I’m going to add a choice here:

In honor of the late, great Steve Albini, Kerosene, by his band Big Black. It’s been covered by a few bands, but no one has managed the harsh, nihilistic electro-punk feel of the original.

Erm, no, that was popularized by Millennial PUAs, who are all solidly middle aged now.

I use diceware and random number generators to create my user names.

Well. I was married to someone that thought it was disgusting, hated that I masturbated, and did her level best to shame me out of it. She also hated sex. (Well, with me; she suddenly liked sex once we were separated and she was dating.) And many fundamentalist religions do teach that no one should ever masturbate, and that women should always be sexually available to their husbands, no matter what. (Oh, and women don’t have sexual needs or desires of their own, they just exist to fulfill male needs.)

rather bloodlessly, around 50k deaths overall,

Wut.

50,000 deaths is ‘rather bloodlessly’? And since that’s comparable to oppression within the USSR, it’s not that bad?

while outright invasions may not be justified,

Correct. That, right there, is the most important point you’ve made. They collaborated with Nazis to carve up territories, and were then shocked when the Nazis turned on them. As far as the appeasement pacts made with Nazi Germany by France, England, et al., there’s very, very good reasons why the Vichy gov’t and Quisling are viewed so negatively by everyone that isn’t an apologist.

The other ended up defeating the Nazis. I’d say the Bolsheviks did a better job, didn’t they?

Uh. The Bolsheviks actively collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis, right up until Operation Barbarossa. The Soviets carved up Poland between themselves and Germany, and tried to invade Finland (Winter War, Continuation War), which is why the Finns ended up allying with the Nazis after Operation Barbarossa.

Goatwhore - Baring Teeth for Revolt

I feel like no one that’s offended by this has ever made their own chili. When chili is made right, beans or not, it should be about this consistency when it’s room temperature. Chili is supposed to be a main course, not a soup, and it’s not supposed to be thin.

Having used Wolf brand chili before, it’s just fine once it’s heated up. It’s solidly okay as canned chili.

Apprenticeships are damn near impossible to find in the US, period. Usually people go to trade schools.

No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.

Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.

Deviant Olam is another good one for physical security. After seeing a few of his videos on gun “safes”, I looked into genuine gun safes (TRTL 30x6 or better, and/or DoD-approved weapons containers) with S&G mechanical locks, and the prices are eye watering. An S&G lock by itself ain’t too bad–about $600, IIRC–but the safe body itself was $15k+, easy. …Without shipping included, since there’s no fucking way I’m getting that into my basement myself. Most gun “safes” are not even UL-listed Residential Security Containers, and you get into $2000+ for one that meets that basic, very, very minimum level of protection. (Yes, I looked in the local gun stores that carry them.) The fact that most gun “safes” aren’t capable of resisting an 18" prybar that’s used continuously for 15 minutes is not a pleasant thought to think about.

I agree with all of this. At the same time, I think that, in most cases, people should allow their body to adapt to heat, if they are healthy enough to do so. Most people can learn to be comfortable in higher heat than they believe, although some people have medical conditions that will make them more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. If you can get by without it, you should. If you’re at risk by not using it, don’t feel guilty.

(FWIW, my office only has a/c because I have a very, very large printer in here, and it tends to have head strikes and scrap prints out if there’s no climate control. But since I’m not printing at the moment, the current temp in here is 82F.)

Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings

I wanted to add to this because it might catch someone else.

I live in a cedar cabin in the mountains. The wood is untreated on the inside. Cedar is not usually attractive to insects that eat wood, but, well… Every year since we moved there, we’d get small amounts of frass (chewed-up bits of wood) from insects eating the exposed roof beams (!!!) of our house. I would spray the beams with permethrin, a bunch of dead ant-looking things would be on the floor the next few days, and that would be it for the year.

This year I called an exterminator, since it keeps happening. He said that it wasn’t termites (yay!), but thought that it was some kind of beetle. (Powder post beetles are a huge problem in our area.) He said we had two options: we could either fumigate the entire house (cost: about $10k, since the whole house would need to be tented), or we could paint all the woodwork in the hose with a 1:1 solution of Bora-Care and water. Bora-Care is a disodium octaborate tetrahydrate and glycerin solution, and should poison the wood for pests, without being toxic to people or animals once it’s dried. (I may also have to drill the beams in inject a similar product in order to get deep enough penetration.)

This should be a one-and-done process; I should not need to repeat it.

On top of that, as we experience higher temperatures, many people also crank up their air conditioners—which emit more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This is not correct. Air conditioning units do not ‘emit more […] greenhouse gases’. Air conditioners use a refrigerant–usually R134a–which does have a high global warming potential (GWP) compared to methane or CO2, but that refrigerant is in a closed loop; it’s not going anywhere unless the system is damaged. Most a/c failures aren’t from refrigerant leaking out of the system, and the system no longer being able to effectively transfer heat, but from the compressor motor failing. When the compressor fails, in most cases you can evacuate the refrigerant, replace the broken part, and then recharge the system. (The fact that they can be repaired doesn’t mean that they usually are repaired. Which is shitty.)

What is true is that a/c units emit heat themselves. An air conditioner moves heat from inside a space to outside of that space; in the process of doing so, the a/c unit itself is creating an additional small amount of heat from the function of the compressor motor, electronics, etc.

Beyond that, most electricity that’s used to run a/c systems–and every other electrical device–is produced from burning fossil fuels. So if there’s more demand for electricity–such as from a heat dome that has everyone running their a/c full-time–then yes, more CO2 is going to get pumped out into the atmosphere. But if your electricity is coming from sources that are largely emissions-free, like solar, wind, or hydro, then air conditioning is a negligible source of heat.

tl;dr - don’t feel bad about using your a/c when heat rises to dangerous levels; agitate at a local, state, and national level for renewable, carbon-neutral ways of generating electricity, and for more efficient use of electricity.

I dunno, when you’re talking about really specialized niches, there are still plenty of forums. Like, 600rr.net; it’s dedicated to nothing but Honda CBR600RR motorcycles. If you have a problem with a 600RR, the answer is probably there, and the forum is still ticking along because it’s just too hard to find those super-niche answers on Reddit. Want gun content with a healthy dose of homo/transphobia and christian nationalism? AR15.com has you covered. Want to talk about the minutiae of reloading and be autistically-focused on long-range accuracy? SnipersHide.com is your place. (They’re a bit fuddy though.)

Sure. If you’ve abused it in some way so that it doesn’t take or hold charge, then you might have to pay for a replacement battery. But I think there would be an implied warranty when you’re given a replacement, that the replacement was fit for service. And the company might just have to roll the cost or replacing batteries every so often into their electricity pricing models.

I moved to the south from the north. Everyone here wants to hug.

Please kill me.

The most?

Fire.

The best guesses right now is that our ability to use fire–and eventually create fire–allowed us to evolve the brains that we have now, because cooking food significantly decreases the energy needed to process it, which allows more energy to be used by your brain. And our brain burns a lot of calories. Cooking food is essentially a preliminary digestion process. Without our brain, the modern world as we know it never exists. Hell, we never even evolve past troops of apes.

Sure. It would make planning for retirement a lot easier; I’d have a pretty good idea of how much I needed to save and invest.

No.

Yes, I wish it was more socially acceptable, but I still wouldn’t be physically affectionate. Because autism.