“Would you say that Brexit was a scam?”

“Yes.”

“And would you agree that it was sold to the British public through propaganda and outright lies?”

“Very much so.”

“Do you take glee at the news at the victims of this mass-scale scam have faced hardship and financial ruin, if not openly wishing death upon them?”

“Of course I do.”

“And would you agree that you are morally superior than these people and that you have their best interests at heart?”

“Undoubtedly.”

It’s shit like this attitude that I just cannot square the circle of. It’s much easier for someone to detect the open scorn and contempt that another person has for them than it is to detect the lies that someone like Nigel Farage feeds them.

That’s not to say that Farage isn’t transparent with his bullshit but when someone genuinely hates you and wishes ill upon you, it’s virtually impossible not to take notice of it. I’m not saying that reactionary and bigoted beliefs aren’t contemptible or that they should go unchallenged but, generally speaking, treating people with contempt is one great big own-goal imo because you aren’t gonna get far educating and agitating amongst people who you consider to be human garbage.

I once found a really niche, deep-youtube channel of a person who was a consumer-animatronic enthusiast who collected and refurbished mostly Big Mouth Billy Bass.

At first I thought it was satire but the person genuinely knew their different editions with different features and would collect and refurbish them. They seemed to be part of a small community of animatronic enthusiasts and it was like peering into another world. I thought it was neat and it was really nice to see that they had found their people and what brought them joy in life.

[Sung to a thrumming new wave baseline]

🎵When a problem comes along, you must Beanis!
When there’s something goin’ wrong, you must Beanis!

I say Beanis
Beanis good🎵

When it comes to content warnings I try to be specific about the content and to give a estimation of how in depth the content is because I think it’s helpful for people to make an informed decision. I also try to remember to bold my content warnings and to put them on a separate line, often I will put them halfway into a comment right before the CW content appears as that way a person can still read part of a response while choosing to skip over a detailed example that may be triggering.

I’m going to give some examples of what I think are better and worse content warnings to illustrate my point in quoted comments:

CW: violence
I disagree with your point because sometimes violence is necessary to defend yourself from harm. For example, take a child who fights back against their abuser…

So in this one the CW isn’t as visually distinct so it’s easier to skip over if you’re skimming and it also excludes a person from reading a response before the potentially triggering content. Also “violence” isn’t really descriptive - is it shouting? Is it a gunshot? Is it something really gruelling like you’d expect from a gory horror movie? This makes informed consent much trickier and it unintentionally excludes people.

Another example:

I don’t agree with the absolute pacifist position like you’ve described. I think that justice is something that needs to be defended, with violence if necessary [note here that just mentioning violence in the abstract isn’t a problem imo because what are you going to do - say CW: violence before you mention the concept of violence?]. As MLK put it, the absence of the absence of tension vs. a positive peace, which requires the presence of justice, is an important distinction to make.

[CW: Brief discussion of child abuse and neglect in the abstract]

For example, only the most rabidly dogmatic pacifist would denounce a victim of child abuse for resorting to an act of violence to defend themselves unless it was wildly incommensurate with the threat or perceived threat that they were defending themselves against. Maybe they would take a different position for a child that is being subjected to serious neglect like a child who is being denied meals but I’m uncertain tbh.

In this example, if a person decides to skip the comment because of the content warning they can still participate in the discussion to a large extent, even if they opt out of the last part so it’s less exclusionary by its structure.

The content warning is also visually distinct and it’s descriptive - it provides a good example of what to expect in the next part and who the language will be addressing. If it wasn’t an abstract discussion I might say something like “Detailed personal experience of psychological abuse as a child who went through it” or “Description of fictional animal abuse in a film” because these can be very different experiences for someone to read about and they can have very different impacts.

When it comes to really intense stuff often I’ll just put a CW at the top saying something like “Really in-depth discussions of transphobia, SH, suicide - if this stuff can be too much for you just skip the comment because you won’t get anything out positive of reading this comment.” such as in a case where maybe I’m really getting into the weeds and educating someone on a topic and encouraging them to shift their opinions. Or I might say “Blanket CW for very detail discussion of most/all forms of child abuse” rather than attempting to make a laundry list of each type of abuse. That sort of thing.

