What are /r/CultureWarRoundup's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The federal government is expected to declare first ever water shortage at Lake Mead. This is the man-made lake at the Hoover dam that helps generate a good portion of California's energy. Heat waves are already putting a strain on their electricity supply. If you're unfortunate enough to live in California, I would suggest preparing for power outages.

Some suggestions that make life bearable for me during a power outage include a portable butane stove, Aladdin brand oil lamps and glow in the dark paint (coat the inside of a 20 oz clear beverage bottle, keep it in your ice chest at night.) Items to do laundry are useful as well. Clothes pins, laundry line, some 5 gallon buckets and floating lint traps. A 2 probe digital thermometer to monitor your freezer and fridge is important if you have a lot of food saved.

These Globe Scientific 601780 HDPE Industrial Tank, 2L Volume are great for power outages. You can fill them with water and store in the freezer. You can use them to maintain the freezer temperature or use them in an ice chest. We keep around 8 in the freezer during the hurricane season. You can use 2 liter bottles but due to the shape they don't stay frozen as long.

Citizen journalist Nick Monroe has been permabanned from Twitter for ban evasion, despite only having the one account, that account not having been suspended leading up to the permaban, and not evading anything. He's currently providing updates over on Gab.

In what I'm sure is a complete coincidence, he was most recently notable (yesterday or the day before) for showing dozens of blue-checks sharing fabricated Trump quotes as if they were real.

> Often, militant recruits are isolated people looking for group, rather than happy and well-adjusted people who are merely extremely politically committed.

I’m in the middle of selling my house so all my books are packed away, but I believe it was “Wars Guns & Votes” in which the author built an MLR^^1 on “probability of future conflict in the next 10 years”, and found that the value for “% of population composed of unemployed males aged 18-40” was significant & predictive in the final model. I think the other important variables included “the number of very hot days”, the binary for Africa, and a few surprising ones I can’t remember.

(Hopefully this was Off-Topic and Low-Effort enough for this thread. I love this topic but it’s been years since I’ve dug up my sources on it)

1 - “it’s only an Econometric model if it comes from the Econometrics region of Chicago - otherwise it’s just a sparkling Multiple Linear Regression”

Looks like even the people posting articles on the Guardian have been compromised by the tentacles of the western intelligence agencies. For context when the Snowden leaks happened they literally had the UK agencies break in to their headquarter and physically destroy their hard disks. If anyone one the left was going to be immune to glowing spooks it would be these guys. Instead we have (bolding mine):

> \3. Use a VPN

> Mitnick says whenever you’re not on your home or work network you should be using a VPN – a virtual private network – which keeps your browsing safe from spying. > You can find a service online that will cost you around $60 a year, but, again, you want to make sure you’re using a service that has a good reputation, such as HMA or ExpressVPN. There’s always a risk with VPNs and using an untrustworthy service goes against the purpose, since it will have access to all your browsing data.

> Things to consider when choosing a service include how many people use it (more is better), and where the company and its servers are located (aim for Five Eyes countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US).

n-slur what??? You literally want me to make my data easily accessible by the very people I'm using a VPN to hide my browsing from, how much were you paid by them to write this article?

Nope. /u/wlxd left his referral URL in there, and I'm betting that's it. Here's a clean version of the link which should work and not get caught by automod.

Atlassian (Jira/Bitbucket/etc), VPNSecure, and other Australian tech companies with an overseas customer base are frantically searching for the nearest emergency exit. Microsoft and Google are evaluating if Australian subsidiaries might be much more trouble than they're worth. Australian programmers are considering if the weather in California might be more to their liking. The Prime Minister has declared that the laws of mathematics do not apply to Australia. All in all a total shitshow.

The law is even more awful than you might expect, it allows the police (not a judge) to issue a notice to an individual developer or other employee of a company to insert a backdoor in their employer's product, and forbids that person from disclosing what they've done. How is that supposed to pass code review? Nobody knows! Try to reassure your customers by publishing a warrant canary? Those are also banned!

There's good news though, after reviewing the "feedback" (read: abuse) that was received after the law passed Parliament sprung into action and formed a committee to study the issue that decided, after an intense review, that two more committees to study the issue should be formed.

