Thanks for the tip! I’m not in poverty or at the edge of starving. I just try to eat cheaply and simultaneously try to fight food waste. I tend to kill 2 birds with 1 stone by buying food marked down 50% on the day it expires. But the pizza and bakery ideas are in line with that.

Thanks for the link.

“Small-volume braille printers cost between $1,800 and $5,000 and large-volume ones may cost between $10,000 and $80,000.”

Well, I guess that settles that option. Perhaps a print shop would have one, but I suppose it would not be cheap to use if they have to recover their investement. I would have to know that my recipient were blind to take that option.

OTOH, I also thought: I could record my voice (either reading my letter or giving a summary), then post on the web with a password, and put a QR code in the letter to an URL that includes the pw as an argument. But a blind person wouldn’t see the QR code. So that kills that idea. In principle, such a practice could theoretically be standardised with the QR code in an expected position.

Trust the BBC to take a widely observed economic downturn during the biggest corporate price hike almost anyone would call “once in a lifetime” if they hadn’t lived through the 80s, 90s, '08… And spin it as just a factors of organised crime, self service checkouts and a lack of door greeters.

To be clear, I cherry picked points I thought were interesting. I think inflation was covered but IMO boring and expected.

Sounds like dumpster diving would be an easier approach

Not in any city I have lived in, AFAICT. Where I am now, the dumpsters are kept out of sight. When dumpsters are in sight, they tend to be in cages, as they worry about liability of unsafe consumption. Maybe i’m not scoping it out well enough but it looks like shoplifting would be easier.

(edit) though I should mention there is some kind of program where students can cheaply subscribe to receive food that is either expired or nearly so. I don’t know the details but that would be the easiest option (for students).

Also in many places its legal to sell expired food, its just not common practice.

I think I recall asking a cashier to lower the price on something that expired (they will usually do that on the last valid day), and they said /no/ we cannot sell that, and took it from me. So apparently it’s illegal where i am.

Aww, sweety, don’t you know written statutes, compliance, and enforcement are all different things?

When this disappears, you can tell all your friends at school that there is “no law any more[sic]” (just like your parent told you), and become popular at your school. Until then, please run along and play with your friends. This conversation is for grown ups.

Whether it’s a good idea to present the DL to ICE depends on whether there is a legal obligation to do so – hence the question about jurisdiction.

If you legally must present a state DL on-demand to feds, then it’s a question of consequences. Refusing to present your DL to a local cop who pulls you over could probably lead to legit confiscation (effectively, loss of driving privs). If the feds take your DL and it’s unlawful, then the confiscation has no legal effect because you are still licensed to drive. You would just have the inconvenience of reporting a stolen ID to the DMV and waiting for a replacement.

One legal theory I would like answered is if you can refuse the DL to feds, then would they have to call a local cop to demand your DL by proxy in the scenario of following a legal procedure? This could be interesting because local cops may not be happy to respond to such calls.

The article doesn’t seem to answer the “why” question too comprehensively… just mentions some performance differences.

I saw a Tesla in Europe with a bumper sticker like this: “I bought this car before Elon went crazy”. So I would not neglect the cultural factor.

PM’s apps perform the encryption on your own device because it’s your device that runs the apps. That is e2ee, but still only in the two scenarios I mention and even then it’s also vulnerable to targeted attack. PM could ship malcious j/s if it wanted (the likely case being to comply with a court order). It’s better if your own non-j/s FOSS MUA handles the crypto, which is actually easier if you don’t use PM.

If mailbox.org works the way anonaddy works, then that’s not e2ee. The msg payload is seen by the server that does the encryption, in the very least. The sender’s ESP would have already seen the msg.

Indeed, which is more reason to not blindly block dynamic IPs.

This page covers CF as a walled garden generally:

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/18/cloudflare-has-created-the-largest-most-rigidly-exclusive-walled-garden-in-the-world/

W.r.t the fedi, Cloudflare blocks Tor and VPNs by default. So if you wanted to run your own Lemmy node, it would be unable to federate to Cloudflare nodes over Tor or VPNs. Lemmy end users are also oppressed by CF because images come from the source and are not cached. So if someone posts an image on a CF node and I use Tor to connect to slrpnk.net, I can only see the text and not the pics.

Users of CF nodes tend to be ignorant about the exclusivity of many clearnet sites, so they often unwittingly post links to tor-hostile sites.

Are you talking about a pure matter of size?

