It’s also great excuse to drink while wallowing in dread. I have a bottle of gin set aside for the occasion.

It’s been a long time for me. My peak PC gaming days were spent playing Warcraft II head-to-head with a friend over a modem. That was on a Macintosh Performa 550. I also had a ton of fun playing Myst and Flashback. I stuck to consoles after that.

Now the only gaming in my house is my kids playing Minecraft on a Dell OptiPlex 5040 that I saved from the dumpster at work because I’m a cheapskate. No dedicated GPU, 8GB RAM, but it gets the job done.

something as simple as a variety of colors took hundreds of years of technological advancement

If anyone is looking for a rabbit hole to go down, the history of pigments is a great one.

Winter weather on the northeast US coast is a battle between cold, dry air blowing in from the northwest, and (relatively) warm, humid air from the Gulf Stream coming up from the Caribbean. The weather is determined by which of those two forces is “winning” at a given moment, and it can swing abruptly when the balance shifts.

Expect cold, windy, rainy weather. But don’t be surprised to get snow and ice if those Canadians send a strong cold front.

The comment comparing New York to Scotland is a good one. Dress like you are going to Aberdeen and you should be just fine in New York.

Being banned from a remote instance, and/or having your content removed from a remote instance, is a total non-issue for your local instance’s admins. It requires no effort on their part, and causes no problems.

In my mind you have every right to request that your personal content be removed. It isn’t always practical due to federation bugs and the nature of distributed services, but any decent admin should make a good faith attempt to fulfill your request.

In some places that is a strategy to satisfy zoning requirements. The builder has to provide a minimum amount of outdoor area per dwelling unit. They could create a large ground-level courtyard, or they can create a bunch of tiny balconies that sum up to the same total area. The ladder latter strategy allows a larger building to exist on the same lot.

Edit: Stupid voice-to-text always gets me.

Good call. I was going to suggest this or Mt. Washington in New Hampshire.

Something is terribly wrong!

I assume part of it is to keep things competitive. Like how Formula 1 limits the tech that cars are allowed to use. If the richest team with the best equipment always wins, that really takes the fun out of it.

Too much technology also can spoil the fun by being a distraction from the rest of the game. A few years ago there was a game where Jared Goff was receiving play calls through his helmet radio but his radio wasn’t working properly. He would just stand on the field looking stupid and helpless for 20-30 seconds before every play, trying to listen to instructions. It looked bad and was a lame experience for the fans.

Schmutz.

It’s Yiddish (?) and is a general term for unspecified dirt or filth. The fun part: once you have identified the filth, it is no longer schmutz.

My spouse and I picked it up from the Says You radio show years ago, and have used it ever since.

This is basically how the city of Richland, Washington came into its present form. During the Manhattan Project the federal government took over the town and some adjacent villages, evicting about 300 people, and built it into a bedroom community that eventually housed about 25,000 people for the nearby Hanford site.

Your first point is technically correct, but 24-hour days and 7-day weeks are a de facto global standard at this point in history. There are outliers, like the Javanese 5-day week or the experimental 5-day Soviet calendar, but they are few and far between.

a physical button on the floor under the gas pedal

I had an E30 BMW with one of those. Push the button and the automatic transmission would immediately downshift, and the engine would spin up in a hurry. Spaz mode was fun.

New Zealand doesn’t exist!

Power and fuel economy are not the only two variables. Emissions are the biggest thing that comes to mind: your new high-performance remap might put your car outside of the emissions limits for your market.

Some aggressive remaps can also adversely affect how the car drives in normal use. Think rough idle, or jerky acceleration. The vast majority of drivers do not want that.

Assuming I’m still in good health, I want to go on some long bicycle tours. Like weeks or months long. Maybe start with the GAP/C&O Canal as a warm-up. Then La Route Verte. After hitting a few other sections of the US and Canada I would move across the pond to the UK, Ireland, and western Europe.

If I can find a riding partner who is open to dirt then I would really love to do the GDMBR. There are lots of shorter trails that would be fun warm-up trips, too. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet anyone IRL who is crazy enough to do multi-day off-road trips with me.

In theory a pension is stable, guaranteed income. The employer promises a monthly or annual payment for life, and they manage a pool of money to make sure you get that payment regardless of whether the market goes up or down. People like stability.

With a 401k you take on the market risk yourself. If the market tanks (2000 and 2008 come to mind) then your retirement funds are suddenly worth less and your payments to yourself (distributions) go down. Of course, if the market is hot you can also direct your investments to try and ride the wave. Greater risk means greater (potential) reward.

401k’s also have required minimum distributions that kick in as you get older. If you live long enough you will reach a point where you have been forced to drain the whole thing into your regular bank account. Then it’s time for another plan.

Your last paragraph is a good one. I fell in love with Sweden when I was there. Then I talked to some teenagers and they said they really wanted to live in America. It caught me off guard. I didn’t understand why they would want to leave a place that seemed so safe, secure, and comfortable. They said they wanted more flexibility and opportunity. Sure, they could get a stable living-wage job and keep it for their whole career, but in America they thought they would have more chances to try new things and reinvent themselves.

Whether our perceptions of each other’s countries are correct or not, for all of us the grass certainly looked greener on the other side of the fence.

I wondered if the Turbo button on the computer really did anything.