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HelixDab2

@HelixDab2@lemm.ee

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HelixDab2 ,

Can't really expect anything else from a person that's on a pro-tankie instance. Almost every time someone starts this both sides nonsense, it's lemygrad, lemmy.ml, or hexbear.

HelixDab2 ,

Still workign for me. I'm using FIrefox in incognito mode, a VPN (I use a VPN for everything), and uBlock Origin.

HelixDab2 ,

What, the NYT is demonizing bicycles?

Oh, wait.

E-bikes.

Right.

Because I guess pedaling is too hard for people that live in one of the flattest cities in the world.

HelixDab2 ,

I used to do 14 miles one way in Chicago, year 'round. (I stopped because I moved to Georgia, and now my commute involves about 2000' of elevation difference, which is likely around 4000' of elevation change.) If you're not fit, well, that's a pretty good reason to start riding then, isn't it? NYC also has a fantastic public transit system, one of, if not the best in the US, and it's readily accessible by people with disabilities. Much more so than an electric bicycle.

HelixDab2 ,

It's really not a big deal. You just shower before you leave, and have clean clothes in your bag.

Seriously. Hundreds of thousands of people do this every day.

HelixDab2 ,

Shower before you leave home, duh. And then change into the clean work clothes in your bag--the one I said you should carry--once you get to work.

Since this is apparently difficult, I'll break it down.

  1. Wake up, get coffee. Maybe breakfast if you eat in the morning.

  2. Pack your work clothes in a messenger bag (I used a Chrome Kremlin for a decade, but ended up switching to a Trash Bag). Pack lunch if you want to; make sure lunch is in a leak-proof container.

  3. Shower. Change into cycling clothes appropriate for the weather.

  4. Carry your bike down three flights of stairs to the street.

  5. Ride to work.

  6. Lock bike to a heavy, immobile, hard to destroy object (I was partial to light poles when there wasn't a city rack available; I used a Kryptonite Evolution chain and lock for about a decade with zero bike thefts.)

  7. Change into work clothes and shoes. Comb hair again to minimize helmet hair.

  8. Stow backpack under desk, get to work.

HelixDab2 ,

In my experience in Chicago, a bike was almost always faster than public transit, period. Even before I was fit, when it was painful to ride my bike in to school, it was faster than the train during rush hour.

If you're not fit [...]

...Then riding an e-bike isn't going to make you fit, because you aren't going to pedal it. An e-bike isn't going to make you fit, any more than my Triumph Speed Triple is making me fit. Sure, I'm still on two wheels, but I'm not getting any physical fitness out of it.

I was--briefly--a personal trainer. I saw a lot of people avoiding putting in the work using almost every excuse they could. People that tried to ease themselves into getting fit were still going easy months later. The only people that made progress were the people willing to do the work, even when it was difficult and uncomfortable. For myself, I don't like making excuses for people that won't put in the effort, and that's pretty much everyone that uses e-bikes. If you want a motorcycle, just do that, pay for insurance, and obey the rules of the road, rather than riding on sidewalks and bike paths while putting in zero effort.

HelixDab2 ,

Many--most of the ones that I see in Atlanta--do not require any pedaling at all. They're functionally speed-controlled electric motorcycles that people ride on sidewalks.

So no, most people aren't exercising, any more than they're exercising on electric scooters.

HelixDab2 ,

Why are you gatekeeping cars then? Some people only want transportation where they don't get soaked in the rain, or cold in the winter.

HelixDab2 ,

All those same things apply when you compare actual bicycles to e-bike though. An e-bike is a half-measure, at best.

HelixDab2 ,

Thing is, the absolutely worst things that he's done throughout his career have been pretty mainstream at the time. Like that omnibus crime bill? That was overwhelmingly supported, with only very, very limited Democratic opposition in very limited areas. (And a lot of black communities still support 'tough on crime' approaches because they look at the short term rather than the long.)

