From here we go on to plausible numbers and tax calculations from 2025. Let's assume his car is used and is paid off.
$15/hour x 8 hrs/day x 250 days/year = $30,000. $1475 is his federal tax. $993 is his Virginia state tax. $1862 is Social Security tax. $145 is Medicare tax. Personal property tax (state and county) is $300 per year (could be double in certain urban areas). Car insurance is $1,200 per year.
2/3
I started coming with an idea for a game where you are a guy working a night shift at a convenience store, based on a friend and I hanging out at Fas-Mart late at night drinking coffee and shooting the bull.
I knew he was going to be in dire straits but I drew up a budget to see how bad it would be. Let's assume the guy is living in a small and old rented house and is making $15/hour (untipped minimum wage here is $12.69/hour in 2026, $13.75/hour in 2027, and $15/hour in 2028)
1/3
There is a concerted effort to try to back up US government websites by ArchiveTeam before they can be deleted: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/US_Government
All you need is an unmetered internet connection and something that will run their virtual machine which is here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior. Once you've downloaded and booted version 4.1 of the virtual machine, select "U.S. Government" as the project and you're good
Looks like I'm searching for a new email provider today since #protonmail decided to bet on Trump
I scraped as much ice off the underside of the outside table as I could, then I thought it would be easy to get the rest by tipping it up. The legs came off while the rest stayed stuck on the deck 🤦♂️
It's November 3 and I'm already watching a Christmas commercial. Can we at least contain that shit to December?
And that's exactly what it did...dammit
I've chained up a bunch of sudo btrfs filesystem defragment -vfrc (folder) commands with && between them so they can run overnight.
I am going to be pissed if it stops after about 2 hours because it wants me to input my password each time
We're in a mild drought, grass has died due to the prolonged heat wave, and it terrifies pets, but fuck it, might as well shoot off some fireworks!
Seriously, I want to find the idiots in the neighborhood that keep shooting them off and drench their fireworks
Fifth hint for the puzzle in CONF: It's a code that has existed for at least 150 years, just using notes instead of symbols
Fourth hint for the puzzle in CONF: The A note in the message is a delimiter separating strings of D and F# notes and also padding at the end
Third hint for the puzzle in CONF: The third piano playing the message is only playing either D, F#, or A and only one note at a time
Second hint for the puzzle in CONF: the high-pitched piano has nothing to do with anything. The second piano is only playing major triads on a loop. The third piano playing the message is adding another note to the triad.
Edit to clarify
For those trying to work out the puzzle in CONF, there are 3 pianos: one that plays through the entire song, one that plays in bits and pieces, and one that starts a few measures in and plays until the end of the song. The encoded message is buried in the third one.
More hints to come as the week goes on