Edit: Added more detail and made the pluralities agree.

> is it just me or has FOSS gone to shit?

Nah, it's just Mozilla. They've been like this since Eich was ousted on SJW charges in what was likely a corporate sting op by Google to poison their primary competitor in the browser space.

If you want a decent browser now, I recommend GNU IceCat. It's a fork of Firefox with Mozilla's bullshit removed and a bunch of default addons for minimizing ads and tracking.

> You can't get to the same places on a bike as you can in a city.

Yeah, but there's a better chance your bike will be there when you get done in the suburbs.

> Given the labyrnthine way in which most suburbs are designed, you need to drive to get to places that aren't even that far away.

This is the poster child for post-war American suburbs, Levittown NY. It is somewhat labryinthine, yes, but it's not literally a maze where you have to go all the way around town to get to the next block.

> Parking takes time, even if there is plenty of space.

Transportation in the city takes more time, whether it be walking or taking (and waiting for) public transit.

The same authors "Vaccines are Dangerous and do not Work" can be found here. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Vaccines-Are-Dangerous-Dont-Work-ebook/dp/B00HSSRK1E

And here is his argument that AIDS is a myth: http://www.vernoncoleman.com/aboutaids.htm

Texas is pure Hell in summer, I'll agree. But I've been in Florida in July many a time, and the Northeast can be plenty hot.

Here's NYC for July last year.

> and because they deserve it, we shouldn't make it too hard on them.

One reason why it's easy is because the model for forcing people to go to college involved persuading them to do so pseudo-willingly, because the PMC feared the direct State control of their institutions that would come with compulsory college. The PMC must always be free to set tuition prices; this is why if free college ever happens, it will be in the form of scholarships to students and not tuition control. The point is for the PMC to suck up as much money and biomass as possible. See Ch2 here.

Unlikely to be anything other than the typical nanny state safetyism. You can still get methylene chloride (AKA dichloromethane) as long as it's not sold as a paint stripper, Tenax 7R is basically pure dicholoromethane but it's used for gluing plastics together so you can get it off Amazon or at Hobby Lobby.

I know less about the Costa Rican case so I can’t strongly comment on it; and I wouldn’t just say that Chile ‘did things the US way’, when the US overthrew what was then the longest standing democracy in Latin America. Argentina has a similar background and I wouldn’t exactly call Mexico a success story either.

But there is a broader point in which you are right, although it’s rigidly segmented. ‘Economic liberalization’ of the variety China implemented in 1978 under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms proved to be a huge success. But that wasn’t at all because of a western notion of private property rights and it was coupled with a specific domestic policy programs that maintained specific targets they wanted to reach. Singapore (where I lived) basically agreed to integrate itself into the US liberal international order, when they invited American MNC’s to setup shop in the country. But again, the reason why they ‘benefited’ from globalization and the West didn’t, was because those economic conditions were tied to very specific domestic and industrial programs that allowed them to ride the high tide of neoliberalism to success.

I know you planted a flag on that point, but my point here is that that’s different than what happened with the US military ventures into Latin America. ‘Supporting corruption’ and ‘buying your way’ into the political affairs of other countries isn’t going to lead to increases of human capital. Of course. Nobody thinks that. ‘That’s what America did’ in those countries (1, 2).

This isn’t true. It’s become a huge part of the heterodox turn to ecological/biophysical economics:

h t t p s : / / t i n y u r l . c o m / y 7 z z 4 n j y

… which has become very relevant to what I do.

More incompetent?

Name another country that failed trying to assassinate Fidel Castro more than 600 times.

Each drag show uses $2000 worth of lube

Not a fan of Tyler at all, but he isn't exactly drawing attention to anything new. Political psychology is hugely informed by genetic research and political divisions can be seen by where you place on the Big 5 personality traits. It's also been speculated that r/K selection theory explains how politics originate. Few people take that ecological model seriously anymore and it's long since been jettisoned in favor of other methodologies, but it's still interesting.

> Republicans have finally gotten around to taking at face value something Democrats have been trumpeting for decades.

Democrats have also been shitting their pants, wondering who’ll be there to pay for their entitlements. This is actually an active debate in the credit markets and around the sovereign debt issue in the future (1).

