Grocery clerks are some of the few people I get to have conversations with these days. You're welcome!

Walmart closed all their Portland stores, apparently because the amount of shoplifting made them unprofitable. Store are getting hard to find in most downtowns. Rural stores have a different problem: they charge twice as much for groceries!

We are down to basically two grocery store companies: Kroger and Safeway-Albertsons. On the bright side, my Fred Meyer loyalty card now works in every Kroger grocery store in the country! And my Safeway loyalty works at Chevron -- I haven't figured that one out yet.

Yes, places like Walmart and Target apparently use 3rd parties to stock their shelves... which results in items being placed on shelves that the store computer cannot lookup the bar code for! If you can't find a similar item at the same price to scan ahead, your own choice is to hand that to the clerk watching you and tell them to take it because it wan't f-ing scan!

Yeah, somebody used my snail-mail address for his SiriusXM. I don't own a BMW, but now I get a lot of mail addressed to the BWM owner at that address. So... I canceled his SiriusXM for him. I wonder if he noticed...

That's exactly the problem: many websites apparently just let you enter an email address and DO NOT confirm it!

about Uber itself here. But as some minor trivia about Manchester: the "Man" comes from "Mamm", meaning "breast", referencing a small breast-shaped hill that used to be located in what's now the Castlewood district (it's since been lost).

The name of the city basically means "Tit Fort".

Yes, but that's not a legal argument.

EGS is so shittily coded that it refuses to use anything but your discrete GPU on a laptop that has one. So you HAVE to force-close it if you don't want your laptop to fail to sleep properly.

"We made it faster, and we let the AI load it with Chinese spyware!"

... astonishingly clunky on my machine too. Don't think you need vibe coding to fix that though. Perhaps a senior or two who are better at setting the right priorities for the software.

When the US was attacked, we sent our children to die in one of your foreign wars.

When WE were attacked, the largest war in the continent since World War II, you abandoned us - even witholding things that cost you *literally nothing*, like intel to help intercept drones and missiles targeting civilians - and switched to instead threatening to attack us as well, helping pick us apart piece by piece.

  Do not act surprised when you get seen as duplicitous snakes and we take action to separate ourselves from your levers of pressure.

This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.

Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.

I see no evidence that BeauHD isn't an AI in the first place. If he is, he's a particularly stupid bot...

I use my gmail address to log into many apps, so they know my phone number. The problem is that some stranger with a similar name keeps using my gmail address to create accounts. So when I creating an account for a DoorDash pickup today, the app decided I was Elizabeth H, and my food was labeled Elizabeth H, and the guy at the counter argued that the old cis male in front of him didn't really look like an Elizabeth... I had the same problem with my Best Buy account, I can't use my gmail address to login to that because Elizabeth already has her account linked to my email address. Unfortunately, she hasn't left a credit card active for that account. One time someone no Etsy used my email address and was foolish enough to leave her credit card attached. So she received a surprise: poop soap delivered to her door! The data collectors can figure out a lot about you by aggregating data from multiple sources, so they do know your phone number, and can link it indirectly to you email.