Adalast @ Adalast @lemmy.world

Posts

1

Comments

703

Joined

2 yr. ago

This. They may be unnecessary for the company, but they are necessary for society to maintain function and for the economy as a whole to continue smoothly function. Consider an analogy for the economy to a food chain, you have to have the bottom rungs of the food chain that are plentiful and prosperous to continue to maintain the larger predators. If you start taking out the bottom rungs, it may take a while, but the apex eventually starves. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The more money the poor make, the better the economy will function.

Yo ho ho

Katana is too difficult to maintain, crossbow bolts can be fashioned by hand from found materials, first aid kit can be scavenged pretty easily. If this is starting gear, go for the stuff that is either rare or likely to be scavenged first, and that is easy for you to maintain by hand. Jeeps aren't rare, real body armor is. The machete is the go-to blade for many parts of the world for a reason. It is heavy enough to cleave small brush and limbs alike, sturdy enough that it isn't likely to break on you, and you can get a utility or survival version that has a saw on the back and other useful tools included in it. Only take the Jeep if you are proficient in maintaining it and know how to make biodiesel. If you have those skills, go for it. Your assessment is correct. If not, it is prioritizing short-term benefits over even medium-term. Even on a full tank, you have less than a day's travel in it. Then it becomes a hard-walled tent or tiny home, take your pick of feel-good terminology. Depending on your starting location, that half-day of travel may not be enough to get you safely away from population centers. If you are in any major US East Coast city, you are fucked. You can barely make it into the Appalachians on one tank, and certainly not remote enough to be safe. As you move further and further west, that becomes less and less of an issue. If you are in the SW, a Jeep becomes top tier pick because it lets you navigate offroad to somewhere truly remote and provides adequate hauling capacity for scavenged materials for setting up a secure base of operations.

I thought the fire axe was a lock pick?

I'm swapping the first-aid kit for the crossbow, but spot on for the rest. Body armor is rare and definitely raises your odds of survival in the short term after the initial spread. A machete is the ultimate all-purpose blade, good for defense as well as butchering, breeching, and it is easily maintained. And the water purifier is a no-brainer. Waterborn diseases are a real problem in any situation where public utilities become inaccessible and clean drinking water grows scarce.

Assuming that I am obviously able to expand my kit as I survive, the ranged weapon that uses easily craftable ammo would be ideal. A first aid kit could be cobbled together over the course of a few days of persistent scavenging. No promises on the crossbow, they are far less common than bandaids, gauze, sterilization solutions, and splints. Really the thing that would likely be the hardest to source is the suture needle that you should have in there.

I always loved 10k in Z-Nation for using the wrist rocket slingshot because that is truly the king ranged weapon for a survival scenario. Lightweight, ammo that is infinite and easily accessible, and lethal out to ranges that matter. Not to mention that they are very easy to maintain and repair.

All that said, I would likely accumulate the aforementioned electricity/fuel items as I am familiar with the production of biofuels and can build some alternative generators (wind, methane, solar concentrators) for electricity once I have somewhere secure. Methane in particular has always been attractive to me for survival scenarios because anaerobic decomposition is a great way of dealing with biowaste and what is left over ends up making really good fertilizer. Just need a couple of propane tanks, some steel, and a car battery to rig as a welder and you can turn one into a digestor and the other into storage, then get a couple 2 cycle lawnmower engines and some AC motors and you can get a power supply running. At least enough to run some incandescent bulbs. Need a voltage regulator for more complex electronics to keep the line clean, but that is a different conversation.

He's right, unless you study up on making biodiesel. Then you have the upper hand in the argument, as a diesel Jeep can be run on biodiesel. Rendering those fatty zombie corpses to fuel should be a functional disposal method.

Can you tell the employers that? They don't seem to be getting the memo from all of the strikes.

