May I interest you in renting this fine pineapple?

Intellectually I know that all currency systems are constructs and are volatile. That said, what bothers me so much about crypto is how it’s either an obvious scam or it appears to behave like company scrip requiring various exchanges or participating vendors, etc. It’s annoying enough using credit cards or systems like PayPal cash app, and crypto reads like a more annoying PayPal with all of the instability of a stock.

I rarely place much value on authority, but I trust a central bank or national treasury much more than three dudes at a startup promising to disrupt how we think of money.

“It was back it the early 2000s, around 2013 or so….”

The “2000s” also has no meaning for defining a specific time period. It should mean 2001-2010, but I’ve also never heard anyone seriously refer to 2011-2020 as the “teens” and 2021-2025 as the “twenties.” Those words are already associated with decades that we still culturally reference.

We’re a quarter of a century in and I still don’t know how to precisely refer to a 21st-century decade.

As with remote work, it really depends on what you’re doing. Some jobs and classes are tailor made for remote, some are nearly impossible to accomplish remotely. COVID inspired some really creative uses of technology but at the end of the day, it was an augmentation not a drop-in replacement.

I think online courses should be available as much as possible whenever practical, but what we all have to realize is that designing an effective online curriculum is expensive and difficult. We also have to realize that certain activities will never transition to online and we just need to accept that. Taking a lecture with 300 students? Put that that thing online. Learning an instrument? You need to be in-person for your lessons and ensembles.

What needs to change is how in-person workers are compensated and how institutions support the development of online programs. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

The best retail job I ever worked was at a high volume liquor store. Sure, it was soul crushing to see teachers buying pints of vodka on their lunch breaks or to load the old widower’s truck with his weekly case of Carlo Rossi, but there were some upsides.

We were legally obligated to refuse a sale to anyone acting suspicious since our jobs were literally on the line - selling to a minor or selling to someone you knew was buying for a minor meant that you could get fined, jailed, fired, or some combo of all three. That gave us a lot of power to control the point of sale interaction. Liquor stores and check cashing business are heavily regulated so there are frequent sting operations to ensure stores follow the various laws and regulations; this made for a wonderful way to disarm cranky customers.

We also were told to not sell to unruly or obviously inebriated people. We had a “banned customers” binder with people’s pictures from the security cameras sitting on the desk at one of the registers.

We had strict hours because it was illegal to sell outside of the hours of 8am to 11:59pm on week days, or 8am to 8pm on Sundays. If you’ve never worked retail, you don’t know the absolute joy of being able to say, “make a purchase or leave; no customers in the store after midnight,” especially if you’ve worked at restaurant. I remember dealing with someone who was banging on the door at 7:50-something in the morning demanding to be let in and calmly telling them through the locked door, “it’s not 8am on our clock and that’s the only clock that matters.”

While I’m not a fan of the police or calling them unnecessarily, the passive threat of the police occasionally being in the parking lot for DUI enforcement regulated a lot of people’s behavior without us having to say anything or make a phone call.

I’d never work at a liquor store again, though.

It’s also part of the antagonism towards the federal workforce and an extension of the “deep state” conspiracy theory.

I can’t remember what this specific rhetorical device is called, but he’s luring people in with something that appears true at face value so that they arrive at a conclusion they wouldn’t logically arrive at otherwise: Hitler personally didn’t kill millions of people, but the Nazi bureaucracy and military did. Therefore, Hitler isn’t to blame for all the Nazi atrocities, the bureaucracy was.

Musk is redirecting blame, like you pointed out, away from leadership and instead leading people to the conclusion that if government were smaller, then evil wouldn’t have happened. What is especially stupid about this line of reasoning is that it will eventually lead to ideas like, “if we give the president more power and consolidate all decision making to a small group, then public servants won’t mindlessly perpetuate evil,” as if this isn’t exactly what happened in every authoritarian regime right before they started doing real evil.

Alternatively, if a book isn’t your style, just search for “Grafton, New Hampshire” and get ready for some wild reads.

These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldn’t involve a traditional bureaucracy.

As if a corporation isn’t just another form of hierarchical organization with departments and redundancy.

The new zones could also serve as a testbed for weird new technologies without the need for government oversight.

Ah, there it is.

They also want to build on Federal land, which is mostly national parks. So obviously conservation is not a part of our future.

And this is just a fucking speed run into a cyberpunk dystopia. Like an extra stupid mix of Snowcrash and BioShock. If the Federal government allows a bunch of technofascists to build independent cities free of Federal regulatory oversight, then what’s stopping them from just not being part of the US at that point? They won’t be paying taxes, they won’t be represented in Congress, and they won’t be subject to Federal law, so why should we allow this?

Pause a moment and consider what are trying to accomplish with this argument.

Black Metal is not a Nazi genre and I don’t think anyone was actually making that claim. However, white supremacism and Nazi sympathies are common enough in the genre that it has its own scene to the point where it could even be considered a subgenre. It’s even known as National Socialist Black Metal.

The line is definitely blurry when it comes to some bands being labeled as NSBM when the band itself appears to be or even asserts they are apolitical. This makes it difficult to confidently make statements like “this is a Nazi band” or “10% of Black Metal bands are Nazis.”

But that isn’t the point of this thread; the point was “Nazis are overrepresented in Black Metal, so listener beware because you might find yourself sporting a t-shirt that advocates whites supremacy and cruising around town blasting neo-Nazi anthems.”

This isn’t about how many Nazis it takes to make a Nazi music genre or if people from opposite ends of the political spectrum are allowed to enjoy the same music. It’s about being aware that musical tastes can be hijacked to get people to listen to, or even defend, ideas they wouldn’t normally.

I’m staying out of the whiskey war, but…

Occasionally I liked a cocktail with Cointreau, Tequila and lime on the rocks. I forget what it was called.

