Let’s not forget about Springfield Township (Montgomery County, PA)

Or, for that matter, Springfield Township (Bucks County, PA)

EDIT: for good measure because your link didn’t play nice with some anti tracking extensions I’m using Springfield Township (Delaware County, PA)

I make no guarantee that there aren’t others. I can’t be bothered to look.

I have an essential job and basically had to work as normal during COVID

I already commute at kind of weird times and basically never have to deal with much traffic anyway, but with almost everything else shut down and no one else on the road I averaged about 1mpg better than I usually do just from not having to deal with even that little bit of traffic.

And that was basically only for my commute into work, I go home at about 3AM, so even on a busy night I see maybe a dozen other cars on the road, so nothing at all changed there.

Just due to where I live and work and the hours I work, it’s probably never going to make much sense for me to take public transit, I’d pretty much be the only person ever riding that bus or train or whatever at those times (and there probably wouldn’t be too many taking that particular route at other times for that matter) and the nature of my job means I’ll probably always have to work at least part time in-person, but getting everyone who possibly can to WFH and/or take public transit means less traffic for me.

I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper. I got rear-ended which totaled my car. Theoretically it was repairable, but when your car is old enough to vote it doesn’t take much damage for it to get totaled.

There was other damage, but one thing that still pisses me off is that a few hundred bucks of that calculation was my spare tire cover, which had some cracks after the accident, and the insurance company would not let that drop.

It was a plastic shell that is mostly just decorative that covered the spare bolted to the back of my vehicle. I didn’t care that it was cracked, it in no way affected the safety of my vehicle, I would have happily driven that car for another decade with it being cracked, if they slapped 5¢ worth of epoxy on it I would have been more than satisfied, or hurry they could have just thrown the damn thing away and I guess my spare would get a little dirtier that it would if it was covered.

But they had to include that in the repair cost estimate, and since it was kind of an uncommon older car, replacement spare tire covers were scarce and pricey and added a few hundred bucks onto the estimate.

I don’t know if that was the thing that pushed me over the edge to a total loss but it certainly didn’t help

I had a perfectly mechanically sound vehicle that was paid off, and could possibly still be on the road today, and instead I got stuck with a couple years of car payments on a car I liked less than that one.

I am no teetotaler by any stretch of the imagination, I have a home bar that is better-stocked than most actual bars.

I’ve definitely been drinking less this year that I have in previous years.

Drinking is, for me, a social activity. I don’t drink by myself, I need friends to be drinking with for it to be a good time.

Everyone’s schedule sucks these days, we’re all too busy and broke to go out to bars and such, and I barely have time to just straighten my house up for company to have people over to enjoy the booze I already have if their schedules manage wo line up with mine.

And even if by some miracle, all that lines up, its harder to get myself into a drinking mood. I have what I think is a pretty healthy relationship with alcohol, I’m not drinking to drown my sorrows, I do it to enhance an already good time. If I’m stressed or anxious or pissed off or whatever, I’m don’t and don’t won’t to drink, and with the world the way it is I’ve pretty much been at least a little pizzed off for most of the last decade or so.

And booze is expensive and so is everything else now, I’m having to choose between things I used to enjoy and things I just need to survive more than I used to.

And even if I find the wiggle room in the budget, I’m feeling like I need to be extra critical about where my money is going. If I buy, let’s say a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, that means that somewhere along the line the state of Kentucky is probably getting a cut of my booze money from taxes and frankly I don’t particulaly think KY deserves my money. If I gut a bottle of Canadian rye, what even is the current state of tarrifs? Is it worth forking over a bit of my money to the feds in exchange for some Alberta Premium? (or for that matter, giving money to Alberta, they have some idiots there too)

And I have a good handful of friends who don’t drink, some never started, some have stopped for various reasons (like all of the above,) so with them I’m usually not going to be drinking either.

Its just a bad time to be drinking.

I’m admittedly in a bit of a bubble, but right now my PC gamer friends are a pretty even split between windows and Linux. Know anyone with a steam deck? They’re gaming on Linux.

No, it’s not quite as user-friendly as windows, and it takes a couple extra steps to get things running, especially if you’re playing non-steam games, but that’s one-time setup stuff then you’re golden. Most games are able to run fine on Linux these days, by some measures more PC games may actually work on Linux than in Windows because sometimes new versions of Windows have broken compatibility issues with older games.

There’s edge-cases to be sure, like some stuff with kernel-level anticheat have issues, but the state of that constantly improving, even the game devs are improving Linux support from their end in a lot of cases.

Anecdotally, I’ve had some cases where games are even running better for me on Linux than they did on Windows. Part of that is that most of the main components of my computer are pushing 15 years old, but I think that alone is a pretty big endorsement for Linux gaming that in some cases it can keep your rig relevant for longer.

When I was about 17 I started training for my first backpacking trip. First shakedown hike I loaded my pack up with about 40 or 50lbs, and I think I lasted about 5 minutes before I went back to my car to lighten my load because I was dying carrying it.

