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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Everything in the link you provided says that Obama could have done a shitton more to ensure that the Senate Judiciary Committee actually did their jobs.

    Instead, they played political bullshit, Obama blinked, and as a result, America is now two good shakes away from a Fascist dictatorship. The midterm elections - or America’s own “Night of the Long Knives”, which seems all the more likely due to the rhetoric surrounding Kirk’s assassination - Will cinch this future in the bag.


  • The fact that Obama didn’t fill the position that Scalia opened when he died is probably one of the biggest missed opportunities in America’s recent history. Had his position been filled with a left-leaning Justice, especially a young one with many decades of life left, much of America’s Fascist changes could have been opposed.

    As it is, the SC has become a rubber stamp for whatever the current Fascist/Authoritarianist regime wants.



  • I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

    It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

    Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

    The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.




  • A rationality check for you, specifically, from a purely biological standpoint:

    For a woman, peak fertility occurs between about 16 and 28. After 30, fertility starts dropping more and more rapidly every year, with pregnancies after 35 being classified by the medical system as “geriatric pregnancies” due to their age-related risk.

    By the time most women hit 40, they need to put forth up to 30× the effort to become pregnant as they would have when 18, and by 45 most women are considered by the medical system as being functionally sterile.

    That’s not to say that women cannot become pregnant after the age of 45, it just becomes highly unlikely without many tens of thousands of dollars of medical assistance.

    Natural pregnancies after 45, and without any medical assistance, really only happen to women who have - ironically enough - been pregnant for most of their adult lives, because pregnancy pauses the natural cycle for up to 9 months. This pausing of the ovulation cycle prevents eggs from being expended, and pushes back the decline of fertility by up to as much as a decade if full pregnancies occur often enough. However, since this means carrying a full pregnancy to term each and every year from the teenage years onwards, I seriously doubt that any woman would willingly reach for brood mare status just for a longer fertile window.

    So if you have any desire to have a child safely and easily, now would be the time to do so.

    Your husband, on the other hand, is likely to continue being fertile until the day he dies. The only risk he faces is a significant rise of mutations in his sperm (starting in his late-40s) that can lead to rates of genetic diseases and birth defects in his children that directly correlates to his age. As in, he ought to be motivated to act soon, as well, but has far less pressure to do so than you do.




  • Sure, it takes a bit of effort. But if you replace your routers with ones that have open-source firmware or actual workstations acting as gateway routers and running business-class open-source software, you can create a personal VPN between everyone involved that shows only one exit point to world+dog.

    The trick is with ensuring that all YouTube stuff gets properly and comprehensively funnelled through this exit node - VPNs can easily leak data if not configured properly, and sometimes do so despite good configs - and implementing this even on other devices that require individual VPN connectivity (roaming, like phones).

    Plus, having a mobile device’s VPN auto-recognize when it’s connected to a known good network, and have it automatically disable itself in favour of the VPN on that network, is not something that’s easy to do.

    Finally, doing so without a high-quality, high-speed ISP plan can easily lead to an unusably slow VPN. The “mothership” exit node, in particular, would have to be gigabit or better because it has both the node and connections to other homes and devices. If everyone started suckling the YouTube teat at the same time, things would likely slow down pretty fast on anything significantly less than gigabit.



  • Abandon your monetarist goldbug worldview, the gold decoupling and subsequent floating of the international exchange rates are downstream of the actual policy decision that have emiserated the population.

    I never said they were directly related, I just wanted to point out that they both occurred in the same year, in 1971.

    This needs to be exactly reversed, the poorer you are, the easier it should be to acquire but the more you have the harder it gets. Up until a point where it becomes nearly impossible to go beyond the “capital horizon” some kind of equilibrium state where wealth can lo longer be acquired faster than you lose it.

    👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

    Absolutely.


  • rekabis@lemmy.catomemes@lemmy.worldCan't have nice things
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    24 days ago

    if you think a “regular bed” on a 70s/80s/90s full-size pickup is 8’, just how long do you think a “long bed” is?

    It’s the 9ft bed you could get as an option on full-sized trucks above the base model. So for Ford, the F-150 was stuck with either the regular 8ft bed - which was the default - or could go down to a 6.5ft short bed, but for the F-250, F-350 and higher, you could go for a 9ft long bed.

    In some model years, the F-250 & 350 even had its rear axle shifted further towards the rear by a few inches when choosing the long bed in order to get better balance for loads.

    This 9ft long bed was even marketed as a “large camper bed” for those oversized slide-in campers that were too long to allow a standard 8ft bed to raise its tailgate. This was a problem with 8ft beds, because a permanently-lowered tailgate could obstruct the license plate, necessitating its removal so the plate was more visible. The long bed didn’t have this problem, and the tailgate could stay on.


