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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • waits to order stuff until there’s a few things needed

    free shipping not available anyways unless you hit minimum order of 50.-

    proceed to order 10 things at once

    each thing gets shipped in a separate package, on separate dates…

    even the 20x 1cm M3 screws that you originally needed come in a cardboard parcel, by themselves

    packages keep arriving randomly at your place for the next 5-10 days, leaving you with a pile of cardboard


  • I mean, yes, i takes some practice. I was more commenting in terms of time+effort, which imo is not that much actual time spent doing stuff compared to e.g. just making regular sourdough bread. which also takes practice if you want nice big bubbles. In my experience, getting a pretty sourdough bread with high hydradation dough actually took more practice (in terms of handling the sticky dough) than getting good croissants.

    And even the first couple of croissants turned out pretty good when i started. Not on par with bakery ones but still tasty. So it’s not like practice results need to go in the bin




  • being the reserve currency isn’t that nice for citizens, though. Other countries and companies need your money, because all the big deals are made in it and you really want some on hand to protect against currency fluctuations (don’t want your 50m € deal suddenly costing 100m€ because it’s denominated in dollars and the exchange rate rose).

    but if everyone wants your currency, in large amounts, your government at some point can’t keep up with printing, otherwise inflation goes up too much.

    now when you have lots of buyers for your currency, but too little supply, of course the exchange rate will go up. But those buyers also look for alternatives that are almost as good as just money.

    well it’s not actually money you hoard, but debts that can be exchanged for money. First government bonds, those are stable and can be exchanged for money easily. Those also have limited supply, so the next best thing, corporate loans. Less stable but better than nothing. Those dry up, etc. and you end up at subprime mortgages. Those suck, but hey, they are still dollars, kind of. So you have more and more financial instruments created that pretend to be actual money.

    on the flip side, in the reserve currency country, borrowing becomes easy, Companies and people that should not get this much cash now can easily get it. You have lots of bad investment as no one knows what to do with all that money. Houses get built that shouldn’t be. There’s more and more risk in the system.

    Until it fails and blows up. We know what that looks like.

    being the reserve currency is first and foremost nice for the government in question. If it’s nice for the people depends on how the government manages it and what it does with the money and how it controls it. And the longer it goes on, the more unsustainable it is. Countries getting too much investment often do worse than countries getting little


  • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.chtoPrivacy@lemmy.worldyikes
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    21 days ago

    Techies interested in privacy and fairness is just another target/focus group to be marketed to…

    But even given that every company sucks(eventually) and every ceo is an asshole. there’s something to be said about about spreading out and e.g. using proton over gmail and other google services.they might both suck, but at least if it’s spread out, there’s not one asshole ceo that controls all our stuff at once. You can’t vote with your wallet, but preventing monopolies (the natural end game of a free market) by supporting smaller alternatives can still be worthwile. Not that it solves the underlying issues, but i think it can at least slow the decay a bit.



  • Buddy Guy. the concert was pretty posh (think bankers in suits), with everyone having arranged seating, audience sitting still and quiet like at a classical music concert.

    he was like ‘fuck this, this isn’t a proper concert, my guitar is wireless, let’s stand up, go to the entry hall and jam’. so he’s just standing in the middle of the crowd and going nuts, at like 83 years of age. That was amazing.



  • One problem with reporting private messages on Lermy is, as an admin i don’t see who sent the message. I only see who reported it. And i don’t have any actlon available, other than marking the report as handled.

    with reported posts, i can ban the poster. With reported messages i’d have to ask the reporter who it was, trust their answer, search for the account manually and then i could ban. Not really efficient or fast if there ever was a spam wave.

    of course sparmers could then just register a new account on a open instance and i might need to defederates which would lead to a fractured landscape of spammy open instances and likely inactive private instances.

    there’s also not even rudimantary spam filtering in lemmy.

