[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

In the past couple months Google has become quite hostile toward front-ends that previously made it possible for Tor users to reach their content. And I don’t have a good connection so I can’t do videos anyway.

But indeed, it’s hard to find proper detergent. I have to go to a big store of a big grocery chain to get it. But it’s worth it on the basis of price alone. Buying a couple kilos of powder gives the most loads for the money. IIRC the pods were twice the cost of powder when comparing a promotional sales price on pods.

(edit) Oh, but speaking of youtube, video rBO8neWw04 (which I have a saved a copy of) goes into pods. The guy makes an interesting point: pods discourage the use of detergent in the prewash. Though I think he over stresses that.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 5 points 7 months ago

It cannot work in the US; but it’s also useless under US rules. That is, it is already illegal nationwide for anyone other than USPS to feed your official US Mail postbox. Some people hate the fact that this gives USPS monopoly power because UPS and FedEx also cannot put anything in your mailbox. But the upside is US mailboxes don’t get junked up by a leafletter.

So in the US, the only legal way for mail to enter your postbox is at the hands of USPS, which IIUC means only mail that is addressed to your address because I don’t think USPS delivers unaddressed material unless it’s actually from USPS. That also means junk mailers must pay postage. If the local pizza shop stuffs flyers in your mailbox, it’s criminal and actionable.

The “no marketing” tags that people put on mailboxes outside the US (e.g. Europe) is to cover situations where anyone can junk up your mailbox. Then the signage means (in effect) “no mail that is unaddressed”.

Of course junk /can/ be addressed to you specifically (inside and outside the US), but you wouldn’t want the postal worker making guesses about whether it’s junk, would you? So I think that’s always delivered.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

breathability is the key criteria for clothing. Polyester and synthetic fabrics are nearly all terrible at this compared to natural fibres.

Natural fibers cannot be grouped together in this way because there is a huge variation.

This is where cotton fails and synthetic microfibers come out ahead. Cotton retains water, swells when wet, and suffocates as water tension spans the threads that are thickened by the swelling. Synthetic microfibers wick moisture away, and do not swell when wet, which gives excellent breathability. Cotton is fine as long as you don’t sweat. Or exceptionally, if it’s extremely hot in some windy situations the water retention can be a plus. I used to don cotton and hose myself down before getting on a motorcycle on a hot dry day. The evaporative cooling effect worked wonders with the high relative wind. But outside of that niche, such as sports, microfibers are king which is why sporting goods shops fetch high prices for high tech synthetics. As someone who sweats profusely more than normal, cotton is a non-starter in warm climates. Evaporation from soggy cotton simply cannot keep up with the rate that I add sweat. So a cotton t-shirt gets soaked in sweat and remains wet the whole workout session, and for days thereafter.

I used to wear tighty whities which made my gear sweat. Switched to Pategonia boxers and wow what a difference in breathability.

Wool and synthetics are similar w.r.t. comfort hence the term “smart wool”. But indeed natural wool is pricey and non-vegan.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

HUGE amounts of clothes are being trashed, many of them new; never worn. I wish I kept the link around. There were several articles in the past few years showing massive piles of clothes along the coastline of some poverty-stricken countries, with all the dyes leeching into the ocean. Fast fashion is the culprit.

Probably what disgusts me the most are political campaign t-shirts. Surely it’s the worst instance of obsolescence by design in clothing. Andrew Yang claimed to be an environmentalist yet his campaign t-shirts were made of non-sustainable cotton. Attempts to spotlight that were censored by Reddit.

If it’s OK and just doesn’t fit I donate it.