Anyway I’m not saying that this is how everyone must do their CWs but I feel like this is a good way to go about doing better, more helpful CWs.

I don’t think it’s a libbed up take but I can give you the boilerplate lib-brained “rational self-interest” ethics response, which is just a variation on their answer to “Why would you support free education if you don’t have any kids yourself?” with that answer being that we all benefit from a society where people have access to this, even if it doesn’t benefit us or our loved ones directly; those people getting an education are your colleagues and neighbours and friends and everyone else in society so an educated population (or a healthy one) benefits us as individuals, if only indirectly. I don’t need to point to the ongoing pandemic or previous ones to help you extend this analogy just slightly further for a real-world example of why this also applies to health. I don’t think this is the ideal basis for justifying universal healthcare but if that’s what it takes to shake people out of their edgy Ayn Rand phase then so be it - it’s hard to argue against this point.

If you want to take a restorative justice approach then even the worst people to exist need good healthcare so they can repair some measure of the harm they have inflicted upon the world for as long as is possible.

If you want to take the most punitive approach to justice then even the worst people to exist need good healthcare so that their lives can be as long as possible in order to exact the most retribution from them because a swift death would be far too merciful for these people.

And if you’re going to provide good healthcare to the very worst people in the world then you’re kinda obligated to provide good healthcare to everyone else, at least if you’re going to be morally consistent about it.

Sure, but there’s a massive disinfo machine which has sprouted its own backyard propaganda industry that works 24/7 to mislead people. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t exist. In a perfect world, people would be highly educated and politically developed where only if you are knowledgeable about the person you are voting for would you vote.

But based on my own anecdotal experience the average person who supports Trump isn’t as intelligent and they definitely aren’t as educated as the average person who supported Harris. I think it’s safe to say that Trump’s campaign exploited this demographic to get him into power again. Sure, if someone in his voterbase isn’t grossly misguided then they have vicious political beliefs but the idea of celebrating a person’s impending death because they are being stripped of healthcare for having the wrong political beliefs is really fucking vile.

The democrat supporters love touting the fact that studies show they have a higher level of intelligence and education and, often, that they demonstrate higher levels of empathy too. Yet they get a thrill out of shit like this or the carpet bombing of Gaza and, like the trees in the forest voting for the axe (like they always love accusing conservatives of being) not only do they vote for the (other) party that represents the interests of capital at their own expense but in doing so they vote for the (other) neoliberal party which continues to strip funding from welfare, education, healthcare, and housing that ensures that the next generation will have poorer educational outcomes and thus who will be in the prime demographic for conservative voters when they come of age but they are also actively ensuring that the development of the coming generations will have lower “IQ” because they are negatively impacting on nutrition during developmental years and doing shit like exposing kids to hazardous levels of lead in the water supply.

The only people who I have much more than a baseline level of sympathy for are the extreme progressives who haven’t quite managed to figure it all out yet but I’m more inclined to be sympathetic to the person who is, allegedly, too stupid to know better than the person who is implicitly arguing that they themselves are more intelligent and that they do know better and yet still support a near-identical party. (Edit: I could have worded this part better. Fascists get no sympathy from me. Radicals get all my love. For all the liberal cohort, though, what I said in this paragraph applies.)

Good to see but the app doesn’t play well with TankieTube yet, which is a bit disappointing.

For the time being I’m sticking with GrayJay which, unfortunately, requires a bit of fiddling around to get it to work with TankieTube although it offers a lot more functionality (search/subscribe/download/background play/PiP/view comments/video quality options/subscribe to channel/playlists/feed categories/queuing videos etc.)

I’ll keep an eye on the official app and hold out hope that this is the start of good things to come but for the time being personally I’m going to stick with GrayJay because it offers a lot of functions that I count as necessary - search, subscribe, and background play are non-negotiable for me.

