Random Dent @ CrabAndBroom @lemmy.ml

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Joined

2 yr. ago

My first thought was to set up a bunch of long-term investments, since you can reasonably assume that you'll live a long life. But then also, being rich might increase the odds of you being kidnapped or killed, so it might just tank whatever you choose to invest in.

Maybe you could somehow get a job testing roller coasters. Once you're in there you have no power to decide anything, so perhaps the universe will make the builders construct the safest possible roller coaster. OR, you could be a food taster for someone rich and powerful. The universe wouldn't let you eat anything that's poisoned, or it would just ensure that no food gets poisoned in the first place!

Here in Canada, the general sentiment among people I've talked to is definitely that the US has fucked up it's relationship with us in a very long-term way, if not permanently. Even if the tariffs went away tomorrow, there's still the issue that Trump threatened Canada's sovereignty, which people here are not taking lightly at all.

I've heard people say that even if Trump went away, there's no guarantee some other dickhead won't take over and start the same nonsense, or we'll just be back here again in 4 years. Even the new Prime Minister said that the relationship we used to have with the US is over now.

It sucks that we all have to live through it, but I feel like the current times in the US are a really interesting test of the sort of limits of democracy. By that I mean, what happens if the majority of the population just willingly elects the worst person they can find, and at the same time every check, balance, rule and tradition that everyone assumed would keep things on the rails just... turn out to be kind of bullshit because nobody is willing to enforce them?

It raises all sorts of weird questions, like at a certain point is it okay to overrule democracy in some way to protect the country and the people, even if the majority seem to want to just run the bus off a cliff? And what about the people who didn't vote for this? Are they expected to just go down with ship or have to leave their home country altogether? An informed and engaged populace is vital to a healthy democracy, but what if enough people are uninformed/propagandized enough that they just willing take down the whole country? Does the rest of the world just let it implode?

I have no real answers to these questions, but I'd love to be studying this whole situation from like 100 years after it's all over.

Also even "Today" is not a happy song lol. From Wikipedia:

After the release and minor success of the band's debut album, Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins were being hyped as "the next Nirvana". However, the band was experiencing several difficulties at the time. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was undergoing an increasingly severe addiction to heroin; James Iha and D'arcy Wretzky had recently broken up their romantic relationship; and Billy Corgan had become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide and plagued by writer's block. Corgan recalled that "after the first album, I became completely suicidal. It was an eight-month depression, give or take a month, and I was pretty suicidal for about two or three months."

...

The dark, ironic lyrics of "Today", describing a day when Corgan was feeling depressed and suicidal, contrast with the instrumentation. Michael Snyder of the San Francisco Chronicle said that the song is "downright pretty as rock ballads go" but that "Corgan manages to convey the exhilaration and tragic release he seeks." Corgan told Rolling Stone that "I was really suicidal ... I just thought it was funny to write a song that said today is the greatest day of your life because it can't get any worse." Corgan later compared writing the lyrics of "Today" and "Disarm" to "ripping [his] guts out".

Not the above poster, but for me: it's a slight concern but AFAIK the profiles are interchangeable so it's pretty trivial to just switch back to Thunderbird if anything does happen.

For me it's handy because I have multiple email accounts so I can just open Betterbird and check them all at once without having to log into several different pages.

There is not a force on Earth that could compel me to ever buy hardware from HP again. I'd rather not have a computer than have an HP computer.

Yeah that's honestly the main thing for me too. It's $120 Canadian for the Deluxe version. My price point is like... $30, especially since by all accounts it's not even finished.

I wonder if some sort of "Dead Man's Switch" might be an appropriate solution for something like this? IIRC there are services that will send out messages to certain people if you don't log in for a set amount of time, so maybe something like that could be set up to email friends/family/a lawyer/the consulate of your home country or whoever in case you get snatched?

It probably won't be able to tell them where you are or what exactly happened obviously, but it could at least let people know something's up.

I feel like the "getting into privacy" journey for a lot of people tends to look like a bell curve - you start off with a few apps and minor tweaks to protect you from the worst online privacy invasions, and then it gradually builds and builds until you become the sort of person that has all their cat pictures on an air-gapped encrypted server hidden in a cupboard somewhere while you use SearX to find the best mask that will confuse facial recognition cameras, and then after a while you break through and just go back to using a few apps and tweaks to protect from the worst of it again.

I have to admit I'm a bit guilty of this, but from both sides. I bike more than I drive, and when I'm driving all cyclists are a menace and are in the way, but when I bike all drivers are reckless idiots who are trying to kill me.

Thanks for uploading these, very handy!

You still can, it's on archive.org!

Edit: not sure if I'm allowed to post the direct link, but it comes up right away on the search.

I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn't look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there's like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn't do it as far as I can see.

• Does nazi salute multiple times at presidential inauguration and instead of apologising...
• Makes a series of nazi-related jokes
• Makes a speech at a far-right rally in Germany
• Retweets that "Hitler didn't murder millions of people"
• Is apparently shocked that people are angry at him now.

I use BorgBackup with Vorta for a GUI, and I keep the 3-2-1 backup rule for important stuff (IE: 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 off-site.)

openSUSE is right there lol

Someone will install Doom on you and post it on the internet

Oh yeah same here, I've been using Linux in some form or another since maybe 2006 or so, and I still have a folder in Obsidian that's just notes about Linux lol. Usually if I customize something or fix something or learn something new, I'll chuck it in the notes along with the link to where I found it so I don't have to retrace my steps looking for it again.