That too. The fedi is designed to make decentralisation /possible/. But obvisouly if network effect causes a majority of people to pile onto a single host, that’s not decentralised. Lemmy was not designed to be smart about this.

There are several node operators who do not give a shit about decentralisation or the balance that that requires. They just want to have a disproportionate amount of power over users so they can control the narrative through selective censorship. So they grow nodes that are obscenely large. Lemmy World goes to the extreme of using Cloudflare to circumvent the natural control of resource limitations, to grow out of control.

Some non-CF nodes also don’t know when to quit new registrations. I track them by calculating the average node size. If a node has more than 2 standard deviations above the avg number of users, I consider them centralised and avoid posting in their communities, just as I avoid posting in Cloudflare’s walled garden.

Consider self-hosting HALF the service. Something like this:

Outbound

local Postfix on dynamic IP → relay (optional and configurable) → recipient

You can configure Postfix to use a relay depending on the recipient. E.g. if you need to reach alice@outlook.com, MS will reject your dynamic IP. But if you have bob@outlook.com, you can tell Postfix to relay via MS servers using your bob@outlook.com account for all *@outlook.com recipients. And yes, you can still use a different vanity address in the FROM: field, like Gobbel2000@nerds.org, if that’s what you want to be known as. You can freetype whatever your want as the FROM: address if you use a good MUA like mutt.

You can even hack postfix to send over Tor. And you can make it possible to support *.onion email addresses, which is something that no non-self-hosted service offers.

When I email someone for the 1st time, say it’s alice@someunknownneverseensvc.xyz, I first configure my mail server to relay to @someunknownneverseensvc.xyz over Tor. If that fails (and it often does), I configure Postfix to directly send to that server from my dynamic IP (or VPN if I have that running). That’s the default, in fact. If that fails, then I can cave-in and compromise my privacy by relaying through a 3rd party, if I choose. Most importantly, I am in control. If I really want to send the msg but I really do not want an additional MitM, I may be able to create an acct on @someunknownneverseensvc.xyz and then use that as a relay to recipients on that host.

Rise-up has an onion SMTP server. So if you have a riseup acct you could use their onion as a relay.

Inbound

(your acct @ rise-up or disroot.org or danwin1210.de or autistici) → POP3 onion using fetchmail → local Postfix → dovecote or procmail → local files read by your MUA of choice

You avoid a lot of complexity and labor by not maintaining a WAN-listening server. Though you still have a fair amount of effort in configuring your junk, you need not do all the configuration up front. You can do it on a piecemeal per-outbound msg basis to spread your config effort out over time. Of course you need to use a forwarding service or do some DNS arrangements if you want an address that does not tie you to an ESP.

This approach relieves you of the reliability problem… you need not maintain a server always online, up, and listening. But of course you lose some privacy because all your inbound traffic is seen by your ESP. At least you can potentially circumvent your ESP on outbound mail.

BTW, you might want to crosspost to !email@lemmy.sdf.org

(update) my complaint with Postfix: no Tor support out of the box

Postfix needs some hacking to get it to work over Tor. As old as Postfix and Tor both are, they should work together out of the box.

side note: downside is, your data there is more snoopable, less so with something like proton.

Can you elaborate? AFAIK, Protonmail only gives e2ee in 2 rare situations:

• Both parties use PM
• The non-PM user has a PGP key and the PM user is competent enough to add the key to their PM address book. (This is where Hushmail is superior to PM, but HM is not gratis)

In all other scenarios (no e2ee), PM traffic and data-at-rest is just as exposed as conventional non-PM.

True, but sending from a static IP that is linked to you yields less privacy. I’ve decided: fuck these email recipients who demand I compromise privacy in order to give them the convenience of relying on IP reputation. Sure, google and MS servers refuse email from me, but I prefer that anyway. I use postal mail for such recipients (and yes, that’s most recipients).

Looks promising. Hopefully the dinox fork fixes this embarrassing bug:

https://github.com/dino/dino/issues/971
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1076963

Both Dino-im and Profanity neglect to use e2ee by default.

Someone plz track down the Debian maintainer of dino and mention dinox to them. Would by nice to get that into Debian. The *.debian.org sites have been under an ongoing attack for weeks now… I’m blocked by fastly.