It’s really hard to say without knowing the conditions of the people you’re targeting for aid but ondols, kangs, and rocket mass heaters are a really good solution for creating thermal mass to use as a thermal battery but they are also quite permanent so its much less suitable as a solution for people who are homeless/housing insecure that are more transient (i.e. compared to living in slums or shanties which are permanent or semi-permanent.)

If you are intending on using this sort of heating method for people who are unfamiliar with safe operating, a rocket mass heater is going to be the safest based on the fact that you are able to build this above-ground as opposed to it being underfloor. (Kangs are usually raised platforms but due to construction there are specific considerations for fire safety so I’ll put them aside for simplicity’s sake.) The only caveats are that a rocket stove needs to have a clear outlet free from combustible materials nearby. For people who are unfamiliar with operating a rocket mass heater who may have impaired judgement due to things like severe mental illness or substance use disorder, I would strongly advise having a straight exhaust as one which curves creates corners that creosote can accumulate upon. Suboptimal operation of a rocket stove will also create more creosote. Straight exhausts are far easier to clear and to visually identify when there is buildup. Realistic worst case scenario you’re probably going to have is the exhaust shooting out a few feet of flame as the built up creosote ignites so you want clearance especially with suboptimal operating conditions and a lack of routine maintenance.

For transient populations, it’s going to be about what is most portable - so stuff that is lightweight and ideally that packs down or can be easily disassembled and reassembled.

For permanent and semi-permanent populations things like cost and safety of longer-term operation become much more of a consideration.

I’m not sure what the weather is like where you are but if you’re only in the early stages of planning I think you might have left your run to late for making a rocket mass heater that uses cob as the thermal mass. I’m assuming that you don’t have a location picked out yet and that this is an org that meets once or twice on the weekend before everyone goes back to their day jobs but at a very optimistic timeframe it would look like everything being settled this weekend, including site and sourcing inputs, then the next two weekends constructing with it being ready to go by mid-January. That’s assuming that everyone is happy with working through Christmas on this too.

I’m presuming a level of familiarity with cob construction and rocket mass heater construction. If it’s a first time job it could easily take an extra couple of weekends. So I’m not sure exactly where that would leave you with regard to the viability of the project and your time frames.

I’ve never fired cob directly after construction. I would assume that it wouldn’t be catastrophic but you could expect to see larger, structural cracks in the cob mass as it dries rapidly due to heat and the inner parts contract much faster than the outer parts. The temp of a rocket mass heater can reach vitrification levels so I’m unsure of the implications of this for the structure of an uncured cob mass - generally speaking cob is easily repaired with patching it however if uncured clay begins to vitrify when it’s right beside the burn chamber it might not be so easy to repair and I’m not really sure where to look to find out if anyone has attempted this or what the short and long term results from it would be.

Cob also takes a surprising amount of effort and inputs. I’d strongly recommend using a small cement mixer to make your cob because otherwise the labour input will be very high - this is fine if you have a lot of people and the weather is decent, especially if you are building a lot of walls so you are limited by how high each layer can be constructed before you have to leave it to cure in order to prevent sagging but it’s less ideal if you are trying to turn out a rocket mass heater in one day.

Do you know the soil composition of the site that you’re considering? This is going to be a major factor with costs and logistics. It’s not uncommon that you will need to source one of the two main parts (either sand or clay) to get the ratio right. If you are planning on using what you have on hand then it’s possible that you’re going to want to use a backhoe or mini excavator to save a large amount of time that digging below the topsoil would take to do manually but it depends on the size of the project and what you have access to including labour power.

Sorry to be a downer about this. I really like cob construction - I’m a big fan of it, although the skin on my feet is too delicate (probably EDS skin) and whenever I’ve made cob traditionally I always find that any small stones or pebbles end up tearing up my feet so this probably my one and only true complaint that I have about cob lol. It’s really not like me to try and ruin someone’s enthusiasm for it.

(Ooh look at me! I’m not just a grass-toucher, I’ll even brag about having touched dirt!!)

