Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?

It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

If I’m going to skin or peel the vegetable, I go with the cheap stuff. If I’m eating the skin then I go organic. I never buy the prewashed lettuce and salads when they are on sale because those have already started to go bad usually. And when it comes to things like berries, strawberries, tomatoes, and peppers I go with whatever looks like it will taste the best. Cheap blueberries for instance, absolutely do not hold up against the good stuff; life is too short for tart blueberries.

Think about how crazy attached that lady seemed for screaming for her bird from dawn to dusk. Now imagine that she is a parrot attached to you and multiply the crazy by 10. Now you want to travel and leave this emotional wreck with strangers in a strange place for a bit.

From what you’ve said in the rest of this thread, most parrots would not be a good fit for your lifestyle or level of experience. I guarantee that it will be traumatic for you and the bird. If you’re still serious about pursuing this, then it is absolutely critical that your first step be to volunteer at a rescue or care facility of some kind for birds specifically. Get dirty, get bitten, get some training, get some experience, and get some contacts for help when things inevitably go sideways. You’ll hear first hand all the stories about: someone’s loved pet that turned into depressed wreck on their owner’s death; or the parrot that was caged alone and never received any attention and went mad; or the malnourished parrot that was fed only seed; or the parrot that was bought as a gift and abandoned; or the family pet that permanently maimed and disfigured a child because of improper training and supervision.

I’ve known a few bird people and their unifying characteristic is a very high tolerance for noise, mess, chaos, bird shit, and emotional codependence. It takes a very special kind of person with a lot of extra time and space to care for parrots full time in a healthy way for either party.

Parrots do not make good pets. They can be kept in captivity, but they require specialized care by experienced and trained caregivers. They are a LIFETIME commitment that may very well outlive you, so don’t forget to include them in your will.

Nothing in either comment speaks about pain either, just screams. I only posted the wikipedia link because it referenced the numerous articles about this well established phenomenon. I didn’t realize I was defending a doctoral thesis here. Y’all are fucking toxic.

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You were always only a few clicks away from some program that look liked it hadn’t been updated since Windows 95.

That remains true for 10 and 11 too. For a quick trip back to 1995, just do something that you probably haven’t done this millennium, change your mouse pointer. Instant nostalgia. Device manager in general hasn’t changed much either.

I wouldn’t even count that against them, working functionality shouldn’t be changed without good reason, except that it exposes how much windows is a patch job on a fundamentally flawed design. If it were a boat or car, it would be more Bondo than metal at this point. Why are these dialogs so stuck in the past? Shouldn’t it be a simple matter to have them use the latest design elements to at least look consistent, even if the functionality hasn’t changed a bit.

The question is rude in this context. It’s not rude to completely ignore rude questions.

Your rationalization sounds like some self centered manipulative bullying bullshit.

“non-lethal” Oh, boy! What an infuriating misnomer that is.

This is also a good time to remember nothing here in this context is “non-lethal”. All of these things (sand bags, tear gas, tasers, pepper spray, mace, rubber bullets, batons, shields, tactical holds, etc.) are accurately called “less lethal” because all of them can and will kill under certain circumstances, even when used by trained officers with good intentions. (I know. How often does that happen, right?) It doesn’t take much to cross that line between “not intending murder” and “actual fucking murder”, often something as simple as a common medical condition or simply falling while moving over hard ground like curbs and sidewalks. If a reporter is using the term “non-lethal” in the context of police brutality, that’s a pretty good sign that you are being lied to.

Are you 100% certain it’s not a cell phone tower?

These are often just appear as a sheet metal pillar from the outside. If you see a small windowless concrete hut surrounded by a fence somewhere on the property, the church could be leasing to a telecom and hiding the antennas inside their oversized idol. Icing on the cake is that this is often a method the telecoms use to hide their operations from local municipalities so that they can avoid taxes until caught.

Not the parent commentor, but I do something very similar with Tasker. Whenever my phone disconnects from one of a list of Bluetooth connections (like my watch or my car) or even if it just gets a solid jolt to the accelerometers, it goes into lockdown mode. This means the screen gets locked and biometrics can no longer be used to unlock it, requiring the entering of a PIN code to unlock.

2fa: No issues, as I can easily migrate to a different device.

How exactly? This ability would seem to negate any benefit or security of multi-factor authentication.

The comment I left t here no longer relevant because parent and child revised their comments after the fact. This is not a healthy way to have a discourse people.

Is your abuse of the ellipsis and dashes supposed to be ironic? Isn’t that a LLM tell?

I’m not even sure what the (‘phrase’) construct is even meant to imply, but it’s wild. Your abuse of punctuation in general feels like a machine trying to convince us it’s human or a machine transcribing a human’s stream of consciousness.

Who is out there wiping their ass with %100 ethanol?

Since you seem to be comfortable citing the codes, what about the space between those studs? I thought it had to be a little less than the 2 feet we seem to see here.

• Embrace
• Extend
• Extinguish

It’s been the Microsoft Business plan since practically the beginning.

It didn’t come together like a granny knot, which I understand to be just a square knot with the orientation of one half flipped. The knot I learned wrapped the free end around the base of a loop and pulling a section of that free end through it to create another loop. It was unbalanced for the same reasons as a granny knot though and probably very similar.

The knot I tie now is basically a square knot where the “top” half is formed from two loops. Admittedly the knot I tie now, would have been much more difficult for toddler fingers than the knot I learned as that toddler.