I’d say GOAT should be a Council of greats, like the Jedi Council but without the religious extremism and child soldiers. I’d like to nominate a couple for this council:

Wilt Chamberlain- go look up his records

Andre the Giant - his drinking records alone should put him on the Council, but reportedly he was a very nice person as well

Dolph Lundgren - he plays a meathead in Expendables movies, but he’s a legit genius, as well as a literally massive human

Steve Wozniak - he managed to build the PC despite Steve Jobs being a colossal dick

Saint Olga - she took vengeance and raised it to an art form

Chomsky is the guy that said Ukraine should just surrender to Russia, right? Truly a great example of living king enough to become the villain, and not in a Batman way.

The slave owning flying guy from Tatooine with a gambling problem?

Yes and no. Basically collapse scenarios fall into buckets. One bucket has all the scenarios with rapid collapse, e.g. nuclear war. The other is slow Collapse, e.g. climate change. The preparation for every scenario relies on broad self-sufficiency, but if you’re looking at climate change, your personal farm might need more water and a way to control soil temperatures. For nuclear war, your whole enterprise needs to be in a bunker away from major targets. Since the exact collapse scenario is unknown so far, the move if you can afford it is a hybrid approach and do both. Excess food is never a bad thing; indeed you can attract workers with a promise of wages and free food to work the farm on the surface while maintaining your non-perishable stockpile and food production in a massive bunker that you only let family members into.

Ultimately, though, you’re still fighting the problem of inevitability. Even if you and your family somehow escape dying from nuclear war, what will your kids do? There will be no doctors, no water sanitation engineers, nobody to rebuild what was. In essence, a billionaire and family might outlive the collapse, but they’ll be either stuck in their Vault or they’ll inherit an uninhabitable planet.

I’ll outright say it. Other than The Prestige and the later Batman movies, Nolan movies have been very disappointing to me. They’re not clever, they’re pretentious. If you ever saw that Netflix movie where the woman dated Keanu Reaves, the part where Keanu asks the chef for a meal the plays with the concept of time is every Christopher Nolan movie in a nutshell. Also, the action sequences in Batman Begins were unnecessarily choppy, and the idea that it was somehow how a bat would see them is just silly.

If it’s extra sweet she might be diabetic.

You know how you know when Newsom’s lying? His lips are moving. He knows Climate Change is an existential threat, but also that he’s rich, so his family won’t face the effects the way the 99% will. The closest he’ll get is his vineyard will use more water, but don’t worry, I’m sure there’s some PUC decision that will keep his water rates artificially low.

California’s current leadership doesn’t really care about climate change, because if they did, the PUC wouldn’t disincentivize rooftop solar through NEM 3.0 and would instead offer tax credits. It’s too bad the common citizens of this state aren’t valued like the profits of Newsom’s friends at PG&E.

Heck, if they really cared, electric vehicles would be progressively subsidized so more working class people could afford them. Instead, workers keep older ICE vehicles longer because they’re paid off (hopefully) and replacements are financially out of reach, even if they’re much cheaper to operate. It’s like housing. A reasonable mortgage payment is much cheaper than rent, but if you are paying rent, you likely don’t have the down payment to get an affordable monthly payment. A house down the street went into escrow the day after listing at $1.7 MM. The nearly identical house next door to them gets $4-5k a month in rent. How is anybody going to have enough money saved up to get their mortgage into a reasonable range, setting aside the $1500 a month for property taxes? The family living next door would need a down payment over $1MM to get even close to their current rent, which is already $50-60k a year! Just their rent is more than the median income for one person, so they likely wouldn’t qualify for a loan that’s exactly the same amount as their current rent even with that staggering down payment.

I have a really good sense of smell; trust me, you smell after one day and just can’t smell it yourself until day four. I’m sorry if this comes as a surprise.

Four monitors plus the laptop screen. It’s…a lot visually, but my productivity is significantly higher than when I only had two and the laptop screen.