Worked my way up to doing it no problem over the next few months, and for the next few years I hiked and backpacked pretty regularly. I never exactly got in good shape, I had a gut the whole time but I could carry a heavy backpack 10 or occasionally 20 miles a day up and down mountains no problem.

I’ve been a lot more sedentary the last few years just due to being a busy adult with a wonky schedule. I still squeeze in some hikes here or there, but nothing with a heavy pack, and rarely doing more than 10 miles, and usually not going up and down any significant mountains, and I’m definitely not hitting the gym or anything, and I’ve probably packed on about 50lbs of mostly fat since I was 17.

But still, a couple months ago I went backpacking with a friend. Didn’t really do anything in particular to prepare for it, and I still carried about 40-50lbs in my pack

And I did just fine. Definitely huffed and puffed a bit more than when I was in my prime backpacking shape, and I was definitely a bit sore and had some blisters after it, but I was able to hit the trail with a heavy pack and almost no prep and I definitely couldn’t have done that when I was just starting out at 17 years old despite being generally younger, healthier, and more active back then.

So to a pretty great extent, my body definitely “remembers” how to backpack.

promptly drove to the chick fil a right next door

That’s… not better, you know that right? The owners of chick fil a have funded some pretty horrendous anti-LGBQT organizations

Please lead the way and get off of it thene be the change you want to see.

I work for my county, I have coworkers who are proud that they don’t vote and don’t follow politics

WE. WORK. FOR. THE. GOVERNMENT! Go up the food chain from us a couple steps and our boss’, boss’, boss’ boss or something along those lines is an elected official! You’re basically passing up an opportunity to choose who your boss is, and those elections often end up happening on off years when there’s no presidential or other big election going on and even less people turn out to vote, so your vote really counts.

We’ll it would be harder to pick some Democrats from this neighborhood and a bunch of Republicans from that neighborhood if the district size is only one neighborhood

Also it would allow for more specific representation. Using myself as an example, my district is basically my county plus a couple small parts of some neighboring counties. One end of the county is pretty rural, the other half butts up against a major city and pretty much just bleeds right into it. We have some ridiculously wealthy old money areas, and we have some that look like they were plucked from a movie about gang violence. There’s a few towns here that I’ve legitimately never even had to drive through. It’s kind of insane that all of these different areas are being represented by the same person, we have very different and sometimes conflicting concerns. And if I needed to go to my representatives office for any reason, I’d have to drive about an hour to get there because of course she’s set up shop at the far end of the county from me.

Personally, I think the ideal way to draw districts is to kind of have voters do it when they vote. Give them a map, have them select the areas where they live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or have other connections to until they’ve selected an area with a big enough population to be a district. Then feed those maps into a computer and have it average them all together to generate the new district map.

I think the name Donald has been out of style since before Trump was born.

Imagine spending your whole life being compared to Donald Duck.

I was a delivery guy for a local pizzeria once upon a time (and that place still has their own drivers, and even their own delivery vehicles, which is practically unheard of)

And I’m not gonna lie, door dash and such was great for a while because it let me get food delivered from restaurants that otherwise didn’t do delivery.

But I’ve stopped using them, for a few reasons including their shitty business practices

But the straw that broke the camels back in each case that made me delete was them fucking up my order.

And that happens, I’m not particularly mad at the store or the driver, I’ve been there

But the way that these delivery apps handle it is, to me, unacceptable.

When I contacted them, their response was to just issue me a refund.

And to me, what should have happened, is I should have immediately had a replacement sent, expedited as much as possible, at no extra cost.

That’s what we always did when I was a delivery guy, and often with a gift certificate as an apology.

And sure, a refund on top of that would be nice, but really the root issue is that I don’t have the food I ordered. If I order it again, I’m going to the back of the delivery queue, and if I happened to order it when I was low on money I may not even be able to reorder it that day because that refund often takes a couple days to clear.

I once heard Spam described as “everything but the oink”

And so when I describe scrapple, I usually start with that, and then describe scrapple as being “mostly oink”

My wife and I did a quick courthouse thing because I got a new job and she needed health insurance. The plan was to do an actual wedding of some kind a year or two later but COVID and a bunch of other stuff happened so it’s been on the back burner. I think we’re looking at a 10 year thing now, which is nice because it’s given us a lot of time to think about guest lists and such.

We have a pretty decent amount of friends we want to invite, I think we’re in the ballpark of around 30

Some of those are gonna have +1s, so that gets us up to around 50 or 60

Then we have parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. and some of them have +1s, depending on the size and relationship you have with your family, that can make things balloon really quickly.

And if you’re able to budget for it, it can be advantageous to invite as many people as you can, money and other wedding gifts can add up pretty substantially. That’s not a major factor in our guest list, but for a young couple, maybe looking to buy a house and have kids or whatever, that can be huge.

I’m not too sure about what the version of scrapple you received was, it sounds like some kind of bastardized hash, but scrapple is a common breakfast thing in the Mid-Atlantic/Delaware valley area.