Edit: I completely overlooked my assumption that this was intended to be constructed indoors or, at the very least, in a well-sheltered location (because I figured ondol = inside a home or sheltered location).

If this construction is intended to be outdoors or in a place which is only partially sheltered then it’s going to become a lot more complicated and, honestly, unless you are pretty familiar with cob construction I’d just advise against it.

Cob can be used in outdoor construction and it can work well however it comes with significant considerations about the local conditions. Outdoor cob construction in areas that have high groundwater or on low elevation like, idk, Florida sounds like a disaster for outdoor cob construction except if you built on a relatively high elevation for the local area on a site that had sufficient drainange (this is well outside my wheelhouse). Heavy rainfall is going to kill it except under certain circumstances that would take a lot of effort to describe but if you are unsure about this then take it as your sign that it’s a bad idea because its really not for beginners. As for areas that get any significant amount of snow this, too, is outside my wheelhouse. My hunch is that unless the rocket stove is being operated on a daily/near daily basis that snowpack piling up on the stove could cause serious problems with getting the exhaust to draft and getting it up to optimal operating temperature - not impossible but unlikely that it would be an easy task and unlikely to be something for beginners. As for snow melt and the damage it could do to a rocket mass heater, again that’s way outside my knowledge but it’s possible that it could destroy the cob mass, requiring either a major repair job or even a complete teardown and rebuild. Hard to say for sure and it’s never something that I’ve had to consider so this is just speculation.

Kurds have been an ethic underclass in Turkey since the founding of modern Turkey, where Atatürk, for unknown reasons, decided to take a hard-line stance against them. Obviously the ethnic conflict dates back further than that but this traces a direct through line to today.

Then it’s basically the same old deal - they got treated like second class citixens, they faced all sorts of government repression and pogroms etc. such that the likelihood of modern Turkey reaching an accord with the Kurds is either a pipedream or its going to take like a century+ of both sides working diligently and in good faith to resolve this conflict.

You know how Romani people are treated as essentially subhumans in Europe, how they are excluded and ostracised and subject to all sorts of repression as well as frequent attempts to displace or exterminate them (at least historically speaking)? Yeah, that’s a pretty good match for how Kurds are treated especially in Turkey.

The Kurds in NE Syria are led by the PKK, which is the mortal enemy of Turkey. The PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, has been imprisoned on Turkey’s own Alcatraz alone for years and years now. The PKK has worked closely with Palestinian liberation movements, especially the PFLP, with training, coordination and mutual support going back decades. The PKK was ML until fairly recently where Öcalan took a sorta libertarian turn, being directly inspired by Murray Bookchin’s (kinda) post anarchist Libertarian Municipalism which Öcalan developed into Democratic Confederalism, which the PKK has been attempting to implement in Rojava.

The chances of Rojava surviving intact after the recent turn of events in Syria are slim. Turkey will do whatever it takes to steamroll Rojava imo and if they aren’t doing it right now then the only reason is that they’re probably drawing up their plans for how to go aboit it. Israel has conducted precision strikes to deal a major blow to Rojava/the SDF’s military capacity.

Of all the groups in the Syrian civil war, the SDF is really the only one qualified for the term “moderate rebels” imo, they are secular and progressive and, although I have significant criticisms of Rojava and I think they are glamourised by anarchists undeservedly, in a situation where Assad has been taken off the board they are by far the best option and, being led by the PKK, Rojava is the only shot at something radical left emerging from the Syrian civil war although how hopeful one is about those prospects-not to mention the prospects of Rojava surviving in this new phase of the Syrian civil war-are very much debatable.

There are a few elements to staying warm in a survival/homelessness situation:

• Avoiding evaporation

• Stopping airflow

• Generating heat

• Trapping heat

Evaporation kills attempts at staying warm. Things need to be dry or you’re just swimming upstream constantly. Spare layers of clothes help as do waterproof layers.

If you have a team and some resources, this method to produce waterproof tarps is ideal. You can use this as a shelter, as a cloak, or as an outer layer for bedding.

Stopping airflow is tricky and it’s very contextual. Layering up clothing is a big factor here.

