Idk about you, but at this rate, I don’t dare try to tell them otherwise.

I appreciate the nuance and detail of your comment. I wanted to make sure I started with that so you don’t think I’m just here to shit on your comment. I’m upset that we’re here and slapping bandaids on this shit instead of actually thinking about solutions.

Congress can’t pass a budget, but they can raise their own pay. They haven’t passed any meaningful legislation in two years, but they can raise their own pay. They can’t raise our minimum wage, but they can raise their own pay. Idk about you, but I’ve never gotten a raise for pisspoor performance at any job I’ve ever held. I’ll be receiving a 3.5% raise in a couple weeks, and I’ve very much earned that, and it’s thankfully a bit higher than the ~2.8% inflation over the past year so it’s an actual raise. Not everybody has been so lucky. I’m completely on board with paying Congress well so that it’s not gated off for only the wealthy elite to have access to, but let’s not pretend that passing a raise for themselves right now is eradicating all semblance of corruption once and for all.

Why does Congress actually need to be in DC anymore anyway? Why not have an office in their district and securely remote vote? Having them in DC maintaining two residences is costing them more, keeping them physically distanced from their actual constituents, and making corporate lobbying significantly easier since they can easily talk face to face with dozens of reps/senators in a single afternoon. We could also raise the cap on the House since it’s been undersized for proper representation for decades; no need to cap it to a number that can regularly gather in the chambers anymore. I’d rather they just stay in their district and lock their pay to their local inflation rate. If they want better raises, then they need to actually help their district.

I for one believe that the question of whether a food service establishment has rats is very relevant to the business.

The character of the staff and clientele as well as the financial state of the staff as a direct result of how stingy their employer is can also be very relevant. Do you want to eat somewhere if the people preparing your food there will sell their morals and decency? Kinda seems likely that I could pay somebody there $100 to put their pubes into your quarter pounder.

I don’t think they want the identity of the rat getting out. I’m willing to bet that there are plenty of people who really want to publicly remind everybody that snitches get stitches. Word on the street is that this rat can suddenly afford a $60k hospital bill, unlike UHC customers whose claims get denied every day.

Now we know the answer to “why is Gamora?”

Oh no.

Anyway…

Dope! I appreciate you taking the time! So it sounds like a slightly less bloated version of 10 that gets more support, but it may not be exactly legal and breezy to obtain for my personal home use.

With the possible exception of finding drivers for a device or two, it sounds like I’ll be better off just pivoting to a Linux distro mid 2025. I have been happy with SteamOS on my docked steam deck with m+kb and controller, so I’m sure I won’t be missing much by picking a popular distro that I can find troubleshooting guidance for when I hit inevitable snags.

Not hating, happy to be educated! I’m not prideful enough to be upset by you taking the time :)

A few questions since you seem to know much more about this than I can probably even find from searching:

• What is “IoT”? What is “LTSC”?
• Other than update support, how is this different from my existing home laptop’s Windows 10?
• Is this free? Will there be obnoxious limitations or reminders to pay to activate?
• Why should I as a medium skill home computer user without work needs opt for this over Mint, Ubuntu, Nobara, Arch, or whatever other distro somebody would insist I use? I don’t need Office.

Edit: most of the following comment regarding suppressors was apparently super wrong. Leaving my ignorance up so the resulting corrections in the reply make sense. Just don’t stop reading after my bullshit comment lol.

In a normal, unsuppressed semiautomatic pistol gunshot, you pull the trigger, a precise little pin strikes the back-center of a bullet, this causes the gunpowder in the back of the bullet to spark and ignite and explode. The projectile portion of the bullet rides the wave of the explosion at supersonic speed down the barrel of the gun, which determines the direction of the path. There is an initial increase of backpressure of gas between the projectile and the back of the barrel, but semiautomatic weapons make use of this to push back the slide, expelling the spent casing and that gas and allowing the spring in the magazine to push the next round into place for the next shot, also significantly reducing recoil in the process.

Suppressors (or “silencers”) work by slowing the bullet down and altering the propulsion gas path. Subsonic speeds means no sonic boom. The downside is that you must manually cycle each round yourself, and you will likely experience more recoil per shot.

Afaik, suppressors are pretty damn hard to legally obtain, so my knowledge of them is a combination of my firsthand accounts with my unsuppressed guns, secondhand accounts of suppressors, a moderate understanding of physics, and some guesswork. I could be wrong about some of this, but this is my general understanding that I carry around with me.

Just choosing to phrase it with an air of plausible deniability paired with a pun related to the industry.

So deny their preventable death?