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Joined 15 days ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2025

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  • First things first: put real feet on your couch so you’re not doing more damage.

    The broader the better.

    Some people already talked about ironing and it can make a difference but you gotta get down to the wood surface with sandpaper, learn how to iron wood then successfully actually do it.

    Dents as big as these would require multiple passes with the iron over time.

    Your real best bet would be to call a handyman or more likely a flooring place and have them give you an estimate on repair. They’ll be able to tell you if you have some kind of tongue in groove, roll or actual hardwood floor and explain what your options are. You’ll also know how much you’re gonna be paying to get whatever the landlord is holding back from them.

    If you do call someone out there, find out what they charge for an estimate and pay them more on top of it in cash. People hate giving estimates because it’s someone shopping around who’s gonna try to get them down to the lowest price and has no consideration for their expertise and experience. Being willing to pay in cash and then some cements you as a customer, not a looky-loo.



  • None.

    Businesses don’t respond to “minor” shoplifting because of an impact to their bottom line. Retail has an idea called “float” that’s meant to account for all the losses not covered elsewhere by spoilage, damage, actual confirmed theft, etc and its always an order of magnitude larger than the volume of loss from shoplifting.

    The response to shoplifting is primarily driven by insurance costs. It’s why the corner store down the street might hire some goon to stand around during peak hours and places that have to negotiate with insurance on millions of square footage spread over tens of thousands of locations tip the scales of local policy.

    If they don’t do something about the “shoplifting problem”(not a problem, not a serious impact to their bottom line), their insurance plan that covers all the stores for hundreds of millions in damages and costs as much in premiums is null and void.

    Okay but here’s why it won’t do what you’re asking about specifically: because not only does your shoplifting not impact the bottom line, the stores claiming there’s a shoplifting problem and then using their insurance premiums to justify draconian measures were already planning on implementing those draconian measures before they came up with the idea of shoplifting.

    Pushing security system upgrades across the board outfits all stores with high definition cameras and rack mount processing equipment that can do object, facial and gait recognition. It creates a stream of data that the store has complete ownership of and can use for whatever it wants. It’s the first step to reversing one area that big box retail has lost ground to online retail in: custom pricing.

    Custom pricing is arguably more powerful in the physical domain. Websites adopted it because getting people to buy shit they didn’t really want was already so hard that they said “shit, we got all this data, hey Jim, go infer what price this person will buy this stuff at!” And it worked.

    Physical retailers don’t have the convenience of letting you shop from your couch, but they do have a much higher conversion rate (that’s how often a sale gets made to someone who doesn’t want to buy) when controlled for other factors. The conversion rate thing is under contention in some circles and sales and marketing people get all their news and job training from magazines so expect funny headlines if you look this up.

    The point is that if you are online temporarily hovering over a marked down socket set you are only thinking about the price. If you’re stopped in target in front of a marked down socket set it’s cheap and immediate.

    It’s the same logic behind the candy at the grocery checkout.

    So if retailers can get the data that lets them fiddle with prices depending on who’s asking then they stand to make a tremendous amount of sales.

    All that is to say that no one cares if you shoplift and so you won’t actually make any difference by doing so.

    If you just wanna shoplift, do it. Your teenage girl ancestors are smiling down upon you as you palm that eye pencil.



  • It’s not p2p but at least many years ago:

    SMS.

    If the Internet outage is local then the towers would still work and you’d be able to get texts. I went through a few storms where wired home internet was down, the towers weren’t giving me a data connection (no mobile web browsing or anything), but I was able to send and receive texts.

    If you really care about what you’re asking after, do what someone else said and get a radio license. It’s 150 year old technology and every time something happens radio operators pop up some kind of emergency communications or bridge to the internet through repeaters or something.








  • None of them are grammatically correct because none of them are complete thoughts let alone sentences.

    All three try to specify the particular monkey by enumerating that it can see your ears but do no more.