The version I’m familiar with as a Philadelphian, admittedly doesn’t sound a whole lot better on paper, but the actual eating experience sounds a lot more pleasant. It’s basically pork scraps and organ meats simmered down until they’re falling apart and mixed with cornmeal and buckwheat then formed into a mushy loaf, which is then sliced and fried.

You’re not going to identify any particular piece of pork or anything else in it, it’s a pretty uniform grey mush, and the only real texture comes from frying it to give the outside a nice crispiness. Nothing tough or chewy about it, you barely need to chew it, the texture is probably more like polenta (which it kind of is) than anything else you might be familiar with. It also usually doesn’t contain any apple or potatoes.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you find yourself near Philly don’t let whatever you were served in the south turn you off from trying actual scrapple.

Parts of Ohio have goetta, which I think is supposed to be pretty similar to scrapple but with oatmeal instead of corn meal.

I’ve also heard of “livermush” and “liver pudding” being served in some parts of the south, which honestly sound like dead-ringers for scrapple to me, though I have some friends from the south who insist that they’re different from and better than scrapple.

I feel like whatever you were served was some southerner trying to recreate something they heard described one time but never actually tried themselves, or just slapping the name on something without knowing that there’s another dish out there with the same name.

I think you’re confusing e85 with 85 octane gas

E85 is 85% ethanol, 15% gas (and e15 is the other way around)

Octane rating is a measure of how much you can compress a fuel before it ignites by itself. Higher octane gas is more resistant to that. (And e85 actually has a pretty high octane rating, usually somewhere north of 100. Regular gas often contains up to 10% ethanol, in part because it boosts the octane rating)

To expand on that a bit, if you compress gas enough, at a certain point it just catches fire on its own. This is actually a big part of how diesel engines work. Diesel is actually pretty hard to ignite, in some cases you can even put out small fires by pouring diesel on it (don’t try this at home) so they rely on getting high enough compression in order to work.

Gasoline is a lot more flammable though, you don’t really need to compress it at all for it to burn. Sure, ideally you probably want a certain compression ratio because something something stoichiometry but gas is more forgiving in that regard. As long as your air-fuel mixture is about right, it’s gonna burn when your spark plug goes off.

In fact, gas is maybe a little too forgiving, if your octane rating is too low and your engine compression is too high (mostly a problem with higher-performance engines) that gas can just kind of go off too early before the spark plug goes off, which causes “engine knock” which will cause damage.

But the other way around, high octane in a lower compression engine, basically does nothing spectacular. It still goes boom when the spark plug goes off and not until then.

I find it pretty weird that you’re obsessing over this so much and have posted about it several times tonight.

Yeah, it’s a bit strange, and it warrants investigation, and as the article says it is being investigated.

But also as someone who has spent a lot of time around water fishing, boating, swimming, etc. there are a whole lot of ways you can get yourself in trouble in or in the water, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that it was just plain bad luck.

Oh absolutely, I have 0 faith in this administration to do this in any kind of remotely sensible way

But in general, with different people at the helm, I could really get behind more hunting opportunities in national parks as a conservation tool.

Really I’d like to see predators like wolves reintroduced, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon, and realistically for it to work in the parks around me that I have in mind for this we’d probably need to bulldoze and reforest huge swathes of suburbia to support those predators, so nothing that’s going to happen in a hurry, even if we somehow got the people living there to agree to move or eminent domained their properties (which isn’t going to happen) we’d probably be looking at years if not decades just to replant and regrow the forests.

I live near a national historic park in a suburban area. They have struggled with deer overpopulation since we have basically no predators left in our area.

A few times a year they have sharpshooters doing deer culls after hours, and it’s helped a lot, you see some of those ripple effects where since the deer aren’t eating all the vegetation you’re seeing more and different kinds of plants returning which has brought back populations of other animals that used to be pretty uncommon.

And the deer are generally healthier with less competition from each other, I remember seeing a lot of sickly-looking deer there when I was a kid and I don’t see that as much anymore.

But even though the culls have helped, there’s still a bit of an overpopulation problem, and allowing some hunting could help with that, and maybe eliminate the need to pay sharpshooters for culling. We have other, similar-sized parks in our area where hunting is allowed with few to no issues and in this part of the state you’re basically limited to bows and shotguns which helps to limit how far a stray shot could go.

I wouldn’t want the whole park to be opened to hunting all through hunting season, but I think allowing it in certain parts of the bark on certain days could be very beneficial.

Sorry, but I think the point about local AI not necessarily being evil is the tangent here.

The OP is about motherboard shortages, which is being driven by the big AI companies and is making hardware unaffordable for normal users

The top level reply to that is about how that’s bad because it removes the ability for people to be in control of their own computing

Then someone comes in, saying “yeah, but you can host your own AI so that it’s not evil so not all AI is bad”

Then someone points out that you can only host your AI if you can afford the hardware to do so which, as the OP and the comment you replied to pointed out, is getting really hard to do.