my_hat_stinks

Your security is only as good as the weakest link, which is usually people. If your password policy encourages users to stick a note to their screen then your weakest link is anyone in the office deciding to take a selfie or joining a call with their camera on. Best practices balance security with what users are actually willing to do.

Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.

Password expiry hasn’t been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.

Current advice is to change passwords whenever there’s a chance it’s been compromised, not on a schedule.

I’m not convinced. Most magic systems in fiction have rules, meaning they can be scientifically proven and studied. Magic is simply when something falls outside your understanding of how the world works. It’s all about your perspective.

There’s a part in the Lord of the Rings where Galadriel shows Sam and Frodo a scrying pool. To Galadriel it’s normal, simply the way the world is. To the hobbits it’s magic.

‘And you?’ she said, turning to Sam. ‘For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy. But this, if you will, is the magic of Galadriel. Did you not say that you wished to see Elf-magic?’

If someone said they were concerned about their sugar intake would you tell them to just stop eating entirely? It’s possible to take steps towards privacy-friendly services without cutting yourself off from the modern world in the same way as you can cut back on sugar and still eat food.

You absolutely do not need to “burn all your devices” to improve your privacy, suggesting so is unhelpful at best.

QR codes essentially just encode text, as long as you’re using a sensible QR code reader and check any URLs before opening them there’s minimal risk to scanning a QR code.

Seems like a non-issue to me. You’ll go to whichever hospital is closest. If you’re resident in one of the countries you’ll be in EU/EEA and get the usual healthcare for residents of whichever country the hospital is in, if you’re non-EU it’ll depend on what travel insurance you have.

Nothing is cut off? The only thing missing is one bonus panel.

https://www.litterboxcomics.com/birth-stories/

There’s definitely some issues that jump out to me on first read.

1. I’m not sure about “indivisible”. An area should be able to self-govern if desired. More detail needed.
2. Awful. Removing people’s voting rights in general is bad, and something as nebulous as “a criminal offence” is incredibly easy to abuse. Are people no longer citizens if they steal a loaf of bread? Also, voting age here is 16/18.
4. No. Guns are incredibly rare where I am. I’d rather not have one, and I’d prefer not to risk getting shot every time some asshole on the street gets mad.
7. Limiting land to a single use is generally not a great idea. What if for instance you have too much agricultural land and not enough housing?
10. A central state-owned bank isn’t a bad idea, but abolishing all non-state banks is iffy. Should the government really have so much direct control over everyone’s finances?
12. Your salary should not be based on the amount of unprotected sex you have. That’s just silly. Other support should be available for those who need it.

I’m not sure that’s a completely accurate analogy either. When you’re using a VPN people can still see that you are sending traffic through your tunnel, they just can’t tell what it is that you’re sending. It’s like looking through frosted glass; there’s definitely something moving in there but you can’t tell what.

I suppose the best way to describe it is you send a locked box to a trusted friend; everyone handling it can see the box but can’t tell what’s inside. Inside the box is a letter, your friend posts it so it looks like it came from them. Your friend then gets a reply, puts it in a locked box, and send it back to you. Nobody between you and your friend can snoop on your mail but anyone between your friend and the final destination can.

Being limited to only three options doesn’t sound very democratic but I suppose it’s better than a two party system. Instead of adding a self-destruct button, have you considered switching to a system which better represents the people?

I like the idea of splitting timelines if reverse time travel is possible, but it does have some consequences. The biggest one being that it means you can’t actually travel back in time. Time travel may even be relatively simple but as it has no effect on the primary timeline you will never be able to change the past as it appears there; travelling back in time simply creates an alternate reality. As far as the primary timeline inhabitants are concerned, you have either died or vanished (or maybe nothing appeared to happen at all) but you have not travelled in time. It also means it’s impossible to return to your original timeline as further reverse time travel will only create new alternate timelines, the closest you can get is a timeline that closely resembles your home one.

Another fun approach is that infinitely many alternate timelines already exist (think Many Worlds), travelling back in time simply means you spontaneously form in another world through quantum fluctuations or something equally hand-wavey. The thing I find interesting about this one is that it doesn’t necessarily involve time travel at all. You form with the memories of having travelled in time, sure, but you have just spontaneously formed through quantum fluctuations so it’s reasonable to assume your memories have too; it may have just been a randomly formed memory that didn’t actually happen. Since it’s just random fluctuations there’d also be infinitely many universes where you spontaneously pop into existence with no time travel memory, so I suppose in a way this never was time travel. The original timeline would be unaffected by this kind of travel as you can only move to universes where you have already spawned in.

The way I see it the only way to actually change the past in your current timeline arguably involves destroying the universe. You’d have a single timeline and each instance of reverse time travel cuts off your timeline’s future and links back to a previous point from which time can continue. You can visualise this timeline as a piece of string, time travel is a loop in that string. If you travel back in time by a year, everything you did in that past year is within that loop off to the side of the primary timeline; the loop starts and ends at the same point. Time travel would essentially delete your future and plonk you back onto the primary timeline. No need to worry about the grandfather paradox; you were born in a loop off to the side of real time so killing your grandfather doesn’t change that loop. It works around the bootstrap paradox for similar reasons; the information was created in some loop somewhere, even if it appears to have created itself on the prime line. It’s a nice thought experiment but the problem here is that if you travel back in time but fail to change the conditions which caused the time travel you may have just ended the universe in an infinite time loop.

