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.

A chain is 66 feet long.

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.

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.

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.

• Embrace
• Extend
• Extinguish

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

Don’t get it twisted. I’m not taking the question any more seriously than anyone else in this thread (including you).

The flaw in the logic of your plan didn’t require any serious analysis. If you think it did, then “Thanks for the compliment, I guess.”

No, the question was “How do you [prove that your from the future]?” You laid out a scheme, which you are likely not capable of doing, especially because you missed the bit about the terrifying complexity of that particular proof.

Wiles’ demonstration of Fermat’s simply stated proposition is more than a hundred pages of complex math involving such esoteric concepts as Selmer groups, Hecke algebras, elliptic curves, modular forms, Euler systems and Galois representations. 350 Years Later, Fermat’s Last Theorem Finally Proved

*Legume

Classic Microsoft Business Strategy

• Embrace
• Extend
• Extinguish

Key lime juice also makes for a very interesting margarita.

Was that supposed to be coherent or relevant? Are you lost?

If you’re going to be snarky about units, at least get the significant digits correct. The infographic gives 100°F as the temperature. If I had to guess I’d say that wherever that number came from, it’s precision is much less than a whole °F, but for simplicity let’s just say that the precision is a whole number, no decimal places in the precision. At that precision 37.5°C and 38°C are both also 100°F. There are 9/5 °F for every °C after all. If you’d said 37.7°C I wouldn’t have even commented. But that was one decimal place too far (and being too lazy to find the ° symbol or type out degrees).

You’re all probably saying, “Who cares? Why do you care? Aren’t you just being any even more annoying pedant?”

I do. I don’t know. Probably.

But, if you’re going to be a smartass, you better at least try to be smart about it.