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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • It basically is saying that if you have more money then you have more “votes”.

    That’s simply true. It doesn’t do anyone any good to disregard the facts.

    Or to put it in another way: If you have more money you matter more.

    That abstraction doesn’t help much. And first of all, it’s more accurate to derive the statement “If you have more money then you have more influence”.

    It’s still a shitty status quo, but it is what it is. The worse thing you can do is tell people not to boycott shit products on the basis of rejecting reality. It’d be like telling people not to vote in elections because their vote is a drop in the ocean.

    Some people vote for democrats, then they cancel their own vote by getting their internet service from Spectrum, buying fuel from Chevron for their car, shipping their packages using FedEx, getting their phone service from AT&T, banking at PNC Bank, flying on Boeing planes, shopping on Amazon, doing their web searches on a Microsoft syndicate’s site (e.g. DDG), buying Sony devices… etc. They either have no clue that most of their voting is actually for the republicans, or they think that drop-in-the-ocean vote that comes once in 4 years somehow carries more weight than the daily votes they cast with reckless disregard.

    Greg Abbott’s war chest is mostly fed by oil companies. If you buy fuel for a car, you help Greg Abbott and other republicans. And if you buy from Chevron, you give the greatest support to republicans (Chevron is an ALEC member).




  • Ending capitalism is not the /only/ way. Within a capitalistic system, you can boycott shit. Most consumers are pushovers but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m boycotting hundreds of shitty companies. Off the top of my head:

    • Amazon
    • Cloudflare
    • Microsoft
    • Facebook
    • Google
    • Apple
    • (surveillance advertisers in general)
    • (all closed-source s/w)
    • HP
    • Proctor & Gamble
    • Unilever
    • all ALEC members (American Express, Anheuser Busch, Boeing, CenturyLink, Charter Communications, Chevron, FedEx, Motorola, PNC bank, Sony, TimeWarner)
    • many shitty banks
    • Paypal
    • AT&T
    • GMA members (Coke, Pepsi, Kraft - Heinz, Kellogg’s, General Mills, McCormick, Hormel, Smucker)
    • BetterThanCashAlliance.org members (visa, mastercard, unilever) – war on cash
    • Bayar-Monsanto
    • Dupont
    • Hershey
    • Nestlé
    • Exxon/Mobil
    • Comcast
    • Koch
    • Home Depot
    • Lowes
    • …etc

    Those are all shitty companies that significantly worsen the world. Giving money or data to any of them contributes to enshitification of the world.

    Of course it’s an option to stop supporting assholes. Become ethical. Be the change you want to see.



  • I could not pull it out with my hands after tapping it in. But to be clear, there’s only a sheer force to deal with, and it’s light.

    I cut a bicycle axle bolt in half, and embedded it in the brick so there is a bicycle sprocket on the wall. Then a chain wraps another sprocket, which turns a shaft that goes all the way though the wall to the other side, where it connects to a right-angle gearbox, which attaches to a water valve. It’s lightweight overall… just the weight of a sprocket, chain, and a small decorative wood thing out of wood to serve as a handle.

    This might come a bit too late but why didn’t you just get threaded rod and use one of these instead?

    I did not know anchors like that existed for machine bolts. That’s good to know! However, it would not have helped in this situation. The bicycle axle has non-standard threading (~9mm bolt with a thread pitch that’s 2 steps away from the norm). Since it had a special nut that interfaced to ball bearings, I could not bring in a standard bolt or threaded rod. And the threaded portion of the axle was short enough that no threads could have gone into the wall. I could have added threads to the bare portion, but my die set skips the ø=9mm size.

    I was asking more for future reference – whether or not I should ever repeat this. And I think you answered that. Even if I get lucky in the future on getting a perfect fit at that moment, temp changes could blow it. I guess I’ll assume anchors (chemical and mechanical) are designed to handle the temp changes.






  • emphasis mine:

    Anti-nuclear is like anti-GMO and anti-vax: pure ignorance, and fear of that which they don’t understand.