This is genuinely shocking -- not in the way the author intends, of course, but because Republicans have finally gotten around to believing something Democrats have been trumpeting for decades.

Now if we can just get them to believe that all those tweets about "abolishing whiteness" aren't mere rhetoric, either.

> Unfortunately, there are any number of smart, sophisticated peoples who historically were emphatically silenced by peoples to whom "forward" meant "superior ability to coordinate meanness."

Just like how ‘forward’ today means putting a damper on everything morally and intellectually superior to the lowest rung on the ladder. Incidentally I agree with the spirit of your remark.

With the introduction of "Technical Capability Notices" in Australia (where Atlassian is based) you should expect their products to be horrifically insecure.

It would appear that this is a paraphrase of a quote from Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

>The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.

While Gibbon did not provide a source himself, it has apparently been considered either from an unavailable text or a summary of Seneca's views on the subject based on the context (much as Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" actually being a summary by Evelyn Beatrice Hall), depending on who you ask.

I abhor social media and would happily ban the technology if there were an easy route to do so. Jaron Lanier wrote a pretty good tract against it. I can't stand his writing style but if you can get past it, his argument's are fairly good.

The wokehead's continue to make Timothy Gordon richer every day.

The problem is that phones are no longer primarily used to make phone calls. If you look at the way people use their smartphones, they spend several hours watching video clips, taking selfies, sharing memes on social media, playing mobile games, and texting for each hour they spend actually talking. And those are all activities that benefit from a larger screen, so smartphones have evolved to become as large as possible while still fitting in a pocket.

I use a prepaid fliphone as my primary phone, so I don't have that problem.

Want some Saturday night (or Sunday afternoon) movies?

• Star Wars: TIE Fighter - an 80s anime style short film:
  >Drawn and animated by [OtaKing77077] over 4 years' worth of weekends, with music by the living guitar solo Zak Rahman and sound design by up and coming audio technician Joseph Leyva. Fans of Lucasarts' seminal 1994 TIE Fighter game may notice a few familiar sights and sounds. That “incoming missile” noise gives me horrible flashbacks to this day...

• Star Wars: The Blackened Mantle - a fan-edit of the Prequel Trilogy with a few twists:
  >It's a combined edit of episodes I, II, and III. (mostly 2 and 3 with scenes from 1 being used for flashbacks) They used the Japanese audio track (the voice performances are actually pretty great) and wrote their own subtitles as to adjust the story in a few fun ways. What they did for Grievous, Obi Wan, Maul, and especially Anakin is just fantastic. >
  >The Japanese audio makes it so the editor could use rewritten dialogue in the subtitles and his script makes the characters so much more likable and believable (especially Anakin and Padme). >
  >Cutting out unnecessary subplots and jumping back and forth between timelines also helped with pacing issues and kept everything linked to the most important parts of the story. >
  >Also, this is the first time I've seen a fan edit create and add in a neat plot twist to give the movie more emotional effect.

No, this is what a real dissident looks like. NSFW.

Trump appears to be following up on his threats to Twitter after they started "fact-checking" his tweets, with this draft Executive Order[PDF] leaking. Here's a summary by a law professor.

The gist is that social networking platforms that engage in editorial conduct (by "fact-checking", inter alia) are deemed to fall outside the protections of the CDA (47 U.S. Code § 230). Federal spending on these platforms is prohibited and the FTC is directed to investigate their trade practicies.

Comes down to social weakness and apathy. Martin van Creveld wrote an excellent book essentially explaining why.

> It sounds like you're saying, a) there is some intervention of which you are aware that can "stifle or encourage" IQ...

Yes. It's called culture. But I'm not here to debate the finer points of its efficacy scientifically. I'm not even claiming it's intentional, or some sort of top-down designed, eugenic style program. Only that it follows a direction and pattern. This is what the Jews did for centuries by controlling reproductive access within their population, and why Rabbinic scholars were the ones having the most children. This is what happened across many dynasties in China and why there literally isn't much of a genetic basis within them anymore for rebellion and disobedience. It's the interplay between culture and biology. Intelligence was predicated upon being able to get the Emperor what he wanted. If you failed, three generations of your family were executed. Three up. Three down. Extinguishing part of your genetic legacy.

