If gym membership shenanigans are what’s keeping you from becoming a more fit version of yourself, might I suggest a home workout regime?

Not long into the COVID lockdowns a coworker at the call center I was working at pointed me towards Hybrid Calisthenics. It’s all workouts primarily using your body weight, minimal equipment (and there’s variations or alternate workouts if you want to skip one requiring equipment) and there’s variations of every workout for any level of physical strength from “I struggle to make it through the grocery store” to “I can lift a literal car” and the guy who does it does a brilliant job of explaining how to work out and how to do each excercise

I got a gym membership from a small independent gym hoping to avoid this bullshit. Nah I still had to replace my credit card to get them to stop charging it despite multiple calls, texts and emails demanding fill ceasure, only I had the pleasure of getting to argue with the owner of the business rather than some peonn at the business

Every body is different, but generally for most people every 2-3 days tends to be the sweet spot for a full shower with shampoo, conditioner, etc.

Personally, I have greasy hair problems, and I ultimately found that showering less frequently made the biggest improvement of all of the changes I made. I’ll generally shower every 2-3 days, and if I do something that makes me sweaty I’ll hop in the shower and rinse off without using any product between those every other day showers

On the other hand, for OOP, they’re making some big changes and probably need the consistency of every day to help maintain the habit they’re building

It’s basically what New York City has been doing with some success already and there’s been attempts to create a similar program for parking enforcement as well

…because young kids are insane and constantly make poor choices when left to their own devices.

I don’t think kids should walk to school independently until they’re at least about 9 or 10. Before that point their decision making skills are simply not developed enough and their understanding of risk is basically non-existent. Is it probably fine at a younger age? Yeah, but it’s not a risk worth taking, especially given how society at large generally considers all kids to require 24/7 parental monitoring even at ages where they should gain some independence

It’s the kind of thing that makes me wish the police had an easy text line for reporting obvious violations like that. Seems like the kind of thing where you should be able to snap a photo of the vehicle, license plate and violation in one photo and text it off for an officer to look over and verify then write and mail a parking ticket. Best part is, it’s a low risk enforcement, and if the law is written well enough it could be a net good in preventing parked cars from blocking shit without lending itself to over-enforcement

I live in a town about that size, and I’d estimate that over half of students get to/from school via their parents driving them. Which is insane because the way the buses are setup, your kids will just be picked up/dropped off from whatever the nearest school to your home is, so the parents spending multiple hours each day going to multiple schools to drop off then multiple schools to pick up could entirely avoid it

It’s seriously the only real rush hour in my town is when school starts/ends

About the only edgecase I’ve seen with busing in my town is if you have multiple kids in school and one is special needs, because the special needs bus exclusively goes door to door and they don’t let siblings ride with them unless the sibling is also special needs, so parents have to be in 2 places at once for both kids to take the bus

When it comes to PC OEMs I’ve observed that right now Dell has really good driver support. They’ve got increasingly good utilities for keeping drivers up to date and they’ve been doing a good job of loading drivers and their utilities into Microsoft’s relevant repositories where it makes sense, and that driver support tends to actually last multiple years. I can often pull down a new UEFI update for a 5 year old Dell PC, which is not something I can say of most hardware manufacturers.

So at the threat model of an enterprise org, I’d prefer Dell for that reason alone. Lenovo and HP have tried to implement some of that, HP seems to have given up after building the bare minimum and Lenovo has their typical wonky software that will become good after a few years if they keep investing developer time into it, but knowing Lenovo there’s about a 60% chance some new executive will come in and change direction, and the software will be made increasingly unusable then later discontinued due to lack of use

However for my personal computers, there’s a high chance it won’t even be running Windows so I just buy based on hardware & price alone

My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we’d forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who’d say “I’ve read the user manual cover to cover and I just can’t figure out how to…” And I’d just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word

At the scale of HP, I can see the logic. You know that, say 60% of calls are directly covered by the knowledge base because you have those metrics. That’s means 60% of their support overhead could be eliminated if they somehow got people to read those documents. Hardware sales usually have very thin margins and a customer contacting support can easily cost more in support than the entire profit margin of the product (and often it’s a self-inflicted problem) and of course an RMA for most products basically negates all profit from that sale. It’s a real business challenge and the asshole solution is to simply tie people up for 15 minutes in the phone system before connecting to a human to see how many people hang up and how much that reduces support load

I tried that and gave up after a year because it was getting old running to the library every few months to print that one page I needed for something odd that came up. Granted it’s been one of those years where so much life insanity happens that you have to work through. But now I’m happy that I can also print coloring pages and anything else I feel like printing on top of insurance documents that the DMV needs me to mail and passport applications and new tax forms for fun new tax challenges I’ve found myself in, and so on.

Also since we’re on the fediverse, toss a donation at your friendly instance admins since they’re shouldering so much cost and trouble as volunteers

Edit to add: ditto for any free/open source projects and services you use!

The control of the media really started gaining speed in the 1960s when a certain President Nixon had a media consultant named Roger Ailes and the two dreamed of creating a conservative news network that functioned as a Republican party clearing house. Roger Ailes later went on to be president of Fox News after of course working in the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations

It’s worth also remembering for anyone not alive and/or not aware that during that period Nixon was also a wannabe dictator and authoritarian and he attempted to rig his re-election and got caught when his associates broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate hotel.