Curious Canid @ Curious_Canid @lemmy.ca

I am owned by several dogs and cats. I have been playing non-computer rolep

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2 yr. ago

Under this administration, an ethics advisor is a clear case of government waste.

All of Trump's appointments and hires have been based on compliance, and nothing else. Well, actually, competence may be a negative and honesty is completely unacceptable.

It's impossible to tell anymore. There was a time when we could have assumed it was a bit. Now we have mentally incompetent people running our government and encouraging their followers to be delusional.

It will always be safer to store sensitive information in a system that you control than in a system that someone else controls. KeePass is easy to setup, it's easy to use, and it provides excellent protection.

I'm getting a T-Deck, but I don't feel too bad about using Bluetooth on a phone, as long as everything else is disabled. It isn't hard to track, but it will be a distant third after cell and Wifi in terms of what the authorities will be tracking. Not ideal, but an acceptable compromise for now.

That much cuteness certainly deserves treats.

We got some Meshtastic radios that we use for protests (as well as for protests). They solve most of the problems quite neatly.

My microwave can boil a single cup of water faster than my kettle. My kettle can boil four cups of water a lot faster than my microwave. It all depends on the microwave and kettle (and the voltage available).

I live in the US and I heat my tea water in an electric kettle. It probably isn't as fast as yours, but it is still close to microwave speed. And I can heat up enough for several cups of tea and have it keep the rest hot. I usually drink more than one at a sitting.

If you live in a place where there are still old lead pipes in the system, which almost everyone in the US does, you should start pushing your city representatives to get it fixed. It's a major hazard in all sorts of ways.

I live in one of the very few cities in the US that replaced all of its lead pipes a couple of decades ago.

AI is already replacing significant parts of the technical workforce. The key is that it doesn't have to successfully replace them. It just has to convince the sociopaths in the C-suites that they can pretend it will so they can layoff masses of employees. That will allow them to collect obscenely large bonuses, sell their stock at a huge profit, and move on to destroying the next round of businesses. Fortunately, the only people this will hurt are, well, us.

People are notoriously bad at correlating data. They personally experience a very limited number of data points, misremember half of them, then draw whatever conclusions they are predisposed to believe.

I know this perfectly well, but it still happens to me too. The difference is that people with a little less self-awareness find it easy to firmly convince themselves that their distorted perceptions represent absolute truth.

There are also areas where the data is open to broad interpretation. For example, the numbers for unemployment have looked surprisingly good for quite a while now. That's because they don't account for either the large number of people who have given up on looking or on the downgrading of many of the jobs from middle-class-breadwinner to minimum-wage-without-benefits. The numbers don't look bad, but the numbers are a drastic oversimplification of the real situation. Similar questions about "the economy" are based on the assumption that what's good for giant corporations is good for the average citizen, which has not been true for at least the last few decades.

The MAGA Cult strongly encourages people to lie to themselves, but that isn't really necessary in a lot of cases.

I'm reading Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. They fit modern fantasy into a British police procedural framework. What makes them exceptional are the characterizations, plus the wit and snark of the dialog. They are both good stories and a lot of fun to read.

It was a basin. It is now a cat bed.

As an American, I would be happy with either Denmark or Canada invading.

That is an amazingly boopable nose.

As a practical matter, most or all of these people are wearing body armor. It isn't full coverage, but it would make shooting them effectively a great deal more difficult. They also operate in large groups, which makes attacking any one of them a lot more dangerous.

The first civilian to shoot at them will almost certainly be killed within seconds. Anyone nearby is also likely to be hit, either accidentally or intentionally. Uninvolved civilians anywhere nearby are also likely to be hit. The agents are unlikely to care about their backstops or about collateral damage.

Any attack on possible government agents that is not part of a well-planned group response, using appropriate weapons, is going to result in civilian casualties and is unlikely to have any effect on the agents. That is not to say it couldn't be done, but a few people responding with concealed carry weapons are not likely to succeed.

Based on your use of the term Left Wing orthodoxy, I infer that you mean the misogynist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic communities. They still exist but have mostly moved to X.

Go bears!

I also think the evidence that Jesus existed is compelling, but my point is that it doesn't matter when you're talking about the philosophy that is credited to him. Reading the Gospels makes it quite clear that a disturbingly large part of modern Christianity is in opposition to everything he stood for.