I think Vonnegut really had his pulse on the human condition. Writers such Aldous Huxley could capture parts of it but Vonnegut seemed to capture it in just about every book.
I had shingles across my back in 7th grade. I remember at the time being told since I didn’t have chickenpox as a kid that led to my shingles. I was also told that once you have shingles you are immune. I have since learned both are not true. I also will get pain in the same location that my shingles started when under great stress.
57 now. I have had such an abrupt life style change that I no longer experience stress like I did. I don’t know if the vaccine helped it’a been less then a year.
I never had the chickenpox as a kid, either. The doc shrugged and noted that I obviously had the virus in my system, so I must have had a sub-clinical case. I recall that when we were young, my sister had a very mild case of chickenpox, so I assume that I got some exposure from her even though at the time assumed I managed to avoid it.
If they are fused on their faces, i.e. with the connection pins on their opposite sides, it may be a combination of a viewing storage tube with a TV camera tube, which could have been used for conversion between different TV standards, e.g. American <=> European.
I believe it's fused on the pin side >=<. I will double check and thanks for the idea. I'm about to start documenting all of the artifacts I have purchased over the past (gulp) 25+ years.
I thought the whole point of LLC was to limit liability so you wouldn't be liable for debt beyond your paid up capital? Why would you ever sign a personal guarantee?
Why would the CEO have the personal liability here and not the board? Does Sundar Pichai have to personally guarantee loans for Google? That would be weird since the CEO could be fired.
“If you are meta” in this case means “if you have a billion dollars already, and a credit rating that you don’t want to destroy.
Nobody is trying to pull one over on a bank here. Pricing the risk of the loan is a bank’s whole business, they’re happy to loan to meta because meta is meta, and they’re a good candidate for a loan.
Meta has $44.4 billion in cash-on-hand as of September 2025.
I'm correcting you because people can't really fathom just how wealthy these companies are. They could buy startups for billions of dollars with literally the cash they have in their bank accounts, let alone debt or stocks.
Do you think any CEOs of gigantic corporations are personally liable for any loans made by the companies they work for? I would be incredibly, incredibly surprised to hear if that's the case.
Then why don't they do it? It's the easiest money they can ever make. Even I can litigate the hell out of it if I get $27B, take the money and close the LLC.
I totally agree about Andy Capp. The only interesting thing I ever heard about Andy Capp was from Jean Shepherd.
He said the Andy Capp title was a cockney accent pun for Handicap. Apparently Andy was a cockney horse race fanatic. That tidbit did make the strip any funnier to me.
Back when I was first started wrestling with this issue it the question was “how much faster will the daily photoshop operations be with a new computer?”
Now a new computer barely does anything faster for me.
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