Where I am most people are happy to drink the tap water, and we’re all oddly proud of it. Which is fair, it’s great water. Very soft too, I remember seeing ads on TV for products to remove limescale but that doesn’t really happen here much. I find it a little odd that some places’ tap water is so full of impurities that it leaves mineral deposits on their appliances.

Come to Scotland, try our tap water!

I’d argue the exact opposite. It’s a fun game to play with new players or in a private lobby with a bunch of friends, but at the highest levels it’s absolutely horrible. You don’t really get more options to make the game more fun as you progress, instead the most effective options are to actively ruin the experience for the other side.

There was an item in the game that survivors could use to instantly complete an objective. If all four brought one it instantly completed 4 of 5 objectives. It was eventually nerfed shortly before I stopped playing, but it’s a perfect example of the kind of game-ruining mechanics the game is for some reason built around. You don’t level up to have more fun, you level up to screw over the other person.

That’s kind of a strange argument. Cellulose isn’t necessarily wood but wood is cellulose. Your sandwich is made with bread.

That reminds me of an issue I had when I was installing Mint. I tried out a live boot first and everything seemed to work except there was no internet connection. Turns out my WiFi card needs a proprietary driver, but no big deal it installed easily enough just from the boot disk. Internet’s working, all looks good, so I go ahead and install Mint proper, remove the live boot usb, start the system, and savour that new Minty smell. But hang on, there’s no WiFi, I forgot to install the driver! Should be an easy enough fix though, it wasn’t hard last time.

So I go to install the driver and the first thing it says is that it needs the boot disk to get the driver. That makes total sense, can’t install something you don’t have! I plug in the usb again and now it should all be plain sailing, after all it’s just installing a driver that worked 20 minutes ago, right? Sadly no, that would be too easy; for some reason now it’s missing dependencies! Or something along those lines anyway, I forget exactly. But can’t it just install those from the boot disk? Well apparently not, it instead tries to connect to the internet to download them. This obviously fails since I don’t have a WiFi connection, which is why I’m installing the driver in the first place. All I get is a popup saying it can’t install some stuff because there’s no internet connection, fix that to get your internet connection. This is the point where face meets palm. I’m sure there’s some fiddly “proper” way to work around that but the thing is I’m incredibly lazy so I’ll just take the quick option instead. I plug in my phone and use a tethered connection. I run the install again and it finally goes through, at last the system is ready to use! It’s been mostly smooth sailing since then (though I did get annoyed enough at NTFS a couple of months ago that I just reformatted a data drive and wiped a ton of data I probably didn’t need).

Tl;dr: I had to tether to my phone for a minute. Traumatising!

I guess, if you don’t like raisins and currants? It’s just a fruit pie, I don’t really see what’s so horrible about that. It’d be more understandable if we were talking about a fly cemetery, a similar pastry with a much more interesting name.

Personally I don’t see that as a good thing. Reddit had a thriving community of active art sharing subrrddits, Lemmy only has a few barely active art coms and instead floods All with ai-generated images.

The numbers do matter because the numbers are literally your entire argument. You’re arguing building for cars is more effective, you cannot make arguments about effectiveness without numbers. Alternative transport methods can be done with current tech since alternative transport methods literally existed before cars. There are plenty of examples of places that aren’t car-centric, and most major car-centric cities weren’t originally built around cars. I honestly have no idea how you could have thought that’s a remotely reasonable argument? It’s utter nonsense.

Even if your massive infrastructure overhaul argument was valid¹, we’re literally talking about a hypothetical scenario where you can pump absurd amounts of money into a project.

^{1. It’s not, just build other infrastructure instead of more roads. From a strictly capitalist perspective it pays for itself when more space can be used for taxable business instead of the dead weight of parking, and those businesses are more accessible to foot traffic making them more profitable and therefore generating more taxes. Not to mention the maintenance costs.}

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make and the metrics you’re using don’t really make sense. If one million people are driving with an average commute of 1 hour (personally I find it insane that that’s considered “normal” in some places, it should be an upper bound) and switch to a train which saves only 5 minutes each way they’d still save that same 10 minutes. Depending on what you mean by your “cars not driving” metric, that’s anywhere between 1 million cars (no more cars driving) and 255k cars (carbon emissions of 1m electric car commuters vs 1m national rail commuters, using this data).

That’s not even accounting for the induced demand previously mentioned, making driving more appealing only creates more drivers which makes driving worse.

And all of that is still only considering the traffic itself and not the effect of the infrastructure. Take a satellite shot of any random North American city and chances are a significant portion of it is just places to park a car. It’s a bit less common to see a city center dedicate half of its land to bike, bus, or train parking; that land is better used for people or business instead.

If they’re genuine friends they’ll be receptive when you ask them to pay you fairly.