Why does that doctor have a mullet?

1. The New Madrid fault is a slow beast, but not to be taken lightly. There are large lakes in that region that exist solely because of earthquakes changing the path of the Mississippi River.
2. I once drove through Cooter, Missouri on my way to a wedding in northwest Tennessee specifically to send my wife a cheeky postcard, and those motherfuckers didn’t postmark it until they’d carted it over to the next town with a larger post office. My disappointment was immeasurable and my day was ruined.

Bobby Morninghand

Pretty sure this is Jacksonville Florida, my hometown, and generally an accurate sense of of the vibes there.

I managed to get Debian with XFCE running permanently on a 6 year old Lenovo ChromeTab. It mostly works, but “touchscreen as a mouse” is clunky and the onscreen keyboard I use, “Onboard,” is utilitarian at best. As a low-distraction writing device paired with a mechanical keyboard and FocusWriter, it’s pretty cool. If anything, it’s a bit too decent a setup for that purpose, as the browser is usable and I left Wifi working.

Now to actually start using it… 🤣

Nope, but I did grow up around people who would hear that in a meeting and then absolutely want to use their new linguistic toy every chance they got, despite not at all analyzing even the half-layer deep that would be required to understand what using it implies about who you think you are (or your boss is).

You forgot the additional $3000 and five years to do enough projects to gain the skills to make a table your loved ones will allow in the house. 🤣

I haven’t “been Mormon” in decades, and the internet was likely a game changer, but there is a reason they get called a cult from time to time.

There is a powerful taboo against even reading, much less investigating, secular sources of history about the early church. If your friends seem to be true believing, then they likely do believe that Josiah Smith was a prophet, the same way mainstream Christians (and Mormons too, lol) believe a Judean rabble rouser came back to life after he got executed because he was divine.

If they’re intellectually honest, they would probably acknowledge that the “facts” exist but would say they’re incomplete or intentionally shaded, and that their faith is not dependent on contemporary non-Mormon accounts. They will roll out quotes from the leadership among the lines of “doubt your doubts” or that faith does not require perfect knowledge.

Then, factor in that the social aspects of church life are pretty all encompassing and that church discipline is very real within the top-down organization they have, and there are powerful psychological motivations not to dig too deeply.

They do, or at least they are very much supposed to. It’s the interplay between their 7th and 9th articles of faith. To follow on that, they (are supposed to) believe that literally every president of the LDS church is/was a prophet.

The direct line to God is super helpful when, for instance, the whole operation is gonna be shut down due to the feds finally having enough presence in the region to enforce polygamy laws, or when they’re going to exclude your flagship university from the student loan program because you said that black men couldn’t hold any leadership positions due to being descended from the wrong dudes in Old Testament times.

It’s close, though. IIRC, you can’t say the same thing about Miami.

Even moreso this time:

Batra, who has spent nearly half her life working in immigration courts, stopped working for the government’s side in immigration proceedings—instead helping only the immigrants seeking status—after seeing the conditions in detention facilities and how detained people were treated.

“I was in an extraordinary personal crisis because I didn’t want to be vaccinated. At the same time I certainly didn’t want to let my team down at the Olympic Games.”

Barely one layer deep, there’s an almost impressive level of IDGAF energy here: “You see, the thing is, somebody wanted me to do a thing I didn’t want to do, but I had this other thing that I did want to do, so being the type of person that I am, I lied about the first thing and it all worked out for me.”

Having attended several red state universities, I chose to take it as a statement that alongside the ubiquitous plaza preachers, who are never affiliated with the school and are generally no one’s favorite campus characters, there’s also plenty of standard college silliness and shenanigans. Apart from the big blue cities, the college towns of the south are generally the most educated and forward thinking enclaves of their red states, hence the huge pressure campaigns from their governors to being the schools themselves to heel.

In addition to FecEx and Dominos, there’s other restaurants, Amazon, UPS, newer Chinese-owned final-mile carriers, Uber including Eats/Pets/Courier/etc., Lyft, Doordash, medical couriers, legal couriers, etc. etc. It’s tougher outside the cities, and it’s all kind of a neo-Victorian dystopia of poor wages and no support, but if what’s you actually want to do, “driving places cuz other people can’t or won’t” is a very doable job-description in the US. Just make sure you’re factoring in car expenses if you do the gig-based ones.

Well, spam, egg, sausage, and spam – that’s not got much spam in it.

There was some fun to this in the early going, but eventually it’s just a yawn-fest of money-whipping the lower leagues and cross-promoting whatever else Ryan is invested in.

Generally yes, but what are called mainline Episcopalians are “in communion” with the Church of England, so they’re kinda sorta Anglican. If an observant Anglican were to want to attend church in the US, that’s who they would look up.

Some red-state suburban churches broke off a few years back and are in communion with one of the churches in Africa that also broke off because they didn’t like the ladies and the gays and whatnot. Very classy of them all.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday that Iran’s 10-point proposal was “literally thrown in the garbage by President Trump.” Trump initially called a plan from Iran “workable.”

Even for their own awful sakes’, they need to take grampa’s socials away.

Assuming all is above board, the main concern I have is if it’s worth that much to them, wouldn’t it be worth that much to me?

Yes, and then some. It sounds like you’d do better randomly selecting a realtor to throw it up on MLS “as-is,” and even better if you followed the usual, admittedly annoying, process. These companies are not literal “risking jail” scams, but they’re not your friends either, and they will not be offering you anywhere close to market value. My sister and I looked into a couple of them when our dad passed, and the offers were far below what we pulled with a Realtor, even priced to move and with a kind of costly “turnkey” arrangement where they arranged cleanup and inspections.