Dojan

Aye. Famine is a failure in policy. Enough people in power have decided that these people should suffer and die.

I rather like the wide berth people give me even though it doesn’t make much sense. Like, anyone could have Covid, but if I had it and I wear a respirator I’ll be less dangerous than someone who has it and doesn’t wear one. I get that people equate respirators with spooky but that’s just because they haven’t thought about it.

Thinking back on it, there was a single dude that spoke to me randomly. I think it might have been because of the mask but I’ve genuinely no idea, I always wear ANC headphones and ignore people. It helps my anxiety a lot.

Sadly, the people that will really appreciate you using a respirator are those you generally don’t see out and about because they can’t be, it isn’t safe for them.

I also mask. People don’t generally talk about it here, and masking wasn’t even very common back when the pandemic was taken more seriously.

Never faced any aggression but people do give you a wide berth which is kind of hilarious to me, but it doesn’t bother me at all.

I was brushing my teeth when reading this comment and inadvertently ended up swallowing all my toothpaste.

I love the idea of a fancy autocomplete trained on Reddit and 4-chan deciding whether or not someone should be murdered or not. Sounds like a fantastic idea.

Wasn’t he in hot water for corruption a while ago?

Wow I’d missed that. Honestly we need to throw out the entire parliament. They’re all broken.

Well, no. It wouldn’t be the first kanji of English. Kanji is the Japanese pronunciation of 漢字 (hanzi), where 漢 means han/China and 字 means character/letter. Ergo, it makes no sense to call it “the English language’s first and only Chinese character.”

If you need to use a Japanese word to describe this, then 絵文字 (e mo ji; picture, character/symbol) fits better, but we already have several words for that, like pictogram or pictograph. One could argue that smileys fall into this category as well. So perhaps it’s a smiley.

I really like Tumbleweed. Sure it updates a lot, but it doesn’t force updates so you can take it at your own pace.

Aye. I didn’t look deeply into it but it’s nice that it exists.

I previously had the Roborock S4, and upgraded to a Roborock S8 with the auto-emptying dock last year. I have a husky mix, and so my home gets quite hairy. Having a robot vacuum that can empty itself without me having to really do much is a lifesaver. Roborock also offers spare parts, and you can take these machines apart to fix them, if the need arises; none of my machines have ever broken down though.

You don’t need to connect the robot to the app, but I don’t think you get the scheduling functionality without it. You can of course always just press the button to start it manually, and that’s what I’ve been doing most of the time since I want it running when I’m out and that time window tends to shift a bit.

Yesterday I also learned that there’s OSS you can flash onto the machine to decouple it from Xiaomi’s stuff, which I think is great.

Good. Hating half the population is a pretty extreme take.

This particular tumblr blog’s entire thing is taking poorly cropped tumblr screenshots from Pinterest and reposting them on tumblr.

This is a fair point I hadn’t considered!

Boggles the mind how one can be a convicted felon and still be in the race, but if you’re in prison you can’t vote.

He doesn’t control much of anything, actually!

The king of Sweden has a similar exemption from the law, but he also doesn’t hold any political power. I also don’t know how waterproof his status is if he did something heinous enough.

Trump already has done heinous stuff.

Yes, unfortunately in the US it’s two parts 1) rural areas are not very well-serviced as you say

It doesn’t even have to be that rural, honestly. My friend lived in a town in MA with about 70k inhabitants. To me this is a fairly large town, my current town is about 20k, and my previous town was about 30k. Honestly I didn’t even have any idea that the town they lived in was so populous until now (as I just looked it up), because it didn’t feel like it. In terms of services and population I got the impression that it was smaller than my hometown at the time. It’s just spread out over a much larger area and very little is made to be accessible by walking.

My friend had a ~30 minute walking distance from their house to the nearest grocery store. In my current town I have 2 grocers within 9 minutes of walking distance. Both are easily accessible with bicycle as well.

There’s also the general consumption attitude. My friend went shopping once every 7-14 days. Nowadays I order in groceries in bulk every 7 days, but in the past going for groceries was a more spontaneous thing. I know plenty of people who pick up groceries more or less daily on their way home from work. From what I observed, a lot of consumer goods is available in larger bulk quantities in the U.S. compared to what you see here. You generally also don’t buy drinking water here, but in the U.S. that’s sometimes required.

There’s a lot of nuances. I live quite comfortably as a pedestrian/cyclist over here in Sweden. I don’t think I could do that if I’d lived where my friend did.

And if you live so rural that that’s not feasible – well that’s your issue then, nobody’s forcing you to live in bumfucknowhere.

Sure, no individual is like to force you to live in the middle of nowhere, but circumstances might.

I’m not saying that cars should be a thing, but rather talking about (some) reasons they are. The biggest determining factor really is just car culture. The car and oil industry has done a great job at manufacturing demand for cars, and I’d wager that’s the main determining factor.

If you want to see a reduction in cars on the roads, the best way to do so is simply to make other means of transport more feasible. You don’t fix traffic by widening roads, that just induces further demand. Instead, set up bus lines, mark certain lanes as bus only. Heck, convert some lanes to bicycle only lanes.

It’s been easy for me to take that kind of infrastructure for granted. Where I live for example, there’s a pedestrian/bicycle path all the way from my town, to the nearby larger town ~35km away. It’s fully possible to bike over there if you’re prepared for a 1-1½ hour ish ride.

I mean there’s status tied to car culture as well. It’s a common problem with consumerism, and why people build these tribes around brand loyalty and whatnot. The fact that massive vehicles are popular in NYC isn’t incompatible with the notion that delivery services and public transport is available there. According to this… Powerpoint (??) on nyc.gov, about 53% of households in NYC have access to a car (page 53), which is significantly lower than the national average.