This happened in another state and this news station did a video on it which was kind of interesting https://youtu.be/mgh3xL5SieI?si=aM4aPRkfysSKBzIs

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Nothing needs to be broadcast on social media 99% of the time. But positivity is nice to hear to muddy up the negativity we often see. So what if this didn’t need to be broadcasted. I still found it heartwarming and enjoyable to read and know someone is doing well for themselves.

Congratulations. That’s quite an achievement to make in your life to cancel out something that didn’t have a positive on your life and to do something better for the future at the same time.

Many of us past our 20’s can’t always say we did something so positive in our 20’s but we wish we had.

Y’all are fucking nuts lol

Maybe you should leave the country if it upsets you that much

I’m still not convinced in this age of AI image generation.

They did use the same voice actress as the video game on the Windows version, I can confirm. Or at least it was a very good imitation.

I was really hyped for Cortana on Windows and then that faded pretty quick. But I remember hearing her voice and thinking how cool that was.

Sometimes I google painless ways to die.

I can relate to this feeling. It’s like feeling suicidal, without actually the planning or action, but a wishful type of feeling.

I was feeling this at my last job because this woman who worked an enforcement type position was legitimately harassing me for some reason. She made up lies and enabled others to lie to hurt me. I had worked hard in that industry that covered a county and built a name for myself, partially off the name my family had built in the industry, but was getting my own name because of the hard work I was doing. I was no longer “so and so’s son”, I was now being recognized by my name. And she just came in and messed it all up for me, made me look really stupid, and worse, it was all lies. I couldn’t do anything to reverse the situation. I tried speaking up and was called a liar publicly. I felt powerless and helpless. I still have no idea why she had it out for me. I worked very well with all of her colleagues and those who worked there before her with no issues. I had also been taken advantage of by a coworker at this time, really a family friend who had known me since I was a toddler, and she used that to deceive me instead of just being upfront with her intentions which would have been a lot easier to work with. All while dealing with a close family member going through stage 4 cancer.

I often “fantasized” about ways I could end it all without actually going through it or would take me out. I would be driving and fantasize about the idea of just letting go and letting my car run into a nearby tree at a high speed or off a cliff into the ocean…

Thankfully I (obviously) never did and ended up switching industries and moving out of the area entirely and now I honestly can’t even remember her name. With being out of that position, that family friend’s betrayal no longer follows me. My family member has since passed, but I am at peace knowing they are no longer in pain.

I’ve been in a good position ever since then in nearly every way. My new career is something I’m more passionate about and feeling more content. I actually have a work life balance now. I get along with everyone at my newer job and also don’t have to work with an overseeing agency like hers. My boss is amazing, and always has been from the moment I met him. I’m also glad to not be supervising anyone anymore. That was a hell of its own too.

I’m sorry you’re going through this and feeling this way. It sucks that having a job is so much a necessity that it can cause this feeling in us.

I suppose the moral of my story is that everything in life is temporary, which is both a blessing and a curse, but a blessing to you right now to know that what you’re going through can be temporary. There is an end and it can and will come. There is a light at the end of the tunnel that you can come out of this and find a decent job again and find fulfillment in yourself again. Though, I hope the feeling of fulfillment comes before that because your purpose in life shouldn’t come from what you do, but who you are as a person. I don’t say that to put you down with how you’re currently feeling and apologize if that’s how it came across.

Is there any way you can volunteer? As I write this, I wonder if that can help in some ways. For you to get out physically and not have to be in the same physical location all day which can be damaging for your psyche. For you to find some fulfilling purpose again outside of yourself. For you to see a different side and find reasons to be glad you’re still here. For you to potentially have exposure to others who may recognize your contributions and help you find a position elsewhere. All things that I think could help improve your current life situation.

Scammers are crafty assholes.

Your health insurance information may have been leaked. There’s been a ton of data leaks as of recent and it’s not unlikely that a list of health insurance providers and their customers are on the dark web somewhere and this is where they got that information about you.

Worse about these data leaks is that a lot of the ones being announced happened months ago, so it’s likely we still have some leaks that haven’t yet made it to the news to let people know their information is out there.

Getting your health data from the pharmacy may have just been the next step in their plan of getting to you to trick you into giving up money, or somehow using your information to do something illegal.

Some home Internet plans do. I’ve seen AT&T had in their terms that if you hit 99GB, they would throttle your speeds.

This was years ago, so not sure if that changed or not.

Satellite plans often had limits too because they didn’t want to encourage lots of usage on their satellites. I haven’t checked in a few years, but last I checked, these weren’t throttle limits either, sometimes they had hard limits where you just couldn’t connect anymore once you hit the limit.

