has mobile wifi hotspots available. They’re nice for families that are struggling to pay for Internet service so their kids can do schoolwork, I’m also thinking about checking one out for road trips and such.

A bigger branch has a pretty impressive library of things available- tools, cookware, board games, small appliances, AV equipment, etc.

One thing I’d really like is vehicles, although I’m sure it would be an absolute liability/insurance nightmare, not to mention the upfront and ongoing costs and such, so I totally I totally understand why it’s not a thing.

I’m lucky that I’ve always been able to borrow a car from my parents when I needed one because mine was in the shop or whatever. Not everyone is so fortunate though, and unless we step up our public transit game, a lot of people need cars to get into work and run errands and such. A small fleet of basic sedans or something that you could check out for a day or two when needed without paying out the ass for a rental would be amazing.

And almost everyone needs to move something big or transport a few people once in a while, so a pickup truck or passenger van in the fleet might be kind of nice.

Even if it’s not totally free, they could be rented out at-cost and not have to turn a profit like regular car rentals.