Is not potato man, is secret police. Such is life.

No, it’s not besides the point because you can have issues with poor visibility and those light guns are not immune from breaking down, and then you’d really want your other communication and instruments to be functioning as they should.

Look, I know we’re talking one in a million, worst case scenarios here, not situations that are at all likely to happen, just ones that theoretically could if Murphy’s law goes into full effect, multiple people at every level drop the ball, and the planets and stars are all aligned just so, etc.

Radios are used for more than just comms like hearing other people talking on the radio. Gps, transponders, radar, and other systems rely on radio waves to operate, and so are potentially (however unlikely) susceptible to interference from other radio equipment.

There’s a reason we have so many safeguards built in, sometimes those systems fail, sometimes multiple systems fail at once, and you don’t want whatever you have left to go down too.

And yes, it can certainly interfere with ambulance comms, I work in 911 dispatch, we have some redundancy with the MDTs in their vehicles and smartphone apps and such, but those systems have been known to fail on us, leaving us with just radios to communicate with our field units. My agency’s systems are a bit more advanced, but I’ve been to some rural areas where they’re using pretty basic VHF/UHF radios that I could listen in and even key up and transmit on with a $30 baofeng (the frequencies they were using were a bit outside of what’s legally permitted for ham radio use, but still within the capabilities of my radio)

For what it’s worth, many, maybe most (sorry, can’t be bothered to look up the stats right now) nuclear plants in the US are already owned by some publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders who expect it to turn an ever increasing profit for them.

Not that it gives me the warm-fuzzies that that’s the case, but it’s not quite as big of a departure from the current situation as you’re making it out to be.

If you’re fucking around with your radio equipment doing something you shouldn’t and end up causing interference on, for example, aircraft frequencies or emergency service radio systems, you could be a contributing factor to an airliner crashing or an ambulance not being dispatched in a timely manner and a patient dying because they didn’t get to the hospital in time.

You didn’t directly kill anyone, but you set up the circumstances that resulted in someone dying.

The price point is way off, but strangely enough I’ve personally been champing at the bit for something with pretty much exactly those specs,just at about half the price.

Currently, I daily drive an SUV and do get good use out of it. I have to commute in the snow (essential employee,) I have outdoorsy hobbies that require hauling people and camping gear around, I tow some small trailers, I use it pretty frequently to move furniture, pick up lumber and other bulky stuff from the hardware store, etc. and while I don’t go off-roading in the sense that I don’t purposely go looking for rocks to climb and mud to drive through for fun, I do sometimes drive onto a beach to fish or drive onto fields for various reasons, and find myself on some really shitty dirt roads where some ground clearance and 4wd are necessary. I’m doing those things usually a few times a month.

But most of my daily driving adds up to 20 miles a day or less, on paved roads, rarely going over 45mph. I also have a wonky schedule where I rarely have to work more than 3 days in a row, and it’s usually just me and occasionally my wife or my dog (rarely both at the same time)

I can’t quite afford 2 cars, but something like this at the right price point would probably tip the scales in my favor. I could daily drive the small cheap electric car and save my SUV (or maybe a small truck) for my days off when I’m doing stuff that it’s needed for while the small car charges.

Having never had kasseler bread, I can’t really comment on the similarities, but after googling around a little it’s probably in the same ballpark. These sort of deli sandwiches are usually served on (what we call in America anyway) “Jewish rye” bread. Just sort of a soft, light rye bread, often with caraway seeds in it (personally I tend to think of the seeds as sort of the defining feature of a Jewish rye) and I couldn’t find any mention of kasseler having caraway, but I also didn’t exactly do an exhaustive search for recipes.

I’d probably push it back to a little over 100 years to include WWI, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the British Mandate for Palestine, since that all set the stage for Israel being founded pretty directly, and there had already been a pretty substantial movement for Jews to immigrate to the region by about the '30s (known as the “Fifth Aliyah”) so a bit outside of your 80 year range.

But of course, none of these events happen in a vacuum, if you want to get really nitpicky, you can start talking about the events that led to world war 1, trace them way back, through the crusades, the birth of Muhammad, Christianity, the Roman empire, all the way back to the bronze age, and maybe even further if you were able to somehow find decent historical records going that far back.

