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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • International relations are often tough to build, especially when one side is quite rude and then wanting special benefits afterwards.

    The UK cut the ties, so the EU has more say in how relations are rebuilt. The UK had a ton of special exemptions and their own national identity in the EU then many other members and the UK still freaked out about how oppressed they were.

    The EU doesn’t really owe the UK anything that’s not in still existing agreements and if the UK wants a relationship they’ll have to come to the table bringing something, not just hurling demands.

    I’m just really glad that the UK leaving the EU didn’t devolve into armed conflict. That’s a pretty normal arc for such a big relations change.






  • They did that to my daughter. I’d setup a laptop for her. The windows boot partition was still there (my bad for scraping every last bit of Windows off - it was setup in haste) and she accidentally chose windows from grub one day. The Windows Bootloader decided to change boot options in the bios and then remove grub somehow, but there was no windows on disk to launch so it was bricked.

    The next time I could out hands on the computer I scoured that disk clean of Microsoft’s plague rats so they wouldn’t get a finger in edgewise again.


  • They’re afraid to be called unfair after he said that they’d be unfair. It’s one of the strategies that us uses to suppress fighting back against his lies and ineptitude.

    First, your preemptively accuse someone of something. Second you do awful things that would normally rightfully get a response, but the authorities have to be careful otherwise you’ll accuse them of doing the thing they should be doing. Third, you get your way even though you broke the rules, or you get to yell about how you knew, just knew! That you’d be treated badly.







  • One of the reasons I loved taking the train to work (yay, Portland MAX!) was that I didn’t have to do the work to drive. I got on the train, snagged a seat (or stood on really busy days) and mentally punched out for 20 minutes. I could read a book, zone out, or make some notes on my thoughts.

    At the end of the route, I’d hop off, walk two blocks and I was at a work. Reverse it to go home. It was a dream commute.

    Driving Hwy 26 would have taken longer, and the sheer stress it caused was horrible. Always having to watch for someone deciding to dart lanes, merge badly, slow to a stop, shimmy forward, wait for a person to merge into the crawl. Commuting by car on any kind of busy road is horrible for your health.


  • This is a great list.

    I wear loose athletic pants for long flights. Not bedtime sweatpants, but Adidas style pants. I wear comfy shoes, that I unlace once I start napping.

    I bring a sweatshirt so it becomes a pillow and something to pull over my eyes if it’s needed.

    I also have a couple of airplane blankets and I bring my own. It comes in handy on flights where we cheap seats people don’t get blankets, and in airports when it’s nap time. I roll it up tight and strap it on the bottom of my backpack.

    I also bring Sudoku puzzles. It’s a nice diversion from watching videos the whole way.


  • In-city land owning GenX here: YIMBY through and through. Been fighting for it at the city level for decades now.

    I hate how stupid and short sighted so many people are. Selfishness has destroyed our cities, gutted our neighborhoods, and given our cities over to monopolies by driving out small and medium businesses. Cities and neighborhoods cannot be kept in amber. They either grow and adapt or they die.

    Let’s start building our city core through dense housing, removing automobiles (they don’t make cities better, and they certainly destroy them), and making places for people instead of asphalt wastelands.


  • I don’t know enough about those to comment. I have not been there yet.

    Given how much history and artifacts the Vatican can assemble, they’re likely on the same scale, if on differing topics.

    If you’re looking for religious artifact collections, the Bode in Berlin has a huge collection. It’s very deep for Christian iconography, as well as later paintings and sculpture. They also have some Greek materials. If you want Roman sculpture the Altes Museum (especially the rotunda) is phenomenal.

    Of course the British Museum is just frakkin amazing end to end. When I was trying to navigate there (I was a bit lost) and wondered what the cluster of people were looking at next to me, and it turned out to be THE Rosetta Stone, holy shit. Worth the trip.


  • Build some damn trains! Our cities are sprawling car-infested shitholes compared to more modern city designs around the world.

    A single freeway interchange costs as much as a big light rail network for a medium sized city. It would transformative to build some modern infrastructure for once.

    Combine that with educating city councils on how zoning laws and architectural rules determine how a city’s space is used (usually very inefficiently and with ugly buildings). We’re making a sprawling, bland wasteland out of the beautiful American landscape by sheer ignorance and short sighted greed.