Apprenticeships are damn near impossible to find in the US, period. Usually people go to trade schools.

No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.

Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.

Deviant Olam is another good one for physical security. After seeing a few of his videos on gun “safes”, I looked into genuine gun safes (TRTL 30x6 or better, and/or DoD-approved weapons containers) with S&G mechanical locks, and the prices are eye watering. An S&G lock by itself ain’t too bad–about $600, IIRC–but the safe body itself was $15k+, easy. …Without shipping included, since there’s no fucking way I’m getting that into my basement myself. Most gun “safes” are not even UL-listed Residential Security Containers, and you get into $2000+ for one that meets that basic, very, very minimum level of protection. (Yes, I looked in the local gun stores that carry them.) The fact that most gun “safes” aren’t capable of resisting an 18" prybar that’s used continuously for 15 minutes is not a pleasant thought to think about.

The first WTC bombing was in 1993, and Oklahoma City was 1995.

Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably get an Apple device.

Sadly, I also don’t like spending money. :P You used to be able to make Hackintoshes, but Apple tends to break them with every software update.

I had been thinking about getting an IoT Enterprise LTSC release of Windows and manually adding the components that I needed. Might still do that with dual boot.

There are a lot of ways to get around that, such as:

I’m doing all of that except the last one already. As has been noted in many other places, Windows itself is now in the business of serving ads directly, and it looks like that’s getting harder and harder to disable. I managed to mostly lock down the Pro release of Win 10 that I’m on right now, but Win 11 will make that much, much harder. If it weren’t for security issues surrounding end of product life, I wouldn’t switch versions at all.

C’est la mort.

But yeah, I’ll def. look for a user-friendly version of Linux when I build my next system in a few months.

I have to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro every day for my day job. I have to keep up-to-date with my versions, because clients send me files that use features in the latest releases, and not being up-to-date means that things don’t render correctly. (I’m super-pissed that I have to update since Adobe dropped all support for Pantone colors abut a year (?) ago.)

I use Corel Painter 2022 and a Wacom pen display for fun. My guess is that a pen display might get a little weird in Linux, but the one I have is not cutting edge at least.

Yeah, don’t use that for regular work, that’s an uber-paranoid distro that’s intentionally locked down, which means things are likely going to be more difficult to get working.

I know, I know, but I liked being functionally untrackable online, and not getting ads shoved down my throat (…despite working in advertising…) all the time. It’s neat, but almost everything online seems to have privacy-invading features so deeply embedded that the browser built into Tails just can’t use them at all.

Allow me to piggyback on this a bit, s’il vous plait.

Is there a Linux distribution that will run Adobe CC out of the box, games from Steam, and VR headsets? I need a new desktop badly, but I need to be able to use Adobe products as part of my job. (No, I can’t switch to GNU products, because I get files from clients, and I have to be able to work to industry standards.) I’ve used Tails before, which is not a user-friendly product, and it doesn’t play nicely with any other software.

Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

A historical Jesus might have had a small cult following, enough that the Romans couldn’t ignore him. He would have been talking about Jewish liberation from the Roman rulers, and how he was called by god. And then boom, he gets executed. His followers probably believed that he was actually the son of god, sent to liberate them. But now he’s dead. How do they reconcile the belief with the reality? So they retcon everything; he was a spiritual messiah, and he’ll eventually return and free the Jews, once the people are spiritually prepared.

You can see traces of this in the way that the four gospels don’t agree with each other, but they all include bits of prophecies from earlier scripture about the messiah. They were written with the intent of making Jesus appear to fit in to older prophecies about who the messiah would be, since he ended up not being the liberator that they had been expecting.

You can see similar behaviors in cults now. It’s clearly visible with Q; Trump was supposed to be their messiah, but he hasn’t managed to make any of their prophetic beliefs come true. So they’ve invented reasons why Trump’s holy will has been thwarted, and changed their history, rather than accepting that he was a false messiah.

Interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of my text messages to my partner fail to send as well, and I also swear frequently and voluminously. I should test this and see if this is what is going on with my carrier.

Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings

I wanted to add to this because it might catch someone else.

I live in a cedar cabin in the mountains. The wood is untreated on the inside. Cedar is not usually attractive to insects that eat wood, but, well… Every year since we moved there, we’d get small amounts of frass (chewed-up bits of wood) from insects eating the exposed roof beams (!!!) of our house. I would spray the beams with permethrin, a bunch of dead ant-looking things would be on the floor the next few days, and that would be it for the year.

This year I called an exterminator, since it keeps happening. He said that it wasn’t termites (yay!), but thought that it was some kind of beetle. (Powder post beetles are a huge problem in our area.) He said we had two options: we could either fumigate the entire house (cost: about $10k, since the whole house would need to be tented), or we could paint all the woodwork in the hose with a 1:1 solution of Bora-Care and water. Bora-Care is a disodium octaborate tetrahydrate and glycerin solution, and should poison the wood for pests, without being toxic to people or animals once it’s dried. (I may also have to drill the beams in inject a similar product in order to get deep enough penetration.)

This should be a one-and-done process; I should not need to repeat it.

As far as I know, we simply don’t have directly contemporary, first-hand evidence of him. Even the most ‘contemporary’ accounts of him that still exist were written at least 50 years after he would have died, and those are quite cursory. Perhaps primary sources were lost–or intentionally destroyed when they didn’t align with beliefs–or perhaps they never existed. There’s not even much evidence for Pontius Pilate (I think one source mentioning that he was recalled to Rome and executed for incompetence?), and there should be, given that he was a Roman official.

People that study the history of the bible–as in, the historical bible, not the bible as a religious text–tend to believe that a historical Jesus existed, even if they don’t believe that he was divine.

IMO, the most likely explanation is that Jesus was yet another in a long-line of false messiahs, and was summarily executed by Rome for trying to start yet another rebellion. Since cult members tend to be unable to reconcile reality with their beliefs, they could have reframed their beliefs to say that he was a spiritual messiah, rather than a physical messiah.

You are confusing actual results with people being on the right side of a conflict.

No, I’m not. The NRA is not on the right side; they’re on the side of authoritarians. They’re on the side of the boot that is kicking you in the face. They’re on the side of the cops that will be the ones disarming people, and on the side of the christian nationalists that want to take guns from everyone but white evangelical christians. The NRA does not believe that the second amendment exists for ALL people, regardless of race, religion, age, disability, sex, gender identity, or sexual orientation, and they’ve never even tried to really conceal that. That’s why they are silent when someone like Filandro Castile is murdered by a cop.

When the NRA fixes it’s own shit so that, as an organization, they truly believe that 2A rights exist for everyone, and are willing to treat the disarming of any group as a crime, then we can talk. But that’s not who they are now, and it’s not likely that this is who they will be at any time in the future, since they’ve made it nearly impossible for grassroots change to happen within the org.

The NRA hasn’t done jack shit in decades. As I said, the NRA did their level best to kill Heller v. D.C. before it even got off the ground, and that was the single most important 2A win in the last 50 years.

Don’t give me that bullshit about them being the line between the US and tyranny, when they won’t even speak up against tyranny when cops murder legally armed citizens.

I have a brand (yeah, the kind done with red-hot metal); my impression was that burning skin and subcutaneous fat smelled like a delicious pork roast.

So you’re saying my choices are either to side with fascists that want to take rights from people, or fascists that want to take rights from different people?

And no, it’s not a zero-sum game. My parents were life-long Republicans. They switched in the 2016 election, and have been voting mostly Democratic since then. I was raised in a deeply conservative religion, and was raised to be homophobic; I have changed, because I learned differently. The game, as you say, isn’t zero-sum; it’s persuasion. If you aren’t being persuasive, then you need to find better ways of reaching people, and yelling and telling them they’re terrible ain’t doing it. You certainly don’t win with circular firing squads.

the only beneficent quality of republicans is supporting the NRA,

Look, I like guns far, far more than most people, but I draw the line at the NRA, and Wayne LaPierre’s suit-fetish. Most people that work on 2A issues at a local level will tell you that the NRA will swoop in after a deal has already been made, and fuck everything up. If you look at the history of Heller v. D.C., you’ll find that the NRA tried to kill the suit before it even got off the ground, because they were afraid it would hurt their funding.