All the charities collecting clothes in my area are fussy. They want no flaws, and they want clothes to be cleaned. Apparently there is no infrastructure for repairing them or even simply washing them. Neighbors don’t bother.. they just stuff a trash bag with clothes and put it out with other trash. Sometimes someone notices that and tears open the bag and rifles through it for stuff. I’ve moved into places where the previous tenant just left clothes and blankets behind. I dumped them in the clothing donation bins anyway, without washing. But it’s dicey.. I could just be adding to their burden and have no idea if the clothes and blankets get used.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

And don’t neglect the disease factor. Recent research shows that stressed animals (both human and non-human) have weakened immune systems. And as you might expect farmed animals are stressed in high numbers. This has been linked to diseases. Diseases in non-human animals sometimes jumps to humans. There would be substantial overlap between climate activists and those valuing safety from pandemics. And indeed, that same political party in the US who fought masks and vaccines happens to be the same group of people who deny climate change.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Why not? If the right eco answer is to eat more of a certain kind of meat instead of quitting meat,

First of all that’s not likely correct info. I can’t see the uncited chart you posted but it certainly sounds untrustworthy. I’ve seen several charts in documentaries and research papers and they generally show roughly the same pattern, comparable to this chart.

But let’s say someone managed to convincingly cherry-pick some corner-case legumes that are bizarre outliers to the overall pattern. Maybe there are some rare fruits that get shipped all over the world. It certainly does not make sense to divide, disempower, and diffuse the vegan movement in order to make exotic fruit/veg X the enemy of climate action in favor of preserving chicken factory-farming. Not a fan of Ronald Regan but there is a useful quote by him:

“if you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

IOW, you’ve added counter-productive complexity to the equation at the cost of neutering an otherwise strong movement -- or in the very least failed to exploit an important asset we need for climate action. This is not an environmental activist move. It’s the move of a falsely positioned meat-eating climate denier strategically posturing.

The wise move is to consider action timing more tactfully. That is, push the simple vegan narrative for all it’s worth to shrink the whole livestock industry (extra emphasis on beef is fine but beyond that complexity works against you). No meat would be entirely eliminated of course (extinction mitigation is part of the cause anyway), but when a certain amount of progress is made only then does it make sense to go on the attack on whatever veg can really be justified as a worthy new top offender. The optimum tactful sequence of attack is not the order that appears on whatever chart you found.

The somewhat simplified take is: “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, then beat ’em”. Vegans are united and it’s foolish to disrupt that at this stage.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Since you said “car centric transport infrastructure”, and zoning, that really sounded like the US. The US has some really fucked up zoning that forces commercial buildings to be separated from residential zones, which forced the norm of driving cars to work. Europe allows homes and businesses to intermingle. In fact, it’s common for a ground floor shop to have residential dwellings on the floors above it.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Any city that still hasn’t got their shit together & built a cycling infra in the next ~5-10 yrs should be ghost-towned. Those cities are not participating in society. Nonetheless, the burden of a car commute on the environment is shadowed by the cost of heating and cooling a house for a full day.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Climate stress is a thing now. A good de-stressor IMO is to take individual actions. E.g.

Note that individual actions are obviously not a replacement for activism against systemic problems. It just gives stress relief to eliminate reasons to blame yourself while still pursuing collective climate action.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Likely, yeah, but I replied in an on-topic effort.

I mostly agree though, and oppose advertising in general. There’s nothing wrong with self-promotion of a business on the premises of the business, but apart from that most advertising forms are harmful. I would most certainly be in favor of overturning “Citizens United”, which gives corporations 1st amendment rights.

-4
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

The problem:

The web has obviously reached a high level of #enshitification. Paywalls, exclusive walled gardens, #Cloudflare, popups, CAPTCHAs, tor-blockades, dark patterns (esp. w/cookies), javascript that makes the website an app (not a doc), etc.

Status quo solution (failure):

#Lemmy & the #threadiverse were designed to inherently trust humans to only post links to non-shit websites, and to only upvote content that has no links or links to non-shit venues.

It’s not working. The social approach is a systemic failure.

The fix:

  • stage 1 (metrics collection): There needs to be shitification metrics for every link. Readers should be able to click a “this link is shit” button on a per-link basis & there should be tick boxes to indicate the particular variety of shit that it is.

  • stage 2 (metrics usage): If many links with the same hostname show a pattern of matching enshitification factors, the Lemmy server should automatically tag all those links with a warning of some kind (e.g. ⚠, 💩, 🌩).

