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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • A lot of good advice on this thread, particularly the emphasis on social connections and food. Given OP asked to assume near or total economic collapse though:

    1. Some people advocated building up money savings. If you are convinced there will be runaway inflation (part of what I assume is meant by collapse) then this is exactly wrong. The thing to do would be to convert as much money as possible into durable goods while the money still has any value. Look into the history of prior examples like the collapse of the deutsche mark in 1922, and the rush on payday to buy necessities immediately.

    2. Gold is also being suggested. If your threat model includes social collapse gold won’t do you much good. Gold has financial value but no use value for individuals (it is useful industrially, but not in a way you can take advantage of). Unless you’re planning to run, bulkier but more immediately useful goods like food and tools are likely to hold more value. When everyone’s starving, a baseball bat to guard it with is worth more than a lump of shiny but useless metal.

    3. If you aren’t assuming social collapse, foreign currency is another option. Be careful, because you want to pick one that is not likely to track your local currency and fall together. The advantage here is that when your local currency stabilizes, the value of gold will drop quickly and it will be very hard to guess exactly the right time to cash out. Foreign currencies won’t have that same crash effect.

    All that said, don’t jump into action out of panic. Take time to think it through calmly - collapse is probably not coming in the next week or two. The actions that will save you financially in a collapse can destroy you if that collapse doesn’t come. Make a plan for what to do if you’re wrong to avoid shooting yourself in the foot (or, as many people do after that kind of mistake, the head).


  • Easiest access to the “inert gas” piece is dry ice from your local grocery store. CO2 is heavier than air. Wrap some in a tea towel and put it in the bottom of the bucket before adding the food. Then place the lid on but do not close. Keep in a place without significant air movement while the dry ice sublimates, pushing out the lighter gasses, before sealing the lid. This takes a few hours.

    Times and amounts are purposely vague, as I don’t remember them, but it should be easy to look up. If not, err on the side of too much and too long - the extra gas will just seep out the top.


  • From TFA (emphasis mine):

    The most aggressive approach, in a bill filed by state Sen. David Gregory, would award a $1,000 bounty for tips that result in the arrest of a person present in the United States without authorization. Gregory, a Republican from Chesterfield, wants to authorize bounty hunters, usually employed by bail bond businesses to catch absconders, to track down people identified in tips.

    And if the tip proves accurate, the person arrested would be charged with “trespass by an illegal alien,” and subject to life in prison without parole if federal immigration authorities declined to take custody.

    I expect cruelty from these people, but the harshest sentence that exists short of death‽ Solely for being undocumented, no other offense or aggravating factors. And held in conditions civilized countries wouldn’t allow for mass murderers (state and local prisons are generally much worse than federal).

    I just can’t even …


  • The ability to use home-made inks, guache, and stick-inks makes Ackerman very special. Particularly since I get to use my favorite Brause Bandzug nibs. And of course there’s the fact that they’re a small specialty company helps make them “favorite”.

    If you’re asking who makes my favorite pens for every day carry or low-maintenance with standard fountain pen inks, definitely Lamy. They will still stand out a bit in a business setting in a way that might be a bit uncomfortable for some, but not in the brute utilitarian way Ackerman’s do. I love broad nibs, and frankenpens just aren’t reliable enough for me at work.






  • The context is that the original version of the keyboard didn’t have the q a and z keys on the right side at all. QMK and similar keyboard firmwares have features that let a key send one code when tapped and a different code when held or pressed, and even another when double tapped.

    The keyboard designer made themself a keyboard where ESC, Tab, and Shift keys were set up to send q, a, and z on a quick tap, and got so many comments on multiple videos asking how they could possibly use a keyboard missing three letters that they made another keyboard with the three cockeyed keys added on the right as a joke.


  • Favorite would be a highly customized zsh.

    fizsh (not fish) is what I actually end up using, as I can’t be bothered to copy that config around and retune it for each machine. Gives me the syntactic sugar of zsh with common default options on by default, an OK default prompt, and doesn’t break POSIX assumptions like fish. Also Installs quickly from the package manager without needing to run through the zsh setup each time - unlike oh-my-zsh. And if I still need customization, all the zsh options are still there.


  • No - it was the language that I said was transphobic, not the author. Given that there were two different word choices (“transsexual” and “perceived gender”) that reinforced each other, it seems more likely than not that they reflected the mindset of the author, but not having looked further for their other writings I was not sure. That’s why I said " transphobic language" and not “transphobic author”.



  • There’s nothing wrong with the example in and of itself, but the word “transsexual” in place of “transgender” is not generally random. It is explicitly chosen by Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) as well as by right-wing transphobes as a dog whistle to conflate gender dysphoria with drag queens and cross-dess fetishists so as to delegitimise transpeople and suggest some sort of sexual deviance. Coupled with the equivocation of “perceived” gender, motive doesn’t even have to come into it. The words themselves and the concepts they reinforce are transphobic and harmful.

    A witch hunt would have been for me to say that the author is a transphobic asshole whose writings need to be wiped from the internet - which is very far from what I actually posted, which was regret for the way the language they chose distracted from the flow of their argument by reinforcing the social stigmatization of trans people. (Edit: That was a deliberate choice on my part. Not knowing enough about the author to be sure of motives and having no desire to deep dive into their history, I decided that it was only appropriate to point out the hurtful nature of the language and not imply motive.)