The last time that I ate fast food was a few years ago and it was McDonald’s oatmeal – it seemed they could not find a way to mess that up. Otherwise, fast food is just over-priced low-quality preservative-filled garbage food that will leave you hungry in a couple of hours. My partner and I usually stop at a grocery store, Kwick Trip, or a non-drive through restaurant if we need to get food while traveling. The price is about the same (sometimes less) and the food quality is much better if you choose your stop carefully. Fully agree that the C-suite of these companies need to eat their food regularly. The fact is that fast food is engineered to make you want more for the lowest cost to the company possible.

Metric - so much easier to understand and work with. I personally hate the imperial system, but I know it because of where I grew up. I would shed no tears if the U.S. switched to metric tomorrow.

The only time that I use Amazon now is when I cannot get the item that I need either in the city that I live in first or another online retailer. My Amazon spending as decreased significantly since I left prime in January of 2025.

So, your perspective is that pregnant people who have life-threatening medical conditions arising from their pregnancy through no fault of their own should have to pay out-of-pocket? Additionally, in it sounds like you feel that premature births due to life-threatening medical issues that the mother is suffering from and subsequent aftercare for the mother and premature infant should also be paid for out of pocket?

I am well aware of that. This couple’s experience was in parallel to what occurs all the time with people who have insurance in the U.S.

Ah yes, the United States – Don’t get sick or you will have to fight tooth and nail to get your insurance company to pay for necessary medical care. This is a story heard over and over again stateside. If the U.S. was truly the best place in the world to live, this would simply not happen. As a person who has worked in healthcare in the U.S. for over 15 years, I feel this in my bones. I am glad you could get legal help and have the right outcome based on what you paid for. I would love nothing more than to see everyone who comes to the U.S. receive medical care appropriately – Nobody asks to get sick :(

Yes, true on all points. Many people do not recognize when they are being sold to and also when they are being manipulated to spend more. I personally will never enter a store without a list of what I need. Then as I shop if I do see something that looks worth trying, I weigh whether it is worth the price. I am the exception rather than the rule though as a shopper :) I personally do not enjoy shopping, so I like to complete my list and get out.

Hahaha! I will tell you, my own mother (70s) buys rotisserie chicken because it is cheaper per pound of meat than a raw chicken and is just as good or better than if she bought the same size chicken and roast it herself in her own oven. Something to know about my mom is she is frugal. She coupons, and will always seek out the best deal. Whoever wrote that WSJ article truly has no idea what it is to budget is what I see. Additionally, some of the neighborhoods that were listed, are some of the richest parts of NY, so of course people who have money will also go out and buy easy meals rather than spend time cooking.

No. I pay taxes while using none of those programs and those programs are there to give people a hand up who are struggling. You deserve a roof over your head, a warm & safe place to sleep, clean water to drink and bathe, and decent food to eat. You are human and trying to meet your basic needs. People who have more can support those who have less. Simple.

Yet another reason to avoid Meta platforms.

Yes, generally you can. I run Linux Mint and can count the number of times that I HAD to use the terminal. There are plenty of times where I choose to use the terminal because it’s faster though.

My sole use for AI has been troubleshooting computer issues. I will say that AI often does a better job than first line tech support when prompted correctly. That being said, I am a tech nerd who knows more than the average computer user that is not in the IT industry. There will always be a reason for human tech support tiers for people who cannot prompt AI correctly, but still need their stuff to work. I personally don’t want AI invading my life any further.

I swear racists are some of the worst low-IQ people I have ever met. What did this guy think was going to happen?! This is how all hate-spreading racist and/or fascists should be treated. Good Job Minneapolis!!

My husband is using the non-LTS version of Ubuntu 25.10 with a 9060XT and has driver support and is happy with it. Mint would not support his card at this time according to our research. Bazzite was just a disaster for him – lots of issues with not sleeping and the immutable distro made it hard to do what he wanted since he uses spinning hard drives for storage and wanted them to automount as well as managing a huge music library housed on a NAS. I think some of the issues were with his older B450 motherboard despite having updated the bios to the latest stable version. I am on older hardware and love Mint. I feel at home on the Debian-based distros though. Depends on your use case and how much you’re willing to learn. Protip: Before you leave your friend alone with the system, make sure that it will do normal system things properly – enter sleep, wake from sleep, reboot, etc since these are the things that will drive an average person insane when they don’t function correctly.

This garbage makes me so glad I switched to Linux Mint. Gaming has been just fine. Sure there have been a few hurdles, but they were well-worth spending time on as Microsoft continues this foolishness.

I can confirm. I learned real quick in college working a part-time help desk job for the University that I attended that I under no circumstances want to work in IT at any level or program because they are both thankless and stressful career paths – when tech works, then why do we need you and when it breaks, why do we have you is all the “leaders” ask in many companies because they do not have a basic understanding how any of the IT systems function, hardware lifecycles, etc.

I’ve found KDE connect to work better than the native Windows Phone Connect when I was using windows. I switched to Linux Mint a few weeks ago since I primarily value stability.

My partner and I keep our membership for TP, Kleenx, Paper towels, Coffee, shelf-stable snack items, and then miscellaneous stuff we see in store or online. We keep the cheapest membership and it is worth it.

I just jumped ship from Windows 11 about a week ago. I have not logged back into my Windows dual boot since because I have not yet found a reason to. Beware of dual booting since Windows updates sometimes hose the boot manager for your Linux partitions. I chose Linux Mint Cinnamon because I wanted a similar look/feel to windows as well as favoring longer and more stable support. Mint is also a good option for Linux noobs (like us!) since it does a lot for you. I play both Steam and GOG games. Steam was easy, just go to to the software manager and download steam then install. GOG was a little different, since they don’t seem to have a Linux version of GOG Galaxy. So, I tried both Lutris and Heroic game launchers (available in the software manager) and connected my GOG account. I have been able to get everything to play so far. I cannot speak to video editing software or programming. Use the online version of Microsoft apps if you need them, otherwise, Libre Office is preinstalled with software that does everything the Microsoft Office suite does. Since I run several storage drives in my system that I wanted to auto-mount on boot, I did have to edit my fstab file to make this happen - this was the only thing I needed to do through the terminal and there were some great videos showing what to do, then you just apply what is shown in those videos to your system setup. I really didn’t have to do this, Mint is great that i could just click the drive and it would mount it, but if my Steam opened before it was mounted, then it didn’t know where my game storage was and I had to restart Steam for it to pick up my game drive. Again, very little terminal usage was needed on my side. My printer just works, wireless, bluetooth headset works, etc. So far, I say thumbs up for Linux Mint Cinnamon!! If I go a month without hitting a wall and logging into my Windows install, I will probably just totally remove my Windows installation.

Kiwis and bananas.