Trying to point to one single event as the one that kicked off a certain conflict is tough, because there was always something that led up to that event too, and when you try to unravel it, before too long you might come to a very Douglass Adams-y conclusion that it all started when our first ape ancestors decided to come down from the trees, only for someone else to say that the trees had been a mistake in the first place and that we never should have left the oceans.

I think you’re misreading the comment of the person you’re replying to here, it’s worded a little wonky and I don’t know if you picked up on a bit of a sarcastic tone there, I think you also may not be reading far enough into the history to really have a handle on the situation but frankly neither of you are doing a great job of explaining your positions so it’s a little hard to say what point either of you are trying to make

Tl;dr of modern Afghan history:

Around the 80s, Russia invaded Afghanistan and installed a socialist government

The US backs Islamic militants, essentially the Taliban or the groups that eventually morph into them, to oust the Russian backed government,

The Taliban also likes to style themselves as the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan

Some power struggles ensue, by the 90s sometime the Taliban is in charge of the country

9/11 happens, US invades, tries to set up their own government, pulls out, Taliban quickly takes back over

The impression I’ve always gotten (and I’m sure no political guru or social scientist or anything of the sort) isn’t so much that the country overall prefers the Taliban as much as most of them just don’t really give a rat’s ass about the country as a whole or who’s claiming to be in charge of it at any given time, they don’t have a strong sense of national identity, they care for more about their tribe or village than anything going on outside of it. American, Russian, Taliban, doesn’t really matter too much to them, when the guys with better guns roll into town, you pay them lip service until they go away then continue right on doing things more or less the same way you have for the last 2000 years.

It does happen that the Taliban probably aligns with their traditional values more closely than the other people who have tried ruling it as a unified country over the years, but day-to-day, they’re still probably mostly only going to the Taliban when they need something from them and deferring to village elders or local warlords or whoever for everything else.

There’s variation I’m sure, those in cities probably have a stronger sense of what a country is and what it has to offer in the modern world than those in rural areas, but it’s a largely rural country, almost 75% of them are living in rural areas and some of them are super rural where some of them have probably never even seen a city.

Some glow in the dark chemicals are called phosphors, and while they’re named after phosphorus, they usually do not contain any phosphorus, zinc sulfide for example. These are the kinds of things you might find on a watch face or stickers or whatever that need to absorb light from some other source first.

To make it even more confusing, phosphorus isn’t actually phosphorescent, its glow is from chemiluminescence, the result of a chemical reaction.

And for what it’s worth, stuff that glows under a black light is fluorescent.

I don’t think phosphorus has ever been used for glowing tattoos, and if it was I’m pretty sure no one is still using it. We’re well outside of my realm of expertise, but it should also be considered that how a chemical enters your body can make a difference in how toxic it is too, there’s a whole lot of chemistry at work in your body, and ingesting something and absorbing it through digestion isn’t necessarily going to have the same effect as absorbing it through your skin, there’s a reason different medications have to be taken oral, allowed to dissolve under your tongue, given as a suppository, intravenously, intramuscularly, subdermally, etc. that said, I’m pretty sure phosphorus is bad no matter how you put it into someone’s body.

Looking down on clouds is a pretty surreal experience

I once went on a backpacking trip, our itinerary had us camping near the top of a mountain, just a little shy of 12,000ft and we knew there would be no potable water at the top, so we had our hot meal for the day at lunch since freeze dried backpacking food needs water, so we could refill and get through the next day.

As we’re making our way up the mountain, a thick fog rolls in. By the time we get to camp, we’re all pretty miserable, we’re tired and starting to feel the altitude a little, everything is cold and damp, we have a dinner of jerky and trail mix and such, we set up our tents and go the fuck to sleep.

The next day we wake up, the fog has gone, and it’s a beautiful day. We make our way to the top of the mountain and look down at the valley below and we see a cloud.

It then dawned on us that the fog the night before wasn’t just fog, it was a cloud we hiked through and set up camp in.

The next time a mattress salesman tries to give you the “it’s like sleeping on a cloud” line, fucking run, clouds suck.

If you take up the project and decide to make my dream your reality, all I ask is that you share the code

I haven’t done a deep dive into how I’m going to make it happen, my programming is rusty as all hell, and I’ve never tinkered too much with a pie or this kind of project

But on its surface it seems like an easy enough problem, just need to turn on the appropriate lights when an emulator starts.