Even the support of Israel is pretty middle-of-the-road. Most Dems still support Israel, even while being appalled at the indiscriminate nature of Israel's violence in Gaza

HelixDab2 ,

Anyone that wants to accelerate things has never lived in the kind of world that they're advocating for.

I had a teacher in school that was a Bosnian Muslim during the genocide of the Balkan wars. She, her older brother, and her mom made it out. I never heard her talk about her dad, so I don't think that he did. She and her older brother would practice their drawing by the light of burning tires. The eventually escaped to England, and then got asylum in the US.

That's what we're trying to avoid.

HelixDab2 ,

I did the same thing, in a solidly blue state, with the same thought processes; I voted for Jill Stein. Even after Trump won, I figured he couldn't fuck it up too badly. I even thought he might manage to get one thing right (I'm very solidly pro-2A), but nope, he couldn't even do that.

Biden isn't nearly far enough left for me. But I'll vote for him without even a hint of hesitation, because he's so much better than the only realistic possibility. And I live in a purple state now, so it might end up mattering.

HelixDab2 ,

It is in part a consumer issue. Consumers want things as cheaply as possible, and companies that produce as cheaply as possible sell more product. We've seen the same issue with apparel; America wants cheap clothing, and so the mills in the US have largely closed, and most production has been moved overseas in order to make the final products cheap enough.

And while it's partly a consumer issue, the fact that wages haven't kept up with productivity--that is, more and more money is being skimmed out of the system by investors and executives rather than going to the workers--has been the driver towards making consumer goods more and more cheaply, simply because people have less purchasing power.

HelixDab2 ,

Just because something is expensive doesn’t always mean that the standard of living of those making the product is any better.

Oh, absolutely. But when mills, etc. are in the US, there's more direct control over the living conditions of the workers.

make everyone feel guilty all the time,

Then people just tune it all out, and learn to accept the inherent violence of the system. Sadly.

HelixDab2 ,

Look, no one decides that they want to work in the mines because it's good for society as a whole to have consumer goods made from what they mine. Everyone expects to be paid in some way.

If I'm making jeans as an independent designer--which I tried doing, briefly--and I decide that my time is worth $20/hr, then I'm going to have to charge around $500 for a single pair of jeans after you figure in all the time needed to make a single pair that's been customized to fit a single, specific person. (Maybe more; I haven't done the math in a decade or so.) Almost no one is going to want to, or be able to afford to pay that. Am I skimming off the top? No, I'm charging a fair--and actually very low--rate for custom work. But just like when I tried to do that a decade ago, no one can or will pay for that.

Even if we capped profits of investors, and capped salaries of executives, and had most of the profits going to the workers, people would tend to prefer less expensive goods over more expensive goods. That's how competition in the market works. In a sufficiently competitive environment, without legal constraints, prices have to drop. (Monopolies raise prices by reducing competition; a sufficiently competitive environment assumes that there is no single company dominating the market.)

HelixDab2 ,

tbh my take is alot of people would like an option between paying $2 for a garment they know involved exploitation/slavery vs an accessible1 independent option that doesn’t cost $500/garment.

I would have wanted to believe that too, but then you see things like Temu that promise clothing and consumer goods at impossibly low prices, prices that simply aren't possibly without forced labor somewhere, and people eat that shit up. I think that most people have an out of sight, out of mind approach to it, and as long as they can't directly see the exploitation, they'll accept it.

1 Quick note on accessibility, there are ofc some scant options between $2-500, but what isn’t clear (ie. readily accessible) to the consumer is which of those options isn’t just some greedy bastard buying a $2 option and selling it on for $15.

I strongly suspect that this obscurity is by intent.

And, taking this whole thing a bit farther, as a designer that was paying myself $20/hr, I still can't guarantee anything about being free of forced labor, because I have no way of realistically tracking everything in my supply chain. This is why there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, so the best you can do is pick your battles.

