For me, rats are filthy, gross, and creepy. But that is not why I fight them. I normally would not care about their presence as long as they stay on their side of the walls. But I fight them for two reasons:

• Their teeth never stop growing. So they are teething their whole life and also build nests, which means non-stop house destruction.
• They can carry hantavirus. It’s an airborne transmission and can come from rat urine and feces.
• The day I decide to remove my ceilings (likely to take away rat turf), I expect to get a shower of feces.

I’ve heard that as well; and claims that they are essential to keeping the sewer pipes clear. Not sure to what extent I would put stock into all that but they are certainly a pest. Disease, filth, destruction of homes.

My city ultimately considers them a pest considering there is a tax-funded public pest control office fighting rats year round. People can call them and they will come to the home and deploy rat control measures (usually poison) at no cost, just like a pro exterminator.

Would be useful to plant a specie that attracts rats, so the trams can cut down the rat population.

I agree. But you have to start somewhere. The guideline has been converted into legislation in Belgium since last week.

Do you have more detail on what was implemented? I could only find this repairability index, which I suspect won’t be much more useful than energy indexes and nutrition indexes.

This is why I said at the local level. City council cannot change federal laws.

The EU has been grappling with right to repair laws for over 10 years now. It’s a complete shit show.

At the moment, a washing machine maker in the EU is only required to release repair documentation to professional repairers who are insured, not consumers. And they only have to do it in the 1st 10 years, not in the time period that things actually break. At the 10 year mark, they automatically lose the docs and stop making parts.

The law you reference is not yet in force AFAIK. But when it comes into force and each member state eventually legislates, look at what we are getting-- from your reference:

A European information form can be offered to consumers to help them assess and compare repair services (detailing the nature of the defect, price and duration of the repair). To make the repair process easier, a European online platform with national sections will be set up to help consumers easily find local repair shops, sellers of refurbished goods, buyers of defective items or community-led repair initiatives, such as repair cafes.

That’s crap. It’s fuck all. Consumers are not getting service manuals. They are just being told where they can go to get someone else to do the work. We can of course already find repair cafes because they publish their own location. But repairers at repair cafes are just winging it. You cannot bring them a large appliance like a washer. They don’t even have water and drain hookups. And even if one repair cafe made an exception for large appliances, their repairers are not insured and thus cannot legally get access to service manuals.

Everything at the state/fed/intl levels is a total shitshow. This is why I asked in the OP what can be done at the local level.

I should have linked the parent thread. Federal laws are a shit show. In the US, most states have paltry R2R protections typically only covering cars, wheel chairs, and farm equipment.

This is why I am collecting ideas for what we might petition LOCAL govs to do, like city councils.

I don’t think that is true. I never heard of a creativity test or measurement as a precondition to copyright protection. As I understand it, anything you write (regardless of artistic creativity) is automatically protected under an all rights reserved copyright unless you explicitly state otherwise.

I don’t quite follow the connection between retailer size and planned obsolescence. Do you have a Cliff’s Notes? Youtube has become a shitshow since Google now treats Invidious and Tor with hostility. We can no longer consider YT videos to be openly reachable. I am essentially blocked from YT.

(edit) I was able to find a rarely working invidious instance and fetch it. will watch it later.

Oki (formerly Okidata) has always had the ethical higher ground, above Brother, AFAICT. Brother does partake in ink waste shenanigans with their inkjets. IIRC, the only negative with Oki is they write that non-Oki toner voids the warranty – but don’t they all?

⚠ But note that you cannot be in the US. Oki pulled out of the US marketplace.

You’re basically complaining that Roth 409s/IRAs exist

You’re basically saying “fuck Europe” (to use your technique of building a man made of straw). This is not a US-only forum. Roths are a US invention and they are US-specific. Canada has something somewhat like it but not quite (no conversion option IIRC, which blows it), and at least parts of Europe (if not all of Europe) have nothing at all like it.

Apart from that, it’s bizarre that you think I would have any problem with Roths. Where do you think you read that? Roths are a great tool that actually supports my goals – though in one country only. And only for as long as conversions are allowed, to the extent they are allowed, and to the extent of 401k limits and conversion limits.

I might have ignored this post without all the anti-NEET, anti … landlords? company owners? contractors? … all the tears of people who seem to me to be in the wrong place, in the comments.

Ah, so anti-work is an elitist movement that excludes some demographics of people you hate? Nonsense. Middle class people can (and should) practice anti-work philosophies. Please fuck off with the: this is for poor people only exclusivity. The geocentrism can fuck off too, particularly when simultaneously coupled with pretentious ass-hattery. Uber Eats contractors would be appalled with the prejudiced grouping you have stuffed them into. The poor people you want to restrict the anti-work movement to don’t have the 401ks needed for the Roth conversion approach to work for them.

