Otherbarry

When you carry it by the handle it’s so long that it may scratch the ground

Always assumed that’s a short person problem. Source: Am short, same thing happens to me.

Maybe there’s a better way to deal with that but what I usually do is add a knot to each handle so the handles are shorter, that way the bags are higher from the ground.

That’s when using re-usable grocery bags/totes with long handles.

UPS/FedEx has sucked for a while now, rarely are they cheaper than USPS

Well yeah, USPS should be cheaper. They tend to get bailout money from the U.S. government due to operating at a loss e.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-50-billion-postal-service-relief-bill-2022-03-08 , UPS/FedEx on the other hand just raise their rates / change services to keep their shareholders happy.

In theory if the USPS was allowed to increase rates as much as any private company then they would be as expensive, if not more, vs UPS/FedEx.

That sounds pretty typical, didn’t know they used to not charge for a residential pickup.

To be fair businesses that have a FedEx / UPS account and have regularly scheduled pickups do get charged for that. It’s one of the items buried in the bills you get from them every week (can’t remember offhand if the pickup fee is a weekly or monthly charge). Maybe the high volume businesses get it for free, not too sure.

I’d expect USPS to do the same but don’t have any direct experience with their billing.

Where I work we have a similar situation, we sometimes have prepaid FedEx labels but no regular FedEx pickup so that has to be arranged differently on our end. We could pay FedEx their pickup fee if we wanted but we don’t ship FedEx every day so it’s kind of a waste of money, and the FedEx drivers would be coming and going without picking anything up most days.

Same here, back in the 90’s had multiple year’s worth of Nintendo Power magazines & later on Game Pro as well. I do remember seeing Game Informer around & sometimes bought those issues but never really got into them. I can’t even think of any friends that had Game Informer magazines back in those days.

TBH I’m kind of surprised at those numbers /u/GammaGames@beehaw.org posted, maybe Game Informer was a bigger thing outside of the northeast U.S. where I was.

Yes of course, I meant as a general idea of what you’d aim to do lacking any other information beyond the fact that the bomb itself fell in the local downtown area (going by the post itself).

Thing is if a bomb dropped that close most people will not know what the scale of the bomb was, what the design was, how far exactly they were from the blast radius, whether it’s ground / atmospheric, wind direction, all that stuff. In that short amount of time you’d just need to run into the nearest still-standing shelter & figure things out from there.

Hopefully with some extreme luck the bomb would fall just as you were walking/driving past your nearest fallout shelter and can easily get in. Or you’re a prepper and aren’t far from your homemade bunker with supplies, radio, and whatnot.

Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city.

If it’s that close you then essentially you’ll need to decide whether to die quick or slow :/

If you’re actually planning on surviving you’d need to stay in an underground bunker or something similar for at least 3-5 weeks to be safe enough to travel outside (and we’re assuming you have clean sources of food/water, bathroom, etc, during that time). If you make it that far then afterwards you’d likely want to go outside & get as far away from the radiation zone as possible.

Coincidentally the basement of my work building actually has a fallout shelter sign from back in the day so the basement might survive a blast but I don’t see how I’d make it 3-5 weeks without being extra prepared for that beforehand.

the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.

Yeah don’t bother doing that. All that will accomplish is them gathering even more information on you, they rarely/never actually unlock your account & let you use it again. You’ve been permanently blacklisted on their service, just move on. And honestly you don’t need Paypal anyway.

Similar stupid thing happened to me too I think about 10-15 years ago, I was using virtual credit card numbers that my credit card company was generating for me & Paypal thought that was suspicious enough to close my account & permanently blacklist me LOL.

Fun fact: I did learn over the years that I can temporarily create new Paypal account(s) as long as I don’t use the same mailing/billing addresses or credit cards/bank accounts. But then it’s just a waiting game, they usually figure it out eventually and close the Paypal account yet again.

I’ve been fully onsite basically the whole time, including during the pandemic, for me it’s been fine. Gets me out of my tiny studio apartment and keeps my work life at work. Also free A/C / heating at work.

The commute is also part of that decision making - for me the commute is a long walk outside to/from work every day. All that walking around outside sort of levels me out mentally & gets rid of any stress I had, not to mention the exercise.

Wow that’s a useful list of things they accept for recycling. It’s a total PITA to recycle anything electronics related in my city especially stuff like computers & hard drives let alone cables. That may end up getting me inside a Staples more often than once every year or two so maybe their plan is going to work.

Perhaps you’re overthinking this? In the house you can go barefoot, keep socks on, and/or wear slippers/loafers.

When you go outside you put on shoes.

So yes most people would have a shoe rack or just keep their shoes placed near the door. If you have multiple doors sure you can consider keeping extra pairs of shoes there or some sort of in between like outdoor slippers/something for when you just need to go check the mail or whatever.

