spaghettiwestern

Prices in Canada and Mexico didn't increase anywhere near this much even at the height of the pandemic.

Maybe Bird Flu is refusing to cross international borders. Or maybe U.S. monopolies no longer need to even pretend to compete and the producers are raking in record profits.

And nothing of value was lost.

I rented a car in Canada a few weeks ago and it required a lengthy argument with their staff to get written proof that the car was returned without damage. I'm done with Hertz too.

Return-to-Work

Blatant propaganda in a news headline continuing throughout the article. These people are already working. It's "Return-to-Office"

Further down In the article.

People would rather stay home.

People would rather work from home.

Propaganda is rarely so obvious.

Magats will blame Biden and the MSM won't say a word.

Why don't you enlighten us with your insight?

That didn’t happen in 4 months though.

I think a tipping point has been reached.

We were in Las Vegas a couple of months ago and the prices were beyond belief. Two pastries and a bottle of water at the Bellagio were $27. Ferris wheel tickets were $30 each. A movie at the Sphere was $95. The food, even at highly rated restaurants wasn't all that good while still being very expensive. We're happy to spend more while on vacation, but there is no way this place is worth anywhere near what they are charging.

Las Vegas is now a prime example of enshittification. The Bellagio's fountain show has been shortened to 6 minutes and is a shadow of the previously impressive show. They've removed the lighting from their famous Chihuli glass ceiling. The city and the hotels have removed all public seating so you can't just wander around without spending hours on your feet or visiting one of those expensive, mediocre restaurants. (The Venetian was a welcome exception to this.)

Las Vegas used to be a fun place to do a bit of gambling while enjoying lots of other activities without being fleeced. Not anymore.

I have everything route through the tunnel and my router. Along with allowing instant access to everything I self-host and my home server through VNC, it allows me to use Adguard Home for phone DNS lookups no matter where I am. Theoretically my cell carrier should no longer be able to see any of my Internet traffic which I consider an added bonus. I've found no downside except some weirdness from Google if I'm out of the country for an extended period.

I self-host various applications and have been really happy with Wireguard. After watching just how hard my firewall gets hammered when I have any detectable open ports I finally shut down everything else. The WG protocol is designed to be as silent as possible and doesn't respond to remote traffic unless it receives the correct key, and the open WG port is difficult to detect when the firewall is configured correctly.

Everything - SSH, HTTP, VNC and any other protocol it must first go through my WG tunnel and running it on an OpenWRT router instead of a server means if the router is working, WG is working. Using Tasker on Android automatically brings the tunnel up whenever I leave my house and makes everything in my home instantly accessible no matter what I'm doing.

Another thing to consider is there's no corporation involved with WG use. So many companies have suddenly decided to start charging for "free for personal use" products and services, IMO it has made anything requiring an account worth avoiding.

Besides the miserable experience unchecked advertisements cause, it is simply not safe to allow those advertisements to load.

A few years ago (before SSDs were common) I noticed unusual hard disk activity when loading a popular link aggregation site. A bit of investigation turned up a Trojan on my system. After removing it and reloading that site, my PC was immediately reinfected. The site owner denied any responsibility and said it was the advertising company's fault.

The way the Internet operates now means no one is responsible for the content their site provides or the damage they cause. Imagine if restaurant owners were able to deny responsibility for the atmosphere in their restaurants or food poisonings they caused? IMO it's the same thing.

Advertisers and websites have created the "dark traffic" mentioned here by repeatedly poisoning the public and they deserve the massive loss of revenue their behavior has caused.