I've had my Earfun Air Pro 3 earbuds since like July and I like them okay. Currently on sale for $76. I used to eat in front of my TV in the living room even when alone, but now I just sit at the dining table and pop these in. Especially with Vanced YouTube. The ads on the PS5 YouTube app became obtrusive to the point that I just don't use it anymore. I'll also pop these in while doing chores around the house. They pair to my phone and Steam Deck without issue.

I had other earbuds before this that were about $35 but not noise cancelling. They fell out of my pocket while I was out of town, so I splurged on something that would sound better, and I'm happy with them for the price point and form factor.

Excellent thought, but we're on public sewer. That's why I'm confused about why they would've been bleaching the water heater.

Built shelves into the back wall of the garage. It's been great for storage.

Installed a water softener, but more on that in a minute.

Also wrote with sharpie on the wall of the maintenance closet the dates of routine PMs for the furnace and water heater. Unfortunately, I found out the hard way that they weren't particularly diligent about the water heater stuff. It just said "bleach" and dates, but they clearly weren't flushing it properly. I found and removed probably like 15-20 pounds of scale and replaced the lower element that it killed. I have a theory that they installed the water softener well after living with hard water for a while, and by then there was already a bunch of scale in the water heater. Combine that with dosing bleach which is higher pH and not properly flushing it out and they welcomed crystallization of the dissolved solids that were already there. Then under deposit corrosion killed the lower element. I'm not sure why they felt the need to dose bleach though. That would only really attack organics, and the water is already treated before coming through. Idk, it's my first home so maybe I'm the one who's a clueless idiot here, so I shouldn't judge too harshly here lol.

I'm not against piracy, but publicly posting about intending to pirate would just invite cops to come and snoop around. I'm not dumb. I should either shut the fuck up about this topic and feel free to pirate or I should not pirate so I can freely speak up about how bullshit it is to pay for these things when piracy is far and away the better experience. I chose the latter, and especially now that resources have been provided to help others to choose the former, others can do so without even asking where to start.

I can afford to buy my media, but I wasn't always so financially stable and I refuse to forget those chapters of my life. People are really struggling right now, so I wouldn't dare judge anybody for pirating instead of paying these absurd streaming bill amounts just to get a dogshit selection, bad UI, and pisspoor video quality. As everything in life seems to be going to subscription model, I'm becoming more interested in owning my media. It also just seems like building a NAS and ripping my discs to build a library within it could just be a fun tinkering tech project.

It's ludicrous that the original pirate-killer service has become such a bad deal. 13 years ago it was such a good deal that it didn't really make sense to pirate anymore. Now it's triple the price, 1/3 the quality content, and a worse experience.

I would have had less issues had I pirated

This right here is the problem. Consumers are being punished for paying for their service. I would be more than happy to hand over my hard earned money for products and services that are good value. I'm not trying to get something from nothing here. It's absurd that we could get better than they're promising, let alone actually delivering on, and it could cost us nothing.

Yesterday, I learned that several titles on Netflix are locked out from the ad-supported tier "due to licensing restrictions". Inexcusable. Pay, still sit through ads, get a fraction of the library. I think I'm gonna start building a NAS and home library this year. BDs and DVDs can be snatched up for cheap from pawn shops and eBay. I'll do it legally just so I can tell any FBI pricks to go fuck themselves if they should ever decide to check on my shit.

Motherfucker, communication to your constituents is a big part of your fucking job. Even if I were to accept your bullshit blame game, whose fault is it that working families weren't aware of what you were accomplishing? There are probably fewer than 10 Democrats in all of Congress who are good communicators, and the party tends to try to suppress them. But that's not as big a problem as the party insisting on attempting to court conservatives. Instead of swinging right to achieve literally 0% more Republicans than in 2020, maybe try swinging left to court some of the 33.4% of voters who didn't vote at all in 2020, which rose to 36.1% in 2024.

But what the fuck do I know. I'm just a regular working class American who's pissed off at out of touch politicians letting capitalists fuck us all over, not some think tank guru or poli sci staffer. But if you try to run Liz Cheney as a Democrat in 2028, I'm leaving the country before the Vance-Desantis ticket wins the presidency.

You know, he broke his toe during that scene. That's why the scream was so soulful. If you didn't know any better, you'd just assume the look on his face and the passionate shouting were just from the blowjob.

This. Conservatives have poor media literacy. They don't understand that they're the punchline in stuff like that. They miss the point of stuff like RoboCop and Starship Troopers and unironically like those movies for the action and don't even recognize the social commentary. They watched Team America and guffawed into their 24 packs of light beer at every shallow joke without recognizing that the jokes were intentionally shallow to point out what an idiot would think is a good joke. It's like the TV show in Idiocracy. The real joke is below the surface.

I had a conversation with a coworker about this a while ago. He said that something he liked about trump was that he already had money so he wouldn't be able to be bought. I said that he has it exactly backwards. The kind of people who amass that amount of wealth in our society have felt the power of large wealth firsthand and know that more money is always better for them. Increasing the number in their bank account becomes exponentially more important, the higher it goes. The wealthy have proven their utmost allegiance to wealth, so they'll be the first to sell out.

