On some level it’s reasonable to say that you own shares in a mutual fund, not shares in the individual companies.

But the other side of that is that you can fairly easily see what the mutual fund is doing, and copy it, without the problematic companies. Yes, it will be less profitable, but you can do it, and you can do it without too much difficulty when you’re talking about millions of dollars in investments. So it seems, I dunno, weak to say that you can’t divest your own personal investments from these things. Plus, I’m pretty sure that there are at least a handful of mutual funds that entirely avoid those kind of companies in order to attract ethical investors.

Where o where is UniversalMonk when you want to shove something in his smarmy, trollish face…?

Well. technically he was an ape rather than a monkey.

The entire Ultima series for sure. I think those were the first CRPGs I played. I loved Ultima: Underworld I & II, but I was never able to get Ultima VII: Pagan to run properly on my computer. (And, holy fuck, that was 30 years ago.)

But also The Elder Scrolls: Arena, TES: Daggerfall, TES: Battlespire, TES: Redguard, and TES: Morrowind. The first two TES games would be challenging to make, given that many of the areas were randomly generated, rather than being designed.

Having seen the trailer for Gothic, it looks good. I really hope that it’s actually good.

To my original claim - finding something that’s reasonable mileage, and in good mechanical condition, for under $10k, is quite a challenge at this point. I sold a 2008 Honda Civic Si with >200,000 miles last year that was not running, had rust, and generally needed a fair amount of work, and had an asking price of $4k. I got fifty offers in under 12 hours. It was crazy.

That’s just one of the many fun things about living in the mountains.

If I took my bike to town, it would take me about an hour, give or take. To get home would be about four hours. It’s 15 miles, one way, with about 2200’ of elevation change.

Average price of a used car in the US, right now, is $29,000. Which means that for a $554 payment, it’s going to be 5.4 years rather than 1.5. From there, you need to figure out how many miles you put on a car in a year, make some rough guesses about how many miles the average car has left before the cost to repair exceeds the cost of replacing, etc. Obvs. a high mileage used car is going to require significantly more maintenance than a new car will (…in most cases, as long as you aren’t buying a new Land Rover or Jaguar), so you’ll need to figure that in as well. You’ll probably want good insurance, even if you’re only required to carry minimal liability insurance, because any accident could be catastrophic for your finances if you can’t afford to repair your car.

It’s a bit of a death spiral; wages are still too low, car prices are too high.

Dave Ramsey hasn’t tried to buy a reliable used car in the last decade, at least. You aren’t going to find anything under about $10k that’s actually reliable where I am. A mid-90s Toyota with 300,000 miles maybe, but not anything under 150,000.

Yeah, but every time I have to buy something new, they automatically sign me up again. They never give me an opt-out.

Nah, you’re not abnormal. I’ve had the same thing happen at multiple store. The most invasive has been Microcenter; they tell me that I have to give them my email in order to wait in line for tech support, and then bombard me with spam. Every time I buy something new there, I have to tell the cashier to NOT use the address on file that they won’t unlink from my bank card.

I can’t afford it. Simple as.

I’ve gotten several quotes. It would cost me about $15,000 to install a system, and that’s after incentives and rebates. I don’t air condition in the summer except the bedroom, at night–it only rarely gets above 85F inside at night–and I heat with a wood stove in the winter, with a propane central heater for the relatively few days when a stove can’t keep the inside of the cabin warm enough. So it would take me years to capitalize the costs. On top of that, I’d have to extensively renovate to insulate what I can in order to really see benefits from a heat pump.

Yeah, I want to. I’d love to. If I move out to northern Nevada–my dream—I will absolutely install a small solar farm and do a heat pump. But where I am, right now? Ain’t feasible.

Oh.

Not Advanced Encryption Standard. Right.

No, I don’t support EAS in that context, because none of the states that they’re citing are anything other than deeply, profoundly authoritarian.

That’s the really crazy thing, innit? We don’t even know what being conscious entails! But we’ve got over one hundred years of studying (“studying”) psychology while just handwaving the underlying mechanisms. We have no idea how all the genes interact, much less how environment directly influences all of that, but we’re still trying to do complex eugenics that’s lightyears past our current understanding.

Maybe we get to Gattaca someday, but it’s not going to be soon.

I’m not going to end up getting killed either way, because I’m not an at risk person. I’m white, and I can do a very good job cosplaying as a christian nationalist, because that’s the kind of home I was raised in. And I can just as easily be comfortable with leftists, because that’s what I’ve been for 20-odd years (although the label keeps changing). On the other hand, my Jewish, Muslim, and Satanist friends, my LGBTQ+ friends, my non-white friends, they’re going to suffer and die because of accelerationist fantasies.

You want to actually see improvement? Start building community locally, expand that into real local political power, and then grow that. It’s real work, harder than being a keyboard warrior. You’ll quickly discover that the very messy job of politics is building consensus and compromising. …Which you should already know, considering how excellent leftist groups are at forming circular firing squads.

As long as you avoid complicated systems–like electronic shifting, hydraulic anything, and so on–anything that’s mid-tier and above, purchased from a bicycle shop (not a sporting goods store, not a dept. store) is going to be pretty repairable for the foreseeable future.

I can still easily find parts for my 2013 Fuji Cross. Honestly, the worst part has been pedals; I had Speedplay Frogs, and when the pedals wore out completely, Speedplay had stopped making them (and had been sold a few times), which leaves me with no pedal options that combine the ridiculous float with the feeling of being firmly locked in.

Anything proprietary is going to be harder to find parts for to repair, or to replace. For instance, Cannondale’s Lefty fork, and their old HeadShok system; good luck fixing those now. Simpler is usually going to be better; suspension may add comfort, but unless you’re mountain biking, I’d skip it in favor of rigid frames and forks.

The people advocating to accelerate the decline and break the system so they can have their revolution have no idea how many vulnerable people will be killed in the process, nor do they care.

I would suggest that they look to Syria, and perhaps Myanmar.

There’s no reason to assume that things will get better after a collapse; things are just as likely, or more likely, to get worse. Right now goddamn near half of the voting public in America wants a guy as president that has told us that he’s going to make things worse for nearly everyone. Meditate on that.

If the system isn’t changing, you need to put in the time to convince people at the grass-roots level. You need a ground game; you can’t expect that Jill Stein is going to swoop in and save us all, and then act butt-hurt when her campaign fails for the third time in three presidential election cycles.

IQ is so incredibly complicated, and we really don’t know how it works, and what genes allow for the possibility of high IQ. So what are they even screening for? If they’re just looking at broad trends in population IQ compared to genetics, then what they’re actually seeing are environmental factors, which play an immense role in whether or not potential is ever reached.

You can sell an anti-wifi amulet that absolutely works. You can also sell an anti-cellular amulet that works, but the FCC will come down on you like a ton of bricks if you use it.