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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The idea of “whiteness” being good is a super new concept in the grand scheme of things. People like to say things like “Irish and Italians werent considered white”, which is not accurate because they’ve always been considered white.

    “White” just wasn’t enough to be part of the “in group” and people nowadays dont have any other terminology to describe what the in group was other than just white. If you go back to the early 1800’s, the in group was Protestant anglo-americans. That doesnt mean people from other European countries werent white, it just means they werent part of the in group.

    “White” being the defining factor of the racist top hierarchy is super new, like 1966 new. The leader of the American Nazi party realized that they could gain more power by folding in white people from outside of their traditional in group (germanic or nordic), so inspired by the black power movement, he coined the term “white power”.

    Even now, just being white isnt enough to be part of the top category to racists. Maybe an Italian is considered part of the in group, but not middle easterners (who are legally white in the USA).

    Since “white” as an identity of people is relatively new (and only really makes sense in a racist framework), a lot of European/Middle Eastern Americans tend not to identify as “white” but instead by whatever jumble of identities their grandparents might have had. If your grandparents tell you they had a Cherokee grandparent, how are you supposed to know any different.


  • Not that I think you are wrong, but DNA tests dont necessarily paint the whole picture the way they companies selling them would like you to believe.

    They’ve gotten better over time, but unless you have a bunch of samples you know for a fact are 100% Blackfoot (which already inherently doesnt make sense because the Blackfoot are a confederacy of different peoples), you have to just do your best to reconstruct what you consider to be “Blackfoot DNA”. People groups are also never static the way racists think they are.

    In your case, for all you know, you could have had a few different Blackfoot ancestors who had offspring with French traders in the 1700s, or an English frontiersman in the 1800s. The offspring could have just been born and raised in the tribe and considered 100% part of the tribe, even if it turns out their DNA was 25% “Blackfoot”.







  • Not a problem I have, but generally, I hate bug spray because of how greasy and smelly it is (and the fact that deet damages synthetic fabrics), so I will go to a lot of lengths to avoid using it.

    I use long sleeves and occasionally a bug net if the mosquitos are really thick. They can bite through clothing, so I make sure it’s loose. I’ve actually been thinking about making a garment to wear under a long sleeve shirt to add another layer to my shoulders where gravity makes the fabric sit against my skin.

    I also use permethrin treated clothes if im going to be somewhere with a lot of bugs. I do try to minimize that to when I really need it because permethrin is harmful to a lot of beneficial insects, too. You could use a permethrin treated buff or something similar to protect your neck.

    Lastly, picaridin comes in a lotion that is not greasy or smelly, and it works just as well as DEET for mosquitos.


  • It’s good to see that there are sane comments here.

    It’s crazy to me when people go through a 10 step logical progression to justify how not voting is somehow the moral thing to do.

    It is essentially a trolley problem, and maybe my personal philosophy is too utilitarian, but it’s an easy choice for me to throw the switch that causes the least harm rather than sitting by for maximum harm.

    Also, there are a lot of non-voting actions you can do that improve things, but voting doesnt prevent any of those. Anyone who says they do direct action instead is full of crap: do both.

    Despite all the attacks on voting rights, voting is still one of the easiest actions to take.



  • Idk about merlin, but with iNaturalist, the purpose was logging sightings and locations of plants/animals/fungi/etc, and letting people double check your ID so it can be used in research.

    This built a massive database of images, locations, times, etc, which is a really good training set for image (or sound) recognition. Now the app is really good at automatically recognizing stuff from pictures, so people just use it for that. The app actually started to try to penalize you for using it for identification without actually logging stuff.




  • Vertical surfaces are not nearly as effective for the majority of cases in capturing solar radiation.

    I will say, I’ve seen compelling evidence for vertical bifacial panels. In east-west facing configurations, they generate more power when demand is greater and regular panels produce little power. They also stay cooler, so they operate more efficiently. I think it’s often more cost and space efficient to have more panels installed flat to something than fewer panels installed at the theoretically best angle.





  • It’s literally Mali. Having alternate country codes is just a way to take advantage of countries with less of a presence on the internet to be able to get better domain names and at a lower price. .ml specifically was given away for free.

    The worst, I think, is .io since the profits of those domains should go to the chagossians, but it just goes to the British government.


  • This is the right answer. “Opposition leader” or a “shadow cabinet” are not meaningful terms in American politics. It’s like asking who the President of the UK is.

    You could go for somewhat equivalent congressional roles like House/Senate minority leaders, or you could try to point to specific political figures that seem to be trying harder to oppose the regime who may or may not be in the federal government like governors, or people like the chair of the DNC.