I've heard many times the freeholders are often what we would call private equity firms and are practicing financial predation. I'm living where I was born. It's disheartening to see houses of the exact type my family lived in since I was born rise from well under 20k in 1963 to over 400k today. Wages and productivity were decoupled in the '70's with wages flat lining and productivity rising dramatically. People in this country today in general literally are not being paid wages that that equal what it costs to live. This country is and is about to be more so in a foreclosure crisis, also. Our neverending inflation crisis just got dramatically worse, also. This isn't the country where I was raised. It's not prosperous and in fact is holding on by a thread.

Thanks to all for the condolences.

They don't have HUMAN consciousness NOR intelligence. Magic [trick] is a perfect analogy.

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/chinese-evs-take-world-storm-united-states-rcna344680 I do not trust cars from China in the same sense that I do not trust network routers from China or computers from China. Still, articles like this makes me question of the American car industry is still alive only because of protectionism.

@wtg and @bernard I spent so much time on the music school's website, you'd think I was planning to move there! I would love to be in a class with your, Bernard!

It's encouraging to see progress in what are sometimes regarded as mature technical fields. Having been involved with technical services to the steel industry earlier in my engineering career, I still find news of advances there exciting. Big Al

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Very clever! How does it deal with the discard?

Thanks everyone!

[image: IMG-5962.jpg] It’s largely a chronicle of his life (hippie surfer baker chef) up to when he opened the Tartine bakery. It’s a good story. There’s also a good bit of it dedicated to recipes that use day old bread - fancy ones! - and various permutations like baguettes, English muffins and brioche. But in the middle of all that is the base recipe and how he developed it. How it’s supposed to look (big holes, baked very dark), how it’s supposed to taste (not sour. Chad doesn’t like sour). Also pictures. The soupy mess that I get when I use his recipe is not a failure - it’s how it’s supposed to look! It’s what gets you the big holes! He goes on to tell how to make it come together again, something not in the base recipe. Read it straight through in one sitting. I’ll read the part with the method again before my next bake.

Turn on automatic software updates for networked devices. That’s about the best advice that can be given to most casual tech users.

@daniel So I have an Instagram account dedicated to board games. Occasionally small board game companies send me games to play with the understanding that I’ll play the games and post about them. Because modern board games are a fairly niche hobby, it only takes a few thousand followers to become enough of an “influencer” for companies to partner with you. Larger accounts (many still under 10k followers but some of the super popular board gamers influencers that I follow have over 100k followers on instagram ) will be paid to make content about games, sometimes for social media or for Kickstarter campaigns. They get invited to try games before they are released and get lots of free product. And these folks definitely influence purchasing decisions amongst fellow board gamers so they are a huge part of a game company’s marketing budget. Every hobby has their own group of influencers. In niche hobbies they may only have a few thousand followers. But in areas like makeup and fashion they may have millions of views on TikTok. It’s a really bizarre landscape. There is a woman, I believe in China, who shows each product for 1-3 seconds before moving on to the next one. She’s a big deal - though I don’t really get why. But companies pay her to show their product, just for a moment.

Realtor.com on X: "Corporate investors are increasingly buying up mobile home communities and raising rents, leaving residents with few options since moving a mobile home costs $4,000 to $10,000. In Clinton, TN, one retiree saw her lot rent jump from $275 to $650 a month under new corporate https://t.co/WfYWAjabgF" / X https://share.google/UJkPuOXkc5TaLmYNJ My lot rent is $890 in '26. It increased by $75 after only $50 in '25 and $25 in '24. It was below $550 in December, 2019. This is a private owner in his '80's squeezing every last dollar he can out of his business by increasing rent and cutting services. People who know (this is second hand) know that his children hate the business and want nothing to do with it. I told the manager I was leaving and why. She said she wished I'd stay but will give me a landlord recommendation for these years when I asked her if she would do this. The worst way to go about it (although I suppose none is good) is when private equity simply declines to renew the leases, renovates every unit to a uniform standard, and re-opens a park, with all the units being rentals.

Anyway, yikes!!

I looked into Optery, which is a similar service. I did the free plan, which provides a report that lists where your info is stored. It originally located 60+ sites, and I manually submitted requests to a bunch of them, requesting deletion of my info. Optery still sends me occasional emails and now it says I'm only on 30 sites. I may do some more manual deletion requests; I haven't pulled the trigger on a paid subscription. PC Mag does a comparison: https://www.pcmag.com/comparisons/incogni-vs-optery-which-data-removal-service-comes-out-on-top