Based on your use of the term Left Wing orthodoxy, I infer that you mean the misogynist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic communities. They still exist but have mostly moved to X.

I don’t think this really deserves an answer, but I’m going to give you one anyway. If you were actually paying attention to the current Catholic teachings you would be aware that they are extremely progressive on almost every issue except for abortion. That is appropriate, since that is in line with the actual teachings of Jesus, who was a far more radical progressive than anyone currently in US politics.

So what network are you getting your version of Catholicism from? It certainly isn’t the Pope.

AI is so far from being the main problem with our current US educational system that I’m not sure why we bother to talk about it. Until we can produce students who meet minimum standards for literacy and critical thinking, AI is a sideshow.

That is a good point. I think you’re right that being raised in an entitled environment by a socipathic parent brings out the worst in people. It also selects for the worst child being the one who wins the fight to take over the business.

American Football: Every time a player suffers a traumatic brain injury the owner takes a punch to the head from a professional heavyweight boxer.

The ratio of poor to ultra wealthy is far greater than a million to one. Other than that, the only practical reason they have for not doing it is that they still need human labor for most of what they do. That isn’t going to change anytime soon, despite AI. However, they don’t need their labor force to be free or happy, which is why the US is on the cusp of a fascist takeover.

The rule of law has largely stopped mattering to the ultra wealthy. It may occasionally inconvenience them, but they know it will never affect them in any personal way.

Not all of the ultra wealthy are socipaths. Unfortunately, terminal-stage capitalism does a surprisingly good job of selecting for sociopathy at the very top of the hierarchy. Becoming that rich requires both a strong belief that you deserve it and a disregard for how acquiring it harms others.

This is actually a triumph for Musk. SpaceX has figured out how to blow up their rockets without all the cost and time required to prepare for a launch.

I edited my previous post to replace some links that had become obsolete. PeakMesh has a great set of options, but they update their links to match their inventory and the one I got has cycled in and out a few times.

The fact that you’re asking the question means you’ve made a lot of progress already. Give yourself real credit for wanting to be a better person. A lot of people don’t ever reach that point.

I’m working on the same things myself and I don’t think there are any simple or complete solutions. All you can do is keep in mind where you want to be, look at where you are, and try to get a little closer all the time.

You can’t control how you feel, but you can control what you do about it. Don’t act on your anger. Treat everyone as if they are a decent person, even if you don’t really think they are. You don’t have to enable them or accept the destructive things they do, but show kindness when you can and show sorrow, instead of anger, when you can’t.

Do this for yourself. Even if nothing else changes, it will change you. And over time, it will have a positive effect on other people, even if you often won’t know.

I feel the same way about it. There was a time when reddit, at least large parts of it, was a fairly decent place. That gradually changed, for a lot of different reason, until it became the mess it is now.

Lemmy feels more like the early reddit, before everyone gave up on real interactions and basic civility. We have our own problems, but the decentralized model tends to work in our favor instead of against us. Any given community, or even site, can still go to hell if the participants want it to and the moderators/admins allow it. The difference is that other communities and sites are not automatically dragged down along with it.

I think it also helps that a lot of the folks here have seen things go wrong, on reddit and elsewhere, and want to do better. There is a world of difference between skepticism and cynicism. So far, we seem to be mostly coming down on the right side of that. It’s amazing how much better things are when you treat others as human beings and don’t assume that nothing really matters.

This is just an attempt to force people to “Buy American” illegal drugs.

Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Oboe, and Bassoon.

The quasar wouldn’t do anything that the vacuum hadn’t already done…

You win.

Yes. One of my wife’s medications is no longer available through our regular pharmacy. We have been able to find it at others, but not reliably.

I think I have dropped a phone either two or three times in the last fifteen years. But I still use a good case.

Carrying marshmallows at all times becomes commonplace.

One of the many things I like about Subaru is that they seem to move useful features from optional to standard, once they’ve had a chance to prove themselves. I bought an Outback in 2016 and paid extra for the EyeSight safety system. Two years later that car was destroyed in an accident (I was T-boned and rolled over twice, without anyone being hurt). I bought another Outback to replace it, but by that time the EyeSight was a standard feature. Subaru now includes EyeSight on all their cars because it saves lives.

They had done similar things with other safety features. Four-wheel disc brakes, anti-lock braking, and all-wheel drive became standard on Sabarus relatively early.

It is also worth noting that the more intrusive EyeSight features, like lane assist, are easy to turn off. There’s a button on the steering wheel for that one. Even if you turn it off, the car will still warn you if you start to cross lanes without using your turn signals, but it will not adjust for you.

There is a section on the Meshtastic site about solar powered nodes, but it doesn’t really talk about anything beyond power consumption issues: https://meshtastic.org/docs/solar-powered/

The unit I bought was the Ultimate Meshtastic Solar Radio Node from PeakMesh on Etsy. I couldn’t be happier with it, but there are a lot of great options on Etsy and elsewhere.

If you plan on buying a pre-built unit there is almost nothing you have to do beyond naming and installing it. Despite there being a Role called Repeater, the common wisdom is that you should leave the role as Client. The only trick is to set up your regular radio so it can act as a remote admin for the repeater. Go into Radio Configuration -> Security and look for the “Add” button under Admin Key. Put the public key of your regular radio in there and save it. That will give you access to the repeater without needing to be within Bluetooth range.

If you’re going to built your own node, you’re already beyond me. :-) The one I got uses a WisBlock chipset for maximum power efficiency. It has two 21700 batteries and two 1-Watt solar cells. I think the WisBlock already know how to handle the solar and batteries. If not, you could look at the Heltec T114, which I know can do that and has separate power inputs for each.

I would be happy to answer any questions you have. Just be aware that I’m pretty new to this too.

I cheated. :-) After spending a lot of time trying to think about where I could mount it on my house I realized that my friend, who lives a block away, is at the very top of the highest ridge in the area. So we mounted in on her house instead. We immediately went from seeing the three radios we own to seeing more than twenty, most of the time. And we started seeing people one or two hops away.

Then someone a few miles away put up a repeater of their own. It’s well within range of ours, so now everyone who can get to either can communicate with everyone in the other area. There are other parts of town that have their own growing meshes. We hope those gaps can be closed to interconnect everything here.

I do still intend to talk with some of the local radio and tv stations. There are three huge broadcast antennas near us (because we’re near the top of a ridge). I’m hoping one of them might be willing to host a repeater, as a public service. Even if they don’t want it on their big masts, putting it on a small tower or on the roof of one of their buildings would get us above almost everything. I know that one of them is already hosting an Amateur Radio repeater.

It blows my mind how easy it is to build a completely self-sufficient repeater node. The one we have now can get a day’s worth of charge from just a few hours of daylight. And it’s under a fairly solid tree canopy. It can also operate for around a month without any additional charging, so even a week of terrible weather isn’t a problem.

It is also easy to configure a node to allow remote access directly through the radio mesh. So I don’t have to get within Bluetooth range if I need to change something in the configuration.