The PUA-types and this alpha/beta/sigma nonsense really appeals to the incel crowd. They believe that they can somehow game relationships in order to get sex. Like, they do steps a, b, c–which is the kind of systems PUAs are/were pushing–and you get laid.

The whole thing is a constellation; I don’t think any of those groups exists in a vacuum, and there’s lots of points where they cross over.

My ex-wife wasn’t even conservative, so IDK.

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.

He wasn’t the president when the crime was committed, ipso facto he didn’t have presidential immunity.

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

Given that child sex crimes were, in the past, largely a crime committed by people that were living in poverty, probably not. It’s more likely that you get to a certain point of fame and money and think you can get away with it since you have so many people telling you ‘yes’ all the time. (This was–supposedly, purportedly–one of the reasons that nobility would have a jester; they needed someone to make fun of them so they weren’t completely detached from reality.)

Well, TBF it’s hard to maximize profit when you’re head is in a basket in front of the guillotine, sooooooooo I guess they need to figure shit out before then?

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

Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can’t pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)

But doing labor outside the home means that labor can’t be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you’re working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that’s 40 hours you don’t have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.

The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it’s entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.

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.

First things first.

Second, given that the author has hidden this in a paywall–you have to sign up in order to access the article and presumably any links–I’m going to immediately distrust the motives.

Third, Medium is a glorified blogging site; anyone can say anything on it.

The first WTC bombing was in 1993, and Oklahoma City was 1995.

I don’t think that B2B cold calls are “spam”, per se, and I wouldn’t even say that most of them are truly “cold” calls. Worst case scenario, they should be warm calls. Or room temperature calls. Like, if you sell printing presses, you probably shouldn’t be calling a hair salon. But calling a local newspaper–somewhere that you know uses the product category that you sell–is reasonable.

I do take cold calls from salespeople in my current position, and my response is usually that, if they can provide a product that meets the needs of the company I work for, I’m more than happy to try it.

Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably get an Apple device.

Sadly, I also don’t like spending money. :P You used to be able to make Hackintoshes, but Apple tends to break them with every software update.

I had been thinking about getting an IoT Enterprise LTSC release of Windows and manually adding the components that I needed. Might still do that with dual boot.

There are a lot of ways to get around that, such as:

I’m doing all of that except the last one already. As has been noted in many other places, Windows itself is now in the business of serving ads directly, and it looks like that’s getting harder and harder to disable. I managed to mostly lock down the Pro release of Win 10 that I’m on right now, but Win 11 will make that much, much harder. If it weren’t for security issues surrounding end of product life, I wouldn’t switch versions at all.

C’est la mort.

But yeah, I’ll def. look for a user-friendly version of Linux when I build my next system in a few months.