I'm kinda shocked to see MicroCenter surge again. The one on Steven's Creek feels like a mini, less seedy, Fry's (I may be biased from Fry's terminal years).
Nevertheless, it still took me 10 minutes to get the attention of the otherwise omnipresent salespeople to let me pick up a UCG, and I ended up getting the rest of my setup at Central Computers.
Edit: I'm ragging too hard. I'm glad MicroCenter exists and the in-person selection they offer.
Fred Sanford owned a small business and lived in Los Angeles in an era when the majority of African Americans were working unskilled wage jobs [0] and overwhelmingly living in the South.
He and Lamont were middle and upper-middle class by African American standards as was seen in the 1970 Negro (the then term for African Americans) Census by the the US Department of Commerce.
And by overall American standards back then they would have probably been around the 50th to 60th percentile of households by income and would have been earning at least 60% than their racial peers in the South at the exact same time.
If you go through US Census data from 1970 - almost a decade after the Civil Rights Act was passed - it is harrowing. Now imagine how much worse it was before that.
Stable societies fundamentally require increasingly large energy inputs.
What we're seeing happening right now, in a large part, is due to a system whose complexity has exceed the available energy required to sustain it.
The idea that what we're seeing is because "too many people voted for the wrong guy" fails to recognize the larger condition for which all of this is merely emergent phenomena. We no longer have the resources to sustain the society we life in so it begins to uncomfortably revert to lower energy states in ways we haven't seen in a long time.
Trump and his acute destabilizing actions are the symptoms of the chronic, broad, deep destabilization of our society in the form of differing perceived realities, caused by....the internet and its exploitation by sick, greedy social media founders, investors/owners, and, yes, employees.
Further more, know your neighbors, join mutual aid groups, build social connections before bad things happen. The idea of a single prepper surviving the apocalypse is a farce, humans work in communities.
A one hundred year old farmer's collective with deep assets and a membership that makes US preppers look ... uhhh, unprepped.
Literally established well outside what one US astronaut called the most remote city in the world, it is made up of individuals that are all capable of survival in harsh environments and yet choose to work together to lower collective costs and ensure fires are kept in check, floods don't knock out individuals, roving scam artists get talked about on bush telegraph, etc.
My relatively stable high trust society has bunker space for more or less the entire population; if the world goes to hell I'd much rather be* among people who (even on our right wing) habitually put solidarity into practice than be worrying about generators, ice augers, and looters.
* one of the best pieces of advice I ever got, related to skating to where the puck is going to be: "if you know where to be, you can let the young guys run"
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