Generating heat is rightly emphasised but I think it’s somewhat overemphasised. Unless you have taken efforts especially to prevent things getting wet and thus evaporating and to mitigate drafts, generating heat can require a ton of resources. Bodies themselves generate a significant amount of heat and ideally you want to trap this as your primary heat source since it’s just the cost of doing business for mammals. You can get fairly cheap yoga mat-like material that has a layer of foil (I’m guessing it must be Mylar) and this is going to go a long ways to reflecting the radiant heat that is generated back to your body rather than allowing it to be absorbed by the ground. Emergency blankets are also really good at doing a similar thing, although they aren’t very durable.

Trapping heat is what tends to get overlooked. There’s the reflection of heat, as described above, but developing ways to store heat is an important consideration. Unfortunately materials that work as heat batteries are heavy and bulky. One exception to this rule is stuff that relies on a chemical reaction like sodium acetate, although I’m no materials scientist so hopefully a person who actually paid attention in high school chemistry and physics will chime in here.

a rocket stove type design

Don’t take this personally because it’s not aimed at you but rocket stoves are so fetishised by certain groups that it drives me to distraction. There are certain design principles necessary for a rocket stove to be a rocket stove and most of what you find being referred to as a rocket stove is just something that is a J-tube.

Honestly I don’t think that a true rocket stove is the right option for people who are homeless because they require a significant amount of space and they are heavier than an alternative like a wood gasifier stove that almost certainly archives an equivalenly efficient burn in less time as it doesn’t require the burn chamber to reach a high enough temperature in order to achieve recombustion. A wood gasifier stove isn’t bound to the same design principles that require a rocket stove riser to be rather high and as they do not require insulation, they are much easier to disassemble and pack down vs a rocket stove.

Don’t be an asshole about it with people who are trying to do good work but the next time you see someone touting a rocket stove ask them about the ratio between the diameter of the burn chamber and the length of the riser or what they are using as the insulation and you’re going to get blank stares like 75% of the time. This is bad news because a poorly designed “rocket” stove burns inefficiently and the riser will develop a creosote buildup that will become a fire risk over time, all other considerations aside. You also see people wrapping heat exchanges around the burn chamber of rocket stoves which further reduces the efficiency of a “rocket stove” in the most infuriating way - it’s like driving while your parking brake is on.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

I’d say that it would have to be more of an indicator than a measurement; it’s not like there’s some magic number of CEOs being assassinated that we would need to reach and then, spontaneously, the masses would reach a point where they are ready for revolution but if that number of CEOs were getting merced then for every assassin you could assume that there’s at least 10,000 people who are deeply sympathetic. With those sort of numbers you’re easily looking at millions of sympathisers and at that point a single spark really can start a prairie fire, in this case.

I think that there’s a direct parallel that can be drawn between Luigi Mangione and Willem Van Spronsen and, in part, it is that both failed to grasp the urgent necessity of building a movement and the ultimate inadequacy of adventurism and propaganda of the deed.

Both are heroes in my mind and both showed a degree of courage that is rare and should be inspiring however there’s a reason why basically everyone knows the name of Vladimir Lenin while Aleksandr Ulyanov is a footnote in history, why Willem Van Spronsen himself has become barely a footnote in history and why we can expect Luigi Mangione to join their ranks in a very short period of time. After all, the American memory is short and it is only getting shorter.

He knew What Is To Be Done

It’s not possible for me to disagree with this position any more than I already do. This is not what Lenin wrote about, this is not what Lenin nor the Bolshevik party did. This is not what needs to be done Brian Thompson has already been replaced. A thousand Brian Thompsons could be killed and the merest of dents would be made in the system at best. I respect the actions of Luigi Mangione but he will never achieve the change he sought because of a fundamental failure inherent to his muddled political beliefs.

We need more than that, the world needs more than that.

I’ve never used Solidworks or AutoCAD so I can’t speak to whether they work in WINE or if it would be suitable for 3D printing - honestly I’d be concerned about stability in WINE for 3D printing because of the risk of prints failing but this is so far outside of my wheelhouse that I really have no idea.

