theragu40

Sounds like you just had a badly made one. Not all franchises are equal.

A well made big Mac tastes good. There's a reason it's been around this long.

You know what they call a quarter pounder with cheese??

It's worth trying if you're interested, IMO.

Nothing mind-blowing (except the morning crunch wrap, which is mind-blowing). But they are pretty consistent, and have a lot more options than most fast food places when it comes to healthy-ish options.

It's not Mexican food, it's not even tex-mex. It's just taco bell. It's its own category of food. Go in without preconceived ideas of what it should be and you might find that you enjoy it.

I like McDonald's. I know, wrong opinion.

Maybe it's because it was an occasional treat when I was a kid, but there is something nostalgic about it. Sometimes I just want it.

But it's definitely hard when eating at McDonald's with our family of 4 is equivalent to eating at a fast casual place, and starting to approach the cost of a sit-down restaurant. The big happy meals are over 6 bucks now, and that's starting not to be enough food as our kids get older. If we get a value meal it's $8-10 each for me and my wife. So even if we go minimal, which usually results in people still being hungry, we are already at ~$30. It's not hard to get up close to $40.

Remember the dollar menu?? I mean if we break each of those meals down to their components of sandwich/fry/drink, if we stayed on the dollar menu what now costs $30 could have been bought for $12. Obviously inflation comes into play a little bit but I'm not sure prices needed to nearly triple.

Sit down restaurants obviously have increased a ton too, but if they have a reasonable kids menu we can do it for $50 or $60 depending on the place. Yes, more than McDonald's, but McDonald's also has no business being that close in price.

The movie, despite being unrelentingly bleak, actually isn't quite as soul crushing as the book. At least it wasn't for me.

I appreciate your well mathed response, but this is a classic example of using a numbers argument where the eye test should prevail. It's like people who play fantasy sports and argue that advanced stats prove a player who sucks, is actually good.

I don't at all think in the terms you are thinking of when I cook. I'm not looking at the flames. I'm not looking for "exactly half" when I drop the temp. I'm cooking, and watching the food I make react. Sometimes I need to raise or drop the temp just a tiny bit, and I can do that with excellent speed and resolution of change with gas. Electric pulses do not offer this. Every electric stove I have ever used is absolutely terrible at making small quick adjustments of heat. I am not thinking about the exact percentage by which I want to raise or lower it, and getting concerned about whether it's exactly right. I'm not concerned about the linearity of change (although honestly if I'm thinking of it, my gas stove's heat range feels fairly linear to me). I am doing this by intuition or feel, and by watching what I'm cooking to see that it is doing what I want.

Also I have no idea what you mean about gas being too hot at its lowest setting. I have never encountered this in many years of cooking. Mine goes low enough that I can keep a sauce warm without stirring without it sticking. I have however, many times encountered food that scorched because the electric coils stayed hot for 15 minutes after being turned off.

Ultimately, I probably incorrectly used the word precision. Someone who is a superior wordsmith may be able to direct me to the correct verbage.

Appreciate you finding numbers when I didn't go to that effort. It makes me wonder if numbers are pretty similar globally. 2% having chronic insomnia doesn't sound completely out of line to me.

I think because it's a pretty gross mischaracterization of the demographic? Usually hyperbole is used for effect to more emphatically illustrate a generally true or accepted point.

The number of Americans who use nightly sleep aids is extremely low. Like, a vast vast majority of people never take them. I don't know anyone who regularly takes them, and honestly I don't know many who take them even occasionally.

So this meme uses hyperbole to drive home the idea that Americans have a pill problem regarding sleep aids and no one in Europe does. I have no idea how the numbers shake out in Europe but I can say in America it is not as characterized. So it's less hyperbole (exaggeration of a fact) and more like a lie.

I've just started dipping my toes back into the waters again too, also after many years of downloading absolutely nothing. It's a combo of things prompting me.

First, costs have gotten out of control and prices just keep creeping up. This is happening at the same time as content libraries per service dwindle. I make more money than I used to, yet it feels like it goes not nearly as far these days with prices of everything skyrocketing.

Second, it's becoming a bigger and bigger pain in the ass to find things. Part of the issue for me is interfaces (though I can get around that, generally). Part is content shuffling from one service to the next. But a big issue is all the trash content companies like Netflix are shitting out to pad their libraries. You have to wade through oceans of garbage to find a single thing worth your time. This experience is exactly why I dropped traditional cable years ago! I hate endless filler trash. I don't want the illusion of a large library to make it seem like I'm getting value. I just want actual good content.

I totally get wanting to play the game when it's fresh. You miss out on being part of the buzz of a new game if you wait to play it. Every gaming site is full of memes about a new game for the first few months after release and it's definitely part of the experience to be on the "in" side of that.

With that said, I just pick and choose which games matter to me for that nowadays, and I commit myself to actually beating the games I buy (assuming I don't hate them). Committing to beating them before buying a new game has really cut back on my buying of new games only to have it languish in my backlog and see price drops before I ever play it.

This way I do get to be part of that community for the games that really matter to me, but I also am not just buying everything out there at full price.

Just checked this morning and it is not detectable inside the car. And it is definitely stronger near the exhaust (and/or is coming from the exhaust).

Good question on the inside vs outside thing. It is definitely more pronounced outside. I'm usually loading kids so the doors are open when I start the car in the morning. I'll have to do a test with getting in first then starting.