If you want to support 2A causes, the Firearms Policy Coalition is on of the few right now that’s both effective, and appears to avoid other ‘culture wars’ (e.g., “anti-wokeism”) nonsense. At a non-policy level, the various John Brown Gun Clubs are doing good work, the Liberal Gun Club is helping create a space for people that are both pro-gun and generally identify as left of center, and the SRA is pretty okay once you get past the tankies.

It’s even weirder because Michigan is purple-trending-blue. I’m surprised that it’s not more blue, considering how much a part labor unions played in building the industrial base that used to exist in the urban areas. So I don’t know how they think that this is gonna “own teh libz” when they’ve already lost the state. Their own party is in tatters; it’s been run by someone so extreme in the state that no one was donating money to them.

And who, exactly, defines “degenerate”? Because I know there are quite a lot of people that would define “degenerate” as anyone that is non-Christian, LGBTQ+ or LGBTQ-affirming, or non-“white” (however they’re currently defining “whiteness”).

The only way you deny these so-called degenerates a say in society is by intentionally disenfranchising them, in much the same way that Republicans have made an effort to deny non-white people a say in society through gerrymandering and voter-ID laws. (Or, earlier, through “literacy tests” and the like, or simply murdering people that tried to get black people registered to vote.)

I have not. On the other hand, I’m familiar with Armin Miewes, who spent a fairly long time in prison for murdering and eating someone that wanted to be murdered and eaten as a sexual kink.

there is no species barrier

There are a few things to unpack here.

First, most of the bacteria, et al. that we have to worry about right now from meat production and consumption are already well-adapted to human hosts. The solution, in most cases, is to adequately cook the meat, and to practice very basic food safety at home. Most food-borne illnesses are the result of inadequate cooking time and temperature. Other toxins–like botulism–are actually a biproduct of bacteria that colonize meat during putrefaction; you can kill the bacteria that produce the botulism toxin, but once it’s present, there’s not a lot you can do. (This is why you refrigerate meat. Clostridium botulinum reproduction is primarily room temperature, and anaerobic, so it’s mostly a problem with canned goods that weren’t sterilized properly during canning.)

The same solution to bacterial contamination in meat now would be the most effective solution for any lab-grown meat: cook your food correctly.

you’ll create a swamp of human meat factory farms that use huge amounts of antiviral, antifungal and antibiotic agents

I think that it’s unlikely that, aside from cleaning agents, that you would need antibacterial/antifungal/virucidal agents in producing lab-grown meat of any kind. Many of the most effective cleaning agents work because there’s no way to evolve protections against them. 70% isopropyl alcohol for instance; any resistance that bacteria evolved would also severely inhibit their ability to have any other functions. You can use radiation, or heat + steam (or even dry heat) to sterilize all of your equipment prior to introducing cells, and you have more control over the nutrient bath that it grows in. Depending on the nutrient bath, you can sterilize that by filtration; .22μm filtration is the standard for sterilizing IV and IM compounded medications. (.22μm is smaller than all bacteria, and many viruses. Molecules will still pass through that filter pore size though. You can also get filters down to .15μm if you need to remove more viruses.) Cows, chickens, etc. use so many antibacterials because they aren’t able to put them in ideal conditions and maintain the desired production levels.

I think that the lack of a species barrier is a far, far smaller risk than you might believe it to be.

BUT.

I think that there is one enormous risk: prions. Misfolded proteins are exceptionally hard to detect, and anything that denatures them will denature other proteins as well. The risk is likely very, very low, given how uncommon prion diseases are, but it’s definitely a risk when you can grow a culture indefinitely.