There's an exchange in The Simpsons that has never stopped being relevant:

• You know, Mr. Burns, you're the richest guy I know. Way richer than Lenny.
• Oh, yes. But I'd trade it all for a little more.

Imagine betting that your prepper neighbor with 30 guns won't buy a 31st gun "because he already has so many".

I appreciate the info!

I opened hot taps on the floor above to break vacuum. My wife had questions about the sounds she was hearing and I compared it to putting your thumb on the top of a straw to hold liquid in the straw; I just took the figurative thumb off the top of the figurative straw to drain it.

I don't have a shop vac (yet). I'm a new homeowner and have bought plenty of new things lately and wasn't in the mood to go to the store in the middle of what I was dealing with, so I just stirred up and drained the bits I saw through the element hole. I didn't know just how much it was until I'd already been at it for a long while anyway lol.

The house is only about 7 years old, and I'm assuming the water heater is too. There's a water softener attached, but I bet it's a new addition they put in in response to the hardness they were growing in the water heater.

I had googled thermostat settings and was mostly seeing about 125° as the recommended temp, and the thermostats I bought were factory set to 120 and the manual recommended against raising it. Now I know I can bump mine up a touch if I feel like it!

I'm a power plant operator with a background in water chemistry. I was uniquely prepared to understand this situation, but not as well equipped as you would've been lol.

Is that the same as a heat pump water heater? They typically need a lot of air around them to work properly and my water heater is in a small closet next to my gas furnace in a townhouse, so that's not really a great option for me.

Eventually, I'd like to upgrade my heat/AC to a heat pump though. They're much more capable and efficient than they used to be. Modern ones heat fine even when it gets down to 0°F, which it occasionally does here around this time of year.

Anode looked better than expected, especially considering it still had manufacturer insulation and cap over it, so it's literally never been changed and the house is 7ish years old.

I always used to use hot water when I needed to boil water for stuff like pasta or rice to get it there faster. I guess now I know haha.

It's only about 7 years old, so I'm pretty sure I got to it in time. I hadn't thought of it plugging a leak at the time, but that's a very valid concern. I'm pretty sure that under deposit corrosion was what killed the element, so it could've attacked the tank itself too. The anode rod must be doing an okay enough job lol.

"shut up and dribble deke"

Idk Gretzky's politics and idc, but I'm pretty sure we don't need more celebrities pivoting to politics. We need leaders who are public servants, not wealthy attention whores.

I appreciate the response. I'd heard that it's similar to pork, and I've heard of prion diseases like kuru being a problem (which might be a non-issue if lab-grown maybe?)

It makes sense for religions to have a problem with it, possibly all meat made this way and not just human as it's "unnatural" or whatever. I'm no expert on religions of the world, but I'm not aware of any explicit directive to not eat human meat, but it wouldn't surprise me either way really.

So I guess assuming it were safe to eat which was my assumption, only secular people would really consider it. But maybe a lot of religious people wouldn't bother with any of the lab grown meat in the first place, so it's possible that lab grown human meat would be tried by as many people as any of the other options.

Yeah, asking for real. We might see such a scenario come to pass in my lifetime. If there's no human suffering and nobody has to die for it to occur, is there anything other than "seems icky" that would stop most people from at least trying human meat at some point in their life? Would it be illegal, legal but restricted, or as legal as beef? If not illegal, would you try it, and if so, how?

Without hesitation. If the taste, consistency, nutrition, and price are all the same, then the only differences would be whether an animal was bred to suffer until slaughter and the likelihood of illness from consumption. I'm assuming that stuff like e coli would be nearly impossible through this. Plus less demand on farm meat means less chance of coronavirus mutations like the 2009 swine flu outbreak. And less of a need for the real estate, feed, and potable water to grow those animals. I must be missing something because I'm struggling to see a downside here.

I'm sure that, in the same way that there's still a market for objectively inferior exploitatively mined diamonds as a status symbol instead of lab created diamonds, there would still be a market for rEaL meat where "you can really taste the suffering" or whatever.

Now here's the more interesting question that actually has me on the fence: if "growing any kind of animal tissue" is what has been achieved, where would you stand on consuming lab-grown human meat? Is it immoral? Are there risks? Should such a thing be restricted in some way like alcohol or handguns? What would be the proper etiquette and presentation and everything if it became socially accepted? What wine would pair best with it? Or would it be more of a beer pairing? If this weren't socially acceptable, would no-suffering chimpanzee meat be okay?

If it only takes a small cell sample, would it be unethical to dig up extinct animals like mammoths or dodo specifically to enjoy their meat? If that's okay, and it chimps are okay, would neanderthals be okay to eat? Where would we draw the line?

I think you're already forgetting just how prevalent the story of the murder was. It wasn't just local news. It was unavoidable.

Luigi is innocent until proven guilty. I think it's weird that cops found a backpack in central park with no real evidence, but found a gun, a suppressor, and a written confession that started off with praising the cops on this guy who decided to get McDonalds in the middle of the day. I'm not saying that the cops planted evidence to have somebody to finger, but it seems convenient.

Trump Aid. TrAid for short. But change the spelling to avoid litigation from Kool-Aid. TrAde. And let's make that A lower case. Trade. Can I have a position in the administration now?

"Wake up sheeple, being woke is bad."

The conservative ideological superposition is so goddamn stupid.