I’m an essential employee who will probably always have to work in-person

I remember during COVID lockdowns with less traffic on the road my car was getting noticeably better mileage.

And I already commute at weird times when there really isn’t much traffic anyway.

Nothing much else really changed about my habits, a lot of my hobbies are solo outdoors activities that are pretty social-distancing-friendly, so pretty much everything else was business as usual for me, just with less traffic.

It feels like such a no-brainer to be that any job that can be done remotely should be

The goods you buy are transported to the stores you buy them from with fossil fuels

The public transit is, in all likelihood, powered by fossil fuels, which may make prices go up

Even if it’s an electric train, or your goods are being delivered by electric trucks, etc. there’s a good chance that the electricity is being generated by fossil fuels

But even if it’s not and it’s coming from solar, hydro, nuclear, etc. those are still likely reliant in some way on fossil fuels some extent for vehicles used to provide maintenance, deliver new/replacement parts, etc. and probably for backup generators to make sure critical systems stay powered in the event of an emergency shutdown, so the price of the electricity is going to go up.

You’re really not as insulated from this as you seem to think, basically our whole economy is based around fossil fuels, when the price of them goes up, the price of literally everything else does as well. Sure, you’re not outright paying directly for fuel, but everything else you are paying for is going to go up before too long.

Edit: also a lot of plastics and countless other materials you almost certainly use daily are made from petroleum.

Different steaks for different purposes

If you’re just gonna plop a slab of meat on a plate with some potatoes and such, I’ll go ribeye any day of the week (although there are other cuts I may actually prefer truth be told)

But if I’m making maybe tacos or something, I’d probably go for the sirloin

For the record, I don’t think the government is in contact or aware of alien life, at least not any technologically advanced civilization (I’m open to the possibility of maybe them being aware of microbial life on Mars or Europa or something and keeping it under wraps)

But, if they were, and assuming we’re talking about a civilization based in another star system (as opposed to somewhere in our solar system or maybe in interstellar space somewhere) I think it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s being handled by people in the military and the president, etc. are all kept out of the loop.

Because it would take too damn long to get a message back and forth to them assuming they don’t immediately give us the key to FTL travel or communications.

Let’s assume that first contact was made in January 1993, and one of Clinton’s first acts as president is to acknowledge that we received their message, introduce himself, and signals that he’s willing to open a dialogue with them.

He fires off that message, let’s say it’s to proxima Centauri, the closest star to us, it takes a little over 4 years to get there, arriving around early to mid 1997.

They reply and we get their next message probably mid to late 2001 (I really don’t feel like crunching the exact numbers of how long these messages are taking to travel or speculating how long it’s taking to draft our messages.)

Bubba is out of office, and Dubya needs to be brought up to speed on the alien situation right around the same time 9/11 is going down. He fires off a reply, and gets back to starting a war in the middle east.

Aliens get that reply around late 2005, and send another reply. We get that around early 2010. Obama’s been in office for about a year, things have kind of settled down a bit. He fires on another reply, it arrives around 2014, aliens are starting to get the picture that they’re probably not going to have a real back and forth conversation with the same president. They send a reply.

Their reply reaches Trump in 2018 sometime. He rambles at them a bit, they get it in about 2022, the aliens aren’t at all sure what to make of that, they think maybe the transmission got corrupted somehow. What they do make out sounds like insane raving bullshit, but at least this guy will be gone soon and they can get back to talking to a real grown up with the next message.

They don’t learn about COVID, or Jan 6, or any of the other stuff going on. Biden get skipped over, Donny is about to receive that reply in a few months, he’s gonna be the first president to have an actual back and forth with the aliens, and he’s probably gonna be pissed that they’re asking if we can put Obama back on the phone.

So yeah, not a great way to be having a conversation. It probably makes a lot more sense to give that responsibility to maybe some career military types, or maybe some unelected pencil-pushers whose government careers can last decades and have more of an opportunity to select and train their successors to ensure smoother communications, and to keep the president and politicians as far out of the loop as possible, because there’s a good chance they could be out of office before they can actually get anything done.

