I forget a password I created yesterday but I remember that 7 digit number as if my life depended on it.

Oats, butter, sugar, and sugar? Probably just a granola bar.

Dublin is in Ireland, not Great Britain. There was a whole kerfuffle about it.

I’m not sure what you were trying, but this works for me:

Never use hardware encoding. That is intended for real time transcoding. There are not many settings that work since it is just sending the file to the video card and letting it do its thing.

Slower is better. If you set the software encoder to very slow it will produce an output that is very high quality per megabyte. I generally don’t care if it takes twice as long to encode it as to watch it. I queue it up and let it run over night.

Choose the right codec. I like 10 bit HEVC, because I know it will work on the clients I play it from. When you rip a DVD using MakeMKV, the video will be MPEG-2, it was designed in the 1990’s and converting the file to a modern codec will save a lot of space. I don’t reencode 4K UHD rips much since I don’t want to mess with losing the hdr or other color features that I like in watching those files.

Audio tracks: I will rip out audio for languages I don’t speak, or desctiptive audio track, but go out of my way to label things like director commentaries. I don’t reencode the audio tracks at all, you won’t save much disk space by messing with them compared to the video tracks.

I would also recommend “To be or not to be” by Ryan North. It is a choose your own adventure version of the play. Well worth your time.

Nobody is saying that tariffs are income taxes, but I pay a bunch of taxes each year that are not income taxes. I have sales taxes at stores, property taxes a couple times a year, and hidden ones like gas taxes. Now we are going to pay more import taxes so that the ultra rich don’t have to pay as much capital gains. To call them anything else is lying to yourself.

A tariff is a sales tax, pure and simple. Sales taxes hit lower income people harder than the rich because they have to put a higher percentage of their income into it.