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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • My first vehicle was a 1971 Ford 3/4 ton. It was extremely reliable and tough. Having sat for most of the previous 30 years in a barn, it even looked good.

    But it had all of the safety features of 1971. Power brakes the would lock up and throw you off the road if you more than thought about braking. Lap belts and a solid steel steering wheel to smash your teeth on. If you somehow hit the steering wheel hard enough to break it, you’d be impaled on the steel pipe steering column. Speaking of the steering, it didn’t have power steering, so if you hit a rut on a rough road, the steering wheel would spin out of control. You had to just let go of it until it stopped spinning lest it break your thumbs. Also, the gas tank was inside the cab behind the seat for extra car crash fun.

    It was a beautiful death trap. I kinda wish I could have put it back into a barn for another 30 years instead of selling it.



  • /sbin is like /bin, but for system administrative type commands. /usr holds all the other software that isn’t critical to get the system up and running.

    A device file is a special file that’s like a pointer to a piece of actual hardware, like a serial port or a hard drive. /dev also has some non-hardware special files like /dev/zero. When you read from that one, you get an endless stream of zeros. Or /dev/null, that discards any data that’s written to it.









  • I don’t think this is a good example of class struggle, at least not directly. The bear meme is valid in as much as it describes one woman’s feelings, but the truth is that in 85-90% of cases, the woman knows her attacker1. The random man is simply not the issue.

    The issue is power disparity. Teacher vs student, employer vs worker, landlord vs tenant. It’s difficult to reduce the power difference due to physical strength, but the others are all changeable. More (meaningful) oversight for police, better tenancy boards, and stronger unions are all examples of structures that might make it harder to victimize women.

    Class struggle explains economic, and maybe political power, but those are not the only types of power in play.

    And if I’m wrong? Then we’ve made a better society for nothing.

    1 https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/most-victims-know-their-attacker







  • bears won’t stalk you, pretend to be friendly to gain your trust with the intention of harming you

    Actually they will (sometimes). I had one young black bear that kept approaching me like a shy dog. It kept looking away and pretending to nibble bushes when I shouted at it. I left before finding out if it wanted to eat me (it probably did, being first thing in the spring). Another time we had a black bear that wasn’t too obviously aggressive, but followed one of our crew around for two days. We ended up shooting it because we were in a fly-in camp and couldn’t leave.

    Most bears I met walked or ran away, including grizzlies.

    Bears are complicated.