HelixDab2 ,

The basis of making CSAM illegal was that minors are harmed during the production of the material. Prior to CG, the only way to produce pornographic images involving minors was to use real, flesh-and-blood minors. But if no minors are harmed to create CSAM, then what is the basis for making that CSAM illegal?

Think of it this way: if I make a pencil drawing of a minor being sexually abused, should that be treated as though it is a criminal act? What if it's just stick figures, and I've labeled one as being a minor, and the others as being adults? What if I produce real pornography using real adults, but used actors that appear to be underage, and I tell everyone that the actors were all underage so that people believe it's CSAM?

It seems to me that, rationally, things like this should only be illegal when real people are being harmed, and that when there is no harm, it should not be illegal. You can make an entirely reasonable argument that pornographic images created using a real person as the basis does cause harm to the person being so depicted. But if it's not any real person?

This seems like a very bad path to head down.

HelixDab2 ,

If one were to take Russia at face-value, they might lighten up a bit with less NATO.

If one were to take Russia at face-value, then one would be an idiot that would be shocked once Russia started invading countries like Georgia, Belarus, Hungary, Poland, Finland...

HelixDab2 ,

The police officers in Uvalde had no legal responsibility to protect the children in the school. They were not required to charge in and stop--shoot--the person that murdered so many children. And yet, we quite rightly condemn their unwillingness to act, even though acting would placed them at risk of harm or death at the hands of the shooter. They had the ability to prevent mass murder, and they did not.

The person that refuses to act, when it puts them at no risk, and costs no more than the minor inconvenience of standing in line for a few minutes, is certainly no better than the police officers in Uvalde.

HelixDab2 ,

Whether you want to be a part of it or not, if you are a US citizen, you are. Your only choice is to reduce hard, or not.

HelixDab2 ,

engage with the opposite side in a constructive manner.

Russia is currently explicitly dedicated to being an enemy of the West.

That's entirely due to Vladimir Putin. Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin were 'enemies' of the west. (OTOH, the dismantling of the USSR really could have benefited from some help from the west; the oligarchs and political elites sacked the wealth of the country, which paved the way for Putin.) Capitulating to Putin would not soften his stance; he would still believe that all of the formerly Warsaw-pact countries 'belong' to the United Soviet Socialist Republics. He still believes that sections of Finland that Russia lost in the Continuation War belong to Russia. He still believes that all the Baltic countries belong to the USSR, despite the USSR not having existed for 30-odd years.

NATO is strictly a defensive organization. The NATO agreement is that IF Russia invades any member country, that all NATO signatories will come to the defense of that country. If a signatory invades Russia, then they're on their own. The only think that NATO directly opposes is Russian aggression; all Russia has to do to avoid war with NATO is... Not invade a NATO country.

HelixDab2 ,

Having been in power for so long and with arguably a strong level of domestic support for decades,

...That's because every time someone else comes even slightly close to having any kind of popular support, they 'commit suicide', or commit a crime that gets them sent to prison in Siberia. E.g., Alexi Navalny. Moreover, he controls all the media in the country, and has largely managed to cut off significant access to any sources of information from outside the country. So that 'strong level of domestic support' is due to a dearth of options, rather than genuine support.

might we perhaps give Russia slight leniency to make minor readjustments to borders, if (hypothetically) the local regions did legitimately vote in agreement?

No. That's like asking if Texas can choose to secede. They can not. Nor can the rest of the US vote to expel Texas without triggering a constitutional crisis. The region belongs to the country first and foremost, before it belongs to the region. Now, if an entire country votes to allow a region of their country to be annexed, then sure. Even if elections in Crimea were free and fair--and the evidence strongly suggests that most of the people voting were coerced--it would need to be all of Ukraine voting to allow the annexation.