  • The 80s were already the second decade of the decline after the gold standard was revoked in 1971 and wages became decoupled from productivity. Everything was on a slowly accelerating slide downhill from there, although it took until the 90s for the first people to truly notice things were going sideways.

    You want a real economic golden era? Try the 50s and the 60s, where a single wage earner could work a low-end service-level job (selling shoes, for example), and make enough to own a detached SFH, a car in the garage, support a SAH spouse and several children, go on modest vacations every year with at least one more ambitious one every few years, and still have enough left over to save generously for retirement.


  • rekabis@lemmy.catomemes@lemmy.worldCan't have nice things
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    25 days ago

    A “regular bed” has always been an 8ft bed for the last 60-odd years. Look at any full-sized Ford, GMC, AMC, or Chevrolet pickup from the 70s, 80s, or 90s – it’s nearly impossible to find one with anything but an 8ft bed. If you wanted anything shorter you went with a “toy truck” like the Mazda B2000 to B2600i, or a Toyota Tacoma.

    It’s just the utter lack of 8ft beds in full-sized modern (last 10-15 years) trucks that has had the industry reclassifying uselessly lobotomized truck beds as “regular” and normal-length beds as “extended”


  • One of the hallmarks of a destabilizing and imminently pre-collapse ecosystem is when certain fast lived species like insects have sudden surges or collapses in population.

    And I’m talking about short-lived species that typically have yearly cycles. Something that can respond very quickly to sudden surges or absences in food or environmental niches, but which does not normally see sudden population fluctuations in a healthy ecosystem.


  • Since a long press on any key doesn’t bring any of those up, my method involved going to the text replacement section of the system settings, and doing a replacement entry. I copy the glyph from wherever I find it on the Internet and assign a unique string (the “shortcut”) to have iOS insert it. I’ve used a reliable pattern, such as (degc) (yes, including the brackets) for ℃. You need to choose a string that you will never otherwise use, otherwise you’ll be fighting against the text replacement.

    Using this method I’ve added all sorts of special characters like fractions ¼ ⅙ ⅛ mathematical symbols ± « ≈ ≠ and even text emoji ಠ_ಠ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and other random symbols № ® ™.

    Fun fact: if you have an AppleID-linked Mac, this will all sync over, letting you use these shortcuts on the Mac as well.


  • Invasive species.

    My region is absolutely infested with Siberian Elm and Tree Of Heaven (A.K.A., the “semen tree”). You cannot cut them down, because they will resprout like a hydra from the stump. You cannot dig them out, because the smallest root left behind can and will resprout wherever it is, leading to a many-year game of whack-a-mole.

    I have near-daily fantasies of going around with a powerful backpack sprayer filled with glyphosate (Round-Up) and an application wand that can extend from 1m to 10m, and hitting everything just as they’re sending nutrients to the roots for winter.

    The problem is, Glyphosate is highly restricted to purchase and own in Canada unless you have both the appropriate class of Pesticide Applicator’s License (an agricultural variant, for example) as well as the venue to use it in (own or manage an orchard, for example). Thankfully my family owns an orchard, and I am starting the process for the former.

    But still. It’s an absolutely bizarre thing to be obsessing over and I. Just. Cannot. Help. Myself. Every time I drive and see clumps of those disgusting trees, I start to uncontrollably strategize how I could hit them with glyphosate in late September.


  • Unless the island is in the PNW and it just happens to be the beginning of berry season, pretty fucking poorly. Can assemble and maintain a fire, but would likely need a modern fire starter like a lighter, electric or otherwise. Can also build most basic shelters, but it would be uncomfortable AF, anything more advanced would be trial-and-error. Not well versed in hunting despite being at least moderately decent with a bow and arrow. My best option would be scrounging for fruit and hoping I don’t get hit with diarrhea.


  • They’re trying to be edgy and use the obsolete thorn character (þ) everywhere you would normally pronounce “th”.

    While I usually enjoy rifling through the UTF-8 character set for better/more-appropriate glyphs such as curly quotes instead of straight quotes and the numero glyph instead of the hash/pound symbol, the thorn character ain’t going to be making a comeback.

    Edit: fun fact, even the temperature symbols have their own fully-assembled glyphs — Fahrenheit ℉ and Celsius ℃ come fully assembled as a single character glyph that you can use without having to cobble together shit. One of my biggest annoyances is seeing the degree glyph (which a math glyph, and has NOTHING to do with temperature) mashed together with a letter in a wholly inappropriate Frankensteining.