> ... this intervention was practiced in Ireland but not elsewhere, and thus clearly explains the rise in Irish IQ. I'm curious to know what, specifically, that intervention is.

I think you might be reading more into this than I am. I just brought them up as one simple example in history to get your thoughts on. But there are hundreds. The Irish were literally called "white iggers," and were marked out for their supposed unintelligence and unsophisticated practices and behavior. But eventually there was a shift that took place, and it wasn't entirely or 'coincidentally' genetic drift that was taking place. Throughout time, their cultural mindset also changed. But they're still the *same people, genetically.

As a person who’s a die hard right-winger, if I want people to take seriously the threat that CRT proposes, citing videos of Alex Jones and imagining that Marx probably did sacrifice a baby and have horns on his head, isn’t the best way to do it.

The problem is always in getting past the narrative to see what the facts on the ground usually are. Even CNN and MSNBC occasionally say things that are true. And no matter how vulgar any propaganda is, there’s always an element of truth to it. I remember when atheist activism became a huge thing and there were large swathes of the left who would cite very popular books like this, going around proclaiming that America is a theocracy. What a surprise to me when as it turned out, America wasn’t a theocracy. Christian pseudoscience and evangelical societies get enormous sums of money pushing trash and conspiracy theories. The left does the same shit. And both for decades have been trying to grip the reigns of power. All I’m trying to point out is that the threat is real but is also overblown, and finally that nothing the left is doing here is ‘new’ in any way. CRT isn’t the first time in history they’ve pulled shit like this.

Fair enough. If I misunderstood you, I apologize.

I don't know though what a misunderstanding of human nature is supposed to mean anymore. I'm very partial to hereditarian explanations of human behavior, but it's undeniable that there are ways in which we're more culturally driven than biologically driven, in a strict sense of the word. I also doubt that a socially 'flat' society, will ever be feasible in any long-run historical attempt that tries to make it so. Certain historians think otherwise but I'm far less convinced than they are.

I think we're on the same page as far as being dissident outliers at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, but when I automatically tend to see words like 'conservatism' reflexively get associated with global capitalism which is more associated with mainstream Republican ideology, I reflexively think and swing in the opposite direction that a person's sadly took the bait, and is repeating the same mainstream misconceptions that prevent people from seeing the broad range of left and right positions across the spectrum (and also the historical nuances). There are fewer 'true' communists in today's world in the west than there are people who still believe in a flat Earth. That's a modern boogeyman that most people have. Yes, I get that you can find your occasionally libtard professor who's 'supposedly' read Marx, but Marxism is one of the closest examples of a completely rejected theory you can find, right after Logical Positivism. The dingleberries that remain in liberal academia (post-1960's) are worrisome not because of some international socialist revolution, but for the same reason all educators represent a potential worry; and that's because they control access to children.

It looks like they have split this hair more finely than I could have imagined! From Craigslist:

> Although the prohibition on discriminatory advertising applies to roommate and shared housing situations, federal Fair Housing laws do not cover the basis of decisions made by landowners who own less than four units, and live in one of the units. This means that in a situation in which a landlord owns less than four rental units, and lives in one of the units, it is legal for the owner to discriminate in the selection process based on the aforementioned categories, but it is illegal for that owner to advertise or otherwise make a statement expressing that discriminatory preference.

Emphasis added. If I've understood correctly, you can have your preferences, you just can't mention them!

> Are there any exceptions to the advertising laws?

> Under federal Fair Housing law, the prohibition on discriminatory advertisements applies to all situations except the following:

> Shared Housing Exemption

> Private Club and Religious Exemptions

> Housing for Older Persons Exemption

(I assume none of these are pertinent here)

Something like this:

https://leetcode.com/problems/sudoku-solver/

(Just how it sounds, solve an arbitrary 9x9 sudoku grid; apparently DoorDash likes it)

would be a fun thing to solve given reasonable time constraint, but to do it optimally in 45 minutes pretty much requires having done it before, and/or throwing any ideas you might have had about showing off good software engineering skills in your interview right out the window.