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Feels a bit like the Masterchief portrayal in mostly never wearing the helmet during the show and fans have wondered if it was because the actor had a caveat “I want to make sure I’m known to be the actor behind this iconic character.”

I mean, I understand, but at the same time, you’re taking on a role as a character who has been portrayed in a certain way by the existing fanbase for decades.

Your appearance you bring is supposed to mirror what has been established, not who you personally are.

Mine does that. It has a big button on the back that just turns on the brightest setting and then turns it off. The button on the handle will let you cycle through 3 brightness settings and then the strobe effect.

It’s just some off brand, probably from Amazon, that my uncle bought for my dad and I took when my dad passed away.

Yeah but it’s a different experience, if that’s what OP is looking for in terms of how it delivers the search results.

But if this is solely about the quality of results, then yeah, my recommendation for Bing is irrelevant.

Have you tried Bing? I’ve been using Bing for over a decade now as my default search engine and while people give it crap, I’ve only had to go to Google a handful of times over this span of time and even then, I can’t remember a time that Google had what I was looking for either.

Bing is customizable so you can get rid of some of the fluff that comes with searches that you don’t want that bloats your results. Like you can get rid of the colorful background, the trending news sections, the Copilot LLM results, etc.

One plus that Bing Image search has had over Google for many years now is the ability to let you see the full screen image without doing any funky stuff. Like when you just want to load the jpg/png in the browser without the Google/Bing banner surrounding it…Bing Image search lets you do that with the click of a button. Google removed this feature years ago which was so shitty.

It’s not perfect, not like old Google perfect, but that combined with an adblocker like uBlock Origin and my PiHole works for me to remove from sponsored results (not all, unfortunately).

It has its own set of trackers too. I’m no fan of Microsoft and know this, but we’re at the bottom of the barrel with decent search engines anymore.

I like Bing for the other perks like trending news, Bing Rewards (no joke, I have cashed in for over $400 worth of free stuff from a PC VR headset to fast food gift cards just from doing daily searches), and I use Copilot from time to time as a quick ChatGPT alternative (using ChatGPT, but doesn’t require an account to use so good for a quick Incognito session if needed) and also nice with the history under your account. I prefer to use Copilot in Bing than the Windows app since I don’t want that crap installed to my computer and would rather keep it to the browser.

You may also check into extensions for whatever browser you end up going with. There are a few extensions that can help customize your search results like easily removing a website from the results, for example.

If you can, turn off unknown callers from being able to reach you.

I’ve done this and it’s been wonderful. The spams have actually decreased significantly since I don’t answer the phone for them at all anymore.

It’s under Settings > Phone (have to go into Apps in iOS 18) > Silence Unknown Callers

Anyone who is not in your contacts gets a ring but the ring doesn’t go to you so you don’t hear it and don’t answer. They can leave a voicemail but scammers never leave me voicemails.

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I don’t think so. Either that or it’s going to be pricey and not likely to work with a cell phone natively like how it is now with your wireless carrier.

One of my pervious jobs used RingCentral which is what I had in mind with my comment. They do have an iPhone and Android app that can send and receive texts and calls, but it’s all strictly through their app. I suppose you could do a forward to your number, but you’re going to need to have an existing number for that which kind of defeats this purpose.

You can manage call queues and the like on the backend in the browser to create something like this where it would send callers through a maze of menus to eventually be able to get to you.

Additionally, you could program a key press to you that wouldn’t be made known to callers such as pressing 7 to immediately be “transferred” to you (something you’d only tell trusted callers calling you) but that’s not stated in the call queue prompt.

I also imagine any business VoIP has a set minimum of numbers/users to sign up with them since they’re really for business, not personal use. But hey! Give it a shot and see or try one of their competitors.

Kind of an interesting thing to think about since you mentioned it.

The VoIP services they subscribe to usually help with this to some degree in identifying common patterns to cut down on some of the spam.

Beyond that, businesses implementing call queues & bot menus is what helps cut down on the rest of it.

It’s becoming more rare to actually get in contact with a human from many businesses nowadays. Businesses seem to want users to use a bot that will help the customer do whatever it is they’re doing as much as possible.

And the only way to get to said human is through a series of menus and questions, usually confirming they actually are a customer.

Long gone are the days of calling and getting a human to give your information to.

When you call something like Bank of America, they prove you are a customer because you give them your account number or they recognize that based on your caller ID and also have to still provide SSN or date of birth, so even if someone spoofs an actual customer’s number, they’re stuck in the menu and never reach a human.

One of the differences is that Osama bin Laden was not the leader of any recognized state in the world whereas Putin is.

Putting a literal bullseye on another country’s leader would be seen as an act of war.

Also, the US is not currently in (direct) war with Russia while the US was with Osama’s group.