Em Adespoton

  • 2 Posts
  • 1.34K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Well… that’s one way to do things. For the past 20 years, I’ve refused all shipments via UPS from the US. I always ask sellers who they plan to ship through, and if it’s UPS, I tell them that’s a deal breaker. I also encourage others not to accept shipments via UPS from the US.

    I’d switch to this method but it’s just such a headache to go through the dispute process.

    I did have one parcel that arrived via UPS in 2020. They dropped it at the door without ringing, and sent the bill for their customs processing in the mail. I called them up and demanded they drop the fees because a) I don’t accept international packages from UPS (as the local UPS guy knows), and b) they have no evidence I ever received the package. When they investigated the signature, it wasn’t mine, but was the delivery person’s.

    They dropped the charges.



  • I don’t get it. Current nuclear power solutions take longer to set up, have an effectively permanently harmful byproduct, have the (relatively small) potential to catastrophically fail, almost always depend on an abundant supply of fresh water, and are really expensive to build, maintain and decommission.

    If someone ever comes up with a functional fusion reactor, I could see the allure; in all other cases, a mix of wind, wave, geothermal, hydro and solar, alongside energy storage solutions, will continually outperform fission.

    I suspect that the reason some countries like nuclear energy is that it also puts them in a position of nuclear power on the political stage.



  • As someone who pre-dates the public Internet and spent a lot of time dialling in to BBSes when most people thought personal computers were for nerds…

    The Internet will fracture, but not break down. What would happen is balkanization of the Internet, with physical areas running their own networks, and a bunch of poor “dark” areas. Some of those networks would likely have low bandwidth interconnections, such that digest data could still spread, much like the early days of usenet and fidonet.

    Local culture and tribalism would increase, and information would skyrocket in value. The rich would still have access to, and control, the information. The poor would be left out completely.




  • You’re only incorrect on one point: he’s not taking us into the past. There has never been a time in the past that was comparable to the future he’s dumping us into.

    The problem is that he’s spread such a large volume of misinformation that people select bits of it that THEY want to believe and accept those lies as truth while dismissing the rest.

    One of the lies is that he’s returning America to how it was in some mythical golden age. That’s not where he’s taking it at all. That lie just gets buried under the others.





  • Agreed; after using various running and other gloves, I settled on a set of work gloves that are thin nylon weave on the back and dipped in nitrile on the front, similar to gardening gloves.

    They let the steam out while keeping my hands from getting too cold in -10 weather, AND I can use my phone with them on (although I don’t recommend doing that below freezing).

    I do 3 hour trail runs through the winter and they’ve worked better than my running gloves or my merino wool cutoffs. And they’re $3 a pair.