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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • There are many people where there is no Canadian identity

    There isn’t really a Canadian identity left at this point. I live in a tiny rural community where we consider ourselves to be keeping the torch in a way… We don’t lock our doors, we share and help each other, call each other on the phone just to chat, we sit around and drink too much coffee or beer and wrench on old junk. Drive around in winter plowing driveways and pulling cars out of the ditch. If a neighbour needs a tool it’s just “let yourself into the shop and it’s in the red toolbox, bring it back when you’re done”

    The cities though? I have friends there and that community attitude is long dead. Any available resources are exploited and nothing given in return, everyone is poor and desperate and barely making rent. Our country is very sick.



  • Here in Canada, we have a loophole in the law where indigenous have the right to use tobacco without taxation due to tradition. Which is totally fair - but it also applies to modern mass produced cigarettes for some reason.

    As a result of ever increasing taxes on tobacco, I would reckon that at this point 80% of cigarettes smoked in my community have been smuggled off of a reserve. The black market is booming with “Rez smokes” selling for $5-10 a pack while legal cigs go for ~$30.

    The federal government recently introduced a regulation mandating a health warning printed on every cigarette. Most agree it’s a transparent attempt for the police to spot an illegal smoke in your hand, as Rez smokes don’t have warnings on them. They are losing a ton of revenue to the black market, and are trying to crack down with heavy fines for even possessing a pack off of a reserve.






  • Anecdotally pills can also alter behaviour and personality somewhat. Especially the megadose hormones like Depo-provera, that stuff messed up a girl I was dating long ago. Turned her into an emotional wreck. I would actually support not a ban, but warnings and restrictions on that particular product.

    I’ve always felt that choices like the Mirena IUD should be promoted over systemic hormones, my ex-wife was very happy with them over the years and we agreed we’ll be offering our daughter the option as soon as she gets her first period. For some reason they seem to push the Pill instead.

    I know some people have issues with IUDs but if they work for you they really work. Her hormones changed and she went asexual after kids, but she still maintains an IUD just for the greatly diminished cramping and bleeding.



  • I agree with you on HLS, the whole thing seems foolish. I meant more like SpaceX will chuck something around the moon for sport than that they would actually get HLS working. After all, SpaceX can already get to the moon, a lot of the recent payloads to the moon have flown on Falcon 9.

    The hardest part of getting to the moon is getting mass to orbit, and Starship just proved it could get mass to orbit, even if the reusable components didn’t work out. Now they just need to put Blue Origin’s lander inside the payload bay with a kick stage to send it off to the moon 😉 Doing a ton of refueling just to send an entire, oversized Starship as a lander makes no sense.





  • True survivalist/libertarian types have always loved solar power.

    I don’t know how solar lost its space age coolness, though, aside from active lobbying from the fossil fuel industry to try to kill it. For awhile solar was undoubtedly the power source of the future, the same thing that was on our space probes and satellites.

    I have old oil-crisis era books and magazines on my shelf which absolutely loved solar power and billed it as the cheap energy solution for the common man. Somewhere we went wrong, and I think it was Reagan (in many ways…)




  • That’s not just a German thing, here in Canada or the USA it’s strongly frowned on to bring your own food or drink to a restaurant or bar. And “no public toilet” snuck in to a lot of places at Covid time and never left.

    Fast food is different and definitely not enforced but it’s still poor etiquette to eat anything other than small snacks or water there unless you’re part of a group. Like a bunch of guys stop at McDonald’s but one guy is like nah, I packed a sandwich, I’m gonna eat that.

    Still it’s kind of expected that guy would buy a coffee or something. This is what I would do in OP’s situation, have a coffee or a diet Coke if you’re hanging out there for awhile. I wouldn’t complain about “pricy consumables”, it’s like $2.



  • We’re talking about replacing lost content here though. And as such you can use the streaming services as a “backup” by re-ripping your whole collection if you lose it.

    I’m actually doing this now as part of a library cleanup. Zotify + beets are a great combo to pull down vast quantities of music and properly sort and tag it.

    Then I stream it to my phone in my truck using ampache and ultrasonic, which does have a local buffering option.

    However if you have some exotics that you ripped from rare discs, demos or prerelease, live recordings with sentimental value etc. I would suggest keeping those properly backed up. I don’t have many of these, but the ones I do have are backed up both cloud and offsite.


  • Nifedipine - vasodilator

    This cheap and common calcium channel blocker has an effect more localized to the peripheral vessels than most other calcium channel blockers.

    I started taking it as a cure for chilblains, which it was remarkably effective at despite not being officially listed for. Did my research and asked my doctor for it. Never had one since.

    However I soon realized the joy of never feeling cold again. Gone are the days of taking swigs from a flask to keep my fingers thawed out while working on a stalled tractor at -30C. Gone are cold/numb feet in ski boots and rubber boots, frozen thumbs on quads and snowmobiles. I can work in my unheated shop all day!

    Of course its main function is to drop blood pressure by decreasing arterial resistance, which I found provided a significant performance boost in someone with only high normal blood pressure. I box and jump rope, and realized a few days after taking nifedipine that I had been jumping so long that my legs were getting sore, but my endurance still felt limitless.

    My blood pressure is down to totally normal too. So drop your blood pressure, boost your endurance and never feel cold again for under $30/month… It’s a deal