Speaking of bicycles, as a teenager I was riding my bike through the neighborhood & then started looking at all the pretty clouds up in the sky that day. Then as I lowered my line of sight back to the road I saw the parked car I was riding directly into and slammed right into it. Not sure if anyone witnessed the event but it must have looked cartoonish, or at least something straight out of Jackass.

Luckily got out of that with just a few scrapes and bruises, and a lesson to always watch the road.

A lot of people’s dogs are trained to wait inside at the door for their paws to get wiped down before walking into the house/apartment/whatever.

But sure, if the dog did go walk outside with boots/shoes then yeah their owner would obviously take them off once they were back inside.

The one I was at just gathered everyone together to let them know layoffs were coming. I was also part of the tech support for the office so I stayed a bit longer to help them wind down systems, wipe hard drives, that sort of thing. The owners were pretty nice/upfront about the whole thing, basically gave everyone something like 2-3 month’s pay upfront & told everyone the business is winding down.

The owners did try to find a buyer for the tech & maybe break even or recoup some losses but that didn’t pan out. AFAIK the investors just took it as a loss, it’s a startup and sometimes startups fail.

We weren’t in fancy offices or anything like you see in movies & whatnot, it was more like working in an industrial warehouse converted for office use. Like the kind of building that doesn’t provide hot water unless you install water heaters yourself, no central AC, that sort of thing. We had one final party & trashed the space on the way out LOL. I think they just walked away from the lease, it’s not like there was any $$ coming in to pay it anymore.

In the last few months after moving out a few remaining people (the owners, tech support, etc.) worked from within the investment group’s own offices (they gave us a spare room to work in). Mostly to deal with the old systems/hard drives & prep the existing data in case the owners found a buyer.

I don’t think there is an earlier option for less money

Sure there is, go to the SSA website itself the earliest eligibility is 62

https://www.ssa.gov/retirement/eligibility

You can also register yourself there & see your own estimates based on when you expect to claim social security.

Could you bear to wait eight more years for the 100%? You’ve already waited 62 years! What’s 8 more?

It’s easy to think that way in your younger years. That’s a much more difficult request for people actually in their 60’s, lots of people make it to that age with broken down bodies, various illnesses/prescriptions/whatnot & probably can’t see themselves continuing to do the work thing throughout their 60’s let alone 70.

There’s also the problem of holding down a job at that age, ageism exists in a lot of industries so a lot of these people are first in line for layoffs / taking a massive pay cut from their earlier jobs vs being a Walmart greeter or just being unemployed.

But sure… in theory if you manage to stay fit & healthy well into your old age & are able to hold onto your normal job then sure working into your 70’s or more could be plausible. People probably worry less about that stuff once they’re higher up on the corporate ladder - though at that point they should already have fat 401K plans & other investments so the social security aspect becomes less relevant.

That’s annoying… even doing a Startup Repair with the Windows 11 USB doesn’t repair it and get it starting up? Thinking on a normal install all this should have already worked, makes me wonder if Bitlocker is somehow a culprit here.

But I guess worst case is to back up your data, do a fresh install of Windows 11, restore your data/re-install applications & move on. At some point that’s going to end up being faster than troubleshooting failed cloning attempts.

That sort of looks right, did the old SSD have the same configuration? According to that partition list you also have an extra partition, maybe a Lenovo recovery/repair partition or something bitlocker related. Your old SSD probably has p1 or p2 a bootable.

Overall you don’t need to do it this way but what I’d do roughly speaking…

1. Format the new SSD, make sure the partition style is the same as old SSD (GPT vs MBR) - Maybe Clonezilla already takes care of that? I can’t remember offhand
2. Note which partition is active/bootable on the old SSD
3. Use Clonezilla to clone the whole drive, all partitions
4. Make sure the newly cloned SSD has the correct active/bootable partition
5. Go into your BIOS, make sure the newly installed drive is still the first/second boot device (on a laptop it should be, in theory) - second if you want to keep your USB drives booting first for troubleshooting
6. Try to boot up - If Windows still isn’t coming up then boot into your Windows 11 USB and try to “repair” the Windows install e.g. instead of installing try to go into Repair, Troubleshoot, Startup Repair

PS - Probably not what you want but worst case you can do a clean install of Windows 11 & then manually copy over your data (back up first!). Maybe not ideal but at least you’ll have a fresh install to work with.

What I’d do is double-check which partition is marked as bootable/active on the old SSD, then after cloning make sure the new SSD is configured the same. On a Windows 10/11 boot USB you can usually go into the command line & run diskpart to do those things, alternatively you do the same in Linux if you’re already using that instead.

I don’t think cloning disks would necessarily mark any partitions as bootable so that’s an extra step you may need to do.

Clonezilla typically works well enough when you’re doing the entire drive though I’ve never needed to tinker with bitlocker so can’t say if that changes things.

Eh it’s not terrible but I usually only buy those burgers when they’re on sale. But I get it, sometimes you want to splurge a bit.

That ancient tool isn’t for SSDs. But if you want OP’s SSD to die quicker it’s a good suggestion :P