Christmas dinner for my immediate family almost $500. That was pretty much dinner and our favorite appetizers but does not count the liquor and wine. This was just me, my ex, five kids, a daughter in law and grandchild. I can see getting to 3k pretty fast.

How did you spend $500 on dinner for 9 people? I hosted Christmas dinner for my family with about 10 adults and 10 kids, and it cost at most $200 divided between 5 families, alcohol included.

Dinner for twenty people at $200 is farcical in the US unless your family owns a farm or something. Going to need more details because I'm inclined to say that's bullshit.

Beer and liquor alone would blow past that figure.

No farm is needed. It's not that hard. I spent about: $25 on a chicken dish (chicken from Costco + ingredients), $15 for baked mac & cheese (ingredients from Meijer), $20 on ciders, $40 on 2 bottles of Cherry Republic wine. The other family members: $20 on raw vegetables and cheese platter; $20 on fruit; $10 potato dish; $10 vegetable dish; $15 on dessert; $15 on salad. Oh and $2 on juice boxes for the little kids (~4 from a juice box 40 pack from Costco). I'm estimating what the others spent, but that's what it would cost me to make the same dishes. That totals to $192.

"host" implies in your home, not in a restaurant.

If your version of hosting is "let's outsource it and just open the wallet", then, yes, sure, you can spend a lot of money. It ain't hosting, though. You failed the "what if I just replaced you with a bank account" test.

Yes, I know what hosting is and $200 for that many people is still farcical.

I bet you are the life of the party. Seriously though, what makes you write that so matter of factly?

I just wish someone would make a first person version of AMFV. It would need to be a really different game to stay true to AMFV but I think it could revolve around not getting shut down by the bureaucrats.

I like that it is a well maintained unix like environment with full on vendor support. Since the pi 5 performance has been good enough for everything I do and the 400 is still my go-to when I need an extra machine for something. Given that, there is almost no way I will buy one but if I didn't already have a pi 5 workstation I probably would.

I use it to maintain our product catalog at work. The server does the final rendering of the complete document but as a page is getting edited the preview is getting rendered in the browser. Back to what everyone is saying, this isn't important enough to move the needle for people making these decisions.

When I was in high school I could hold my breath all the way through comfortably numb. None of my friends could even come close. My technique was to breath in and out real fast until I felt tingly.

Which is dangerous and should not be done that way, see my other comment here. Doing it that way masks the signals you get, drastically increasing the chances of blacking out.

Yep, this is it exactly. When I was young TV, including HBO, would go off the air at night. You could not have hours of fun playing an Atari. Having fun at home was cards and board games. Late night fun . . . well that will probably never change.

I would say shut up and take my money but they don't want my money.

Omega has been doing an "indirect impulse" escapement for decades now. And they actually sell their watches to people.

When my son was six he found a girly magazine at a friends house and was sneaking away to look at it. When my wife caught him she told him the magazine was bad and he should not be looking at it. His simple reply was "But I like it Mom."

Even if Unix is bad, I like it.

I met a lot of folks playing TT and the method that I used most was to jump for numbers and the first letter of speed chat was the letter. Adults and older teens picked up on it and kids did not so it worked out well.

I played some TT rewritten a couple of years back and everyone can just chat away. My opinion is that restricted chat was better.