    First of all anti- #GMO stances are often derived from anti-Bayer-Monsanto stances. There is no transparency about whether Monsanto is in the supply chain of any given thing you buy, so boycotting GMO is as accurate as ethical consumers can get to boycotting Monsanto. It would either require pure ignorance or distaste for humanity to support that company with its pernicious history and intent to eventually take control over the world’s food supply.

    Then there’s the anti-GMO-tech camp (which is what you had in mind). You have people who are anti-all-GMO and those who are anti-risky-GMO. It’s pure technological ignorance to regard all GMO equally safe or equally unsafe. GMO is an umbrella of many techniques. Some of those techniques are as low risk as cross-breeding in ways that can happens in nature. Other invasive techniques are extremely risky & experimental. You’re wiser if you separate the different GMO techniques and accept the low risk ones while condemning the foolishly risky approaches at the hands of a profit-driven corporation taking every shortcut they can get away with.

    So in short:

    • Boycott all U.S.-sourced GMO if you’re an ethical consumer. (note the EU produces GMO without Monsanto)
    • Boycott just high-risk GMO techniques if you’re unethical but at least wise about the risks. (note this is somewhat impractical because you don’t have the transparency of knowing what technique was used)
    • Boycott no GMO at all if you’re ignorant about risks & simultaneously unethical.


  • Im glad we agree. Because its the entire point. You are nitpicking where it suits you and thats not really honest conversation.Tor browser isnt the only way to access tor

    TLS is useful very specifically in the case of banking via Tor Browser, which is the most likely configuration the normal general public would use given the advice to access their bank over Tor.

    There are entire swaths of the world, billions of people, where phones are basically the only gateways to the inter.

    I do not recommend using a smartphone for banking. You’re asking for a huge attack surface & it’s reckless. People will do it anyway but to suggest that people should avoid Tor for banking on the basis that you’re assuming they are using a phone is terrible advice based on a poor assumption. Use Tor Browser from a PC for banking. That is the best advice for normies.

    The point is, again, that Tor and specifically exit nodes are more hostile than normal ISP relays.

    And again, those hostile nodes get less info than ISPs. They have to work harder to reach the level of exposure that your ISP has both technical and legal privilege to exploit.

    Saying selling metatdata that is unencrypted is the same level of malicious as a nation state going after you (life and death) or having your identity or bank account stolen is clearly pretty naive.

    Wow did you ever get twisted. You forgot that I excluded targeting by nation states from the threat model as you should. If someone has that in their threat model, they will know some guy in a forum saying “don’t use Tor for banking” is not on the same page, not aligned with their scenario, and not advising them. You don’t have to worry about Snowden blindly taking advice from you.

    It’s naive to assume your ISP is not collecting data on you and using it against you. It’s sensible to realize the risk of a honeypot tapping your bank account and getting away with it and regulation E protections failing is unlikely enough to be negligible.

    You still have to deal with getting your funds back and paying for stuff to live in the interim.

    If you’re in the US, you have ~2-3 bank accounts on avg, and 20 credit cards (US averages). Not to mention the unlikeliness of an account getting MitM compromised despite TLS in the 1st place. Cyber criminals choose the easier paths, just as 3 letter agencies do: they compromise the endpoint. Attacking the middle of a tunnel is very high effort & when it’s achieved they aren’t going to waste it on some avg joe’s small-time bank acct. At best you might have some low-tech attempts that result in no padlock on the user side. But I’ve never seen that in all my years of exclusively banking over Tor.

    Thats a bad assumption.

    Not in the slightest. Everyone is subject to mass surveillance & surveillance capitalism.

    MOST people arent really concerned with it in the western world.

    Most people don’t even have a threat model, or know what it is. But if you ask them how they would like it if their ISP told their debt collector where they bank so the debt collector can go do an unannounced legal money grab, you’ll quickly realize what would be in their threat model if they knew to build one. A lot of Corona Virus economic stimulus checks were grabbed faster than debtors even noticed the money arriving on their account.

    And thats not a Trump thing. its existed WAY before trump. Snowden showed that and it was Obama, not trump, that went after whistleblowers harder than any predecessor before them.