It's quite a weird way to interview, especially if what you are looking for is people who can write good production code -- like I say I'm OK with it because I don't mind solving a bunch of these problems so that I'll have the tricks in my mind come interview time -- but it does seem to select more for various forms of borderline cheating than anything I'd personally want in a developer.

Sure, but would it have ended up that way without an independent America in the world exporting its ideas?

> In Charles Royster’s excellent and only mildly neo-Unionist picture of the Civil War, <em>The Destructive War</em>, he mentions a foreign traveler in 1864 who asked some random American to explain the war. “It’s the conquest of America by Massachusetts,” was the answer. Massachusetts, of course, later went on to conquer first Europe and then the entire planet, the views of whose elites as of 2007 bear a surprisingly coincidental resemblance to those held at Harvard in 1945.

—Mencius Moldbug

(One might say the problem was that Charles I and Charles II both let too many English Puritans escape to set up shop elsewhere, and thereby persist as a problem.)

To my knowledge, I'm actually surprised Richard Haier hasn't received the kind of scorn for his summary of the state of intelligence research. Especially when you consider Sam Harris has evoked his name, after the podcast he did with Charles Murray; fortunately his name wasn't dragged through the mud, even though he also concurs with Murray's findings.

History doesn't setup experiments for people to watch, but people should pay close attention to the state. It'll be useful to see what lessons a progressive, first world shithole can yield.

Including absolutely everything isn't that bad assuming you have a system that supports it. Good systems like nix let you have multiple versions of a package installed side by side.

>reduce internet addiction

Another thing I'll plug for that: the <code>links</code> browser. Has a non-terminal mode for most desktop OSes, successfully renders most modern stuff as long as it's an actual web page and not just a pile of JS. (To be fair, a lot of the internet now is just a pile of JS, but there are work-arounds like nitter.net for read-only twitter.)

https://www.wanikani.com/vocabulary/%E9%9D%92%E5%B9%B4

https://jisho.org/word/%E9%9D%92%E5%B9%B4

Maybe there's some specific redefinition of the word seinen in manga context? I don't actually read manga, so I may be missing something here.

If you're using an Android phone, you could sign up for a $10/mo+ Google One plan: https://one.google.com/about/vpn

It looks like one of the better VPNs out there in terms of privacy (if their whitepaper is accurate, it's the best I've ever heard of) and I imagine "Google VPN" won't be able to be penalized quite as easily as some smaller provider's.

There's this downthread with a forum for a particular project, but maybe we should have some more-general-in-focus scheduled IRC meetings too. ~~UnrealIRCd has IP cloaking.~~ [For minimum effort, unless somebody's already set up a secure server, let's go with freenode + whoever wants security can use Tor. Open to better suggestions on this.] This Saturday is an obvious symbolic Schelling point; how many people does 4 PM Central work for?

> Teachers are told to “speak their truth,”

Actually, the truth is, pressing the n key is antiracist, and choosing not to is racist. Silence is violence.

You must become anti-racist activists and use the n key at every possible opportunity.

I'll start: N

Shot:

>Twitter has locked the personal account of White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany for sharing a New York Post article.

Chaser:

>For a story that’s true >
>>“Biden’s campaign would not rule out the possibility that the former VP had some kind of informal interaction with Pozharskyi, which wouldn’t appear on Biden’s official schedule.”

The options for getting off Substack look reassuringly good. If they misbehave, (a) they let you get a dump of your data, including posts, and (b) even if they fall to the blight and break their export API, the Substack HTML looks almost trivially easy to scrape. I could probably write a program that scrapes all the posts from a Substack blog and migrates them to something self-hosted in an hour or two if I were feeling pissy enough.

(The story for migrating paid subscribers is a bit more complicated, but apparently not that bad. Not particularly relevant to SSC, thankfully.)

(Seriously, their HTML is nice. Kudos to whoever's responsible for that.)

My sidebar says:

Matrix room available for offsite discussion. Free element account - intro to matrix. PM rwkasten for room invite.

Long-form explanation.

TL;DR: Google either doesn't understand or pretends not to understand the difference between the Matrix federated network and the Element client. Someone posted badthink somewhere on the network, and you can see it with Element, so Google banned it.

Next week: "Google bans Firefox because of CP and Nazis on the internet."