But it sounds like dual-booting would probably be the best solution for you, especially with the odd game that isn’t compatible.

Sounds like you don’t have much to lose. In your case, unless there is some specific programs you need to use on your laptop for work/study then you should be fine diving headlong into a Linux install tbh. Windows can be a pain to have running on a dual-boot on the same drive though. You will need to disable secure boot and the way that the different OSes manage the internal time on the device differs so you need to direct one of the two to follow the other OS’ default format, I believe. Aside from that you should be alright - I’ve heard that some people encounter other difficulties but these either emerge when you have a shared partition on your drive and you have that open in on OS, then you suspend that OS rather than shutting down before starting the other OS as I think this will cause the partition to be locked out from the other OS until you shut the first one down. I figure nothing big will likely come of that but I’ve never encountered it personally so just something to be aware of.

As for the other issues that may occur from a dual-boot set up on the same drive, I’m not sure whether that’s an older issue that doesn’t occur anymore because the cause of it has been resolved or if it’s specific to certain OSes or what. I’ve never encountered it personally, although after the initial week the number of times that I’ve booted back into windows has been less than half a dozen times.

Pro-tip: if you are pretty set on making Linux your daily driver then I’d go through the pain of allocating the majority of your drive space to Linux because you will probably want almost all of it there. If you divide it up 50/50 you’re probably going to wish you had a larger partition for Linux once Windows becomes your backup “if I really have to” OS, especially if you plan to have an extensive library of games on Linux.

Speaking as someone who recently made the jump, Linux Mint is good. Not perfect but an easy enough on-ramp, aside from a couple of hiccups. You can run lots of (most?) Windows programs in Wine which is not an emulator.

If you have the opportunity I’d recommend dual-booting with windows to ease out the transition. Make Linux your default, have windows as a backup which you can resort to in moments of absolute frustration (and also to get a taste of how bad it really is on the Microsoft side of the fence), and gradually over time you’ll find yourself probably relying more and more on Linux.

Dual boot works better on two separate drives for unnecessarily complicated reasons (thanks, Microsoft), so if that’s at all an option then do that.

Linux gaming has come a long way in a short time, especially thanks to the Steam Deck and now Bazzite really driving Linux gaming to get up to speed. I’m not really much of a gamer so I can’t tell you what it’s like on Linux and I haven’t had the capacity to sort out emulation as of yet but at a guess I think you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised for the most part.

Pro-tip: if you are trying out a Linux distro, consider buying a reasonably sized SD card, presuming that you’ve got a SD slot in your laptop. Just get a microsd card and use an adapter for the broader applicability, if possible. Load up your distro on the card and run it off of that for a little bit to get a feel for Linux in your own time. Then, as long as your SD slot is low profile that it doesn’t protrude, once you switch to a more permanent dual-boot set up you can use the SD card as a makeshift shared drive (because Microsoft makes a shared Window/Linux drive kinda painful, naturally).

There are other good distros out there but Mint has been my daily for months now and I’m quite happy with it. It’s not perfect but I have a strong preference for it over Windows, which is the destination I wanted to arrive at.

Either of those outcomes would have been wonderful radicalising moments for a ton of supporters though

Awesome, thanks for your response I really appreciate it!

I’d consider repurposing an old phone and making that your podcast/music player-only device. That way you have separation and you aren’t getting sucked into endless scrolling and perpetual notifications. You could go one step further and buy a cheap brick phone. Use that for calls and texts.

If you separate out your media device from your mainstream communication device from your algo-entertainment device you’ll probably manage things better, especially if you keep your entertainment device powered down when you aren’t using it. You could go a step further and use tablet for your entertainment device, locking down your current phone to only specific functions and apps.

What is the most underrated facet of each these fields (geology, geography, and climatology)?

Like, what’s the big thing that gets overlooked or which doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves because it gets dwarfed by other things? (Basically “I don’t care about your tyrannosaurus, give me your ankylosauruses!”)