You can also get away with being queer in Yerevan. Not anywhere else in Armenia sadly.

Armenia is perfectly safe as well and everyone speaks Russian there.

At the point of first contact IRL, I avoid mentioning anything even vaguely inflammatory: that I’m an immigrant (that one is hard to hide because my pronunciation of the local language is still quite terrible), vegan, atheist, hold anarchist, marxist, and generally anti-capitalist views. If the relationship lasts longer than just a single contact, as I build up trust and goodwill I slowly start seeping out that info, usually in the order that I listed it in.

A lot of things break on cars that old, so any buyer has to be a bit stupid to pay that price…

laughs in a 30 year old van, that gained about 40% of value since I bought it 3 years ago

If it was built well, and is simple enough, it’s not too much of a hassle and you can maintain a lot of it yourself. Most new cars are complicated garbage that breaks constantly straight out of the factory, and you have to take it to a mechanic to do anything because of their complexity and proprietary software. Compare that to my van, where I can read the OBD2 error codes on my phone over bluetooth with a $10 dongle, and can do most basic maintenance (oil, ATF, spark plugs, belts) with basic hand tools and a car pit.

Nah they were. Being a nazi makes you a bad person, categorically. It doesn’t mean there’s no possibility for change or reform, but it does mean that while someone holds nazi believes they are a vile piece of shit.

What’s up with approx. 1.8?

I’ll say it’s a 6-9 depending on my mood.

Sure this may sound ridiculous but it’s basic knowledge that studying your opponents viewpoints is the best way to counter them and get new insight yourself.

I don’t think this is necessarily empathy. I’ve read Hitler, Ilyin and Dugin, understood their arguments and point of view. If anything it made me less empathetic to them, seeing their vile hatred spilled on paper like that; but I agree that it is useful in practice to understand people who hate your guts.

To me, empathy means not only understanding the individual’s viewpoint, but moreso understanding how they got to it. This is how I can still slightly emphasize with any awful individuals, from nazis to billionaires: I understand that their viewpoint was formed by their position in the capitalist hellscape we fine ourselves in, and by incessant capitalist propaganda. If I was born in their stead and lived through their experiences, I would likely share similar ideas. This makes me more hopeful in the possibility of reform even for the worst of the worst; if a person was convinced of something, they can be convinced that it is wrong too; noone is born a nazi, and so noone is beyond hope in my opinion.

As for my family, they can be incessantly racist and homophobic, not to mention all the various small things like climate change conspiracies etc. I politely disagree with them and try to nudge them towards more inclusivity and empathy for others; we’ve never had a screaming argument despite holding very different opinions about things so dear to my heart. But yeah at times, especially when I’m in a bad mood, I also just shut down political conversations with them.

With how complex (and unrepairable) modern cars are, in a few years the used car prices will probably shoot up because of flailing supply.

TBH nowadays android is becoming just as guilty of the walled garden bullshit. We need mobile linux and we need it now.

There are moments where the potential payout for a ticket is greater than the value of the ticket.

Has this ever happened in recent history?

In that mathematical moment, buy exactly one ticket.

I’d say buy as many as you can within the amount of money you’re ready to waste. Same as with investing, pretty much.

You can get phone batteries from Aliexpress for very cheap. They are typically not too difficult to replace (as long as the back panel is not glass). Give it a go!

Not-a-parent here. I would probably speak with a therapist/child psychologist. Kleptomania is a thing, it happens, it is treatable. If it’s not that, a therapist would still be able to help.

In any case, holy shit definitely don’t do that:

I can take her to the local police by pre -arrangement

Ratting out your own child to police for very minor infractions, even just for a scare or whatever, sounds like a good way to lose her trust, ruin her psyche and destroy your relationship with her forever. All for what?

• A pinecil. It was like $30, and has paid for itself within the first two things I did with it (repaired a good computer mouse which just had a USB connector lift from the board, and fashioned a DIY solar connector). I have repaired/made countless other small things in the few years I’ve owned it.
• Our bicycles, I guess? Financially speaking, they were dirt cheap (~$80 for both), we’ve sold our Prius since we bought them ($5000), we’re not paying for gas for trips within the city (~$30/mo), we’re not paying insurance or parking or maintenance or any of that crap (~$20-30/mo or so). So they have paid off within the first couple of weeks. And there’s so much more: both of us lost some weight, city errands are sometimes faster, and usually more pleasant now (no being stuck in traffic ever), and we’re not wasting space on a useless hunk of metal or polluting the air we breathe.

To expand on this a bit: impeachment in a liberal democracy isn’t meant as a tool for the people to remove a president that doesn’t serve their interests. It is meant as a tool for the wealthy and powerful (the venn diagram there is almost a circle) to remove a president that doesn’t serve their interests. Look at who’s paying the congresspeople and their parties. Their donors, for all intents and purposes, get to decide whether to impeach. (those same donors also control the vast majority of the media, so they can shape public opinion/manufacture consent too).

So far the wealthy have no reason to dislike Trump, so he’ll stay in power for a while. If that changes (due to dementia or otherwise) he might get impeached. I think the most likely way for that to happen is if his dumb ass crashes the real sector again in a way that hurts the rich, a-la 2020. It sadly comes down to a game of chance here: his austerity measures and trying to “save a buck” on vital government functions make a disaster more likely, but not guaranteed.

It’s the same in South Korea: the only reason the president was removed is because his erratic actions while trying to cling to power hurt the interests of the wealthy directly. The people had very little to do with it; it could have very easily gone very different, if the military (which was present at the time of the protests) got slightly different orders, or the congress people got slightly different whispers in their ears.

I’ll just adb install those same apps from f-droid. But my hope is that I will be using mobile linux more and more as a daily-driver, until it eventually replaces Android 100%

I would argue that Wi-Fi is also fundamentally the same as it was invented, it’s just network packets sent over high-frequency radio waves, but there has been a lot of changes in specifics. It’s the same for wheels, while the fundamental principle is the same, the differences between a wheel 4000 years ago and today are staggering.

It’s very niche, but the only thing I could come up with is Kvevri, a traditional Georgian winemaking vessel. They’re sold today (and still used for their stated purpose, aging wine), I’ve personally seen kvevris with the exact same shape buried in a wine cellar of 12th century monastery, and at least going by the article they’re like 8000 years old, and haven’t changed much in that time.

My other ideas were:

• Bricks (turns out the earliest sun-dried mudbricks, which are very different from modern ones)
• Concrete (turns out it changed a whole lot since the Romans, modern concrete is much easier to pour, sets faster and is much stronger)
• Nuts & bolts (initially were hand-crafted and non-interchangeable - yuck!)
• Knives (I’ll let knife enthusiasts speak about that one)

Wheels have definitely changed a lot though.

It’s gonna be a bog-standard Android device with some software modified/removed.

Really? That would be heavily antithetical to everything they do. I expect it would be a Linux distro (like PostmarketOS) with some blobs removed etc.

I mean, it in a very literal way the parent project of GTK, and therefore indirectly responsible for GNOME, so that kind of checks out. I use it quite often though, and you can learn it to do what you wanna do.