This is going to have an asterisk because I’m in a fairly remote area on vacation. Like, in the Upper Peninsula, not a lot of grocery competition.

But we went to get some food for the week at this grocery store today, and I was staggered by the prices, many of which were crazy out of step with what I’d pay in my home state at a random Walmart or similar chain. The smallest Lucky Charms was over $6; the largest was on sale for $4 and change but only if you had the store loyalty card. If you use the store loyalty card it doesn’t auto-discount anything, you have to use the credit card reader to scroll the available coupons and try to pick the ones relevant to your cart.

Normal sized Starbucks whole bean bag was $17. Extra big one was like $27. Of course I bought neither.

Twizzlers in the big bag was two for $8. Fuck off lol.

They extrude corn syrup and artificial flavoring for pennies and will do anything to increase or maintain profit margins as people can less and less afford luxuries like sweet treats with 0 nutritional value. They’re going to price us all into diets with their inflexibility and greed.

But I did :'(

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Dayton represent.

We have so much debt but also all the police forces have become hyper militarized and laden with the left-over military hardware of the last 30 years of American warfare.

The world seems to be led by idiots at every level. Top to bottom. That’s not an observation just to bitch; it’s meant to let you know that you can aim higher. If your boss is a fucking idiot, if the head of your organization is a fucking idiot, then that should show you how far someone with a brain in their head must be able to go, too. Don’t feel defeated and relegated to nothing roles. Be inspired by how apparently easy it is for fucking idiots to do seemingly important or well-paying jobs, and then start thinking about whether you can show them up.

Also, you never realize how important project management is until you work in an environment where no one gives two shits about it. It turns out that writing things down, planning, documenting, agendas, follow-up, attending meetings you said you would attend, being able to back up the things you say, are all very fucking important. It turns out that being an incompetent piece of shit and con artist can get you very, very far, but gradually, people start to realize they’ve been had; one only hopes that the department or organization are still in one piece by the time and that they have the authority to get rid of you.

They can force upgrade themselves in the ass.

The only thing I’m looking forward to more than the collapse of the AI bubble is Microsoft, specifically, eating shit at the hands of a public that doesn’t want, need, or give two shits about them anymore. Just like Intel or whatever your favorite example is, see some fucking titan that thought they were some great titan, only to turn out to be Ozymandias when the whole fucking world looks up at them and shrugs. Like the end of the Truman show when this massive, all-consuming industry of a production comes crashing down in an evening, and the television viewers at home happily shrug and say, “what else is on?”

The word about Linux is out, and, as Snazzy Labs recently pointed out, Macs have accidentally become the best value in new computers. There are excellent non-Windows options for ordinary people who just do everything through a web browser and an office suite, for not much money all over the fucking place, and the day their greed catches up to them and they start to lose real market share is so close I can taste it.

Yeah. It’s a great looking car and all the upgrades sound great. I don’t think I could go for that model though due to the lack of CarPlay. I don’t think companies replacing existing value with enshitified subscriptions should be rewarded for those decisions. Then again I could never afford a new one anyway, haha.

Chevy Bolt EUV (sorta kinda bigger than a normal Bolt) Premier without self driving: very good.

Cheap feeling like any American car. Infotainment is trash; you can’t skip tracks on CarPlay using the steering wheel controls most of the time because it’s always indexing. A problem no other OEM or even the cheapest of aftermarket radios I’ve ever touched has had. Remote climate control (essentially what we always mean when we say remote start) is locked behind a $50/mo OnStar subscription. Spies on you to sell data.

But, it costs like $30-40 a month to drive, it’s zippy enough, I’ve got front and rear seat warmers, it’s a hatch, and most importantly, it was a steal. We got it like four days before the tax credits were eliminated. Before that I’d have said EVs were the only deals to be had in the automotive space. Now there simply are no deals. My $18k Bolt Premier was the last chopper out of 'Nam for getting anything resembling a decent deal of a car.

We like it. Charging at home is nice. We hope it doesn’t break. Hybrid is a smarter buy because of the added flexibility afforded by gas but again, you weren’t getting any 2022 fully* loaded hybrid with 60k miles for $18k. Since this isn’t our only vehicle this was the easy choice.

Came during the initial revolt. Increased attention after getting banned from Reddit because I joked I’d like a guy with a bunch of guns to give me one cause he had too many. They tried to say I was soliciting for the purchase of firearms, and when I said there was no way any serious person could have thought I was asking to buy a gun, they told me the lifetime ban was in place and if I ever came around again they’d ban me for ban evasion.

Lul. That place is a total fucking hellscape.