  • stage 3 (inclusive alternative): A replacement link to a mirror is offered. E.g. youtube → (non-CF’d invidious instance), cloudflare → archive.org, medium.com → (random scribe.rip instance), etc.

  • stage 4 (onsite archive): good samaritans and over-achievers should have the option to provide the full text for a given link so others can read the article without even fighting the site.

  • stage 5 (search reranking): whenever a human post a link and talks about it, search crawlers notice and give that site a high ranking. This is why search results have gotten lousy -- because the social approach has failed. Humans will post bad links. So links with a high enshitification score need to be obfuscated in some way (e.g. dots become asterisks) so search crawlers don’t overrate them going forward.

This needs to be recognized as a #LemmyBug.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the info. Bug reported.

8
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net

I tried to create a community called buyitforlife (in part because !buyitforlife@lemmygrad.ml is apparently unreachable from here). When I click “create” the button spins for a moment but reverts back to a “create” button & nothing happens.

This was the sidebar I submitted:

For practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last.

Please be sure to tag your post based on topic in the post title.

  • [Request]
  • [Request - answered]
  • [Discussion]
  • [Review]
  • [Repair]

Like !buyitforlife@lemmygrad.ml but copied here because for whatever reason lemmygrad is unreachable.

7

When I type @user@node.tld, there is no hyperlink created. Does that mean I did not properly mention them? I also tried u/user@node.tld.

The docs do not cover this.

[-] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 year ago

Ah, I think I see what happened. A collection of accounts were used to down-vote my post then up-voted a bunch of older posts. This pushed the post off the 1st page in a way that goes unrecorded in the modlog.

9

I posted this:

https://slrpnk.net/post/2479741

It wasn’t deleted but it has been scrubbed off the timeline of https://feddit.nl/c/thenetherlands -- yet the modlog is empty. What happened here?

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/fightforprivacy@feddit.ch

cross-posted from: https://fedia.io/m/privacy/t/312963

There’s a huge chain of ATMs in Netherlands called Geldmaat which is a partnership of Ing, Rabobank, ABN AMRO, possibly others.

So I have several questions w.r.t privacy:

  • when you draw money out, do all those banks have access to the transaction?

  • if you use a Rabobank card, does Ing see the transaction?

  • if you use a foreign card that is not associated to any of the partnered banks, which bank handles the transaction?

This trend is picking up in other countries as well and it seems no articles that announce these changes are talking about the #privacy consequences.

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by activistPnk@slrpnk.net to c/fightforprivacy@feddit.ch

I went to a cafe in Amsterdam which turned out to not only be cashless, but their payment processor was “Zettle”. Zettle is owned by #PayPal (who shares customer data with over 600 corporations).

So my question is, apart from the expected privacy consequence of your bank & the recipient’s bank recording your transaction, what does Paypal walk away with? Paypal is a data-abusing US-based company. But OTOH the shop is in a #GDPR region. Does the GDPR give any protection in this case?

IIUC, customers consent by default to their data being processed by the merchant & whoever the merchant hires (Paypal), and from there whoever paypal shares with & on down the endless chain. The only notable GDPR protection I can think of is that the data must remain in the EU. So the transaction data cannot be sent to Paypal’s servers in the USA -- correct?

BTW, I asked the owner why he trusts Zettle & also why he does not accept cash. He conceded right away that he didn’t like it either. He said he’s cashless for security and that when he looked at a number of electronic payment systems, Zettle was the cheapest. For me, “cheapest” is a red flag. It’s probably cheap because the data is probably being monetized.

Concrete question: if an American feeds a US-issued credit card into a #Zettle terminal to buy a creme-filled artery-hardening pastry in Amsterdam, is there anything to stop Paypal from doing the processing on the US-side of the transaction before selling that info to a US health insurance company?

1

Crossposting here because an off-grider is relying on milk and potatoes for nutrition completeness. I suppose getting nutritional completeness with as few ingredients as possible is generally interesting to off-grid living.

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activistPnk

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