In my community, it seems the local, state, federal government and local utilities are all competing to shut down as much of roads as possible, so there’s always a bunch of weird diversions to traffic. An unfortunate side-effect of underinvestment in infrastructure until the need is absolutely dire.

Because the crews don’t get much work done in the winter, they tend to concentrate all their work on warmer months, which exacerbates the issue.

I remember the routes, too, but you don’t have random road congestion or construction that sometimes necessitates alternative routes? It’s like having a psychic friend that tells you when the most direct route is fucked.

Well, Israel is a country, not a group of people, nor is it explicitly a religion, despite having an official state religion.

To wit: If criticizing Israel is antisemitism, then is a criticism of Poland seen as anti-catholic? Are criticisms of Somalia seen as anti-Muslim? Denmark/Anti-Lutheran, Thailand/anti-buddhism, Turkey/anti-atheist?
The last one is a bit of a stretch, since Turkey is merely officially secular, and not explicitly atheist, but my point is that for the above named pairings, criticism of the state isn’t considered to be attacks against the religion.

It’s a bit silly to have an exception for just the one country, isn’t it?

It’s fun to be silly and the fediverse has a bit of a “ministry of silly walks” vibe to it. I hope that helps clear things up.

I just had this funny thought— so boomers adopted and settled into Facebook after millennials made it popular. And then everyone except for boomers stopped actively using it. It’s kind of their “retirement social media platform.”
Now you have TikTok, which the millennials flocked to after GenZ popularized it. Does this mean after Gen Z flees the platform that it’s just going to be the Facebook equivalent for millennials?

It’s like people forgot about that.

I guess I also want to add that when I go out, I’m always in a helmet, knee and elbow pads, and wrist guards.

You never quite know what’s going to happen out there —
A few years ago on a wide trail, someone in front of me panicked right as I was about to pass them and they moved directly into my path. I had to bail off the trail to try to “run off” my momentum, but they stepped more into the way and caught my skate with theirs just before I could get a foot down. I wound up in a semi-uncontrolled fall that saw my wrist guards taking the brunt of a tree I was going to dodge if I’d had my feet.
Last year on a freshly paved road, my wife let out blood curdling scream from behind me as we were bombing down a hill. I swung into a power slide to stop but instead of sliding, my wheels just kept traction and I suddenly found myself heading for a curb at about 20 mph with only a few feet to maneuver. It was bad, too. Curb, couple feet of grass, then broken and uneven sidewalk, followed by mangled and rusty metal fence. Clipped the curb and went down hard on my pads and helmet – cracked my helmet on the sidewalk. Walked away fine. (Buy good helmets and always replace your helmet after a crash.) My wife was fine. She hit a small rock and panicked. Didn’t even fall.

I know – same! I fall constantly on traditional skates.
My wife is the opposite. She can’t figure out in-line skates, but traditional skates just work for her.

In that instance. I’d probably drag a wheel, or use the alignment of my feet to slow myself down, paired with an occasional spin stop.

I’ve never really thought about it. I’m not a fancy skater – my skates do have brakes, so my technique isn’t such that I have to plan for never using them.

If I have the width I’ll slalom down hills to bleed speed - even doing little loops up the hill at the turn of each switchback to bleed off speed. If there’s not enough room to slow down, I might bomb though if it’s safe to do so (because that’s why roller blading is so fun, anyway). I might skate on one foot and drag a wheel behind or make my toes point toward each other slightly, just out of parallel - the greater the angle, the more drag the out of alignment wheels produce. I often tend to drag a wheel or use the brake, then spin to stop, before resuming.

There are other techniques for stopping or slowing down, but those are my go to’s.

I never learned to ride a bike and every attempt has been met with injuries as soon as I build a modicum of confidence. But I can rollerblade like nobody’s business, so I got that going for me.

Amen to that. I thought about having a serious look around, but I’d rather not deal with their nonsense.

Hitting the back button takes me back to the page I was visiting. An annoyance.

Disabling content blockers seems to prevent the behavior, but then you’ve disabled content blockers.

I experience similar broken site behavior from other online platforms, too. I suspect Shopify is trying to annoy users into not using adblockers.

Everything you said is valid, and in my experience mailings easily take a week to orchestrate.

If you have to send out 5,000 letters, you have to first print 5k letters — assuming the local water department already has a robust template in place, and it doesn’t wind up dragged on by reviews and approvals.

If they haven’t made generic prints to keep in stock, they have to have their own print facilities, or have an on-call printer capable of dropping all other work to deal with emergencies, or possibly taking on work outside of business hours.

Even then, it’s a minimum turnaround of a day. The mail has to go into the system, be sorted and sent to local post offices, then given to mail carriers. The few times I did direct mail, they estimated a minimum of 3 days to deliver, even when dropping off first thing in the morning and the addressee was in the same city.

Even if they managed to get next day delivery, they’d still have a 24h delay in which people could be drinking contaminated water.

Mirroring what others have said - at a nearby university that has (had? sigh) a large foreign student population, some folks actively feed the squirrels. For several weeks at the beginning of the school year, you could very easily spot new students by who was out taking photos and getting mobbed by these squirrels that are way, way too comfortable getting close to humans.

It’s funny what people notice. I have a friend who grew up in the American Southwest, and her wildlife culture shock when she moved away from there came from wild rabbits.
The Southwest is populated by jackrabbits, so after they encountered an eastern cottontail, they were genuinely concerned some malady had befallen it to cause it to have such small ears. She thought maybe someone was torturing the local wildlife and cutting off its ears.

Yup. You got it.

I bought a batch of business PC’s from a foundered business back in 2010 for cheap, to flip and sell on Craigslist. They were supposed to come wiped, but almost none of them did. I wiped ‘em/reinstalled the OS, but before I did, I got into a few of the user accounts and found that basically all the machines had been used for in the past few months was job hunting.

My first Linux issue was that it didn’t support the USB hub I had at the time that was just always plugged into the windows machine I was installing Linux onto. So in 2003, I took my bulky tower to a friends house and it booted on the first try after weeks of failures trying on my own at home.
I was both relieved, and incredibly annoyed.

My overactive imagination: They used a speargun designed to fire RJ-45 shaped bolts through walls, pulling high tensile strength networking cable with it.