911 center: Okay, what is the phone number of the phone you are testing (so we know which inbound call to disregard)?

Your argument stems primarily from that point.

The purpose of contacting them is not to identify what phone number will be making the call. The purpose of contacting them is to ensure they are not currently in the middle of a mass casualty incident that you don’t know about.

They don’t care what number you will be making the call from. They care that they have the time and resources available to take it. If your test call is successful, you will tell them that it was a test call.

As for your argument about not having a phone to make the initial call, it’s 2026, not 1926. You have a phone, it’s in your hands right now, and you’re using it to read this.

The problem with your scenario is “competitive”. You’re describing single player competitive gaming. Few gamers participate solely in such games: single player free for all. You won’t find the relevant skills while players are participating in such games.

However, the overwhelming majority also participate in various forms of cooperative game play. PvE Raid groups. Team-based PVP competition. Air traffic control is a cooperative system, not a competitive one, and it is this aspect of gaming that is relevant here.

The same players who seemingly lack emotional control and maturity while engaged in single-player competition are very often also players who patiently carry newbs through raids and dungeons. This is exactly the behavior we expect from a controller.

A player who engages in the behavior you describe toward his own teammate is a player who doesn’t remain on the team.

I stand by my assertion. Social aptitude and communication are essential skills for modern gamers.

I’m hoping Corporal Couchfucker and the cabinet decide to oust him, but the earliest that would realistically happen is the end of January, after the new Congress is seated and he becomes eligible to run for two full terms himself.

USS Abraham Lincoln departed for a 180-day deployment on November 21st, 2025. That was ~270 days ago, and they are scheduled to remain on station until USS George Washington relieves them later this week.

Normally, the Navy schedules a port call for its carriers every 30-45 days. Lincoln hasn’t had a port call since a one-day stop in Guam back in December.

What Trump is really saying is that ships that had been scheduled to participate in the exercises are being diverted to support the Iran war. The Navy is reducing its presence in the South Pacific and repositioning them in the Indian ocean.

Donnie asked South Korea for help in Iran, and South Korea told him to pound sand.

Social aptitude and Communication are critical skills for online gaming. Your “doubt” is about 20 years out of date.

They don’t buy enough yachts and private jets and other manufactured property that would put a worker to work to produce it.

I would argue that “Real Estate” and “Politicians” are de facto “stocks”.

The upper class doesn’t buy anything but stocks.

Let them eat slop.

You don’t need a static IP, you just have to keep track of what your current dynamic IP is.

You still need a public IP address. More and more often, IPv4 services are provided behind CGNAT, which won’t be able to work as you describe.

If you don’t have a public IPv4 for your LAN you can use IPv6. Or, you can reverse proxy your services through a gateway with a public IPv4.

I use a a reverse proxy (Pangolin) running on a VPS. A Newt tunnel connects my LAN to to Pangolin, exposing my local services via subdomains.

/edit; vpns are good and all, but they require you to setup software on the remote device to connect to it, and that typically routes most if not all your traffic back to the vpn server then out to the internet. That can create speed/bandwidth issues.

Tailscale, ZeroTier, and other similar services generally establish direct tunnels between devices, without a separate VPN server. They use a central service merely as a sort of common meeting point (STUN/TURN) for the devices to figure out how to establish direct tunnel(s).

What are you trying to accomplish with that?

I’ve got pangolin running on a VPS. It was dead simple.

Lordstown Motors got done in partially by its own management, partially by a short seller making an ass-ton of money by screwing them over. It had little to do with fleet customers.

I really wish EV manufacturers would get around to targeting fleet pickups. Generic, bare-bones, featureless trucks.

It’s already available and parents are not utilizing it.

The parents have determined that it’s not needed. They’ve determined that trying to strictly regulate exactly what Little Johnny can and can’t see online does him far more harm than porn ever could. This hyper-authoritarian nonsense needs to die in a fire.

Stevia is the worst, IMO. It’s got a strange mouth feel.

You know how eating tortilla chips will cut up your mouth a little? They irritate the tongue and throat, making them feel a little gritty? Anything with stevia gives me that “tortilla chip mouth” sensation, even when I haven’t been eating tortilla chips.

Every other artificial sweetener tastes like cancer. Stevia tastes like sand.

9.9999%

Does anyone else pronounce it “Ass Part o’ Me”?

What?

No, it’s because we have something called “Civil Asset Forfeiture” which basically means that American cops can just stop you for no reason, file a lawsuit against your cash and just take it out of your wallet. If you want it back, you have to declare yourself to be a criminal defendant, and then be found not guilty of the criminal charges against you. If you don’t, they get to keep your money to put in their pension fund.

That’s not from math. That’s from lack of practice. Nobody has used cash in 10 years.

Pretty sure the nuclear plant will provide significantly more heat. I mean, those giant cooling towers are specifically designed to unload heat into the atmosphere.