I heard a story of someone who was about to be conscripted into the dutch army back in the day.

Before his intake interview he stuffed a load of peanut butter between his butt cheeks.

When they had him come in for the interview, he told them he looked forward to serving, but then proceeded to take a big scoop of peanut butter from out of his pants and eat it.

I assume that wouldn’t work in Russia, because you’d run the risk of becoming a general.

I’ll have 55 of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)

Perfect is the enemy of good.

completely unavailable to obtain in the US

vinted/ebay

3G is being phased out everywhere

2G fallback.

specific apps that relate to taxi services and talking with my group

Yeah. That’s a no.

I find it annoying that everything’s an app now, when it could also still be a website.

In the Netherlands and Belgium employers sometimes offer what is called a “baaldag”. Basically, if you’re having an especially shit day, you can take the day off. No doctors note required.

That’s why I said you could have someone drive you.

And mandatory sick notes are stupid.

Plenty of places you don’t need a sick note for a day off.

Small scale co-op bicycle manufacture and repair is eminently feasible. Especially if it’s a simple single speed.

The problem with farming is that the world is arguably over-populated, so you need mass scale high tech farming to feed all those people, especially with global soil degradation approaching catastrophic levels and climate change reducing yields.

Small scale farms will never be enough. Also, it would likely actually be more polluting, because you’d end up tilling (which contributes significantly to emissions) or fertilising less productive soil, and need more passes, when you have places where the soil needs relatively little tilling and fertilising. It makes sense to use the most productive soil, in the most efficient way possible, which means large scale and super high tech.

It’s really not for the amateurs. Co-op orchards, jam and juice manufacture? Sure. But it’ll never be enough. That’s best left to the experts.

15 tons of nuclear weapons + delivery systems should do the trick.

Forget about saving the revolution in Ukraine. A few nukes here and there and you could establish anarcho-communism globally. Under my benign leadership, of course.

You’re not carrying supplies for an army of 110,000 in 15 tons.

15 metric tons of pure gold is worth approximately $2 billion US today. I assume gold wasn’t entirely worthless a hundred years ago either.

This is probably not what you want, but I sometimes use a 2017 Nokia 3310, the one with 3G.

There are not really apps on that(IRC only twitter and facebook, and I don’t know if those still work), but you can install/upgrade to the latest version of opera mini, which does offer access to (some) more apps.

To be clear this is on my to do list. In the past I just used it as a dumbphone.

No thank you, I just ate.

Hey maybe I misunderstood your comment, but your comment seemed to suggest it’s something we layman should look into if we wanted to do something, but if so you might as well suggest people look into car manufacturing.

The problem with farming is that it has become one of the most advanced sectors out there. It’s drones, autonomous tractors, AI, micro-targeting, lasers, ground penetrating radar, it’s three story floating factories that produce finished goods in harbour. It’s far far above the skill level of most of us here, especially if you want to produce the volumes required without high emissions, even more so as the climate changes and soil degradation continues unabated on a global scale.

We’re hurtling towards famines across the globe and all the unrest that causes. Billions are already vulnerable. It is possible we will simply not be able to produce enough food, sooner rather than later.

We’re so fucked. I need to go to sleep.

Sorry grandpa. All your friends are dead.

I’ve never lived in the US.

Going to the doctor for the common cold is insane. Why waste doctors’ time on something that’ll pass on its own with a bit of rest and paracetamol? Utterly selfish.

Driving to a hospital if you’re not badly injured is also perfectly normal. Once again, why would you call an ambulance that could be helping someone in dire need, if you don’t need to?

Unless the injury is life threatening, drive yourself or have someone drive you. Not insane at all.

Oh, yeah.

But I mean piracy filesharing. That was already popular on dial-in BBSes in the 80s.

when I buy rice that was transported thousands of miles before it got to me.

People like to complain about container ships, but they’re ridiculously efficient at transporting cargo, because they transport so much in one go. If you use a container ship to transport only rice, you could probably transport something like 200 million kilograms.

Road transport produces something like 70% of emissions generated by freight transport globally. Sea is only 20%.

That means it’s often less polluting to buy something made on the other side of the world, than from a few hundred miles away, depending on how close you live to the sea/port or a railway station.

local politics and co-operative food production

Meh. The benefits of scale drive down prices, but one of the ways they do that is also by lowering fuel consumption. If you’re producing everything on small farms, it’s likely you’ll use more fuel and create more emissions, than larger farms which can produce at scale and are hyper-efficient. For example, bigger farms use drones and nutrient maps, which allow them to be very targetted in where they sow seeds and spread fertiliser, which means they use much less fertiliser, which means less fuel used.

Farming efficiently also really isn’t something for amateurs. Plenty of large scale farmers have engineering degrees for that very reason, or employ people who do.

Filesharing pre-dates the web.

Fun fact: a tarot deck has 72 different cards. That means there’s 72! combinations, which is a number that is roughly 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000​ larger than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.

Sorry to tell you this, but my father is not a medical doctor.

Almost 50 years ago…

When’s your next prostate check?