    The main saving grace is that Lemmy is too small to attract a ton of spam yet.

    maybe some of the above is just due my pick of clients (jerboa and the web interface), and there’s better tools? If so, i’d love to hear. But as things stand right now, there’s a lot to be desired




  • i have a venta lw45. same principle, but instead of a wick, it has these rotating disks that the water sticks to (with a little soap in the water). Works incredibly well, still uses next to no energy (<8W) and the disks are super easy to clean. It’s a beast, goes through 9 liters of water in a bit over a day. All the parts are easily accessible for maintenance and there’s replacement parts if anything ever were to break (though i havent needed those yet).

    the disks are especially nice when you have hard water, the calcium can be a pain to remove from a wick, but you can put the venta plastic disks (and lower housing, if you can fit it) in the dishwasher to get them good as new. And calcium does not stick to them weld, so a quick rinse under a strong showerhead is usually enough to clean the disks. Definitely one of the best appliance purchases i ever made.


  • It’s also the plot of Forego Quest (a short novelette included in the book Dragons Banker). the hero is not just the chosen one, he’s THE chosen one, as in, the chosen one of every prophecy and myth. His body is covered in different birthmarks from hundreds of prophecies, he stumbles on unique magic weapons to defaet a dark lord at every coner (they sell for a nice profit), every inn he enters, the maid is suddenly super pretty and starts going on about actually being a princess in distress or some such. And he’s having none of it.

    i quite enjoyed that one, and as a novelette it’s short enough to not overstay its welcome.

    The main book was ok, had some nice ideas but nothing too spectacular. It’s about some magic kingdom intoducing bank notes instead of gold and a dragon hiring a banker to convert its hoard of gold into this new currency without being noticed or crashing the market.



  • Fair enough. As I said, compared to some other european countries it’s still relatively bad here. Though 52 hours vs 45 is a whole extra day of work. And while I don’t care about the religious stuff, and there is some convenience lost with (most) shops not being open on Sunday, having a specific day that is generally off for everyone so you can spend time with family/friends is kind of nice. And I think one important thing is that most of these things aren’t negotiable by a contract, otherwise they’d be meaningless imo, at least in the sense of preventing low paid workers from being exploited.

    There’s also lots more rules I didn’t mention, like acceptable hours you can work before you must take a break, number of hours you can work in a row (with breaks) before you need to get a half day off etc. A lot of it is focussed on giving workers an opportunity to regenerate properly.


  • tbh, for european standards, that still sounds pretty bad.

    for examle here: 45 hour work week, sunday labor is generally banned, with 6 sundays/year being the limit and having to be paid 50% extra for that work, plus being required to compensate for that day by taking an extra day off the following week. Overtime 2 hour/day, 170 hours/year, 25% extra pay or compensate by taking off same amount of time. Of course there’s also exceptions, same as everywhere.

    and this is still relatively bad compared to e.g. france with its 35 hour work week.



  • It’s not economical to grow. It has very specific requirements in terms of wet soil and not too much sun, it has pretty low yields in terms of weight/area, compared to other crops. and since it isn’t grown commercially, you also dont have optimized farming techniques and breeds etc.

    and since it’s quite common in the wild, well, if the price is too high, you’d just go and collect some yourself. Wild garlic products in supermarkets are already too expensive for me and i’d rather spend half an hour filling a bag with 2kg than buying 50g for 5 bucks.


  • It’s not just the use itself, but also how irresponsibly it is produced. Exposing pregnant workers to high levels, dumping it in community water supplies, on farmland etc.

    Also the EU did ban them last september (effective in 2026) for essentially all of the uses you outlined, most of which I dont think are such a big deal and just minor inconveniences. It’s not like the 60s were terrible in terms of living conditions.

    We also used to use asbestos for a lot of the uses you outlined and we got rid of that without too much inconvenience, but you could have made similar arguments about it back then.

    And any reduction is a good thing, it’s not an all or nothing thing. DDT was banned, but can and is still used where there’s no better alternative. And just categorically saying any alternative must be just as bad is just a non-sequitur, there’s no reason that should be true. Cookware is a good example, cast iron works just as well, is not as bad, the only downside compared to teflon is weight. But it’s not like sending us back to the stone age or anything…