You’re right, and I was little ambiguous and unclear what I meant by formality.

By formality, I was suggesting that the US government spends a lot of time hand wringing about the budget, delaying for compromises, and then exceeds the budget anyway in certain areas.

They intentionally hold it hostage for compromises on other things we don’t actually want.

The budget is probably more a formality anyway.

I brought you into this world, so I can take you out of it! GO BRUSH YOUR TEETH!

Join Toastmasters and they will (quite kindly) help you rid yourself of this in a few weeks.

I’ve been there a few times over the past decade. It’s a major metro city with substantial tourism. The people there are just like people anywhere else in the world in that if you treat them with respect, they will reflect that; and if you treat them like smug shit, they will also treat you like smug shit.

The semi-popular reputation Paris has is unearned and based in prejudice.

But security be off committing their own crimes…

I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won’t.

–Mark Twain

“Stand of the tide” is offered by Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_tide?wprov=sfti1#Misconceptions

I used PiHole for a long time, then graduated to self-hosting a VPN so I could get as-blocking when away from my home network.

Ultimately I ended up using just AdGuard DNS via the DNS profile for iOS, and hard code the DNS into my home routers.

There might be a better setup, but this simple deployment takes care of 98% of ads.

If you’re on MacOS, you can run networkquality via crontab and append the results to a text file. I did this for a few months on a congested network to identify ideal times to try and do schoolwork.

E: A word.

Mi parolas iomete da Esperanton, y yo hablo tambien un poquito Español, pero medyo fluent ako sa Pilipino, ang wika taga sa Pilipinas. I’m pretty good at English, too.

Lemmy.radio here!

This is the real value of agglutinative languages. We sort of try it in English but it doesn’t always work. I don’t speak German, but I recognize the word roots.

When I lived in central Alaska, I saw summertime temps of up to 90F (32C) and wintertime temps down to -55F (-48C).

Summer was amazing; endless sunlight. 23.5 hours during the Summer Solstice. Want to play sports at 2am in broad daylight? Easy.

Winter was also amazing, but with the serious understanding that venturing outside without the proper life safety equipment (proper cold weather gear and communication with someone about your whereabouts and route), you could die in about an hour. But those Auroras… a stunning, and gorgeous midnight sentinel dancing above your head—absolutely worth it.

I miss it.

By the time one becomes a senator, they are experts at fleecing money. He is disappointed because he knows all the lost revenue he could have had if he only had known about the data beforehand.

The place I worked at used Soma.fm

59!

And the skills to use it; they’re not plug-and-play. Get you license and get on the air to hone those skills.

A buddy experienced the exact same issue as OP just the other day. We ran diagnostics and it turns out his computer was running deprecated DNS IPs for a popular ad-blocking DNS provider.

It was DNS.

You know the pop culture reference we use for someone who has misplaced their cellphone, “have you tried calling it?”

This will sound absolutely silly, but one day a friend was looking for some trinket which wasn’t a phone, and playfully I asked, “Have you tried calling it?”

They doubled down and started actually calling it, “Trinket… trinket, where are you?”

And wouldn’t you know it, within minutes they found it, and so far this has worked about 99.9% of the time.

So like using a flashlight focuses your eyes, having someone call it out loud kind of quiets the mind, too. It’s wild.