slavery wouldn’t ever be voluntary, since any rational person would only decide to sell themself into slavery due to material hardship, so they’d be a victim and the slaveowner would profit from their suffering, thereby indirectly funding the economic conditions that led to slavery. and any irrational person would lack the mental capacity to have signed such a contract. in either case the contract would be unconscionable, rendering it invalid.

Hive minds would be a superior form of consciousness than lone individual minds. If the technology ever materializes, we should install brain implants to create a form of wireless telepathy, allowing the sharing of senses, ideas, knowledge, feelings and subsume our self-awareness into group awareness, like little Borg cubes.

the number of times I’ve wished for a time machine so I could transition sooner… 😣

the most secure possible? you’ll need to learn a ton. you’ll get there, but it’ll take a while.

decently secure? install Linux Mint, install your updates, don’t run sketchy commands with URLs in them unless you know what you’re doing, maybe follow a hardening guide. you’ll be okay.

if you need to be extremely secure and private, install Tails on a USB stick. it will be slow and frustrating, and you’ll need to save files to a second USB drive, but it will probably keep you pretty safe, and it’s decently user-friendly. just make sure you keep Tails updated! you’ll have to do that by flashing the new Tails onto a new USB drive, there’s no easy way around that.

those are your two most user-friendly, safe approaches.

update from the future: the suspect is Tyler Robinson, a young white Utah man from a Mormon family, with unregistered party affiliation. he confessed to his father, who called a youth pastor to talk him down from suicide, who then called US marshals to take him into custody.

rule of three is broader than Wicca though. something like it is common in a lot of pagan beliefs.

Why do we pipe natural gas into homes?

puts on Technology Connections hat

because heat pumps and green energy weren’t a thing in the US until recently!

heat efficiency is weird. electric heaters are 100% efficient, but 1) they’re only as efficient as the generator, and 2) transmission losses add up. and until recently, most power was generated by coal and natural gas. turning those into electricity is lossy, since lots of energy is lost as waste heat. so why not send the gas you were going to burn for electricity directly to the customer?

heat pumps can be 300-400% efficient, since they move heat - from outdoors, into the home - rather than generating it. they can get >100% efficiency even in cold climates! but stupidly the US never bothered make our air conditioners reversible, or every home would have a heat pump by now.

and with solar/wind (for peak) + nuclear or grid storage (for base) power, we can now get rid of natural gas. …once we give everybody heat pumps. …and shutdown our gas generators. …we should probably get on that.

pragmatically I think reducing meat consumption rather than eliminating it is an easier sell. I’ll admit, I’m too weak of will to become a vegetarian. I’ve been inside a chicken plant, I’ve seen the horrid conditions firsthand. I know the climate change impact. I know my diet is hurting animals and the climate. but I crave meat, and none of the delicious vegan food my partner makes hits the spot.

it’s too hard to forswear every future pot roast, chop and drumstick. I can probably get myself to eat less meat though.

thank you for writing this up. ❤ I’m also trans and spent time in that particular community because I have very intense dysphoria/bdd and found other spaces to be toxically positive. it wasn’t a healthy place, and I picked up more brainworms, but I felt like I could vent and not feel so alone.

it’s really easy for people without crippling dysphoria to sit back and judge you for going to /tttt/. it’s unhealthy, I know it’s unhealthy, but sometimes unhealthy outlets are the only way I can make the hurt get better for a while. I can’t just be all uwu skirt go spinny when my body feels like sewage.

most fascists don’t call themselves fascists. so YouTube censoring the word “fascist” tends to muzzle people calling out fascists, not the fascists themselves. it vexes me.

lemmy.ml (used to?) automatically replace “bitch” with *removed*. I’d see people call themselves a “basic removed” or say “removed please” and it was very confusing. it applied to every message.

“cunt” wasn’t censored, though? or maybe they removed the filter at some point.

I’m not a tankie so I left and never looked back.

Unnatty Light