The_Sasswagon @ The_Sasswagon @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Caususes are a way some state political parties choose to pick out their favorite party candidate for the November election.

In most states they have a primary which is just a normal election by US standards. In a few, including Iowa, they gather in a physical room and move from location to location to physically show who they support.

That means if I'm "caucusing for Bernie" I'd go stand next to the Bernie crowd. This ends when a certain candidate has a majority (I don't remember the exact amount). So people move from candidate to candidate as they see theirs isn't winning or as they are persuaded by others there.

Every state has their primary or caucus on a specific day, so yesterday was Iowa's day, and it's often very cold this time of year in Iowa. This year it's pretty brutal, high of 3°F and low of -3°F today (-16C and -19.5C), and it was colder a few days ago.

I got to travel to Brussels recently and it was a short visit but so great! It's really cool to see the obvious new work and the areas they haven't gotten to yet.

This article got me looking at the street view comparing 2009/10 to now along some of these new pedestrian areas. it's amazing how not only does the street change, but where there were a bunch of banks with no canopy there's now restraunts with covered seating areas and little parks with trees and flowers.

Along bd Anspach is where I was looking if anyone was interested.

Their coffee tastes the way it does because of how they roast it, it's a purposeful style thing (that tastes terrible and is horribly overpriced imo).

Their roasts are also darker than they say. Everything they have is dark roast, with their 'blond' coming in closer to a medium.

People go nuts over the sugar, caffeine and perceived status, it has nothing to do with the taste of the coffee. As a fellow black coffee drinker, my recommendation is to avoid Starbucks unless you happen to be near a union store where the coffee is guaranteed to taste more like freedom, but still like ashes soaked in oil.

In case you want more details: The way coffee roasting works is you move beans around in a real hot container, and you try to keep them to a specific point on a temperature graph at each moment as they roast. A different roaster would roast them a bit slower, but Starbucks just blasts those beans with everything they have, then they don't stop until the beans are burnt. This gives them their "signature taste". This is largely because of Howard Shultz, the guy who drove the company to be a cafe, and until recently the CEO. That's his preferred coffee taste and that's what he demands the company makes.

I just installed Fedora with KDE plasma and Wayland last weekend using the surface kernel. Was pretty painless, after abandoning a couple other distros that did not play nice.

The instructions on the GitHub are also very good, though obviously every years surface has its challenges I'm sure.

Yeah, it's the manipulators fault. Ideally we would all have time and energy to consider every input on our lives for spin and slant, but most of us don't. And even if most people didn't have to work two jobs to own a car and have a home, it's still the manipulators fault for using their status for personal gain at the expense of others.

I do agree that a society built better would not encourage the manipulations we see today, but we haven't failed because people are dumb. Perhaps we are struggling because our current society was built by bigoted white men who wanted to expand control, power, and wealth. Maybe we could do better by allowing for time to mingle with our neighbors and learn from one another.

Nobody is stupid for being manipulated. That line of thinking only encourages people to double down when they realize they are wrong, to avoid being seen as stupid.

Our ebike takes about the same amount of time as driving for most of our trips and nearly halves public transit time to some places we go. It was about 2k, and for that price it has been an actual steal. I think we put about 1.5k miles on it in the first year, and cost wise I think it'll break even at about double that.

It doesn't sound like ebikes are overpriced, it sounds like you don't find value in what an ebike does. And that's totally ok, especially if you're advocating for making your community more healthy and doing your best to live that way too.

It is a real shame that ebikes weren't subsidized like electric cars are, that would have changed the equation a lot for folks who are more on the fence and could have started a shift where more people want safer places to use their new bikes.

Edit: just read your reply to the other folks, you get it. I gotta wake up more before I start commenting

You might have fixtures that overheat the bulbs. LEDs run cool compared to other bulbs but they are very sensitive to heat (that's why the old ones had fins on them). If your fixture is enclosed, LEDs in there will have a much shorter life span.

One common fixture in these parts are those silly domes with the screw in the middle, they regularly killed bulbs at my old place. I even had one come out that had discoloration from the heat.

CFLs and incandescents didn't like those fixtures or heat either, but I don't know as much about how their life span was impacted.

I'll second this, I've only had issues with a couple games, even brand new ones run with proton and it just works. Obviously distro and hardware make a big difference (I have AMD) but even when I had an NVIDIA GPU it was very simple and stable with only a little messing around with drivers up front.