We aren't supposed to be working. Seriously. Members of hunter gathered tribes put in about 15 hours per week and a medieval serf worked about ⅔ of the year. Our lives are supposed to be filled with leisure time. We are our neurobiology evolved around having fun and doing the minimum necessary for the survival of our community. We aren't supposed to be spending huge swaths of our life toiling to make someone else rich so they can have 100% leisure time. We aren't supposed to live in persistent existential dread because we are one sniffle or broken bone away from homelessness. We aren't built for our world.

They would end up shooting themselves in the foot. They are on shaky ground already and it would only take a new platform that can entice a few of their top content producers over to lose enough chunks of their revenues to hurt. And all they have do is keep fucking around to find out what a tech-literate group of nerds who hate big corps can do when they are aligned in a certain direction.

I fundamentally hate self-checkouts because they were an attempt to eliminate an essential job in the company. I refuse to use them. Frustrares my wife and stepdaughter, but it is my little way to give the corporations the middle finger and force them to have to employ people.

I do. That is a side effect of always standing on the hill. I am there when it matters, but also when it doesn't. Such is the curse of my superpowers.

Captain Pedant AWAAAAYYYY!

While I don't disagree with you in spirit, the use case for most instances of the expression are to dissuade the act of comparison at all because the two quantities are so dissimilar that the correlations are irrelevant.

It is an anti-intellectual statement because it presupposes that the person doing the comparing is not able to distinguish between meaningful comparisons and ones which are irrational but support their argument. It ranks up there with "big words" as far as I am concerned, saying more about the person they are being said by rather than the person they are being said to.

Valve is one of those companies that I genuinely believe makes a strong argument for ethical capitalism being possible. Sure, they have some shitty things, but overall they do treat developers and customers reasonably well, they provide hardware and software that is easy to use and non-abusive (not filled with spyware and data harvesters, doesn't use advertising, is well maintained, etc.). If we could obliterate all of the other major conglomerates and replace them with people/companies that understand that you don't have to be a massive pile of shit to make money the world would be better off.

I keep seeing ads from them on YouTube. It gets just far enough to hear a guy saying some BS about supporting legislation that is pro-entrepreneur. I give him the finger and hit skip every time. Gotta love sprinkling anti-union anti-labor messages into the commercial with shit that sounds reasonable.

Except you just compared them in saying they are both fruit. In fact, saying they are both fruit is finding a commonality between them when comparing. There are many metrics on which Apples and Oranges can be compared. They are different colors, have a different internal structures, and different juice content. These are negatively correlated comparisons. More positive correlations would be that they are both roughly spherical, provide vitamin C, and grow on trees.

I have always hated that expression. You can compare anything since comparison is just the act of identifying similarities and differences (positive and negative correlations). One can make meaningful comparisons between and apple and a suspension bridge if the situation calls for it.

Yeah, I wrote elsewhere that I wish medical insurers were required to be 501(c)28 (I think that was the number). It specifically states that they are not allowed to lobby or fund political organizations/candidates.

You are correct, I have studied both (math degree). Both need to be trained though. Informal logic helps a lot to notice the nonsensical statements that can be made that satisfy the rules of formal logic, but still don't operate in reality.

Don't forget the part where Insurance Company X calculates the maximum amount of damages they could be liable for from marauding flash mobs for a given affected area then raises the rates on all of their customers in an even bigger area to compensate so they can never lose money on Alice's wrenches.

Source: I'm a mathematician who spent a summer working in the office of a roofing company and I literally watched homeowners insurance companies do it.

Formal Logic. Please, can this be a full k-12 course like English and Math? Just learn to think, analyse, and correlate ideas in ways that are communicable. Learn what the logical fallacies are and how to avoid them. Train a functional bullshit detector. This world would be so much better off if the bulk of the population could understand what a confirmation bias was. As much as I hate to link to a Grammarly blog post, it gives good examples. Obviously all of it needs to be made age appropriate, but we never bother to actually teach people how to think, we just expect them to know and that has not been working out too well.

Steam Deck. Without question. I don't think I would have been able to cope with the last year and a half of my life without it. This year has been very rough and I have been able to escape life while still spending time with my family. Top-tier psychological maintenance for me.