Recall, being “ethnic Russian” is of key interest and, in my opinion,

There are a lot of "ethnic Italians", and "ethnic Irish" living in the US, and they were badly mistreated during the first part of the 20th C. That wouldn't have given Ireland or Italy the right to invade New York, because, despite their ethnicity, they were Americans. Not Irish citizens, not Italian citizens. And, bluntly, Putin claiming to be concerned about the treatment of ethnic Russians is concern trolling. It was an excuse to invade, just like his claims of de-Nazification. The real issue was that Ukraine had left the USSR when the USSR failed, he wants it back, and any excuse that people can be suckered into buying is good enough for him.

when exactly would we start to repair our relationship with Russia by loosening up on them a little?

Again: no. You don't improve your relationship with a bully and a criminal by capitulating. They are the one that is acting incorrectly, so it is incumbent on them to improve their own behaviour, rather than the victim accepting a little victimizing.

HelixDab2 ,

Like I said, arguably. Show me some data that says that the opposition has grown above 25% (arbitrary, you may understand what I mean)

In 2020, the support for Alexi Navalni was around 20%, which, as the article notes, was despite the fact that all of the available Russian media--which is entirely controlled by the state--demonized him as a traitor to Russia. If you had a reasonably free media in Russia that was free to report on what Putin was really doing, then it seems likely that support would have been higher.

But if opposition leaders keep getting jailed, or commit suicide, every time their public support breaks out of the single digits, then yeah, duh, of course you aren't going to see opposition about 25%.

There are diplomatic avenues to solve this problem, so maybe Ukraine can solve the whole thing, in the interest of preventing future wars.

You're missing the point entirely. Sure, it's not rape if you consent. And you can stop a rape that's already happening by saying, okay, sure, I consent to this. But, really...? That's the direction you want to go here? Russia could also stop this at any time just by pulling troops out, and giving Ukraine it's own land and kidnapped people back. Russia can prevent future wars by, I dunno not invading other countries. Why should it be the responsibility of the victim to negotiate with the aggressor?

Again, for the sake of argument, assuming that Russia itself was victimized during the fall of the USSR, and assuming that Putin is seeking to redress that, rather than him trying to take over the whole old-bloc, then is there any other peaceful path?

Russia was victimized by Russians. Not by the west, not by Ukraine. These are all self-inflicted wounds, not some grand conspiracy by The West. The former Soviet states didn't want to be Soviet states, because the Soviet government had always been complete dogshit. When the USSR broke up, the politically powerful and connected systematically looted the country of wealth; it wasn't western governments and companies that looted the country. So if Putin wants to fix that, he needs to fix his shit, not blame everyone else for the problems that Russia created for itself. But that's not what he's been doing; he's trying to mask internal problems by claiming that it's an external enemy.

HelixDab2 ,

<serious> Frozen blueberries are about $15/4#, and don't go bad unless you forget them for several years and they get hideously freezer burned. Yeah, they're as good as fresh if you're just eating plain blueberries, but if you're making something that uses blueberries as an ingredient, they work wonderfully.

HelixDab2 ,

...No?

You aren't paying for the merit badge per se, you're paying for the physical manifestation of it. You have to do the work and meet the goals in order to get the merit badge. Once you've earned the merit badge, there's no need to pay for the embroidered patch if you don't want to. It's not going to affect whether or not you are able to get your Eagle.

HelixDab2 ,

Having to deal with a drug dealer that wants to also sell you actually addictive drugs

Clearly marijuana has some serious kind of habituation, and it's equally clear that many people that use marijuana are problem users. Addictive? No, not by any strict definition of addiction, since you won't suffer serious adverse effects if you stop. OTOH, I've known at least as many problem marijuana users as problem drinkers

HelixDab2 ,

The question is whether Marijuana use in and of itself encourages or preface additional drug use.

I would argue that in many ways it does. Marijuana is--or was--illegal. Alcohol is legal, but age restricted. If you are willing to use a substance that is (was) entirely illegal, you are more likely going to be willing to try other drugs that are legitimately addictive, because you've already crossed one of the major hurdles. If alcohol had been illegal for the same amount of time that marijuana had been, then I would agree that alcohol was likely a gateway drug as well.