Also:

> According to section 3.6.4 of RFC 5322, an email message can have multiple parents (i. e., multiple message IDs in the in-reply-to header field). At least one email client (Mutt) allows the user to manually type multiple message IDs into the in-reply-to field of a message. Unfortunately, however, it seems that no email client has embraced this functionality to completely supplant forum software; the universal focus is on showing merely a linear thread.

Oh they've definitely changed dramatically. I am not a military historian, I've just read a handful of books on the subject. But the two broad categories in which things have changed:

1) Disposability

Up to and including WWII, soldiers were still more or less like pawns on a battlefield. To be used and, if necessary, sacrificed.

These days, the army really really really doesn't want their dudes to die, if they can help it. Because a dude dying means like a million dollars worth of gear and training going up in smoke, and months of time to replace him

2) Independence

Up to and including WWI, soldiers were expected to follow orders, stay in formation, and generally shut off their brains. In modern warfare it is very, very, very not like this.

I was recently reading a book called Armies of Sand that seeks to answer the question (I'm paraphrasing) of "why does Israel consistently curbstomp Arab armies 10x their size?" One of the answers given is that Arab armies haven't adapted to modernity. They wait for orders instead of taking initiative and acting independently. The book points out that the IDF (as well as other modern western forces) devolve a considerably higher amount of planning and decisionmaking to lower levels of command than in the past, and how this is necessary on a modern battlefield. Modern battlefields just move too damn fast to keep the (eg) napoleonic army norms of "follow orders and stay in formation even under fire"

Alger Hiss was innocent. The Rosenbergs were innocent. John Stewart Service was an Honorable Survivor. (These are all things very influential people at the time fervently believed, and some apparently still do.)

>There are a million and one things that adults could do to de-stress. Coloring books are not in most peoples' top 100 choices. The very fact that this is a thing proposed seriously to adults should be understood to be incredibly demeaning

Mindfulness and meditation are things that have pretty strong evidence of being good, and adult coloring books are actually a pretty effective way to calm your mind. Google is pretty big on encouraging those sorts of things. Also, we build multi-story slides in our offices. My office has a pretentiously fancy version of this in one of the lounges. If you're the kind of person who would feel demeaned by seeing toys in the office, it's not the right company for you. But I disagree that it's evidence that Googlers are coddled or act like children. Plenty of better evidence out there if you want to reach that conclusion.

>there's a reason my TC would probably rise by at least $50k/yr if I went to work at Google. Maybe Google has standards, but my employer does not

That's a great point. Very few people are lazy at Google, and these sorts of perks only work when the company can trust employees not to abuse them. Sure, your company might lie in their promotional material by showing coloring books, but they're incentivized to do that because top performers want to go to a company that has so few shitbags that they can offer those sorts of perks without employees abusing them.

Yea but when Amazon is just giving stuff away the purchase price is so low that you can still make money. For example, I picked up a 10 pack of brand new 3m rust/paint remover discs for $18. They have one more set at that price if anyone is interested. The normal price is $130, so $13 each. They are small to store, cheap to ship, have a good brand name and don't go bad so there's still room for profit.

Reminder that the middle ages was a dark age and the preindustrial economy/civilization peaked in Ancient Rome (imagine if instead of adoring pussies who run around in 3 layers of padding groping big brown balls if we watched criminals fight lions, tigers, and each other to the death):

• Ancient Rome had the best quality of life relative to any other time before industrialization - https://www.amazon.com/Economy-Princeton-Economic-History-Western/dp/0691177945

• The Romans were a century or two away from a scientific revolution and industrialization - https://www.amazon.com/Scientist-Early-Roman-Empire/dp/163431106X

Imagine if it had happened, we'd be colonizing the Andromeda right now under Caeser Augustus LXXI instead of debating whether or not children should be automatically given puberty blockers so they can chose whether or not they want to be a cross dresser when they grow up.

Michael Malice frequently brings up this book on the subject, which is all about how all the American journalists and intelligentsia of the 1930s were infatuated with communism and served as a combination of 'useful idiots' and 'apologists' for Soviet atrocities.