The dynamic changes a bit if we’re talking to someone closer, if maybe we’re dealing with a fleet that’s parked somewhere in or near our solar system that’s authorized to act autonomously from their home planet. Maybe then we could loop the president in a little more, but if they do ever need to phone home for something we’d still have the same problem.

Or if they’re further away than the closest star to us, the problem gets even worse. Let’s say instead of proxima Centauri at about 4¼ light-years away, they’re instead based around Altair at about 16.7 light-years away. They would have gotten Clinton’s message in around late 2009 or 2010, and we’re probably just about due to finally hear back from them in the next couple of months.

I really only need 1 HDMI port on my TV- to connect my AV receiver to, everything else gets plugged into that receiver, it’s got about 8 HDMI ports.

Right now there’s 3 consoles, a pc, and a Chromecast hooked up to it, so I have ports to spare, and I haven’t had to use anything on my tv since I initially set it up and set the input to HDMI 1

It’s not necessarily feasible for everyone, it does take up a little more space in your entertainment center that not everyone has, but I also think it’s 100% worth it to at least have a decent set of speakers hooked up to your TV if you can find the space and budget to do so.

Probably the coolest thing since I started learning it is some of the weird places it turns up

If you read the comic series Saga, the “blue” language is Esperanto

It shows up in the background of some movies and such as a generic “foreign” language

The watch brand Movado is an Esperanto word (movement)

I’ve never dived too deep into in, but I know there has been some research into native Esperanto speakers (denaskuloj) because that’s a thing that exists

Basically none. A couple friends have learned a little bit with me, and I’ve sought out a couple Esperanto books, podcasts, etc.

But otherwise I can’t say that I’ve ever randomly run into another esperantist I could talk to, and I’m not the type of person who seeks out clubs and conventions or making friends with strangers online.

But it’s an easy language to learn, and I feel like it’s taught me how to learn a language, and I think that I’ll be better prepared if I ever decide to try picking up another language somewhere down the line.

And while I’m not holding my breath, I like the idea of an international auxiliary language, and while there’s some valid criticism of Esperanto for that purpose (like that it’s too eurocentric) it’s probably about the best option that we have right now since it already exists, there’s people who actually speak it and it doesn’t have all of the weird grammar rules and such that natural languages all tend to have.

I believe in esperanto it should be

bonvolu stakigi la seĝojn ĉe la fino de la tago

Literally translates to something like

“Please make stacked the chairs at the end of the day”

The measure of a good story isn’t in a brief description of the premise, but in the actual telling of that story. A good writer could take something mundane like putting on your socks and make a funny, interesting, or thought-provoking read out of it, and a poor writer could make the most absolutely amazing thing imaginable a slog to get through.

I see nothing glaringly wrong with the premise of your story, but it’s all of the other details you don’t want to give away and how you tell the storf that would determine whether it’s a good story or not.

So the question really is how are you as a writer?

I’m pretty sure this is at least the second time I’ve seen you asking this question somewhere on Lemmy, so at the very least you don’t seem to have a lot of confidence in your own writing abilities.

And maybe that’s warranted, maybe it’s not. I haven’t read any of your writing to be able to say, and even if I had, just because I do or do not personally like it doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad or good, it’s a matter of taste.

Start writing. Share some of what you’ve written with others and solicit criticism. Take that criticism into consideration and write some more. Lather, rinse, and repeat until the people you’re writing for (maybe it’s others, maybe it’s just yourself) are happy with what you’ve made.

The first things you write, in all honesty, probably won’t be good. As a talking dog on a children’s cartoon once told me “sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something” you gotta start somewhere, and unless you’re a rare generational talent who’s naturally gifted at writing, you’re not gonna be starting from the top.

Scrolling through your history I see a lot of “do rich people do X” kind of questions. And I feel like that’s sort of your way of doing research into this project.

And that’s good, the best stories have some aspect to them that’s grounded, that feels familiar to them in some way, that things actually could play out in real life the way it does the pages.