This is just a margarita on the rocks, sometimes called a classic margarita. 👍

I had an atomic purple gameboy at one point and I miss that thing dearly.

I really enjoy seeing the components of a thing and most of my mechanical keyboards have translucent or semi-translucent cases.

They’re not high-tech, but “demonstrator” editions of fountain pens also hit this vibe.

And if anyone is curious, I’m pretty sure the watch in this image is a Swatch JellyFish (or an imitation). Swatch still makes watches like this, but this style is called Clearly Gent now.

I’ll help you on your quest for downvotes because this seems fun.

American religious anti-intellectualism as we know it really started with the rise of evangelism and fundamentalism in the 1890s-1900s. But it goes in phases: Pentecostalism emerges in the 1900s, fundamentalism and the rejection of modernity and science in the 1930s, anti-liberalism and various “youth” movements in the 1950s, television ministries and mega churches in the 1970s, religious political conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s, and the rise of the non-denominational “bible follower” churches in the 2000s.

But America also experienced several “awakenings” in the 1800s, which gave rise to all sorts of new flavors of spiritualism and Christianity ranging from Mormons to abolitionists. And there’s the rise of the (literal) Salvation Army in the US in the 1880s (but we really have the UK to thank for them).

It’s been incubating here for a long, long time.

Thanks! I registered a domain with cloudflare and that was easy enough. I’ll read up on some alternative providers and see how this all shakes out.

Would I need to do anything with the custom domain beyond registering it for this to work with an email provider?

Because this sounds like a great migration plan: set up a custom domain, add it to protonmail, update emails, export data, and then switch providers.

I’m just a bit clueless on the whole setting up a custom domain part.

I understand what you were going for with this comment but I think you wildly missed the mark.

I don’t expect presidents to be knowledgeable on all subjects either. I expect leaders to surround themselves with experts as well, but Trump has a long history of disagreeing with and firing his advisors and staff whenever he is wrong. This isn’t because he was in real estate, it’s because he is a narcissist and treats learning as a bruise to the ego.

I expect heads of state to take the time to know why they are visiting a place or attending an event. For all the planning and preparation for the tour and the ridiculous travel time to get to Hawaii from the east coast, you expect me to believe that the President couldn’t be bothered to at least look it up on Wikipedia? Not even considering that the president doesn’t just show up randomly at places.

Didn’t look it up, didn’t ask before hand, didn’t listen to any briefing, didn’t pay attention to where he was going. This isn’t because his background is in real estate, it’s because he is a selfish, inconsiderate, ignorant fool.

And for the record, I’d expect the president of the Union to at least understand the importance of Gettysburg.

I haven’t seen Evil Dead Rise yet, so no opinion. Do you recommend it?

• The Thing (1982)
  • This is one of my (and the rest of the internet’s) favorite 80s sci-fi horror movie, but it’s also a remake of The Thing From Another World (1951) and is based on a novella titled, Who Goes There? (1938).
• The Fly (1986)
  • Who needs Vincent Price when you’ve got Cronenberg, Goldblum, and Davis?
• Suspiria (2018)
  • This was a sleeper hit for me. Great soundtrack and cinematography. It put the creepiness back in Argento.
• The Ring (2002)
  • Not my personal favorite but this movie did more to raise the profile of Japanese and Korean horror than anything.
• Evil Dead 2 (1987)
  • Is it a sequel? A re-imagining? A hallucination? I don’t know, but this is my go-to Evil Dead. The 2013 remake gets an honorable mention for being bloody, dark, and chaotic just like it should be.

My bet is also on they wildly underestimated what employable means (or overestimated the value of their skills and experience).

I’m also laughing over here at “long terms gains” of Trump’s policies. Unless this person is one of the billionaire class, there are no long term gains. The people who will benefit from whatever Trump and co. are up to wouldn’t be “out of a job,” they’d just transition to a new role either at the same company or another or be immune from the whole thing altogether.

I think strategically used tariffs (i.e. used in trade negotiations for specific sectors or items, not unilateral tariffs) can convince a country to export items at a price that benefits one country more than the other, usually in tandem with an agreement to reciprocate. Basically, countries agree to trade at certain rates or exclusively sell. Tariffs are the “bad cop” of trade negotiations.

The tariff isn’t what lowers the price, it’s the threat of the tariff that lowers the price or keeps it stable.

Imagine Canada exports maple widgets at $10 a piece to reflect the true cost of manufacture. The US says that is too high, our people can’t afford that price once it’s on the shelves, so how about you export them for $8? To sweeten the deal, we’ll export freedom widgets to you at reduced cost.

Canada responds saying $8 for maple widgets is too low, $10 is firm and we’ll deal with the current cost of freedom widgets. The US threatens a targeted tariff on maple widgets at 25% which doesn’t affect the price of maple widgets in Canada or their sale price to importers in the US, but importers in the US have to pay $2.50 in tax on top of the purchase cost for maple widgets which drives up the cost for US consumers.

This results in the price of the item increasing in the US $4.50 over the price determined to be “affordable” which will result in reduced imports and reduced purchases of maple widgets by consumers. Canada now has to find somewhere else to sell their maple widgets since the US isn’t buying at the same rate which drives down the value of maple widgets in Canada.

And if the US was feeling particularly vengeful at being denied their cheap steady supply of maple widgets, they could convince other countries to not buy Canadian widgets at all or impose a blanket ban on all Canadian goods (see: how the US obliterated the economy of Cuba because of “communism” which was really just Cuba not wanting to be the US’s sugar plantation anymore).

Canada will evaluate this and determine that selling maple widgets is essential to their economy and less profit for their maple widget industry is an agreeable trade compared to the US not buying at all.