I have no reason to believe that our current year is any different, especially in light of the recent Time article bragging about how our society is actually manipulated and orchestrated by left-wing conspiracies

That explains some but not all of the variance - the Cuisinart and Kitchenaid are both 1500W but the latter is 30 seconds faster than the former, for example.

I'm sure you're right that wattage is the main thing here. But I feel at least partly justified in my previous assertion that not all kettles are alike qua boiling speed, and that by spending more you can get a faster one. Probably you're right that this 'boils down' (badum-tish) mostly to variation in wattage; still, see above. I'd also note that the really discerning American kettle connoisseur willing to splash out can even get 1800W kettles like this, which presumably would be faster still.

If you liked that comment, perhaps you'll appreciate this book I wrote. It's about how to use rationality to work towards *your* goals instead of *other* people's goals. I call it Dark Rationality because it's basically exactly the same as regular rationality, but oriented towards people who (quite reasonably) want to push back against sociopathic narcissists who want to exploit them, and are willing to employ dirty tactics to that end. There's even a brief section in there about how to manipulate elections! :-)

I've been reading the new Michael Anton's book, and I was thinking about making a review, but I feel like there really is not much point. Anton quite simply points out every single thing that's wrong with today's America, explains exactly and in excruciating detail why it is so, and how exactly we got here. I don't think there is going to be much of novelty there for people posting here, but it's been definitely enjoyable read to me, as I like listening to people who agree with me on almost everything.

One interesting thing Anton said was that he used to parrot the standard line of conservatives condemning New Deal, but after watching the current day's America, the idea of attacking entrenched interests of elites who enrich themselves by exploiting regular people, is not so absurd to him anymore.

As others have said, use a VPN. I picked up a paid one (Private Internet Access) a few years ago to get around geographical streaming restrictions and I now don't like browsing without it on. If you're doing anything seriously, seriously FBI+ illegal it may not help (seems like a contested point), but it certainly makes it far harder for companies, busybodies, local law enforcement etc. to track you. I recommend reading reviews, choosing a decent provider, paying the $60/year and never looking back.

> William D. Hamilton

Have you read the "great planetary hospital" chapter from Narrow Roads of Gene Land? Startlingly clear prediction of the path we're on towards becoming a lumbering, heaving, tranquilized super organism, the increasingly degraded human gene pool being "protected" from purification by doctors and other well meaning medical professionals whose efforts are sentimentally venerated in popular media, despite their saintly striving simultaneously upping the risk of our future degeneration. His review of Lynn's "Dysgenics" is good too, bit tangential though. A very funny [to me] Hamilton anecdote:

>He didn’t conceal these ideas in his lifetime: his most vigorous defence of euthanasia and infanticide was delivered at a conference in the Vatican organised by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, where another attendee remembers him saying loudly that he would grieve more for the death of a single giant panda than for that of “a hundred unknown Chinese.”

Same, man.

She wouldn't call herself a conservative (while presently writing for The Spectator), but Lionel Shriver's <em>The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047</em> is a fun read.

> Is there any modern fiction worth reading?

The Expanse series, Powers of the Earth, The Three Body Problem, etc

> Is there any modern fiction written by white conservatives?

Sure

Should we get ahead of the game and make one of those jesus toast toasters but for Floyd?

Also I tried looking up an example and they have an RBG toaster... who buys this? https://www.amazon.com/Bader-Ginsburg-tostadora-Tostt-SCOTUS/dp/B07YZSDV8K/ It just looks like an average jowly short haired male in glasses.

There's apparently some cloth masks on Amazon with filter pouches you can buy; you insert a filter in the pouch and toss it out after a few uses when you go to wash the cloth. I'm guessing those are of lower quality than the cambridge mask one linked by higzmage (and those like it) but I haven't personally used them as I've secured a sufficient number of disposables until my cambridge mask order arrives. Here's one example that is surprisingly not Made In China. (It says "Made in Korea South", so whether you believe that or not is up to you I guess.)

I don't have an opinion on the quality, I imagine it depends heavily on the thickness of the fabric border and the fit around the filter; if the majority of the airflow is going through the filter it's probably as good as a surgical mask if not better. If it just turns into "all the airflow comes in from the sides because the filter restricts airflow too much" then it's no good, and I'm pretty sure you'd be able to tell instantly which it is once you use them.