But remember, this is your world, your character, your story, you make the rules and while it’s good to keep things grounded in reality, it’s also good to ask “what if?” Even if there had never been a biracial drug-addicted rich-kid street-racer (based on some of the things you’ve asked) in all of recorded history, it’s your prerogative to write a book based on the concept of “but what if there was?”

A lot of your questions also make me think that you’re pretty young, or at least just don’t have a whole lot of worldly experience for one reason or another. That’s not a knock against you, that just means that you’re at a great point in your life to start building knowledge and experience about the things you want to write about. Don’t rely on Lemmy to spoon-feed you those answers go out and find them for yourself.

Read. Read absolutely everything you can stomach. Reading is probably the most absolutely important thing to learn how to write, how can you hope to write well if you don’t know what good writing looks like? Read fiction, read nonfiction, read news articles, stories, biographies, memoirs, comics, short stories, epic novels and multi-part series, read analysis and criticisms of other writing, read theory on how to write, read new works and the classics, read about philosophy, psychology, sociology, science, art, math, etc.

And think about what you want your own writing to be like, and what worked and didn’t work and why in all those things you read.

And don’t limit yourself to reading. There are stories all around us- on tv, movies, all over the internet in various forms, and most importantly real life, go do things and talk to people as much as you are able. Experience as much as you can, and think about how it all makes you feel and how you’d write about it. Talk to people who have used drugs, maybe see if there’s some kind of volunteer opportunity at a rehab clinic near you. Go to a racetrack, maybe work on your own car. Good luck finding an in to get direct access to the mega-rich, but there’s no reason you can’t try, sometimes you might be amazed at what’s possible if you just ask- there’s only about 6 or 7 degrees of separation between you and almost anyone else in the world, the odds are pretty good that you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows exactly the kind of person you want to talk to if you just care enough to chase down those connections.

Learn about black culture. Learn about Japanese culture. Learn about the experiences of biracial people. Learn about the lives of people around those people. Learn from their own perspectives and from the perspectives of outsiders looking in. Learn about the rich, learn about the poor, and all of the complex interactions between all of these different groups of people and when, where, and how they all intersect.

And again, just write. The only way to learn if a story is any good is to actually tell it.

I think it’s coming sooner than a lot of people think.

We may even hit it within a year or so if we count the Steam machine and how that launch goes

Less and less people even have a home desktop these days. It’s basically gamers, programmers/IT/etc. types, and old people who refuse to learn how to use a smartphone.

A decent amount of those techy types are either already using Linux, or at least have some familiarity with it from working on servers and such, and it’s only a matter of time before a lot of them switch out of frustration with Microsoft’s enshitification

Gamers are already moving in pretty great numbers, valve has made it so that most games can now run fine on Linux which kept a lot of people from switching previously, and the steam deck has made a lot of people curious about it. And there’s a lot of people who have perfectly serviceable rigs that they can’t “upgrade” to windows 11 now that they won’t be getting regular security updates for 10, and with the price of RAM now, they may not want to invest in hardware upgrades and may turn to Linux to at least squeeze a couple more years out of their system.

And as far as the old luddites go, most of them could probably use Linux just fine. They’re not doing anything besides browsing the web checking their email, and using basic office programs anyway.

I recently switched my parents over to Linux Mint because their computer was just too bogged down with windows 11 bullshit and everything was going at a crawl. They’ve been on it for about a month now and it’s been smooth-sailing.

And I think as more of us gamers and tech nerds get more familiar and comfortable with Linux, more people are going to do the same thing. For those of us who have made the switch ourselves and play tech support for our parents and grandparents, the next time they call you up to come take a look at their computer, bring a Linux flash drive and boot that up for them. Tell them to play around with it a bit to see if they can live with it (I left my flash drive plugged into their computer for about a week for them to play around with it before I installed it for them) show them that libre office is basically the same as Microsoft office, install whatever web browser they’re used to, make sure their printer is working, etc.