I'm in favor of de-scheduling marijuana entirely. But I think that it's disingenuous for people to act as though there weren't serious problems with chronic and underage marijuana use.

HelixDab2 ,

So, alcohol was banned far longer than marijuana.

...What? The 1970s were 50 years ago. And marijuana was illegal long before it was classified as a schedule 1 drug under the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970.

HelixDab2 ,

It also seems like you don’t understand that it being banned 50 years ago is not the same as it being banned for 50 years.

Dude, it is literally illegal at the federal level at this very moment. If you use marijuana, and you buy a firearm, you are a felon. The ban may not be fully enforced in some states right now, but the feds can, at any moment, and on a whim, go into California and Colorado and arrest every single person working at a dispensary and charge them under federal drug trafficking laws, and send every single one of them to prison for life.

I would ask what you're on, but I'm pretty sure I can guess.

HelixDab2 ,

720p? Pfffft. 240i. Rip them in '2014 YouTube over 2G' quality.

HelixDab2 ,

Okay, first: Don't use Google for that. What the fuck, dude.

Actually, that's it. Just get BitWarden.

HelixDab2 ,

That's... Genuinely complicated.

Kids aren't asexual, and then BOOM they're sexual the second they hit 18. I was very interested in sex from an age that would make most people deeply uncomfortable to think about. Romeo and Juliet laws exist because we recognize that first, kids are going to be sexual, and second, it's not always going to be with peers that are exactly their own age, and that prosecuting minors for statutory rape--since neither party could legally consent--is a little crazy.

So there needs to be some kind of line between recognizing that kids are sexual, and adults not treating them in a sexual way.

HelixDab2 ,

Here's the basic line of thought:

Men occupy a more powerful position in society due to the generally patriarchal structures. Women occupy a less powerful position than men, even when a particular women holds more overt power (e.g., a woman that's a CEO). As a result, sexual relationships between men and women always have a power imbalance; that imbalance of power means that women can never really be consenting, since there's always some form of 'threat' involved. A woman that believes she wants sex believes that way because society has conditioned her to be that way, rather than that being something she chose in a vacuum.

And theoretically, this is all true, kind of. But it also isn't, because that would mean that women can never have any agency over their own body or their own sexual choices. ...Unless they "choose" to be lesbian, which isn't actually a choice at all.

HelixDab2 ,

Okay, let's put it this way.

Let's say you're a woman, and you've been pulled over by a male cop. He's got you dead to rights on possession of cocaine with intent to distribute after spotting the bales of cocaine in your back seat. He's willing to just give you a ticket for a burned out tail light, but only if he can fuck you, right then and there. Can you, in that moment, morally and ethically consent to sex with him, when he has the legal authority to arrest you and ensure that your life is fucked forever if you do not consent? Most people would say no, that entire environment is coercive, so there's no way that, within that framework I've presented, that the woman could morally or ethically consent to sex in order to make her 'little problem' go away.

2nd wave feminism presented all male-female relationships in that way, although usually with a less blatant abuse of power going on. If you assume that patriarchy stacks the power deck in favor of men, then there's very little basis for women to ever consent to sex with a man, because she is never able to have an equal position of power within society from which to consent. But that's also a problem, because it abstracts people to the point where it's almost meaningless on an individual level.

HelixDab2 ,

And I think you would have found that person doing the sexualizing was well past their 30s

...What are you even talking about?

HelixDab2 ,

A lot of 2nd wave feminism does sound weird now, yeah. But at the time--this would have been the 50s-70s or so--it was a novel way of viewing power dynamics and what consent meant.

HelixDab2 ,

Wait wait wait, does that mean that being gay is the ultimate straight behaviour? Like, it's gay to like women, because only a man knows what a man wants? ;)

HelixDab2 ,

Lots of rumors, very little evidence.

