Well, TBF it’s hard to maximize profit when you’re head is in a basket in front of the guillotine, sooooooooo I guess they need to figure shit out before then?

Apprenticeships are damn near impossible to find in the US, period. Usually people go to trade schools.

Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can’t pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)

But doing labor outside the home means that labor can’t be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you’re working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that’s 40 hours you don’t have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.

The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it’s entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.

No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.

Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.

Deviant Olam is another good one for physical security. After seeing a few of his videos on gun “safes”, I looked into genuine gun safes (TRTL 30x6 or better, and/or DoD-approved weapons containers) with S&G mechanical locks, and the prices are eye watering. An S&G lock by itself ain’t too bad–about $600, IIRC–but the safe body itself was $15k+, easy. …Without shipping included, since there’s no fucking way I’m getting that into my basement myself. Most gun “safes” are not even UL-listed Residential Security Containers, and you get into $2000+ for one that meets that basic, very, very minimum level of protection. (Yes, I looked in the local gun stores that carry them.) The fact that most gun “safes” aren’t capable of resisting an 18" prybar that’s used continuously for 15 minutes is not a pleasant thought to think about.

First things first.

Second, given that the author has hidden this in a paywall–you have to sign up in order to access the article and presumably any links–I’m going to immediately distrust the motives.

Third, Medium is a glorified blogging site; anyone can say anything on it.

While mass-shooting deaths account for just 1 percent of firearm fatalities, they play an outsize role in how safe Americans are feeling, Murthy said.

Yeah, no shit. And this is even worse when you consider that the overwhelming majority of mass shootings–which are defined by the gov’t as four or more people shot (not necessarily killed), not including the shooter–are gang violence or ordinary crime (robbery, etc.). So the kind of mass shootings that people worry about are, statistically speaking, relative to the number of people that live in the US, *very, very rare. When you look at the kind of targeted, mass-casualty events that happen annually in the US, you’re looking at odds that are similar to winning a jackpot in the lottery.

It’s not that mass shootings are realistically a problem that most people will have to face, but people freak out about them because they’re on the news all the time–if it bleeds, it leads–and because it feels more random than, say, a serious car accident. Despite serious car accidents being more common by multiple orders of magnitude.

It’s fundamentally a perception issue.

Here you go - https://archive.is/tjywS

“Gender critical” is a dogwhistle for anti-trans. Dawkins falls squarely into that camp, of questioning everything that trans people, and experts on the subject have to say. The problem with being anti-trans–or, one of the problems–is that by its nature it assumes that there’s some kind of sex role in society. E.g., women are A, B, C, and men are X, Y, Z, and you can’t move between them. That kind of gender-essentialism is fundamentally socially regressive. Dawkins is also quite significantly culturally Christian, and Islamophobic, e.g., he is entirely critical of Islam both as a religion and as what he perceives to be a culture, but doesn’t direct the same types of criticism towards the Anglican church that he grew up surrounded by.

how you identify/feel is a different matter in many people’s eyes.

The way I see it, it’s just not my business. The only time that someone else’s gender identity is going to matter to me is if I’m potentially interested in dating them. They’re not harming people, they’re not ‘taking’ anything away from cis-women (or cis-men, for that matter), so why should it be my business what they feel they need to do with their body in order to feel comfortable in their own skin? I came across this a few weeks back, and it really drove that home to me.

But does that alone make him Right Wing now?

It’s a spectrum, like all things. You can be pro-science, but also still have a very socially conservative view on the ‘right’ place for people in society, or still maintain false beliefs about the ‘rightness’ of capitalism, imperialism, and so on. And scientists are still human, and prone to the same cognitive biases as everyone else.

Being right wing doesn’t necessarily mean being religious. Being left wing doesn’t necessarily mean being atheist. Yes, that’s more often true than not, but I think part of that is that the right in general uses an appeal to tradition–which includes religious practices–as part of their package. But, on the other hand, Jesus, as depicted in the 4 gospels and the early Christian church, would have been very comfortable to socialists, as would the teachings on tolerance.

