Hexbear’s resident machinist, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades
Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.>
but then how do you weld in the post apocalypse.
(okay it still conventionally relies on brazing / welding, but I don’t think it is an absolute requirement of the technique. Though brazing makes for a very strong bond between the lugs and the tubes, they could conceivably fastened by bolts or rivets)
I guess im just not seeing the maintenance issue as much as anyone else.
I agree. Cars are absolutely ubiquitous. Nearly every tool one would ever need to maintain a bicycle can be found in any suburban garage. Not to mention, there are a handful of auto mechanic shops and hardware stores in every single town where more niche tools can be found. A calamity of one sort or another which severely disrupts supply chains might make niche materials and gases more difficult to obtain, but even in the event of a global nuclear war, there would be many surviving manufacturing facilities and the means to produce these things. There is an inconceivable amount of manufacturing capacity which is dedicated to consumer slop and industrial supply. A lot of production facilities dedicated to cranking out Labubus and golf carts and robotic vacuum cleaners can be re-purposed to produce staple items like tires, wheels, and ball bearings. Larger plants making automobiles, oil and gas machinery, etc can also be repurposed.
It won’t exactly be efficient, but the obliteration of production for exchange value would free an unbelievable amount of productive capacity. If the markets which make these factories profitable go up in smoke, the buildings and machinery will still be there.
Wooden wheels work for a bicycle, it just sucks compared to rubber.
Compared to the old-school road tires which run at 90+ PSI, a wooden wheel might actually be more comfortable (ok this is a joke). There is a lot of potential in plastic recycling as well. Butyl (rubber) inner tubes are already being replaced with TPU (a flexible thermoplastic also used in 3D printing) in performance road/gravel bicycles.
You will probably want a set of “helping hands.” The old-school ones are garbage. Get one with a metal plate and magnetic clips you can move around.
it’s hard to imagine how the Dems can lose the next election.
Winning majorities in Congress this November only to use their position to approve the 1.5T military budget, collaborate on all of the nakedly evil imperialist shit, and ramp up domestic anticommunism and survaillence for the next two years. Bail out Nvidia and all the AI companies a month before nominating a Gavin Newsom / Josh Shapiro ticket in another blatantly rigged primary.
The Liberals have always believed this. From their perspective, progress manifests only through reform of the institutions. As far as they’re concerned, anyone who takes action on the belief that the existing institutions are irredeemable and beyond reform is an enemy of progress.
The Sisyphean nature of reform in financialized liberal democracies makes them incredibly defensive and bitter. Their plans for reform have been so thoroughly sidelined by the domination of capital that they are operating on time scales of the Bene Gesserit. In 100 years - as long as they don’t lose a single election along the way - they will have placed the right number of people in the right places to begin reforming the Supreme Court and to initiate some hearings about the possibility of funding research for policy incentivizing private development of clean energy.
Their lives are dedicated to pushing the bolder one inch further up the hill, and when it inevitably starts tumbling downward they will blame everyone who told them it was going to happen.
I think it has some limited strategic merit. By doing this, they are ensuring that no country can cut side deals with Iran for oil/gas/helium/fertilizer deliveries. I think they fear diplomatic normalization and the establishment of neutral (from the US POV) payment mechanisms more than the Hormuz being shut entirely. The play here is to ensure the US remains the sole arbiter of who can trade what with Iran. It is a desperate attempt to keep the sanctions regime from crumbling by fait accompli.
It doesn’t help them dislodge or subjugate the IRI (sanctions and an economic blockade were already the status quo antibellum), but it will definitely discourage other nations who are more eager to shift their economic alliances in the short term now that they are starving for these resources.
It also gives them a bargaining chip in the next round of negotiations (not soon, but inevitable). Iran has effectively established their control over the Hormuz, but the US will attempt to use this counter-blockade to trade for some other more meaningful conditions.
In the long run, there is probably a need to transform the global US sanctions regime from one of paper and policy to one of physical obstruction, as many alternative payment networks and counter-alliances continue to develop and mature. Each year the US is less capable of relying on aligned banks and institutions to prevent transactions they don’t like from taking place. We kind of see this happening already with the destruction of Nordstream and the naval blockade in the Caribbean. War is sanctions by other means.
GAME OF THE YEAR
Just installed Debian on my laptop. It is done.
The rigged election was the Democratic Primary, which they used to coronate a senile old man with stage four cancer while retaliating against any challengers because the prospect of letting voters decide who should lead the party is absolutely intolerable.
The only potential issue with polarized glasses is if you are a dentist who uses a cycle computer to monitor your heart rate, cadence, speed, and dual side power meters while riding on your cervelo. It makes it hard to read the screen.
I ride with polarized glasses all the time. Keeps the bugs out of my eyes (more important than the UV protection IMO).
Mr. Measurehead is helping me find my lost racial caste
for any crime he may have committed
The real blame rests on Gerald Ford who pardoned Nixon under the same framework to prevent the Department of Justice from investigating any of his official crimes. The notion of a serious liberal democracy was certainly buried at this point. Anyone pretending otherwise is full of shit. We have had full indisputable executive impunity since then.
“Technology is apolitical” bros can bite me.
Send them one of these
And if they reply, send them one of these
Layoffs have been brutal in the factory. A handful of people every week.
Hell yeah. Another clown car primary.
Yeah tbf I only use Fedora for VMs and to recommend to non-technical people so I’m not the best judge of its quality. But my experiences of it have been smooth + no complaints from the non-technical folks I’ve recommended Fedora to who have gone through and installed it.
This has been my experience more or less for the past decade. I moved to Gentoo on my desktop in 2020 so I could have better control of all the bells and whistles (trying to balance web dev, game dev, ham radio, astronomy, CAD/CAM, GIS, and gaming on one machine), but up to today Fedora has been what I run on anything I don’t want to fuck around with (like a laptop that I want to stow for a couple months, update the night before a trip, and not deal with any bullshit when I should be packing). I’ve also set it up for a few coworkers in addition to my brother, and they’ve been fine. I was truly shocked to hit so many problems in the installer this go-around. It is very uncharacteristic of my experience overall.
X dot com is doing the same thing with Grok