the only one within an hour of here has very high prices. they basically feed off of walmart hate, and charge those customers a premium for the convenience of not having to drive an hour (each way) to get to the next nearest store that isn’t them or walmart.

ya. basically they hit that ‘tipping point’ where the increased profit margins from the higher prices is no longer keeping up with the decrease in sales volume resulting from those ever-increasing prices.

they ain’t gonna shut it down… not before some shenanigans involving new corporate entities, loads of debt, and a bankruptcy that ends up with the feds (taxpayers) with the clean-up bill.

also 13 original colonies… 13 stripes on the flag.

some magahead: so that means 1.2…3…4…7 republicans… and 1…2…6 confederates?

correct; acquired in 2013.

i’ve seen two of these things around here. they’ve both been on the flatbed of a local towing service.

i bought a few smr drives, knowing they were smr. they were cheaper, a lot cheaper than the same amount of space in cmr. used only for static media storage, so that’s not a big deal, really., but holy hell was it slow getting stuff on them initially.

i have a few self-powered externals that are also smr (quite common with those as they use 2.5in notebook hdd). when those things have to start shuffling bits around and rewriting tracks, sustained write speeds fall well under what even usb2 can send.

i bought a big external hdd recently on impulse… a clearance sale. it was really, really cheap. with the thinking that i could ‘shuck’ it because i’m short on space in a couple storage systems. i checked. i can, but i haven’t. hell, i haven’t even used it yet other than to run a full smart diag on it, followed by a full format and a read/write verify. took days. then i put it back in the box and have basically forgotten about it until now.

you have to be careful on what models you buy. some have usb built onto the controller board (no internal sata) or other things (e.g. encryption chip, weird power) that make it more difficult or even impossible to use the internal drive in an environment other than the enclosure it ships in.

tmobile (and sprint when it existed) and att suck around here. they are only built-up along the interstate. verizon (through acquisitions) and uscc were the legacy cellular providers. towers everywhere, in every small town and every other farm field in between. it’ll make tmobile better here, but at the expense of higher prices across-the-board with one less player in a game with far too few left.

fire the computer. go back to the pigeons

patents is what you’re thinking of. and all (afaik) of them relating to mp3 format have expired.

they also rely on those big cities they hate so much to provide some of the funding for the services and infrastructure they no-doubt take for granted.

a shift of ~ 240k people from oregon to idaho would result in oregon going back down to 5 congressional districts, and idaho gaining one for three. so one electoral vote moves from a reliably-democratic state to a republican one. that one elector could very well swing a presidential election.

iirc, changes to state boundaries requires approval of both states and congress (and also the president, who would have to sign-off on the legislation passed there). oregon would never go for it–not entirely sure idaho would be on-board, either, even with the thought of gaining a congressional seat. providing state services and funding to that region would be a perpetual net-drain on idaho’s economy.

not to worry, it won’t be long until “after almost 29 years…”

verizon did the same thing awhile ago, and it was more than five bucks a month.

was still cheaper for us to keep the old plan than to switch to a new “unlimited” one, though.

usb nvme adapters are not expensive and it likely won’t be the only time you need it. they are a handy accessory to have on hand if you have nvme storage.

don’t mess around with imaging to a file on the zfs, then restoring it. simply clone nvme -> nvme using a usb nvme adapter then replace the internal with the clone.

same deal with the far-right alternatives to aarp. just scamming money from america’s most gullible.

haven’t had their shredded cheese, but the target store brand grocery items i’ve had lately have been pretty good. and far better than walmart’s (the only store within an hour’s drive of here).

it just boils down to him hating and hurting the ‘right’ people.