In re: podcasts, the only explicitly atheist one that I still listen to is The Friendly Atheist. I find Jess to be annoyingly hyperbolic most of the time, and she frequently makes wildly overbroad statements, but Hemant Mehta is pretty measured overall. Mostly I listen to politics (FiveThirtyEight), 2A podcasts (A Better Way 2A, the irregular Tiger Bloc Podcast, Guns Guide To Liberals, Practical Shooting After Dark), a couple of ex-Mormon podcasts (Mormon Stories is great if you love really, really long form interviews), You Are Not So Smart, sometimes BtB, Cool People Who Did Cool Things, a couple others.

[…]with intent to obtain money, property, or other tangible benefit[…] [emphasis added]

There’s your problem. You’d have to demonstrate that he claimed the badge in order to receive some benefit. He’s a congressional member of Texas, and Republican; by winning the primary–which likely did not hinge on the medal–he was almost certain to win the general election.

This would be a very, very hard case to make as a prosecutor.

Interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of my text messages to my partner fail to send as well, and I also swear frequently and voluminously. I should test this and see if this is what is going on with my carrier.

Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings

I wanted to add to this because it might catch someone else.

I live in a cedar cabin in the mountains. The wood is untreated on the inside. Cedar is not usually attractive to insects that eat wood, but, well… Every year since we moved there, we’d get small amounts of frass (chewed-up bits of wood) from insects eating the exposed roof beams (!!!) of our house. I would spray the beams with permethrin, a bunch of dead ant-looking things would be on the floor the next few days, and that would be it for the year.

This year I called an exterminator, since it keeps happening. He said that it wasn’t termites (yay!), but thought that it was some kind of beetle. (Powder post beetles are a huge problem in our area.) He said we had two options: we could either fumigate the entire house (cost: about $10k, since the whole house would need to be tented), or we could paint all the woodwork in the hose with a 1:1 solution of Bora-Care and water. Bora-Care is a disodium octaborate tetrahydrate and glycerin solution, and should poison the wood for pests, without being toxic to people or animals once it’s dried. (I may also have to drill the beams in inject a similar product in order to get deep enough penetration.)

This should be a one-and-done process; I should not need to repeat it.

…Have you been paying attention to Dawkins in the last decade? The dude is decidedly anti-trans, anti-woke. Harris has been on the side of Republican foreign policy for decades, even if he’s more socially permissive. Shermer is the same kind of anti-LGBTQ anti-woke as Dawkins.

So, here’s the thing.

He shouldn’t have gone there. Being there, being armed, there to protect property, was taken to be provocative by the people that were protesting cops shooting an unarmed man.

But the narrative that we got in the news wasn’t how things actually went down. The first person confronted him and tried to grab his rifle when he wasn’t threatening anyone. The second person that was shot had just chased Rittenhouse down and struck him with a skateboard. The third person was pointing a pistol at Rittenhouse when he was shot in the arm. Source.

Given that he was not directly threatening anyone there, it was a clear-cut case of self-defense. Yeah, I don’t like it that a shitty person walks away, but he walked because he wasn’t guilty of a crime in defending himself. Is he still a right-wing shitstain that’s supposedly too dumb to get into the military? Yeah. But self-defense is a right for everyone.

That’s $62,000 annually. The median personal income in the US as of 2022 was $40,480, which means that’s about 50% above the median.

Not sure what you’re on that you don’t think that’s a pretty decent individual income.

Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer.

All prominent atheists, all decidedly right-wing. If you want to include dead atheists, then I’d also say Christopher Hitchens was decidedly right wing on a lot of issues.

I moved to the south from the north. Everyone here wants to hug.

Please kill me.

The most?

Fire.

The best guesses right now is that our ability to use fire–and eventually create fire–allowed us to evolve the brains that we have now, because cooking food significantly decreases the energy needed to process it, which allows more energy to be used by your brain. And our brain burns a lot of calories. Cooking food is essentially a preliminary digestion process. Without our brain, the modern world as we know it never exists. Hell, we never even evolve past troops of apes.

Sure. It would make planning for retirement a lot easier; I’d have a pretty good idea of how much I needed to save and invest.

No.

Yes, I wish it was more socially acceptable, but I still wouldn’t be physically affectionate. Because autism.