I don’t know what “other countries” you’re talking about, but where I’m from, a “can opener” looks like this:

(I’ve been using one just like this for my entire adult life, and guess what - it’s ok!)

If we’re also talking about vehicles… I’m about average height (~180 cm) but have long-ish legs, and this means that I simply don’t fit well into the driver’s seat of most cars. Even with the steering wheel adjusted all the way up, seat slid all the way back and reclined all the way forward, my legs are hitting the steering wheel and yet I can barely reach it with my hands. Because of this, I sometimes have to take my shoes off while driving.

Also, almost every car has some annoying things like your oil plug; simply because a modern combustion engine is really quite complicated and there’s not enough space under the hood to give every component a convenient place. E.g. my Delica has the starter located below the engine and quite far back, so it’s mostly covered by the engine protection plate. Good luck banging on that starter relay if it sticks in the off position and refuses to start, while you’re stuck in the mud! However I do agree that making periodic maintenance painful, like in your case, is way worse.

Alec from Technology Connections is known for his extensive rants about household appliances: https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections

As for me, I’m just trying to avoid things in general, and things I don’t enjoy in particular. Perhaps the only things that I find annoying at my home are:

• An awful flow-through gas water heater, which requires me to wait for like a minute before water gets up to temperature every time I need hot water (I’d go with an electric one myself, but unfortunately I’m a renter for now). It’s also a poor design because it’s going to fuck over humanity in a couple decades via climate change.
• Packaging on almost all processed food. I don’t need everything I buy to be in a plastic bag. It’s an incredibly poor design because it is almost always non-recyleable, either because it has a thin foil layer or it’s a mix of plastics or both, filling the landfills forever and contaminating everything with microplastics.
• Poor window frame design, combined with inevitable building settling, has resulted in a cracked window twice within the last year.

I have many more gripes about things, some of the most prominent:

• Most modern smartphones just suck. Gimme back the headphone jack, an SD card slot, and a back that I can open with my fingernails! (thankfully my current phone has all of those despite being only a couple years old and very cheap)
• Generally everything that has a battery which I can’t replace
• Bluetooth headphones without a headphone jack or at least audio-over-USB are an awful design, it would cost the manufacturer like a dollar do add that functionality that can come in really handy and yet they don’t
• Fuck clothes without pockets!
• Cheap plastic crap from wish.com or similar that’s designed to fail after one use, it just shouldn’t exist. I hope CPC bans this shit soon. (although I find it fun to pull out broken christmas lights from recycling, fix them and then get free christmas lights for every New Year’s)
• “Teflon” or similar frying pans. Just get a cast iron one. Lasts forever, doesn’t poison you, also allegedly enriches your food with iron

It’s the fact that Mercurial tags the commit with the name of the branch that it was committed to which makes it much easier to determine whether a commit is included in your current branch or not.

Isn’t this trivial in Git too? git branch --contains COMMIT ?

POTUS? Nobody. No single person should hold a position with such power.

I’ve never done something on the scale I’m describing, so this is mostly just speculation, but I hope it could be useful.

First of all, find the people who do care. Talk with them. Make a local antifascist group in a secure messenger (Matrix/XMPP, or at the very least Signal), or join an existing org that you disagree with the least (don’t be afraid of the word “socialist” if you stumble upon them). Do not discuss anything illegal, as it could spell trouble for everyone - you live in an (increasingly) authoritarian country with a wide range of tools to repress you. Keeping it legal at least makes it less likely.

Now that you have a support network, you can start reaching out. Until/unless your organization gains serious traction, unite over common goals instead of squabbling over your differences. DO NOT guilt anyone for being financially well off, voting for the wrong candidate, believing in stupid things, etc. Find people who are somewhat unhappy or unsure about concentration camps. Try convincing them that concentration camps are bad - it probably would be easier if they are on the fence already or if they are being unjustly treated themselves. Show compassion. Do not be condescending or use the words that may trigger them (Nazism, etc), instead appeal to humanity and empathy to specific people who are being repressed. Bring some examples of unjust repression with you. Do not overdo it - you don’t (yet) have to agree on anything except that these concentration camps are bad. Propose to do something together - it can be small at first, like calling your representative or organizing a picket - common action builds connections and mutual understanding.

Actually, I don’t remember if I ever thanked you for your work; We don’t always agree on everything but your positions are thought-provoking, your delivery respectful, and your patience seemingly infinite. So, thank you. I wish there were more people like you on the left.

Yep, but the rest can mostly be replaced with a mailing list. Or, if you’re allergic to email, there’s also https://forgejo.org/.

Federated browsers

That’s literally just regular browsers, you can interact with any one of billions of webservers

Federated github

Git is federated by nature, you can add as many remotes as you wish and push/pull to all of them. Add in a mailing list for issue tracking and “pull requests” (patch submissions) and you’re golden. You can look up sourcehut to self-host a well-integrated combination of the two.

Federated hosting providers

Not sure what exactly you mean by this but maybe take a look at IPFS, although it’s more P2P then federation.

Federated internet

Internet is already fairly federated by nature - most commonly used protocols in the OSI stack are open and you can host your own components of critical infrastructure. Getting others to interact with them might be difficult due to security & privacy issues.

Honestly, I think I’m mostly set already (as I often go backpacking and there’s no internet there). I have offline maps for the country I’m in and neighboring regions downloaded in OsmAnd and mapy.cz (two sources just in case), Wikipedia in Kiwix, and my custom NixOS setup as a bootable ISO on a flashdrive. I’ll probably miss being able to watch science/maths edutainment on YouTube, but it’s not something I’d download.