Dunno, it's a year away, why call my shot now when I don't have all the information yet? But if I voted today and it was Biden v Trump and no competitive 3rd party, it would be an easy blank on the presidential section.

But that's a hypothetical, we'll see if Biden aligns more with me in voting day, I can only assume he will double down on trying to seduce disenfranchised Republicans so I'm not hopeful.

I used to work retail far from where I grew up, and everyone I knew would go home for the holidays but I would have to work. It was tough sometimes but also it's just another day, I "took time off" from my home chores to go do what I want once I was off work or if I wasn't feeling up to it, just stay in with a frozen pizza and watch horror movies.

I'm not sure if that helps, but even though it did rob some of the remaining childhood magic for me, changing the view of holidays to be more mundane helped me feel less bad about my situation and enjoy the fact that I had some time to do whatever I wanted.

As the others have said, a tester can be really helpful, especially when trying to figure out what all the different terms mean that people throw around online.

I currently have Novel Keys Cream (linear/smooth) switches on my main keyboard, cherry browns (tactile) on another for work, and jade box switches (clicky) on a little project board I made for when I want to feel the click in my bones.

I'd recommend trying any of them, though personally I find the most variation in linear and clicky switches and I never found a tactile switch that felt different enough to me to justify the price.

Enjoy the new keyboard!

Unfortunately it's really hard to know for most of early history because people didn't write down or tell stories about that mundane stuff. We do have lots of documentation from colonizers in North America as they interacted, observed, and tried to convert the native peoples though.

I'd recommend looking to the great lakes region in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest reaching down to northern California since the Europeans wrote a lot about them. Some people had slaves and owned property and some did not, and some built their society around a system of social capital, where collectively being good to each other was a way to pay each other back for wrongdoing.

It's honestly absurd how many different ways people lived before us, and presumably, will after us.

Is that true? That sounds like something someone would just say with no factual backing. I read a fair bit recreationally about pre European societies and I haven't seen some universal truth about screwing each other over for some action.

There were and presumably are many societies that treat procreation and child rearing completely differently than we do today. Once you stop looking at your neighbors kids as "theirs" and seeing them as "ours" there isn't much drive to compete with them.

This is awesome! I already knew that many names in the Midwest were anglicized native names, but I didn't realize the same was true of the southeast.

A really cool project

That's what I figured too.

If only it was just teenagers, physically grown ass men and women do this too. Have had some I thought were good friends cut me off from talking to them "because I didn't have an iPhone".

We recently got a chip drop and cardboard/mulched the entire yard in prep for a more food and natives oriented lawn (and to kill the grass). The neighbors and family are incredulous, but the enormous earthworms we keep finding seem to enjoy it. When the leaves started falling we started mixing them with the mulch, even asked some neighbors for their bagged leaves.

I think they'll understand better when it starts taking shape. And anyway, it's not their lawn, who cares!

This song's about Alice. And the restaurant.

Wow, that's crazy! I certainly did not have that experience with my lockup, but it was in a parking garage behind a second locked gate, so fairly secure.

I guess that just becomes part of your risk assessment for biking places then! I know in my situation I'd have to lose an awful lot of bikes to make the cost of a car worthwhile, but I'd really rather not lose any.

I recently read about a system used by some groups in North America (I think, geography could be off) where people were held accountable by independent arbitration and a cultural expectation of reparations.

It's hard to say how well it worked, the Europeans were idealizing the "exotic natives" and the communities were proud of their community and could have exaggerated it's success. But they did this for a long time.

From what I understand, if I robbed your home, made off with your dog, and in the process hurt your mother, my direct community of family and friends would meet with your direct family and friends and hash out a way to make things better. My family and I might be on the hook to return the things I took, help you with repairing some clothing, and should you or your family need help for a period of time we would be obligated to help. If we couldn't come to an agreement someone else from the community who was not involved would come to help decide.

Obviously this is primarily focused on preventing these things from happening in the first place. I don't want my friends and family to be indebted to others, and through helping your friends and family, we might end up closer, making whatever caused the problem less likely to occur again.

As to how exactly we do such a thing today, thats tough. We have many complicated societal problems that make many feel disconnected from everyone around them. One thing is for sure though, police do not prevent crime, they do not solve crimes, and they sure don't police evenly. We desperately need to try something different, and maybe a first step, in a weird way, is trying to connect with the people around you.