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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • I have some better quality kitchen knives I like keeping sharp.

    I use a two-sided whetstone 400/2000 grit for basic shaping (400 is akin to those rolling sharpeners, to be used only when you fucked up real bad), a leather strop with green sharpening paste (~6000-8000 grit) glued to a piece of wood, a plain leather strop, and a honing steel.

    Green sharpening paste is most of what I ever use, a couple of strokes weekly (more realistically about 20 once a month), and maybe polish it up with the plain leather strop. Keeps the knives wicked sharp, and then I just hone them after each use.

    Sometimes I do stupid things and get burrs in my edge (like cleaving frozen bone), that’s where the 2000 grit saves me.

    400 I guess is for when the apocalypse comes or your kids decided to practice chef’s knife throwing into scrap metal. It’s nice to know I can remake a whole edge, but rarely used.










  • My list is quite different than the ones currently in the thread.

    The boring ones:

    Creating a vaccine or other cloaking to make humans invisible to ticks & mosquitoes. A separate project would be to do the same for parasites.

    Enacting strict pollution/carbon limits and mandatory circular economy everywhere in the world.

    Researching, trialing and Enacting a sustainable post-capitalist system everywhere in the world.

    Developing solar energy until covering global energy demands, including a power network that can transport energy from the sunny side and/or orbit everywhere.

    The slightly more ambitious:

    Establish self-sustainable colonies living on off-earth resources, most probably also situated off-earth.

    Create a Dyson swarm with enough energy output for in-system exploration, mining, colonisation, and terraforming.

    Perfect matter replicators.

    I have some other ideas as well, but those would be a start.









  • From a European perspective, the US centre-right are more conservative than the European fringe right. The European far right doesn’t (typically) want to restrict abortion, sabotage education or reinstate child labor for example. And are mostly about increasing and militarizing police, disenfranchising minorities, and different schemes to control that only the right people get to vote.

    I’d argue that the US centre right is actually as radical, or even more so than the European fringe right, they are certainly causing about the same commotion, but of course have much more power in the US.



  • I will add my voice to the chorus, real life isn’t a cartoon where good people are morally, ethically and physically in the right. Real people and real situations have layers, and are rooted in fundamentally human wants, needs and limitations.

    I get that if you’re a brand, and living only in a symbolic sense, you might want to distance yourself from symbols that don’t align. But us humans, actually having experienced reality, should know that some or even most actions aren’t perfectly informed, selflessly good from every perspective, for all of time.

    And frankly, I think wanting and needing that unambiguity is dangerous as you’re dehumanising people and disempowering yourself from reflecting upon behavior and setting proper boundaries. That, and/or a sign of considerable stress (compare with black & white thinking or catastrophic thinking).

    People can be flawed and make awesome contributions. The theory of gravity is good, useful, and a significant discovery forming the basis of much of industrial and modern society, even though it was made possible only by colonialism and systematic oppression.

    Socrates/Plato made astounding work contributing to the development of every field of knowledge, despite being weirdo homeless hermits before forming a cult.

    Be inspired by the greatness in people, not the flaws.