I have one. I hated the stock skin. I like having the apps I use regularly groups together by purpose on my home screen so I can get to them quickly. I immediately re-skinned it.

Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry

I fail to see any downside to this.

Which “legal experts” are claiming Trump could be facing prison? If they actually have JDs, they should be disbarred for incompetence.

SCOTUS has already ruled on this; the president has very, very broad immunity from any criminal prosecution. The case was dropped in Florida because his stealing highly classified documents was an “official action”; if that can be handwaved away, then so can defrauding the country with a shitcoin pump-and-dump.

Calling the interim president of Syria a ‘former terrorist’ is… Well, it’s something. I notice that not too many people are talking about how a large number of people that are in high-level Israeli positions were also terrorists that killed British diplomat families when Israel was trying to become independent. But when it’s a brown dude…

I’m a former body piercer (from, like, 25 years ago, but still). My suggestion would be waiting until you are no longer getting any discharge from the piercing site. After one month you should still be cleaning off dried lymph and serum from around your piercings. Until there has been nothing to clean off for at least a week straight, I would not recommend changing jewelry. While the fistula-the ‘tube’ of skin going through your earlobe–is forming, it’s very delicate, and will be easily damaged by changing jewelry.

How long that takes is going to depend on your body; some people will heal very quickly, other very slowly. I don’t recall that my ear lobes took more than a few months to fully heal. I have two piercings that I’ve had for decades now that still aren’t fully healed, and probably never will.

As far as cleaning goes, saline or plain water and mild hand soap are your best bets. Alcohol, iodine, Hibiclens, hydrogen peroxide, etc. are all disinfectants, and will harm the piercing as it’s trying to heal. (Hydrogen peroxide is no longer recommended for cleaning wounds, period.)

I would love to see a complete remake of Daggerfall with the same randomly generated dungeons; I’m not sure that the random landscape and dungeon generation would work with the way games are programmed now though.

Come to think of it, re-doing Morrowind, Arena, Battlespire, and Redquard would be neat, too.

Oriental shorthair. They sound very unusual too.

Good managers are able to allocate resources–particularly human resources–to complete a task. I know that it’s a common trope to think that managers only take value instead of adding it, but it’s simply not true; processes and production are less efficient without effective management.

People working in production shouldn’t have to deal with clients/customers, nor should they be expected to coordinate with vendors, or even all other people involved in production. Production people are hired for their skill/expertise in production, so they should be left to do their job rather than taking on more jobs.

The flip side is that ineffective management can make processes and production less efficient than they would be without any management at all.

Drive to get groceries? You’re dependent on most of those same factors.

I said I wanted enough arable land to grow my own.

Water? Same. Even if you have a well, you still don’t want that well to be polluted by people around you.

See above.

Shelter? You presumably don’t want a neighbor’s rickety structure to fall over on yours during a storm.

See above. I don’t intend to have neighbors within a mile.

Then what you’re asking for is a more fractured human society.

No, I’m saying I want energy independence. I don’t want to be dependent on the vagaries of service providers, or politicians that decide one day that renewables are great, and then the next day fuck it all drill baby drill, or a utility–or government–that refuses to invest the necessary capital into infrastructure to maintain capability. I’ll pay my taxes so that shit can get done IF that ends up being the will of the people, but I don’t see the point of being dependent on a system that I both need and have no control over.

It doesn’t take advantage of economies of scale very well.

You missed my point; I was talking about being entirely off-grid there. So unless the homeowner in question also has a large industrial building with a flat roof, we’re back to where I said that they didn’t have enough generative capacity to not be reliant on a power grid, at least in part.

If what you want is energy independence from your local power utility,

No, I want energy independence period. Not just from the local utility, I want independence from a co-op as well. I want to have my own well so I’m not relying on someone else to deliver water. I want enough arable land to grow most, or all, of my own food. This isn’t compatible with living in a city. (And part of the reason I want to generate my own power is so that I can use all electric vehicles.)

Without reading the article, I could already see what the problem was.

Unless you have capital to invest, you can’t expand or improve the power grid. That capital can either come from the gov’t–through taxation–or from private industry. If you, personally, have enough capital to do so, you can build a fully off-grid system, so that you aren’t dependent on anyone else. But then if shit happens, you also can’t get help from anyone else. (Also, most houses in urban areas do not have enough square feet of exposure to the sun to generate all of their own power.)

Fundamentally, this is a problem that can only be solved by regulation, and regulation is being gutted across the board in the US.

Under that criteria, there are a grand total of zero areas that can accommodate them. Same goes for dogs.

But that’s a stupid criteria, because cats are tamed, and thrive indoors.

Hope that helps.

If someone intentionally caused harm to any of my cats, I live near a large national forest, and once you get a few hundred yards off a trail, no one is going to find a body.

Who tf gets a pet cat and doesn’t let it outside?

People that love their cats and don’t want them to die young. Outdoor cats live an average of 2-5 years, indoor-only cats live an average of 10-15 years. By allowing cats outside, they’re exposed to pathogens, parasites, and dangers that they wouldn’t otherwise experience. In my area, there are coyotes, bobcats, rattlesnakes, hawks, and owls, all of which will quite happily make a meal of a cat. There are also cars; they don’t tend to be able to stop on a dime.

But isn’t that also true with snakes? All of the times that I’ve stumbled across copperheads or rattlesnakes, they’ve just wanted to do their thing, and go on their way. They didn’t want to bite me. And 99.999% of the time, as long as you back off, the snake isn’t going to do anything.

…Except there’s that .001% of the time when a snake is going to chase someone, and attack them. And that makes everyone terrified of all snakes, because they never know which one is going to be that .001%.

It’s understandable, but it’s not fair, and yeah, it sucks to have people think you’re a threat when you’re trying hard not to be.

Related to this - all fabrics used by the military need to be both Berry-amendment compliant, and NIR compliant. What that means is that, first, they need to be made in the USA (because you don’t want to outsource military equipment if you end up going to war with the country that makes shit for you), and second, it needs to not show up like a sore thumb under infrared light, A lot of fabrics and dyes will show up as hot spots under IR, which means that they show up great with night vision. NIR-compliant fabrics will still appear camouflaged under IR.

That’s why those nylon-cotton blend Crytek combat pants are something like $450, when the Chinese knock-offs made in poly-cotton are about $70.

What up, fucko?

Facial structure is very different between Devon and Cornish; Devons have very round faces. Cornish tend to have much sharper, more delicate features. I think that the term for Devon Rexes is ‘cobby’.

I know a couple of Finns on a discord server. They seem like pretty friendly people to me. I dunno, maybe it helps to have some kind of common interest first? One way I’ve found to meet people–although not always people I want to meet–is to see what other people are bringing to the gun range, and then ask them about what they’ve got, assuming that it’s something neat. That’s how I got to try out a CZ Shadow 2 Compact (…and I’m now waiting for the one I ordered to arrive!), and got to talk to a cool RSO.

I think the Finns I know would be happy to talk about things like that, and would probably even let you shoot a magazine or so.