Viewing profile — helterskelter

Some people speculate that the USA gained control of Oregon country in large part because Canadians/Brits trading in beaver furs had to send all their pelts back to the UK before t…

I like the idea of a shorter character limit as it nudges users to a specific mode of interaction: short thoughts/updates and not long-winded soliloquies. It's signalling that inte…

2036 crime prevention, detecting this behaviour and automatically forwarding it to the police to be referenced later for probable cause.

I've managed to run Linux just about exclusively since probably just before I was a teen in the early 2000's. I think I bought Red Hat 8 or 9 or something like that at CompUSA on a…

The greatest rec of all was seeing the NSA crying about tor in the Snowden docs. Doesn't get any better than that.

A secure browser that loads an ad doesn't prevent you from being surveilled. Tor mitigates this to a large degree but doesn't entirely eliminate it. The only real solution is to bl…

There are two books people ITT may be interested in: How to Read a Book (a classic that everyone should read), and Make It Stick . The latter goes over the current state of learnin…

NetBSD is the only nix I've ever been able to use for novel (for me) tasks without consulting the internet for help; the design is so clean and the documentation complete that I ne…

Go through the SE comments on this recipe. The amount of fish sauce makes the broth smell like asshole. I recall several Vietnamese scratching their heads over it. I love fish sauc…

Oh man the the amount of fish sauce he wants you put in this will ruin it. Add a teaspoon or a tablespoon or something, but not 1/4 cup. The first time I made it I nearly threw it …

Great way to tank a brand. Part of BMW's value is/was the expectation of an upper middle class snob driving it, but having your car force ads on you is something people wouldn't ev…

Huh, yeah you're right. I swear I remember hearing about this on an NPR radio piece about how police really don't need to do anything to protect you.

Taxpayers will just foot the bill. These cops need their personal funds taken, and before they blow it all on legal bills defending themselves from criminal charges. Come to think …

IIRC "To serve and protect" was originally from a movie. Cops don't have a duty to protect you, and there in fact many cases of a cop not intervening during a violent crime due to …

I certainly don't believe everything should be based on essentials, but when very little growth is from honest to god innovation which produces more or better of something, and isn…

Perhaps by some measure, but what I'm referring to is how everything is becoming a fly by night scam-adjacent "product" that isn't much better than Alibaba drop shipping.

Ie, a junk economy. None of this produces value, if anything it's parasitic.

I got selected as juror once just hoping to laugh at anything the cops said on the witness stand and let some poor soul go free but it turns out the defendant was just a violent sc…

Local politicians need to coordinate to remove their Flock cameras at the same time and pass laws to prevent any new one from being put up. Flock doesn't have the resources to sue …

Forgot to add, there was one customs officer in $SMALLCOUNTRY who used to take bribes from somebody I knew, but was transferred to the taxation department. The person I knew died, …

Once you get outside the first world brides seem to be the norm -- every person I know who does international work has a story about having to bride somebody, especially if you nee…