Easier said than done I’m sure, I also suspect you’d probably need some kind of led controller or maybe an Arduino or something between the pie and the lights, I don’t think the 3.3v it puts out from its GPIO pins would be enough for some light strips.

If someone had a lot of money to throw at the project, I imagine you could also do a pretty cool setup with smart lights like Philips Hue that would be pretty clean and require minimal tinkering with the physical electronics side of things, but you’d probably be throwing as much or more at it in bulbs as the rest of the project put together.

Yeah, I like to bring it up and put the idea out into the world whenever I get an opportunity because part of me is kind of hoping that maybe someone out there will do the hard work and write the code and share it online so someday when I have the space for it all I have to do is wire up the lights

Also when it comes time to fill in the gaps in my collection, I can save some money and still get the same effect because the console doesn’t even have to be in working order, it just has to not be too beat-up looking. I could probably even 3d print some dummy consoles to hold me over (though of course I’d prefer to have actual working consoles if possible)

A dream project for me, when I have the space for it, is to have a set of Ikea kallax shelves with a cubby for each retro console with some LEDs inside hooked up to a retropie emulating those consoles so those cubbies light up when that console is being emulated.

I have a lot of the actual consoles and they’re in working order, but it’s a bit of a pain in the ass to get them hooked up, swap cartridges, etc. sometimes. And I have just enough programming and electronics background that I feel up to the task of trying to make it work, just don’t have the space for a big display shelf at the moment.

I can appreciate the experience of playing on the actual hardware and the cases where it’s superior, but for me the experience emulating them is 99% as good with significantly less effort. Totally cool if others prioritize things differently though.

I believe when talking about naval ships, commissioning is when they enter active service, so construction probably began early 90s, maybe even late 80s, and probably a few years of designing, bidding, etc before that. And of course there were probably all of the usual idiot politicians, bean counters, stubborn assholes, sales people, etc. involved who pushed for older tech. Maybe because everything else they had worked on the old disks, maybe they were skeptical of the new tech not being robust or tested enough or wouldn’t catch on, maybe it was just cheaper, etc.

I’m willing to bet that they somehow locked themselves into using 8 inch disks in the early to mid 80s if not earlier, when the 5¼ discs were still new-ish and the 3½ were brand-new or not even available yet.

I feel like it’s a pretty common experience for a lot of us maker types- we come up with a solution to a problem, maybe we tried searching for one and came up empty, or maybe we just thought it would be fun to make from the get-go, then sometime later we stumble upon someone selling pretty much the exact thing we made and think “huh, so thats what these things are called” maybe with a touch of disappointment that your idea wasn’t as original as you thought, or maybe just intrigued because you just added another term to your vocabulary and you have a better idea what to search for next time.

Yours looks good though, It’s probably unnecessary but I’d be tempted to add like a U-shaped cradle piece to the top to help keep it in place if your computer ever gets jostled for any reason, and maybe a jam nut at the bottom to make sure it stays where you set it. Again probably totally unnecessary, but I always figure that if it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing.

What sort of printer and filament/resin are you using? I’d worry a bit about it warping or sagging over time from the heat inside a computer. I know some materials can handle the heat better or worse than others, but I haven’t dipped my toes into 3d printing myself yet, so I may be overestimating how much of an issue it is.

And can your printer make decent screw threads, or do you have to clean them up afterwards with a tap and die or something? I’m not really up on the current state of 3d printers, but one of the first 3d printed objects I remember ever handling was back in high school 15 or so years ago. One of my teachers went to a conference where they were showing off new gadgets for computer and shop classes, and he brought back a couple 3d printed crescent wrenches for us to fondle. I remember the screws being really crunchy and they almost but didn’t quite work, so in the back of my mind I’ve always thought of functional screw threads as something 3d printers can’t quite do, so it’s wild to me if we’ve gone from barely able to make even a coarse thread with huge tolerances work to being able to make pretty fine threads with pretty tight tolerances.

Of course back then, they hadn’t even really settled on calling it “3d printing,” I remember that teacher calling it a “rapid prototyping machine” when he was telling us about it, and described it as being “like a 3d printer”

I may be misinterpreting what you’re describing, but it kind of sounds like you’ve reinvented the machinist jack.