There are some models for sabaticals, like lower pay and then basically a year of paid vacation. It also includes insurance policies, as there is an obvious incentive to just fire you before you take the time off.

None of my employers have offered that. Colleagues would take a sabatical but I think it must have been uncompensated – just an understanding that the gig was held for them. Is there a particular region where this arrangement is common? If it’s just 1 year off every 7 years, that’d be useful but doesn’t match up to my pattern of working about ½ time on avg (1yr on, 1yr off, 1yr on, 1yr off, 6 on, 6 off, etc).

That paying a little extra when you made more money is how a progressive tax system is meant to work.

You think the progressive tax system deliberately punishes people with unstable or fluxuating income? That’s foolish.

Whether that’s by design or not, no self-respecting anti-work proponent endorses it.

BTW, different countries have different tax tables, but 5% is ~100 hours. Would you like to work an extra ~1—2½ weeks per year for free? If yes, what are you doing in the anti-work community?

by coming up with a sophisticated tax avoidance scheme

The intellectual dishonesty here is atrocious. We’re talking about working less/minimally by leveling income across fiscal years (or achieving that effect) to avoid penalties for anti-work practices.

Perhaps that was the case a year ago when you posted this, but now the free accounts allow zero outbound msgs.

It’s interesting that their highest tier plan is capped at 150 msg/day. In any case, I think @[email protected] has no cause for concern.

My problem is that they delete trial accounts without reason & without warning. So I distributed my email address to people and just a few months later the address is dead. They don’t say the free accounts have a time limit. I thought the only limit was lack of sending feature.

Yes, and in fact it’s worse than your linked page suggests. I was happy to receive email and not send. So that free trial would have been forever perfect for me. But after a few months my login creds mysteriously quit working. No warning and no msg after the fact to tell me why my #onionmail.org account was deleted.

It’s a dick move because people rely on email for important tasks. It’s fair enough to have limitations, but concealing the limitations is off.

Considering the price of a Fairphone you have a right to be upset. I suppose the only thing going for your situation is maybe the parts are worth something since they can be used to easily fix other Fairphones.

Political ads are not designed for targetting unpersuadables. Over the very long term propaganda that over and over blames undocumented people for problems starts to take a toll which could pull someone out of the unpersuadable demographic. But to a great extent they influence pursuadable voters in swing regions.

You say you would not switch to voting for Trump, and yet the sole reason Trump took power in 2016 was precisely due to advertising. Read about Cambridge Analytica and Peter Thiel. If Peter Thiel had not introduced Cambridge Analytica to the Trump campaign and bought Facebook data, Trump would not have taken power in 2016. THAT is how important advertising is. C/A master-minded indentifying the most important pursuadables, did a deep analysis of exactly what issues would be of interest to those individuals, and targeted them surreptitiously.

I strongly recommend you watch the PBS series “Hacking your Mind”. This episode in particular:

https://www.pbs.org/video/weapons-of-influence-gpuj68/

Well to be more accurate, boycotting is the practice of fighting harmful use of money by witholding money. Of course that stands to reason. If your money spent in a certain way is doing harm, you can prevent the harm your money does by not putting it on the harmful path.

I’m not sure what specifically you mean by getting people to reason better (whether you are talking about voting w/money or voting on the ballot in that context). Of course ads work. Political campaigns have started leveraging the same manipulation by ads that works to get people to buy goods and services.

What we certainly know does /not/ work is people thinking they are immune to ads. Everyone thinks that, and marketers prove them wrong over and over again. Advertising is specifically designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the human mind. You have no hope of creating an advertizing-immune population. It would be an ocean-boiling type of endeavor.

The most stark demonstration of money buying politicians seems to be with AIPAC. It happens often enough that a US politician who goes against Israel gets ousted that there’s even verb for it: AIPACed. AIPAC blows a fortune on the campaign of whoever runs against anyone who opposes Israel in any way – and they apparently get their way every time.

• https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/03/aipac-israel-spending-democratic-primaries-00144552
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/wesley-bell-backed-by-aipac-defeats-squad-member-cori-bush-in-st-louis-distrct-primary

Also interesting to note that most American Jews are liberal democrats who oppose AIPAC. But what can you do against a massive war chest like that?

The old laptop is the same one I use for all computing. So using an SBC would just add to the energy consumption.

But an SBC could be interesting anyway because there could be moments when I would want a phone to connect without the laptop dependency. So I would be interested in hearing how it works. Does the SBC also charge the phone over USB? Does the reverse tethering software exist that can run on an SBC? It would be cool to have this configuration:

phone → USB → SBC → ethernet → router…

Especially cool if the SBC could run Tor and proxy all traffic over Tor (though I suppose that job would best be served by the router).