Dumb math slip on my part! Edited

In fairness, the population of Uruguay is about 1/100 as big as the USA, all else being equal there should be 1/100 as many families as well.

There’s a bunch of different systems that vary how close they are to standard print

Pretty clever move NGL

The HRV and CRV get 12-17% worse mileage on the highway and

The Sound and the Fury is a Faulkner novel? It’s been too long though and IDK if it quotes Macbeth past the title.

You don’t need (and can’t afford) a suitcase full of gold unless you’re obscenely wealthy and can probably just charter a plane anyway. There are hundreds of accounts of e.g. Jews fleeing Nazi persecution (and Nazis fleeing the allies post-war) carrying wealth for bribes or starting over or what-have-you in the form of gold jewelry worn on the person or gold coins.

I think the “don’t hold it don’t own it” advice does make sense for a small amount of portable gold if you’re considering a scenario like a fascist government taking over and needing to flee the country with any wealth you can, predicated on the assumption that other countries are still relatively stable.

There are also a lot of silly people who hoard pounds of gold for apocalyptic currency which you’ve pegged.

In fairness, if the US dollar collapses, say, but the euro is fine and you find a way to get to Europe, you’re much better off with a few chunks of gold that will be worth relatively what you bought them for than with wheelbarrows full of hundred dollar bills which are now worth less than paper.

Supernote is an eNotebook and is writing focused rather than book focused, but it uses a stripped down fork of android and you can easily side load other android apps onto it including e.g. F-droid. You can use it without an account and with no network connectivity (loading content via USB), or your choice of cloud providers, including recently self-hosted storage.

I mostly read library books so unfortunately I have to go through Kindle, but you can use the Kindle app on the device and it works pretty well. Not as many features as a dedicated device, but the basics work great.

Major caveat: it’s not backlit so you need a book light/lamp/headlamp, which is a big pain.

Had a volt, I don’t even think they were selling them 3 years ago. I had a 2011 or 2012, one of the original models before the update, from from 2019-2022 or thereabouts. Had to replace the radiator, 12 volt battery, reset the traction battery, and replace the coolant system hoses. Again, huge PITA but got more than double the MPG of the 2001 sedan it replaced and held its value decently.

All cars period are bad investments. That’s being said, I had a volt for about 3 years and I saved more in gas than I lost to depreciation and expensive maintenance. I bought it before there was an EV that could do my daily commute that wasn’t horrendously expensive; they were a good transition vehicle 10 years ago before batteries and charging speeds improved, though they’re definitely a huge PITA to maintain.

I don’t doubt that there’s going to be a big effort to discredit Mamdani, but why would Trump care if he looks clean? He’s never cared before about that kind of thing.

“I need a laptop because I work on the go a lot”

“Just get a carrying case for your desktop so it’s easy to haul”

A big unsecured bump sticking out of the bottom of your phone during normal daily use is a great way to ruin your port. Plus then you can’t charge while using your media.

I doubt it, but they’re also not worse than any equivalent year gas car I’ve heard of

Most demographic information in the US (all?) is self-reported, and unless you were in the American southwest, Hispanic community prevalence and cultural influence in the broader US is pretty recent, so I suspect that not many U.S.-derived Native Americans are mislabeling themselves as Hispanic.

Traditionally it actually went the other way: Native Americans, while second class citizens in a lot of respects, were more respected than black people or dark-skinned immigrants. So, for instance, there were tons and tons of light-skinned black folk passing as Native and marrying into white families in New England especially. It was a big topic in genetics when things like Ancestry DNA reports became more common and lots of people who’s great great great grandfather was Cherokee or whatever found out he was actually an escaped slave who passed as Native.

That being said, most Latin American Hispanics are of at least partially indigenous descent, so in a broader sense most Hispanics in the US are indeed indigenous, they’re just descended from Nahuatl/Mayan/Quechua/Mapuche or some other indigenous ethnic group, rather than one of the groups that is today considered ‘Native American’ in the US.

At this point who cares, it’s a distraction, “what about the emails!” Even if it’s true, she’s not the sitting president and they were both adults.

Depends what the grade structure is like, in my one college CS class homework could probably have been GPT’d (didn’t exist yet) but tests were 75% of your grade and were handwritten in a proctored hall. Mostly they involved pseudocode and showing knowledge of data structures and algorithms rather than specific coding requirements. That couldn’t be GPT’d, at least not with competent proctors and a time limit, so you couldn’t pass without some competence even if the specific coding syntax went over your head.

David Sedaris in a commencement speech gave some advice that has really stuck with me and is quite apt, I think. To paraphrase, “you can’t win everything, so pick one or two issues to be passionately angry about and try to change and focus on those, or you won’t get anything done.”

Found the quote, Oberlin 2018 commencement: “Choose one thing to be terribly, terribly offended by, and be offended by this as opposed to the dozens or possibly hundreds that many of you are currently juggling… Stand up for what you believe in, as long as I believe in the same thing. Those of you who’d like to ban assault rifles, I am behind you 100 percent. Take the front lines, give it your all, and don’t back down until you win. Do not, however, petition to have a Balthus painting removed from the Met because you can see the subject’s underpants. The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.”

Donald Trump spelled forward is also a synonym for asshole!