Lotus-eater

"Victor"/Victoria: King Marchand is an arrogant, opinionated, chauvinistic pain in the ass. Toddy: I think I could fall in love with him. "Victor"/Victoria: I think I could, too." A young James Garner (who played King Marchand):

The seller is not completely off base. Upgrading RAM and storage drives is common on older computers (I did it to mine), but it's probably not worth it if the CPU has not been upgraded to a chip that is recent enough to allow use of Windows 11 (without extraordinary measures like modifying the registry).

Costa Rica’s Most Expensive Home Is This $30 Million Mansion Overlooking the Gulf of Papagayo ROBBREPORT.COM The Astor Mansion at The St. Regis Papagayo Resort is set to become Costa Rica’s priciest listing, with three pools...

Stark contrast: "Spacious" 1,500 sq ft at $1,000/sq ft in NYC v. 54,000 sq ft at $92/sq ft in suburban Alabama.

Natty=natural bodybuilder (no steroids). Red Dye No. 3 (correct number is 3 not 5)=synthetic food coloring recently banned. I.e., I think he's on steroids.

He's as natty as Red Dye No. 5.

I've found the staff at the Ralphs in PS to be much more helpful than those at my local Ralphs in LA. As for pricing on the middle shelves, it's location, location, location! Products on the middle shelves are the most expensive because they're at eye level for most people (who are more likely to buy those products), so grocery stores charge a premium to wholesalers to have their products placed on the middle shelves. Notice that sugary cereals tend to be located on the lower shelves because that's eye level for children:

In this American's mind, a "phone torch" looks something like this:

They got it right in the 1980s. I don't want to see the kitchen from the main living areas. I doubt whether Lady Violet ever entered the kitchen.

That's precisely why I picked it. You'd be safer flying even if the death total this year turns out to be 2,313, which is the largest number of commercial airline accident deaths to occur globally in one year (1972).

You'd need an additional 400 deaths this year in the U.S. to match the historically high 531 deaths from commercial airline accidents in 2001 and that was still about 16 times safer per mile traveled than driving a car.

It's the base rate fallacy. Statisticians are correct in the sense that even if death is more likely when an accident occurs while flying on a commercial airline, the overall risk of death of traveling by air is still much lower because the probability of any accident occurring at all on a commercial airline is much lower than in a car.

If you want to increase its longevity: I would not pick the lowest end processors (the AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS in that Lenovo is more than adequate for your needs). 16GB rather than 8GB RAM doesn't cost that much more, which is useful for Windows (which requires more memory after every new version) and if you keep many tabs open. An SSD with more storage space will last longer because the writes are spread across more cells, so I wouldn't go below 512GB even if you don't need much storage. I don't think a touchscreen is very useful on desktop but YMMV.

Relative prices are constantly changing, so a price change above the overall inflation rate is not a reliable indicator of price gouging (anymore than price increases below the inflation rate indicate predatory pricing, which consumers rarely complain about). Higher rates aren't surprising with a sustained period of low unemployment and higher stock prices (which evidence suggests increases relative demand and decreases relative supply) combined with strong post-pandemic demand for in-person recreation.

His history apparently includes a conviction for embezzlement and subsequently violating probation by using illegal drugs, both of which landed him in prison. Bad habits die hard.

Yes.😁

But A's pronouns are first place/second place. So B passes second place and B is now second place, which is not possible. H/T Abbott & Costello.

What was promised: time or performance?

No, truth has not always been a defense in a charge of libel. See, for example, People v. Croswell: "English law in the time of the Star Chamber had disallowed truth as a defense, saying "The reason assigned for the punishment of libels, whether true or false, is because they tend to a breach of the peace, by inciting the libelled party to revenge, or the people to sedition." Alexander Hamilton lost the case and it was not until 1805 that the New York legislature changed the law and the state constitution in 1821 to allow truth as a defense. Other states also had to change their laws because of English common law.

The dead person still suffers no harm because they are not aware of any inaccurate assumptions about them (unless you believe in ghosts). And any harm to the dead person's reputation among the living would presumably come from the release of mostly accurate--but potentially embarrassing--information. Under the old rules of defamation, proving a claim to be true was not a legal defense based on the logic that a true claim was more damning to a person's reputation than a false claim, which seems to be your logic as well. Why should the family (at least those who were on good terms with the dead relative) and friends be entitled to be shielded from any negative publicity? What if the public wants to use that information as the basis of a protest at a funeral?

Why should dead people have such rights? They lose the right to vote (unless they lived in Chicago 😁). More relevant, as a matter of common law in the U.S. and Canada, the details of a probated will are a public record (so the public can find out the value of an estate) and dead people can no longer be legally defamed because they no longer have a reputation to protect.

You said that he received good reviews, so perhaps you had different expectations than his typical client, he had an off night, or the reviews were fake.