    You missed the source I gave. Obama banned the practice of ISPs selling customer data without their consent. Trump reversed that. That is wholly 100% on Trump. Biden did not overturn Trump, so if you want, you can put some of the fault on Biden.

    W.r.t history, echelon predates Snowden’s revelations and it was exposed to many by Nicky Hagar in the 80s or 90s. But this all a red herring because in the case at hand (banking customers accessing their acct), it’s the particular ISP role of mass surveillance that’s relevant, which Trump enabled. Or course there is plenty of other mass surveillance going on with banking, but all that is orthogonal to whether they use Tor or not. The role of Tor merely mitigates the ISP from tracking where they bank, and prevents banks from tracking where you physically are, both of which are useful protections.

    Further trying to make this about “party” sides is a bad idea. Its something all parties

    You can’t “both sides” this when it’s verifiable that Obama banned the practice and Trump overturned it. While Obama’s hands are dirty on a lot of things (e.g. Patriot Act continuity), it’s specifically Trump who flipped the switch to ISP overcollection. Citation needed if you don’t accept this.

    And there are some areas where straight access TOR is illegal and can get you in trouble.

    The general public knows your general advice to use/not use Tor is technical advice not legal advice, and also not specific to their particular jurisdiction.


  • That’s not a magic bullet for secuirty.

    It wasn’t presented as such. Good security comes in layers (“security in depth”). TLS serves users well but it’s not the only tool in the box.

    There are so many ways to exploit connections. Look at what happened here on lemmy with vulns leading to takeovers of instances with xss of session cookies.

    Tor Browser includes noscript which blocks XSS.

    The primary difference is your ISP is not generally actively hostile. They may want to sell metadata but they aren’t actively trying to exploit you.

    Selling your metadata is exploiting you. And this exploit happens lawfully under a still-existing Trump policy, so you have zero legal protections. Contrast that with crooks stealing money from your bank account, where, if it’s a US account, you have regulation E legal protections.

    If your ISP (or in some cases a nation state is your isp) is actively tracking you, then there are other alternatives that may be better.

    Different tools for different threat models. If you are actually targeted by a nation state, Tor alone is insufficient but it’s still in play in conjunction with other tech. But from context, you were giving general advice to the general public telling them not to use Tor for banking, thus targeting is not in the threat model. But mass surveillance IS (i.e. that of your ISP).

    But to answer my your question my thesis is tor is not necessarily a privacy panacea.

    Tor is an indispensable tool to streetwise users. Of course it is a tool among other tools & techniques.

    The threat model an American or European has is much different than someone from Vietnam or turkey or China, which is also much different than someone from the Nordic countries.

    Those threat models all have a common denominator: mass surveillance. It is safe to assume mass surveillance is in everyone’s threat model as a baseline. Of course there are a variety of other threats in each individual threat model for which you couldn’t necessarily anticipate.


  • Also. Those running an exit node can and do sniff traffic.

    Sure, but if you stop there with that statement you’re just FUD-scaring people from using the service that does more for their privacy than conventional direct clearnet usage. Every connection that matters uses TLS so the exit node honeypot only sees where the traffic is going, not what’s in the traffic and not where it comes from. IOW, the exit node knows much less than your ISP.

    It’s bad practice to login to stuff that’s important (like banking) over tor.

    It’s the other way around. You should insist on using Tor for banking. It’s a bad practice to let your ISP track where you do all your banking.

    Also, nation states can track you using a variety of techniques from fingerprinting to straight up working together to associate connection streams.

    And your thesis is what, that we should make snooping easier for them by not practicing sensible self-defense?

    A large number of tor nodes are run by alphabet agencies.

    Let them work for it - and let them give the Tor network more bandwidth in the process.



  • What’s the reasoning behind that ban?

    The drain infrastructure in most US cities is relatively modern. The city drain pipes are big & thus able to handle a big amount of food waste coming from residents. I think I heard some minority of US cities also ban garbage disposals because for whatever reason their pipework can’t handle the load.

