I do have all of those in my cabinet, but wasn’t aware they would help with falling/staying asleep. Def agree about not becoming dependent on melatonin supplements; I try not to over-do it, but sometimes when I have important stuff to do first thing in the morning, I don’t want risk being a zombie from poor/no sleep.

Story of my life lol.

I’ve been taking melatonin gummies before bed, and those seem to be helping.

Lol, yeah, they definitely don’t have to suck. When they first put those in, they were actually pretty fantastic. But Kroger Corporate said “not on my watch” and cranked up the security to obscene levels and made them horrible. There’s just not another decent grocery story close to me, so I’m stuck. Yay food deserts 🫠

It absolutely is. Almost like it was designed to be as frustrating as possible for some kind of social experiment.

Because the bagging area is like 9 feet away at the end of the conveyor.

They’re basically reversed from what the cashiers use where you load your items onto the conveyor to be scanned. On these, the scanning platform is a little, tiny table on one end where you scan your items and then you put it on the conveyor that takes it to the bagging area.

When the belt gets a little less than half full, the machine makes you go bag some stuff.

All the while, my groceries are melting lol.

Edit: Like this

The other style where you can bag as you go (pictured below) also make you wait 2-3 seconds, but if you’re scanning a lot of little items (seasoning packets, yeast, those little water flavor enhancer things, etc), they don’t trigger the scale and you have to wait for it to realize you’re not stealing or something. Either way, they’re not suitable to scan a whole cart of groceries. Like, if you fill up the carousel and try to set some bags down until you can put them in your cart, it’ll call for backup and you have to wait for the single cashier that’s attending to 12-15 of these abominations to come and verify you’re not trying to steal.

I would LOVE to use the self checkouts since the grocery chain near me has been replacing all the human cashiers. But the damn things treat you like a thief, make you wait 2-3 seconds between scans, you can’t scan your whole cart of groceries without going down and bagging them when the conveyor gets more than half full, etc.

They’re horrible. I just wait in line for one of the human cashiers every time.

I liked most of it, TBH.

S3 was kind of weak for me, but it wasn’t terrible. The finales, though, ugh!

Oh, that’s handy.

With present tech, I don’t think so unless the area where you’re being tracked is full of equipment that can read the tags (think big RFID readers like you see on the exits of stores). Unless the tracker implant is fairly large to be able to contain/harvest power to power their own active transmitter. Then it would probably be noticeable or at least uncomfortable.

I’m basing this on the fact that we chip pets with passive tags, and those don’t seem to suffer any kind of rejection/infection.

Lol, good luck! (and I mean that). Hopefully their county is more receptive to the well-being of its residents than my state is.

There’s an Air Force Base not too far from my house. The volume from it was always tolerable, and I knew that when I bought the place. A little under a year later, the state is all giddy about it being selected as a live refueling site.

Live refueling is where aircraft don’t have to shut down their engines to refuel. Since then, it’s been a constant, all-hours drone of obnoxiously loud aircraft (Ospreys are the fucking worst). The governor basically said “we realize this might impact people in the surrounding areas, but fuck you, deal with it”.

I just started the last season of it yesterday.

That’s a stupid question! (Hopefully my display name and or avatar show up to put that into context)

But my hot take is that I actually liked the second season of Discovery that everyone else on the planet seems to hate.

Oh no :(

I learned so much from him over the years. Used to visit HowStuffWorks almost religiously.

Is there a TL;DW for that?

When I think of mechanical batteries, I think of flywheel energy storage. Those can deliver a lot of power, but for a short period of time. Is this describing something similar, or something more novel?

Short answer: Yes

Long Answer: Good lord. Yes, it would be something a bad person would do.

In effect, any gains you make will be blood money. Have fun with that on your conscience.

Eventually, “our” pretty much always becomes “my”.

Why? I’m not clear, but power corrupts regardless of the political system surrounding it (e.g. look at pretty much any HOA).

Good deal!

Lol, I probably could have mulled it over for months and still come up with less than half of those.

Look at you. I was struggling to come up with just one non-obvious one.

Well done.

Put on a blindfold and throw a dart? I’ve given up expecting any kind of logical consistency out of that group.

I’d have no problem banning the disposable ones as they’re a scourge, but the juice is where I have the issue. Also, yeah, I do miss my re-buildable rigs, but no shops sell the parts anymore; it’s all the packaged / disposable coils which I hate but grudgingly use.