And eventually, maybe they’ll even tell their old people friends about it. I can definitely see one of my mom’s friends complaining about how slow their computer is, and my mom saying “well my son put this Linux stuff on our computer, and it sped everything right up” and then boom you got old people getting curious about it too.

I think this is a case where trying to actually research a product may be more trouble than it’s worth, and you’d probably be better served by just walking into your local sporting goods store and grabbing the cheapest game camera they have on the shelf is.

I imagine there’s not going to be a ton of ambient light available in a nest box, so you’re probably going to be relying on night vision, so picture quality is probably going to be kind of shit no matter what, and since it sounds like you pretty much just need to see when a chicken goes into the box, no sense spending money for higher quality cameras.

These cameras are meant to be left outside exposed to the elements strapped to a tree or whatever, inside a nest box is more protected so IP rating and such isn’t going to be much of a concern.

I think whatever you can grab off the shelf will do the job fine.

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No one is arming

This is anecdotal, but I’m basically what passes for being the “gun guy” among my mostly very liberal friends

Basically my qualifications are that I went shooting when I was in boy scouts, have a few friends who own guns and have gone shooting with them, and have a lot of outdoorsy hobbies that have overlap with hunters and such (my own attempts at hunting have been with a bow, and I wasn’t very successful,) and generally have a casual interest in guns, but don’t really have money to throw at them, I have plenty of other hobbies and things I’m worried about and guns are near the bottom of my priority list.

Which isn’t all that much, but it’s a lot more firearms experience than most of them have. And they also know I’m someone who will do some research and not just make stupid recommendations.

But a good handful of those people have been asking me about guns because they’ve been thinking about buying one themselves. And some of these same people were, at one point, fervently anti-gun.

And those who already have guns have been going to the range more, trying to stockpile a little extra ammo, maybe acquiring some new guns, getting a carry permit when they never felt the need to and we’re content to leave their guns at home in a safe before, etc.

They’re not out there talking about it, spreading it all over social media, posting pictures of their guns or at the range. Some of them, I think, are a little ashamed of it, others just (probably justifiably) think it’s not wise to spread that knowledge that they have them.

So there is arming happening, I don’t think it’s on a massive scale but I do think it’s happening, but you probably won’t hear much about it unless you’re someone those people have already decided that you’re a safe person to discuss guns with.

And I don’t think it’s specifically building up to any sort of an armed revolution or anything. I think it’s mostly people wanting to be prepared to defend themselves if/when things get bad. I think we’re a long way off from liberals wanting to take to the streets, pull a Jan 6, or even show up to protests armed in any significant numbers. The overwhelming sentiment I’ve gotten from most of my liberal gun owner friends is that they really don’t want to be the ones who take the first shot.

There’s a number of ways to get non-steam games to run through proton or other compatibility tools.

I’m not the expert on that matter because basically everything I play is on steam, but off the top of my head Lutris comes to mind

As far as mods, I’m not a huge modder, so again I’m probably the wrong person, but the handful of mods I do use (mostly some basic quality of life/bug-fix things) I’ve been able to get running on Linux without too much drama. No, there’s not currently a nifty tool like Vortex to automate it for you and you have to manually copy files to the right place and such, but most mods tell you that information, so all you need to do is get used to the folders you’re looking for living in a slightly different place than they did on windows. YMMV if you use more complicated mods than I do of course.

For starters, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone say “anonym” in that sort of context before, so if that’s something you say regularly, change that habit, either leave it at “anon” or fully write out “anonymous”

And I’m not saying that to be a dick, I’m illustrating a point, if you have a unique style of writing, that’s something that can be used to fingerprint you. That’s how the Unabomber got caught after all- someone noticed that in his manifesto that he said “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” instead of the more common “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” and said “hey, that sounds like Ted.”

A while back there was a post on one of the food communities here where someone made a post about the “salmond” they cooked, and I immediately thought “is this the same guy who misspelled ‘salmon’ that same way like a week ago” and sure enough it was. Those stupid little things can stick out to people.