There's a lot of really bad stuff on Tor. Like, really bad; probably worse than you're imagining. Things that make the old rotten.com stuff look like a child's birthday party. If Tor was actually compromised, the people creating and uploading that stuff would be grabbed quickly. Instead, LEAs have to cooperate globally and run long-con sting operations in order to identify people in order to bust them. Most of the time, they're busting people that use Tor due to social engineering or one kind or another, and the remaining times it's because someone fucked up configuration on a site.

HelixDab2 ,

Freenet was never really anonymous; there have definitely been busts from Freenet. IIRC it's distributed, but not anonymized; I haven't really done anything with it in ten years or so. i2p is probably pretty solid, but it's often very difficult to use. I've tried it, and most of the time couldn't make configurations work. Or else the eep sites I was trying to reach were offline. IDK.

I dunno; given that Tor was originally designed to be extremely difficult to track, and was designed by spooks, it's plausible that they aren't able to crack their own security. If they controlled enough of the network, they could, in theory, track individual users. But it would be extremely resource intensive, and they would already have to be targeting you.

IIRC, the case you're talking about involved social engineering to gain admin privileges, then illegally hacking computers through malicious javascript to leak their real IP. IIRC a huge number of the cases ended up getting thrown out because there was no way they could legally do what they did, and the convictions they did get were ones that they would have been able to get without the illegal hacking. That was, what, something like ten years ago? Around the time that The Silk Road got taken down? (That was taken down because the site owner used the same username both on the Silk Road and on a clearnet site; he essentially doxxed himself.)

HelixDab2 ,

Oh, yeah, I've been seeing that a lot of it has been really dragging for, like, the last year or so.

Yes, if a state-level actor is able to get control of all the nodes, then everyone is pretty much fucked. I suppose that, with enough nodes, you could make that kind of attack really, really hard. I'm also guessing that Monero transactions are taking a really long time right now to go through? I saw that the Finnish (?) gov't claimed to have 'broken' Monero, but they're not giving any technical information about their claims, and most current speculation is that they busted the guy doing other shit that they were able to trace link to Monero transactions. (I don't really keep up with Monero; last I knew, there wasn't a good wallet that didn't require downloading the whole blockchain, and my home internet is slooooooooooooow.)

HelixDab2 ,

Requires a log-in. That means that there's absolutely no way to anonymize your searches. At least if I want to do an anonymous search, I can open my laptop, boot up in Tails, and search DDG on Tor. With a required log-in (and billing that presumably doesn't include a Monero option), you can't make that work.

Pass.

HelixDab2 ,

When I open Tor browser on my desktop--not in Tails--that site doesn't even load. So either it is fooling it, or it requires javascript to run, which I have turned off by default in Tor.

I'm going to leave it at that.

HelixDab2 ,

CMYK printing typically uses CMY only for black/grey generation up through a certain point. When I'm profiling my printer at work for transmissive printing, I can set that in the profile at about 50%; anything less than 50% gray is going to be CMY only.

And here's another fun fact; pure black ink (or toner) doesn't give you very good blacks. If you use only black when you're printing the darkest areas, you end up with a very washed out looking blacks. The best blacks are achieved with 400% ink coverage, using 100% of each ink channel.

Text is the only place where you can get away with only using black and still have it look good.

HelixDab2 ,

So, uh. That glove isn't leather. You don't need to break in a glove that isn't leather, because vinyl isn't going to shape to your hand with oils, etc. the way leather will. Same goes for shoes; unless your shoes are all leather, there's no break in period.

Yes, plastic will melt in the oven. And that's what your glove is. Or was.

HelixDab2 , (edited )

That's not beak-in, that's wear/wearing out as the padding gets compressed.

Break-in for leather is where it's molding to hit your hands, feet, body, etc.

HelixDab2 ,

I don't know if you can; Tor breaks a lot of websites, esp. if you have Javascript turned off (and you should if you're using Tor).

HelixDab2 ,

Notably, computers that I'd previously used to log in to my banned account. I strongly suspect that if I'd used my wife's laptop to log in to my banned account, then she would have seen her account banned as well for 'ban evasion'.

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