They’re arranged in a square so clockwise from top right:

1. Work entry screen - this is where I’m typing a lot

2. Reading screen - this is the general source of what I’m working on

3. Outlook - I’m fully remote, Outlook is life

4. File folders - I work mainly with two or three folders all day so it just makes sense to have them uncovered

Laptop - Teams!

Of note, I use a ton of keyboard shortcuts and have generally optimized my workflow so I’m not hitting the mouse nearly as often as my coworkers. Having Outlook and Teams each have their own screen means I can keep them open and see what’s coming in while still working on my stuff on other screens. Final thing I’ll say about the arrangement, because you’re probably visualizing this making for a good gaming setup, no it wouldn’t because of how the screens are placed.

No matter what, get yourself a mirror. I don’t like people suddenly appearing by me, and since I’m using noise-cancelling headphones with music/podcasts 40+ hours a week, this keeps me from jumping out of my skin.

Thank goodness Pokemon are fictional; I don’t even want to imagine how much interspecies sex would occur, consensual and other.

Autistic James Bond would have a martini with fifteen directions including, but not limited to the number of ice cubes in the shaker and the length of time to shake it. Autistic James Bond, you see, would know that stirring a martini is all wrong.

Also, for some hobbies/interests, there really isn’t another space. For instance, if you’re into tactical gear, there’s really not another community like r/tacticalgear. Lemmy has the promise of being free from Reddit’s admin and moderator madness, but doesn’t have the user base and neither do any other sites.

TwoXChromosomes has the same problem, though of course it has a much wider appeal. The moderators there protested the API changes and the gradual decline of Reddit in general, but they face two bad choices, and I genuinely don’t know the right answer:

1. Keep serving as a large and visible space for women within the confines of Reddit’s sinking ship

2. Abandon Reddit (ship) and let Reddit powermods run a space that they may be uniquely unqualified to operate. those same powermods/admins don’t care about doing the right thing in every other sub they control, so why would they ensure that women are protected from, say, tracking their visits to Planned Parenthood and selling that data to “advertisers” or hostile governments.

We need Reddit to truly self-destruct to ensure an Exodus, and right now it’s crumbling but not broken yet. It’s honestly sort of a mirror to society in general. We’re in the Crumbles, and every day we inch closer to the final straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Real question is, why are there no UFO’s ever seen from Disneyworld? Quite generous of UFO’s to respect designated no-fly zones.

They’re painted “Go Away Green”, so while the UFOs are probing Clara, visitors are focused on finding Hidden Mickeys.

Good Excel users think themselves better than a beginner. Great Excel users think themselves somewhere between Intermediate and Advanced. Excel Masters, and I know one who placed in that Excel data modeling competition, know they’re somewhere in the Intermediate to Advanced range.

Depending on what functions you have running to make it do all the things, could you have it live on Sharepoint and just access it through Excel online? That offloads a lot of the processing to MS’s servers but does have the disadvantage of being Excel Online, which has some but not all the functions of desktop Excel and the keyboard shortcuts may or may not work. Also, Excel Online doesn’t seem to love macros, which can break things.

Orcas are a natural predator of everything that his the ocean. Fun fact, orcas have been known to toy with seals by catapulting them with their tails. I believe I remember seeing at least one baby seal got seventy feet in the air before returning to the sea (and its inevitable death).

Take a look at the fault lines around California. There’s lots of seismic activity, and we’re close to train tracks so we have gas mask drills too (added after what happened in East Palestine). Given the major large-scale risks in our area are fire, earthquakes, and a train derailment spilling chemicals, those drills seem prudent.

One for every room I intent for humans to survive in, plus one in each car. Also recently upgraded to hardwired CO/smoke detectors and each bedroom also has a combination alarm that uses Z-Wave to alert me anywhere, just as a backup. Also, we practice fire and earthquake drills monthly, along with a couple of other scenarios that are more rare/less dangerous.

So you’re saying the Bible specifically recommends slaying ass?

“Honey, the Bible says I gotta go slay ass! I know I promised those days were behind me, but God wants me to do it! Completely off topic, how’s your sister? She still single?”

Come on now, you know that it’s sworn testimony that Prince Andrew doesn’t sweat.