And if you carry those quirks around to different websites, it’s possible for people to connect the dots if they really want to. Search around for different accounts across different websites that say “anonym” and they might be able to piece together a profile on you.

Hypothetically, let’s say maybe somewhere on Lemmy you say that you’re a fan of the Chicago Bulls, and on xitter under a different username you mention that you grew up in New Jersey, but both accounts have used the word “anonym” and they figure they might be the same person. Then on still another site with a different name where you’ve also said it, you mention that you were in marching band and went to Catholic school.

So now the profile is for bulls fans from New Jersey, who went to Catholic school and were in marching band. That is fairly specific. That might have narrowed down who you are to just a few hundred, or maybe even dozens of people.

So the most important lesson is to just be really aware of what information you’re willingly putting out there about yourself and think about how it could potentially be used to identify you. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Tor and a VPN and all of the other technical measures you can take, because you’re still just putting information about yourself out there.

Possibly the best thing you can do is to not to log ino post, comment like, subscribe, or otherwise interact with anything if it can be at all avoided.

For most people, most of the time, that’s of course way overkill, I’m here writing this comment after all, and I’m sure there’s plenty of information about myself on this account for some to build a pretty good profile about me if they really wanted to.

So really you need to consider why you want to be anonymous, and just how much you’re willing to sacrifice your online experience to meet that goal.

I’m honestly a little conflicted about how people like you who are still actively involved in scouting should react to this.

On the one hand, yeah, screw the organization, they don’t deserve support for this kind of stuff.

On the other hand, it’s about the kids, and I do overall believe that the core values of scouting and the kind of structure it can provide are great things for a lot of kids to experience. There are other ways to provide that sort of program, but scouting is already there, and it makes more sense to me to try to preserve and improve that than to try to start something else from scratch.

And good adult leaders can do a lot to insulate their units from the bullshit from higher-up. I know my troop wasn’t at all afraid to bend or even outright break the rules when it made sense to do so (I actually remember first learning the term “plausible deniability” from one of my leaders,) and being active at the district or council level can help put pressure from the inside (back in the 90s my local council actually tried to force the issue and allow gay scouts to join, they got shot down by national but imagine if more councils would have stepped up to do that.) Good leaders with their heads on straight leaving scouting will just result in the organization collapsing into exactly what we don’t want it to be.

I’m not currently active in scouting, I don’t have kids and my schedule doesn’t really work with it these days to be active as a leader, so all I can do is try to make some noise from the outside leaning on my experience as an eagle scout and former leader. I have nothing to lose but also very little leverage. People like you have more leverage, but also not much to lose- absolute worst case scenario they find an excuse to kick you out, but if you don’t succeed at making change from the inside you were probably going to leave anyway.

Maybe you’re right, and I’ll have sent my medal away for nothing, in which case I’m down a prized but essentially useless trinket.

Or maybe I’m right, in which case I’m either ridding myself of a symbol of an organization I’ll no longer wish to be associated with soon, or maybe, just maybe I’m doing something that helps to prevent that from happening.

If you’re right, I’ll feel a little silly and otherwise continue my life as normal, content that I at least stood up for something I believe in.

But what will you do if I’m right? How would you feel knowing that you brushed this off as a non-issue if girls and trans youth, and maybe eventually other “undesirables” are eventually kicked out of scouts, when their commitment to dei wavers, and maybe they’re even twisted into a militaristic, nationalist organization like some modern Hitler Youth?

Also thank you for showing real scout spirit and taking this seriously.

I’ve been talking to a lot of other eagles and other former scouts, and so far none of them have been happy about this. I have a couple other people also planning to return their medals, and a few who can’t find their medals or who are (understandably) reluctant to do so but are at least planning to write some letters and make some noise over this.

“DEI” is baked throughout the scout program

And do you really think that they’re not going to try to come after that too? They’re already leaving the door open for them to come back and put more pressure on scouting in a few months, and Drinky Pete has pretty clearly said that he hopes the organization will go back to being the boy scouts.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

Also really convenient of you to just ignore the concerns about trans youths. I’m sure you’re not pushing an agenda here /s