Not throwing shade, it makes sense and there’s a reason that machinists the world over use them to tackle the same sort of problem of how to support sagging parts- it’s simple and it works. And coming up with the same solution shows that you have a good understanding of the issue and how to tackle it.

Just pointing it out because I love the overlap between different fields and hobbies, and maybe if you didn’t already know that machinist jacks were a thing you’ll find inspiration for a version 2.0 if you ever feel the need to make one.

I’d also like to see your version when you get around to sharing it.

Just to kind of give you a sense on my personal thought on the handles, I have 3 razors, an old one that’s either a Gillette or a Merkur (I honestly can’t remember which one) that I scrounged from my dad’s junk drawer, one I picked up from a grocery store or target or something that I believe is a van Der Hagen, and one my wife got from somewhere on Etsy, so I feel like that’s a pretty decent cross section of what’s out there.

All 3 shave just fine. They all shave a tiny bit differenly, but that really kind of comes down to personal preference and that technique/learning curve I mentioned. I wouldn’t really say any of them are significantly better or worse than the others.

The Etsy one is my usual razor, probably feels the nicest in my hand, the handle is a little longer which I like, but the real reason it’s my main razor is because it looks the nicest hanging on my razor stand and because my wife got it for me. I’m not crazy about how you change the blade because you basically unscrew the whole top and I don’t love needing to fiddle around with it that close to the blade.

The junk drawer razor is my traveling razor because its handle is kind of short and it fits better in my toiletry bag. It probably has my favorite blade changing method, there’s a little knob at the base of the handle you turn to unscrew the head and the top half of the head comes off. You can also halfway undo it which leave the blade a little loose without the whole thing coming apart which I find makes it easier to rinse hair out. If I had to pick one that shaves the best it’s probably this one, but it’s also the one I’ve had the longest so I’ve had more practice with it and I’m pretty sure that’s like 90% of the difference. It’s probably my best quality razor, even though it’s probably a few decades older than me everything about it still feels rock solid, but it also had probably a half century worth of tarnish, scratches, etc. that I’m too lazy to really clean up, so it’s also probably my ugliest.

The van der Hagan razor has sort of a butterfly opening thing for the blade. I feel like on a nicer razor that would be kind of nice, but with the fit/finish/tolerances it was made to, it feels a little cheap to me, like it wants to break (although it’s been years and it hasn’t broken on me yet, so my fears may be unwarranted) it has a slightly longer handle which I like, but it’s also skinnier, which I dont like. It probably gives me the worst shave, but it’s also my least used and again I feel like practice and technique probably play a bigger part in that than there being any significant shortcomings in the design. This one lives in my guest bathroom for when I shower and shave in there if my wife is hogging the master bath.

And when I say one shaves better than the other, the difference is pretty miniscule once you get used to the razor. When I first got it, I thought the Etsy razor shaved terribly, now that it’s been my main razor for years I’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and the junk drawer razor. And since it doesn’t get used as much anymore, I feel like I get worse shaves from the junk drawer razor than I did when it was my main razor. I also noticed my shaves get better with the VdH razor when I tried to use it more, but honestly I never put much time into getting used to it because I always felt like the handle was too skinny. But that’s personal preference, I like thick-handled heavy tools in general, some people like thinner handles and lighter weight.

Probably the biggest thing is to try out a few different brands of blades to find what works for you, that’s probably going to be the biggest variable. There at least used to be some variety packs you could order on Amazon and such

Personally I like feather blades, they do have a reputation for being ridiculously sharp even by razor standards, which can make them a little unforgiving, there’s a good chance you’re doing to slice yourself up a little when you’re first using them, but find what works for you. About the only thing I purposely avoid is store brand blades, they’re pretty much all garbage, try to track down pretty much any name brand.

Other than that, pick a handle that seems sturdy, and comfortable in your hand. Honestly I think most options out there, even a lot of the cheapest ones are just fine, there’s really not that much to them. Be prepared for a bit of a learning curve as you figure out the technique.

Some people get way into it, and will give you a whole lot of recommendations about soaps, creams, lotions, etc. and by all means experiment with them, but don’t feel like you absolutely need to get too into it. Personally I lather up with whatever soap I have on hand and splash on some old spice afterwards and like my results just fine (disclaimer - my skin isn’t picky, I could probably just about wash my face with acetone and dry shave with a piece of broken glass, some people have more sensitive skin, so find what works with you)