In the decentralised free world:

🗽☯lemmy.sdf.org/c/electronics (67/0) “Electronics”
🗽☯fedia.io/diysolar “DIY Solar”
🥧piefed.blahaj.zone/diy_hrt “DIY HRT”
🥧piefed.social/solarpunk “Solarpunk DIY”
🗽☯krabb.org/c/diy (8/0) “DIY”
🗽☯lemmy.perfecthluxury.store/c/DIY (1/0) “DIY”
🗽☯notdigg.com/c/diy (32/0) “DIY”
🗽☯europe.pub/c/DIY (71/1) “DIY”
🗽☯foros.fediverso.gal/c/maker (58/1) “DIY e Makers”
🗽☯hi-fi.community/c/diy (5/1) “DIY”
🗽☯hilariouschaos.com/c/diy (58/1) “DIY”
🗽☯lemmy.sdf.org/c/synthdiy (192/1) “synthdiy”
🗽☯lemmy.staphup.nl/c/diy_energy (2/1) “DIY wind water energy projects”
🗽☯szmer.info/c/diy (179/1) “DIY, majsterkowanie i takie tam”
🗽☯tech.pr0n.pl/c/electronics (5/2) “Electronics”
🗽☯feddit.uk/c/diy (284/4) “DIY”
🗽☯sopuli.xyz/c/bike_repair_tips (374/29) “Bike Repair Tips and Tricks”
🗽☯discuss.tchncs.de/c/electronics (2631/38) “Electronics”
🗽☯slrpnk.net/c/fixing (950/66) “fixing”
🗽☯beehaw.org/c/diy (8518/184) “Do It Yourself”
🗽☯discuss.tchncs.de/c/askelectronics (3901/326) “Ask Electronics”
🗽☯slrpnk.net/c/diy (3792/500) “DIY”

specifically audio:
🗽☯hi-fi.community/c/audiophile (33/1) “Audiophile”
🗽☯lemmygrad.ml/c/audiophile (115/1) “Audiophile”

There are also DIY / fixing communites on these centralised instances which should be avoided if you value digital sovereignty:

hexbear.net, lemmy.blahaj.zone, lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.ml

^ Those are bad nodes simply because they have grown 2 standard deviations above the mean. Thus growing out of control.

The following are the worst of the worst because they are in Cloudflare’s walled garden:

lemm.ee, lemmit.online, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world, lemmynsfw.com, programming.dev, sh.itjust.works, zerobytes.monster

Best not to work in the US. They drug test like crazy no matter how trivial the gig is. Even back when video rental was a thing, Blockbuster Video required employees to give hair samples proving that they never smoked pot for the time it took them to grow the amount of hair they have on their head.

Europe is smarter. If someone’s career is incompatible with the drugs they take, it’s the /doctors/ job to block them from working. Employers cannot invade the privacy of workers by drug testing; rightfully so.

I love to get in a hot tub and gradually turn up the temp to dangerous levels. It’s not painful… it’s dangerously comforting. I only read the article not the study, but I wonder if the study examined the effect of slow boiling (like the euphamism “boiling frogs”).

The article has this:

This is awful, but what can we do?

The first step is acknowledging that these animals might experience pain similarly to how we do.

With that understanding, industries and regulators can work towards implementing more humane methods of handling and killing crustaceans.

Restaurants and home cooks alike can adjust. Rapid chilling at 32 °F for 20 minutes puts many crabs into torpor; specialized devices such as the CrustaStun deliver a quick electrical jolt that ends consciousness in under a second.

So it makes sense that a restaurant would use a commercial device to do it quickly. And I guess most home cooks are buying dead crustaceans. But some grocers have a tank of live ones. I have never bought seafood like that. Do they give it to you live or do they kill it in the store before purchase?

The ultimate question is whether consumers “need” to toss these animals into boiling water, or if they can put them in moderate water and slowly bring it to a boil. Or if the research shows that it’s relatively painless.

Removed by mod

I gave more detail of what happened in the other post under this thread. It never went to court. IIRC, the city accepted my argument.

But indeed you are right. The court case could have gone as you suggest had it occurred. I think the gov is just bluffing and intimidating people into beautifying their landscapes.

It’s an old story. I don’t recall exactly what happened after I pushed back. I certainly was not fined and IIRC the city got off my back because they had no case.

I eventually landscaped by choice. I don’t recall the motivation but I think it was to exploit a rebate offered by the government.

Then years later weeds (ugly plants) emerged again because the weed blocker that was under the landscape was compromised. Neighbor was on it and I got cited. I then noticed one of the plants actually was a weed (or resembled one), legally. So I had to pull them. I acted within the deadline so there was no fine. I was bummed because I really wanted to give the neighbor the middle finger.