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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 16th, 2023

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  • A couple of ideas:

    • Home Ownership. I know condos exist, but it seems to me that we need a solution for home ownership that is accessible and ecologically viable. Traditional houses (and even duplex’s/townhomes) are massively inefficient from a climate perspective, not to mention the space requirements and cost.

    • Child rearing. In college, I learned that children were typically raised by multiple neighbors, in order to lessen the strain on parents. I think it is unrealistic and unhealthy to expect people to nearly kill themselves attempting to raise a child for the first couple of years.

    • Recreation space. I realize this is mostly an American thing, but lawns are a colossal waste of space. To be of any use at all, they have to be at least half an acre, and realistically, there’s no reason every single family needs their own outdoor recreation space. Plus, a tiny minority of people even use them these days.



  • There is no company that does not engage in anti-consumer data collection practices. Mozilla tried to rank them a couple of years ago, but they couldn’t because every single brand got an F on their grading rubric. That being said, anything can be airgapped if you’re handy. Just disconnect the antenna(e) and you should be golden.

    In regards to reliability, Toyota is and has been the golden standard. Mitsubishi/Nissan/Honda are a mixed bag. Stellantis has been a complete shitshow for a long time. VAG and BMW tend to be reliable, but expensive to fix. Ford and GM tend to be unreliable, but cheap to fix. Hyundai has improved massively over the past 20 years, and now has several models built like tanks, but also several that continue to be tire fires.

    I don’t know what your means are, but I’d get something small and budget oriented for a first car. Smaller cars are generally safer and cheaper, and lower engine power will help make the car more controllable in adverse conditions. If you have the option, a manual gearbox is cheaper to own, and it’s a good skill to learn.

    Edit: Also, don’t buy a car the first year of a generation or a model. Don’t buy a car on a rainy day. Do wait until the end of the month/quarter/year if buying from a dealership. Do find a local, independent mechanic who is reliable and trustworthy.


  • My cousin’s wife divorced him after 6 months to move to her home country. Her stated reason was that during lockdown, she was isolated from her friends and family, and she couldn’t handle being alone again.

    It was hard on all of us but…uh…what does she think the rest of us single people did?










  • I live in DFW, a large amalgamation of two cities and a bunch if suburban sprawl in Texas.
    I live in a neighborhood that is considered extremely walkable, as I am directly across the street from a university and less than a mile from city hall.

    Here are my walking distances:

    • To the nearest convenience store: 1.8km
    • To the nearest chain supermarket: 4.3 km (They have a monopoly though, so unless you can afford whole foods, the closest good one is like 22.5 km)
    • To the bus stop: Lol, we don’t have busses. A neighboring city does, so I guess 29 km?
    • To the nearest park: Nearest park is 2.8km. Nearest public space is only 1.5km because I live right next to city hall.
    • To the nearest big supermarket: 8.9 km to Walmart.
    • To the nearest library: 1.5km, again, I live right next to city hall.
    • To the nearest train station: 16km, unless you mean one for intercity travel. We don’t have one of those because Amtrak is slowly being killed.

    Straight-line distance to Big Ben: we don’t have a Big Ben, but we killed JFK and that’s 34km away.

    Bonus fun fact, I commute 42km each day. This is considered far by most people here, 32km would be much more reasonable.


  • “I don’t really get why people get so up in arms about discussing it, but Sex is fun. Be careful though, those swimmers are persistent little fuckers.”

    “Drugs feel good and you think everything is fine until one day you look up and realize it all went wrong years ago. I can’t stop you, but I really hope you’ll choose not to try them.”

    I think both worked out well. I’m sex positive and I generally avoid drugs because it just isn’t worth the risk of finding that one substance that totally ruins my life.





  • What is your budget and needs? Used thinkpads from a certain time period are very hardy, but they’re getting old enough now for performance to be an issue for anything beyond basic web browsing and word processing.

    Framework also makes laptops with the explicit goal of being more repairable. Even if you decide not to work on it yourself, it would be trivial for a repair shop to fix most things that could go wrong.