about the Synergy post?

No, not me!

I viewed a YouTube about how Mafia control of the Las Vegas casinos ended by the 1980s on account of Department of Justice going after them for "skimming" income from the counting room to avoid taxes.

Apart from cheating the government, meaning you and me out of lawfully imposed tax revenue, along with the services we the people derive from it, and the odd murder here and there to maintain organizational discipline, Mafia Las Vegas was the Golden Age of the $1 buffet lunch. Sure it was a loss leader that you would drain your bank account at the gaming tables, but whether through illegal of legal gambling, the Mafia offered much better odds than the government in the form of state lotteries.

Sure, from the images, The Strip of the late 1970s was cheesy schlock, but private equity has sunk billions into schlock with high production values. And how they (the current owners) fleece you with a 50 dollars for parking, 40 dollars per night resort fee, mandatory 20% (or more) tipping and on an on. If you had no interest in gambling or set a strict budget on how much you were going to blow, Las Vegas used to be a budget destination, but not anymore!

in Back to School, explaining to a Business School professor tha palms you need to grease came to mind.

who gives it one star in their review on account for the catastrophic meltdown at an urban site.

I would feel better if these modular nuclear reactors were shipped from an Amazon warehouse and hence eligible for the over $35 dollars free shipping.

If they are sourced from an Amazon Partner, I bet they arrive with a cracked reactor core and a leaking pressure vessel?

The slow to a crawl is starting it up after a couple of missed Update Tuesdays, and if I wait long enough, the system settles down and runs just fine. It is just when I turn it on after being off for two weeks, the boot is sllooowwww!

What this has to do with TFA is I cheaped out on a Windows 11 replacement computer and this is what I am getting.

Copilot (yes, the A.I.) guided me through running Crystal Info, and true to form of a refurb machine, it has a Patriot 220 1 T SATA drive, the cheapest and slowest possible drive on the market, even for a SATA drive.

The Crystal Info SMART test shows the drive is healthy with only about 8% of its life used up in write cycles in where ever the refurb place got its drives from.

I ran tests on the drive, and what Task Manager shows to be thrashing the drive is what Copilot tells me is involved in processing Windows Update.

Given enought time, the system quiets down, the drive light goes dark, and the system runs fine. The claim is that Windows changed their way of doing updates that it isn't the raw drive throughput as much as the fine-grained using the SSD as RAM that is going on.

Owing to the October 2025 Windows 10 phase-out/scare/scolding, I purchased a refurb Dell Micro for cheap that came with Windows 11 Pro. 16 G RAM, 1 T SSD, what was there to not like.

Come March 2026, Windows Update was slowing this machine to a crawl, especially if I booted it every other week because it was my PC separate from work that I paid bills on.

Consulting with Copilot AI (natch, you would think Copilot is savy about Microsoft products), it turns out that my cheap PC has a SATA SSD, not an NVMe SSD, and around that time, Microsoft upgraded the thoroughness of their weekly Update Tuesday. Copilot suggested that I spend 50 bucks on a 1T NVMe stick, and with current memory prices, good luck with that.

Yeah, yeah and yeah again, I should just change over to Linux, but I run tax software that is Windows only, so there is that.

Anyone know anything about this or is Copilot funning me?

Those of us who have rubbed elbows with our fellow student-athletes in Intro to Astronomy should know that the visible surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere, and it is the first layer at which the gas density has gotten low enough that photons are no longer trapped and can fly off into space, giving what we observe as sunlight.

I thought this was a parody of one time Senator from Indiana and later Vice President:

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

On the Dark Side of the Sun, of course.

How about the Statue of Liberty frozen into the ice of Lake Mendota in Madison, WI?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.wisc.edu%2Fhistory-....

I propose a continuous adjustment of clocks between summer and winter to avoid the step changes between daylight and standard time.

I mean this whole business of mean solar time has us meandering about when the sun rises and sets anyway,