Switched over to Brave and have had perhaps a day or two of failed ad blocking on YT. Otherwise it’s been a rock solid experience and the built in Tor is nice when I need to quickly test geo rules.

The analogy was “don’t tell your kid not to stick crayons in their nose” - otherwise, well, they most certainly will latch on to the topic and do so.

In any case organics seem to be both less brined (aka not paying for salt water) and well prepared, everytime.

I believe I spent $1200 on my last set only to lose two of them in the first six months due to road debris. Perhaps this is down stream of living in a boom state with constant construction but I’m nearly replacing cracked windshields and at least partial tires annually as of late.

I spent years in a metro water system and this class of corruption is rampant. You get 90k maximum salary, but your last 5 years dictate your retirement… so guess what you find yourself with maximum overtime.

We tried to fire an employee for cause… who hired counsel, so we caved immediately because of optics. So we gave them a do nothing barely-show-up job for the last 7 years.

I personally went on a death march for 12+ hour days for 6 months, 7 days a week, off the clock and without compensation, only to be screwed out of my “accrued” PTO. The VP, two years from retirement, suffered not a bit of repercussion for this violation.

The public sector is rife with corruption, no question, but if you worship it as your God, you’ll have to look past this sacrilege to find the truth.

While the rest of the tunnels aren’t quite as interesting or accessible, Stumphouse is part of a series of tunnels, some collapsed, some underwater, and one caged off for a bat colony susceptible to “White Nose Disease.” One can hike the Blue Ridge Mountain Railroad trail in Stumphouse park to see the remnants.

There is still good meat-on-the-bone in the book, and especially interesting if you’re working in a legacy system from that older time and place.

Unfortunately, the last 10-15 years has truly shifted what was once a low or middle tier CoL area into a higher tier. The Carolina Lowcountry went from hidden gem to a playground for the rich, or as a friend once put it “Antebellum Disneyland.”

I’ve used the example in other areas - my first team lead bought his house at 300k and sold it for over 1M last year. You just can’t compete anymore, I get similar stories from my Nashville and Texas colleagues.

The only winning move is to not play.

It’s not a “personal story” - the finances of living are a bitch and my math isn’t magically different, I’m not keeping up with any Jones’.

I have a lesser standard of living than my (single) mother buying a home in the 1980s here in the 2020s.

Offer a real rebuttal or kindly piss off, this isn’t Reddit.

Somehow my grandfather did this as a painter.

Inflation is a killer.