    Take away the description of the monkeys ability to see your ears and what you’re left with is “the monkey”.

    “The monkey” isn’t a sentence.

    If you are the subject and what’s happening is that you’re wondering if the monkey can see your ears then the sentence you want is “I’m wondering if the monkey can see my ears.”

    If, as I suspect, you’re using “the monkey whose ability to see my ears I’m wondering about” as the subject of some larger more complex and cool sentence then you gotta lay out that part before someone can give solid grammatical advice.


  • No.

    E: okay, it’s not fair to just tell you the answer when you’re already broadcasting a desire to read a bunch of stuff so here goes:

    If you want to see analysis and consideration of the right from an outside perspective you ought to be on hexbear or grad. Both instances don’t have near as many sky is falling posts or comments and trend towards figuring out why something is happening within the framework of doctrinaire Marxism Leninism or imperialism or at least what should be done to mitigate the effects rather than having a big ol hissy fit over it.

    If, as is implied by your post and comments (“ good spirited debate”, “ opposing and novel”, celebrated and debated“, “ worthy of discussion or debate”), you just wanna see people fight each other online then check out reddit, x (the everything app) and facebook where that happens often.

    If you have, and this is a reach, the desire to understand people who you think are on that right wing spectrum around you in real life, go talk to them. People love telling you what they think and when they don’t it’s because they know something you don’t or they’re up to something.


  • There’s a lot of answers itt but heres a simpler one:

    If you want to prevent people in power from having access to communications there are two methods employed, broadly speaking:

    The first is to make a very secure, zero knowledge, zero trust, zero log system so that when the authorities come calling you can show them your empty hands and smirk.

    Signal doesn’t actually do this, but they’re closer to this model than the second one I’m about to describe. Bear in mind they’re a us company so when the us authorities come to their door or authorities from some nation the us has a treaty with come to their door signal is legally required to comply and provide all the information they have.

    The second is to simply not talk to the authorities. Telegram was closer to this model than signal, using a bunch of different servers in nations with wildly different extradition and information sharing mechanisms in order to make forcing them to comply with some order Byzantine to the point of not being worth it.

    Eventually the powers that be got their shit together and put hands on telegrams owner so now they’re complying with all lawful orders and a comparison of the tech is how you’d pick one.

    The technology behind the two doesn’t matter really but default telegram is less “secure” than default imessage (I was talking with someone about it so it’s on the old noggin’).


  • It’s just as well, rcs in America only has guarantees of features if you’re on the same servers as the other people, so there’s a big split between the Samsung and google rcses with all kinds of weird mixed media stuff if you’re both on gchat or the Samsung fork and nothing but maybe higher resolution pictures if you’re not.

    It’s part of why I’m so willing to recommend imessage because for better or worse in America it’s the defacto standard.



  • Yeah per text charges are really uncommon in the anglosphere, although the pay as you go carriers and plans have data limits.

    If you’re on contract or renewing contract with an American carrier they’ll usually take literally any phone you have in trade for their lowest cost ios or android device, your choice. I took them up on it several years ago because the gimmie device was the only physically small iphone at the time. Sometimes it adds a couple of bucks to your monthly bill if you pick one with a little more storage or whatever but that amounts to them selling you the phone for fifty bucks or so over two years.

    Hell, usually if you’re signing up for a new account they’ll offer some android and ios phones for free to get you on contract.

    Half of each person is getting them to use encrypted chat with you one on one and half is getting the group chats to use it. If you can knock out half the battle most of the time then you should do it.

    In my experience ios and android users are equally open/resistant to using some new thing.

    I recognize that for a particular type of threat model or ideology all proprietary software amounts to the same level of vulnerability. The op only asked about encrypted chat. The implication that I picked up on and responded to was that the op is in America or concerned about American cell network compromises and wanted to address that.

    That’s a real simple threat to get past, just go to whatever is encrypted that the most people use.

    Most people use imessage, so that’s what I suggested.