Okay, Zen_Shinobi got the details wrong but the landscape right. It wasn't that difficult to rack up a long distance bill with your computer. It usually wasn't your ISP collecting that bill though.
In the early 90's it wasn't uncommon to have an ISP that wasn't your phone company. AOL, Compuserve, all the little Randonets. The first ISP my father used was NANDOnet, which was operated by the Charlotte News and Observer. We were in a different area code than Charlotte, so using his state of the art 14.4kbaud modem to access NANDOnet accrued a long distance charge like any other phone call to Charlotte. You don't remember the likes of Earthlink and AOL advertising "more local numbers?"
Well into the 90's, you'd have use for a modem even if you didn't have an ISP at all. BBSes were often a computer with a modem attached. You'd dial directly into that BBS. No TCP/IP at all going on; you essentially had two computers connected together with an arbitrarily long serial cable. These BBS systems were owned by random nerds scattered across North America, so using BBS systems almost certainly meant long-distance phone calls. Doing things like multiplayer gaming in something like Doom over a modem could, theoretically, be done over a long distance line if you were that kind of decadent.
Anyone remember porn dialers? There were probably other industry sectors that used this business model, but it was commonly associated with the early internet porn industry. It's the 1990's, nobody's got a Venmo account, hell you can't rely on every American having a Visa card. How do you bill your customers? What you do is you host a website purely for advertisement purposes, you don't ship your actual product over HTTP at all. You offer a download of a scummy piece of software that uses the customer's modem to directly dial your 900 number. They can download...almost certainly pictures probably not video, while connected, and then their phone company bills the customer for the toll. Not unlike a phone sex service, same business model, slightly different product.
Cats are a newtonian fluid with a melting point somewhere around 75F. If I cool the house to 74 or below, Izzy loafs or curls up in a ball. If I let it get warmer than that in the house she stretches out. They remain viscous and cohesive with a high surface tension.
Note this testing is done at around 29.8 inches of mercury ambient pressure.
Then make themed instances. Everyone wants to make general purpose instances probably with our particular brand of politics on it so we get soc dem c/linux and dem soc c/linux and communist c/linux and we have no values of our own other than hatred of America c/linux.
Make an instance where only communities about music are allowed. Or about sports, or TV/movies. Let that be where that content lives, on a website that refuses to host religious content like c/fuckcars at the domain level.
Make a WHOLE BUNCH of communities on a general purpose instance, one for each team in a league, and then add a bot to each one that posts game results or scores or whatever the fuck they're called, so that anyone sorting by New sees nothing but redundant sports statistics until they go through the process of blocking everything you've done to make the rest of the platform usable again.
The United States was at one point a manufacturing powerhouse. We built the materiel to fight our own two front war and a lot of the kit used by our allies. Our solution to any other nation on Earth trying to put the thumb on the scale should be to shrug our shoulders and just fucking win. We've got manpower, energy and resources falling out of our ears.
I've seen similar tariffs circumnavigated by putting cheap crappy seats in the bed of the Subaru BRAT or selling a Japanese truck as a "Ford Ranger." Or importing parts and assembling them in America rather than just importing the whole truck.
Tariffs are politics, politics is bullshit, therefore tariffs are bullshit.
And I don't think it works at all for manufactured goods.
For example, in the 70's or 80's Yamaha came out with their Virago line of motorcycles. They were American style teardrop tank cruisers set to compete directly with Harley-Davidson, except with objectively better engines and lower prices. The only thing Harley had going for it was their trademark engineering mistake. of a single pin crankshaft.
Harley asked the government to step in, the government applied a tariff to motorcycles over...some engine displacement, I think it was 1200ccs or so. Yamaha responded by slightly reducing the cylinder bore to bring it down to 1150cc and made a range of lower end models all the way down to 250cc, none of which qualified for the tariff, and Yamaha is still selling cruisers in the US to this day, meanwhile Harley-Davidson is a popular designer clothing label with a small vestigial powersports division.
She's very affectionate and cuddly with my mother, and will attempt to murder all other humans. She's an adorable little psychopath, she's a little grey tux, cutest purr, serious laceration hazard. She's just...touched in the head. I could honestly do without her.
My own cat Izzy is the friendliest cat on earth. She's laying on the floor next to me, probably wants me to go to bed so she can cuddle up to my arm. She belonged to a relative of mine who passed away, so I adopted Izzy as a senior cat, which has its difficulties. Cat owners can understand what their own cat is saying, because individual cats kind of learn how to communicate with their humans. Well I'm not the one Izzy learned to communicate with, so half the time I have no idea what the little dunce is talking about. Sweet as honey, just...frustratingly incomprehensible sometimes.
It is a Maine Coon, known for extra toes, but this is kinda ridiculous. I hope kitty will be able to live a comfy life with what? over a dozen extra digits?
I never even tried to watch Game of Thrones, which I think is why I'm not technically a human. I am a meat popsicle. For like a decade, it seemed like it was a felony to have any kind of small talk related to anything but that show. So I stopped socializing entirely. I gather that it's based on a book series that the author never finished, they kept making the show after they ran out of books to adapt, did a shitty job about it, and nobody talks about it except how disappointing it was.
The Plinkett reviews of Star Wars...they're so long ago the first one or two were split into ten minute videos because Youtube had a 10 minute time limit for videos back then. The gag about "Leave me a message on this web zone and I will send you [a pizza roll] in the mail" made me think there was such a thing as a "web zone." Back then, so many different platforms were popping up that I invented a service halfway between Myspace and Geocities that called user created pages "web zones."
A stack overflow of cuteness. I'll take it.