• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 27th, 2024

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  • Excellent answer. I fall into the category of your last paragraph. I feel like I’m in a country not my own and if this is what the populace wants, maybe I’m in the wrong place.

    This actually connects a few things for me that I’ve been thinking about lately. I believe that the current “ruling” class has figured out, among other things, that it is easy to disrupt a collective action problem while somehow also solving it for their own groups. If you look at the people in the cabinet and other supporters, they’d all be fighting each other, but are somehow united under one man.

    If I understand your post correctly, organizing to protest puts like minded people together to further organize into groups that can unite to solve common problems even if their personal problems differ. For example, if I’m out to support trans youth and I meet up with someone to support women’s reproductive rights, we both have a common vested interest in changing the current political climate even if I’m also a gun owner.



  • I had to read way too far to get to the reason:

    Trump has spoken about how he believes the US is being “ripped off” on global trade. He believes Trump genuinely wants to restructure global trade, which, however, has turned into a “revenge thing.”

    “The problem with it is he really only has one metric, which is the bilateral trade deficit, and he really only has one tool, which is tariffs,”

    I feel like Trump wants these countries to do something and he can’t control it, so he is using tariffs to apply pressure. Being who he is, he can’t back down until he gets what he wants despite anything else. Never show weakness. I worry that we’re all feeling the hurt from this narrow mindset.






  • I can’t speak to the quality outlook, but from what I understand about enshittification, it typically requires a self-serving entity like a corporation whose interests are not in alignment with its customers/consumers/userbase. In some of Mr. Doctrow’s writings, he indicates that federating cans be a “circuit breaker” for enshittification.

    In a well federated platform, when one node begins to act counter to its users, the users can easily move nodes/instances. This is one of the reasons why there needed to be a law to allow phone number portability. Email is similar, but only if you own your own domain. Look for Cory Doctrow’s writings on BlueSky for more examples.





  • I was going to post a link to Once A Month Meals (or is it Cooking?) but it looks like they charge a subscription now. A lot of sites have freezable recipes now.

    Anyhow, it’s different than leftovers. Cooking lasagne? Make 4 trays. Burritos? Make 25. The key to freezer meals is to cool them completely before freezing and wrap it tightly or else you’ll get frost. For pasta, get those tin trays and use press&seal to store. For burritos, wrap in parchment paper, then foil as foil can stick to the tortilla.





  • Probably not, but it could open up a whole new set of business possibilities for creative Canadians. As the article points out, building repair kits for cars & tractors to sell world wide or selling printer ink bypass kits or mandating in country app stores.

    I’m no economist, but I don’t think this will offset the cost of the US tariffs to everyday Canadians, but it will steal profits from US companies who will cry to uncle trump that Canada’s stealing their lunch money. He may reconsider the tariffs.

    If I had my way, Canada would also make a statement that US copyright works are not copywritable in Canada, so copy & distribute to the world. Worst case, Canadians get free US music, movies & software. Best case, concerned US companies establish a presence in Canada and pay taxes, bring jobs, etc.


  • Depending on what your question is asking, search around for Steve Forbes Flat Tax or Ross Perot Flat Tax.

    I may have this wrong, but I recall Steve Forbes was proposing to decomplicste the IRS tax codes and implement a flat IRS income tax. In other words, remove the tax brackets and have everyone pay a fixed percent regardless of income.

    Similarly, I recall Ross Perot propose that the US remove income tax completely and instead charge a flat tax on purchases (sales tax). If memory serves, it was 13% (inn, addition to state and local sales taxes).

    In my uneducated opinion, both of these seem like good ideas at first. Who wouldn’t want a simpler tax code? Upon deeper inspection, I feel like both plans would favor wealthy Americans more than “the average Joe”. As said in other posts here, the wealthy report having less income through deductions and other financial wizardry and the unrich spend a greater percentage of their income on day to day expenses.




  • The solution ended up being a setting on the printer that was overriding the firmware setting. I found the answer here.

    In case anyone is having the same problem, It seems that the settings stored in the printer overwrides the FILAMENT_RUNOUT_DISTANCE_MM in the firmware. So I just went the the printer configuration -> advance configuration -> filament and then I changed the runout distance and stored the settings.