If the Internet went away, we’d have a little time before batteries were not viable even if replaceable, as distributing those batteries would get problematic.

Good thing portable solar panels & lead-acid batteries exist that can easily power a couple of laptops even if their internal batteries are cooked. Solar panels last for a very long time if cared for, and lead-acid batteries can be (somewhat) useful almost indefinitely if you replace the electrolyte.

No, we’re all gonna need to learn how to fight, and live without hospitals and drugs and probably electricity.

So it would be really handy to have instructions for maintaining or even building weaponry, medical/medicinal literature to find useful herbs or other remedies, and engineering literature/textbooks/software to help us rebuild the electrical grid and then the Internet.

Honestly, while fun, those videos don’t provide too much value per GB - and I say that as someone who’s watched almost all of them. Their main actual benefit besides entertainment is (IMHO) getting people interested in the relevant field so they study more thoroughly. They often explain simple yet dazzling concepts which get you hooked but don’t provide much value on their own, and don’t directly enable you to solve real-life problems. Even more involved videos like those by 3blue1brown are still edutainment at their core, as acknowledged by the author. In an apocalypse (which, let’s face it, is the most likely reason the internet would indefinitely go down in a developed country) you would be much better off with engineering (mechanical, electrical, etc) literature and textbooks, maybe a couple science textbooks for good measure (I have a drawer full of the Feynman lectures in case something like this happens).

Hmm, right. This makes it somewhat more complicated. If this new name starts being used by many people and organizations, I suppose it would make sense to create a new place=sea boundary=maritime, but until then it’d be kind of stupid to pollute the map with a new entity just because it’s in the official records.

You can try out Nix. It can be installed right there on your Kubuntu box, without any conflicts with apt or other package managers.

It’s somewhat similar to portage with its ebuilds in that it’s source-first and allows you to set up complex dependency trees and configure every package in them. In your case it would allow you to avoid manual rebuilds and just build&install all your custom software with one command from one directory containing some .nix files that describe how to fetch, configure and compile every package. (Actually, for your dependencies those files are likely to be in nixpkgs already - you can check at https://search.nixos.org/packages. In that case, you don’t have to write any packaging instructions or even build everything, as Nix will intelligently download the binary versions which are helpfully provided by the Nix community).

It’s quite different from most other package managers/build systems, though, being much “simpler” (it can be described as lambda calculus on files with syntax sugar) but much “harder” (the learning curve is actually a learning wall with the first section requiring mountain climbing experience and covered in barbed wire). If you’ve been maintaining builds for multiple packages by hand for years, though, it shouldn’t be too bad.

Very few things are trully impossible in linux land, but having multiple package managers on a single system is just asking for trouble.

Nix/Guix (and a couple other similar package managers) are specifically designed to not interfere with the rest of your system.

I think the discussion there is quite reasonable given the circumstances, and official_name:en-US once the GNIS updates is the correct way to go until people actually start calling it the new name.

what a stupid timeline this is

But instead, the device turns on (nearly) instantly. Because the wire isn’t actually what causes the device to turn on

That’s not exactly true. In this case, the energy transmission would go like this: (change of electric field in the little bit of wire next to the power source) -> (change of magnetic field in the air between the wires) -> (change of electric field in the wire next to the load). This limits the amount of energy transmitted significantly and incurs a lot of losses, meaning if you had something like a lamp plugged in it would start glowing extremely dimly at first (think about how some cheap LED lights keep glowing even with the switch off - it’s similar, albeit it happens due to inter-wire capacitance and not induction). It would then slowly ramp up to full power over a course of a year.

Here’s a video from the same person about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vrhk5OjBP8 (although I haven’t watched this yet)

Edit: after watching the video, I think I was actually wrong in a couple of my assumptions. First of all, it looks like the reason for the initial energy transmission is wire capacitance and not induction, so (electric field in wire) -> (electric field in air) -> (electric field in wire, in the “opposite direction”, but because the wire goes back and forth it’s the same current direction). This means that my LED example is even more potent. And the second one is that because it’s capacitance and not induction, this means that there’s no slow ramp-up, it just makes the light glow very dimly all the way until the electric field makes it through the wire, and then it ramps up very quickly.

The Fed Board, apparently: https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm

After reading through that page and the FAQ, I think it’s because the banks should now be compelled to held reserves because Fed pays them a reasonable interest (close to what they would get if they give a very low-risk loan) on them, rather than it being a strict requirement. I don’t know enough about economics to have an opinion on whether it’s a good idea, but I feel like it’s not too horrible? Like, maybe it makes some shitty banks even more susceptible to bank runs, but that’s the reality of fractional reserve banking in general.

• Catalan children get (some) of their Christmas presents by beating a cute piece of wood that then shits the presents out onto the floor. Seriously.
• There was a British guy who fought in WW2 with a scottish broadsword and bagpipes. However, the best thing is that he wasn’t even a Scotsman.
• On a small enough timescale, the electric field actually bounces around in your wires for a while after you flick a switch, even if it’s DC, just to “figure out” where it “needs to go”.
• More than twice as much time had passed from the invention of the motorcycle until the first motorcycle backflip, then had from the invention of the airplane until the first humans landing on the moon.

It’s actually 0.06 microseconds (0.00000006 seconds) per day, or ~22 μs (0.000021915 s) per year.

Also, technically, anything moving up or down in Earth’s gravitational field while physically connected to it is having an effect, however it’s usually to small to be reasonably measurable.

(I wonder what would happen if the rotation speed was changed by 0.06 seconds per day - that feels like a lot, adding up to 22 seconds per year, but would anyone except timekeeping nerds actually notice? I don’t even know how to begin figuring something like that out.)