Oh yeah, the Patriot act was the biggest victory any terrorists could’ve hoped to gain over the US. People still get offended when I say that our modern security state means the terrorists, at least to some extent, won. They destroyed an important part of the fabric of our society.

Oh yeah, from the article it sounds like the entire town is funded off of high pressure civil asset forfeiture.

The politicians who created the bill to eliminate civil asset forfeiture in Nebraska are idiots though. They didn’t notice the loopholes of it still being allowed if there’s any suspicion of drugs, or if the amount is over $25k? It’s their job, and the job of their supporting staff, to read the bills they’re proposing and passing and make sure stuff like this doesn’t happen. Saying they’re upset it still exists despite their efforts just emphasizes how incompetent they are at passing working laws.

Civil asset forfeiture is a problem in a lot of states, not just Nebraska. Here’s a few from Texas, home of a lot of stuff, like some of the fastest growing cities in the US.

https://reason.com/2022/02/18/dallas-police-seized-an-airline-passengers-cash-new-information-only-makes-their-case-weaker/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2023/01/10/veterans-case-to-hold-officers-responsible-for-robbing-his-savings-can-finally-move-forward/

This and qualified immunity are the things that really strike me as big, common, root cause issues with policing.

My current hope is to have an induction/gas mix one day. Boiling and simmering and so on are just so much more efficient with induction, but I need to move and slide around my saute pans a lot. This creates two problems.

First is needing to learn a new cooking style since most induction cooktops either can’t transmit heat very fast vertically, or turn themselves off if they detect the pan isn’t in sufficient contact with the cooktop.

Second is worries I have about the durability of induction cooktops, again with regards to the same sliding and slamming (not too hard, but still) around that happens. Scratches, or even worse, cracks, depending on the exact surface of the induction top would be a huge pain.

An unrelated problem that someone has already pointed out is woks. I have a ridiculous outdoor wok burner already though, that at least solves the indoor air quality problem, at the cost of me hating the summer a little.

12ft had a few months of being great, but I think they ended up selling out or giving in to legal pressure, and doesn’t do anything on several major news outlets anymore

blackout.photon-reddit.com seems to be down for me. Any idea what’s up with that, or other places that are visualizing traffic?

This website seems to be down for me right now, dunno where else we can see comments and posts numbers. All the other blackout trackers seem to just be tracking #subreddits

I could be wrong, but my understanding from Backblaze data/articles is that if your HDD made it past 1 year, it’s probably going to last at least a decade. Drives tend to fail early if they’re going to fail.

A warranty warning is fine, though still more obtrusive than I want personally. I haven’t lost a disc at all yet tbh, including well over a decade of pretty hard use one several. I’ve got local parity and cloud backups for when that inevitably changes though.