    Old cities have small pipes that could not sustain the onslaught of thick food waste, as I understand it. In my city, rats outnumber humans by 2 to 1 and I think they thrive in the sewer. So I’m not sure if it’s also an effort to not feed rats. In any case, the city’s preferred way of dealing with waste food is to put it in the trash.

    Recently they required food waste to be separated into a different color bag than the others. So they collect the food waste together and compost it. In the end, this is probably the most forward-thinking approach despite the sewer system being quite behind.


  • I can’t quite work out if you’re making a prediction of a clog returning, or if you’ve not realized that there is no longer a clog.

    For weeks I have been fighting clog. But the clog is finally gone and the drain is now faster than I have ever seen. The drain actually keeps pace with the faucet on full blast. In the past, even in the best of times, I think the fastest it drained was 1 liter in 20 seconds. Now 1 liter drains in 6 seconds.

    You’re already hundreds of dollars into gadgets and chemicals. Stop it. Cut your losses and call a professional next time.

    Pros give different results in different areas. I called a plumber for a leak once. I was out of town, but a simple leak was dripping and forming a puddle on the floor. The leak was in exposed PEX pipe visibly strapped to the wall (yes that room is quite ugly). The plumber spent little time, failed to find the leak, blamed something that was fine, and charged €200. We called him back and he made the outrageous claim that the puddle was due to “condensation”. Left and gave no refund. I would love to have a reliable & trustworthy plumber. But since I don’t have that I have to become the plumber.

    My costs in the drain fight were ~¾ of €200 (less than the incompetent plumber’s charge for simply showing up). Every time I redo the pipes I’m appalled by the work of past plumbers. So I think I’m just not in a good place to hire plumbers. There is no quality control of any kind in my area. No Better Business Bureau of sorts to record complaints. So the infrastructure is not setup for bad plumbers to fail.


  • Ok, so as you noted at the end, sulfuric acid was a bad idea for the pipes.

    Not exactly. The sulfuric acid likely solved my problem (in combination with a plunger). It overflowed a little & attacked radiator pipes due to me underestimating the foam expansion rate (user error - perhaps poured too fast), but AFAIK it did not harm the drain pipes. Sulfuric acid would not be a good early stage choice, but when most chemicals and techniques have been exhausted it’s one of the most effective options.

    The problem you will quickly run into is that you poored many chemicals in your pipe, so new chemicals might react with them.

    That’s good general advice. But note that my episode spans many weeks. I know not to mix them (acid & bleach in particular). Every chemical went in on a different day with a water flush in between (which often took ½ day or a full day).

    Bleach is not a dissolvant, it’s a disinfectant. It’s of no use to free a pipe.

    I’m a bit confused on this because many of the consumer grade drain cleaners seem to rely on bleach as the active ingredient. Some of them are simply “thick bleach” (in a gel form).

    To my limited knowledge, the best chemicals are acid chlorhydric or soda. Never ever use both. acid chlorhydric might be bad for the pipes though, so soda is usually better. Acid chlorhydric is best to remove limestone. Soda is best to remove biomater. Both of these are very cheap.

    Do you mean hydrochloric acid & caustic soda (aka sodium hydroxide/NaOH)?

    The hair-specific drain cleaner I have is based on sodium hydroxide.

    The 2-component one was based on sodium hydroxide & sodium hypochlorite (aka bleach). I don’t recall what the other cleaners were.

    Another point of confusion: chemists told me consumer drain cleaners are useless against hair. Then I noticed hair-specific drain cleaners on the shelf, which somewhat supports the idea that universal/generic drain cleaners lack effect on hair. But then the hair-specific drain cleaner I bought only mentions sodium hydroxide as an active ingredient, and this is the same common ingredient in many non-specific drain cleaners.


  • Can you explain why you say this?

    The same branch is shared by a bathroom (toilet, shower, sink) and those bathroom drains have never had a clog. Although they always periodically stunk despite full traps so I suspect a leak was always there. But since it’s only occasional I wonder if it’s a leak at the top of a pipe, not spillage. Well, otoh there might be spillage going on in the bathroom because there are drain flies, which might be feeding on spillage from somewhere. It just seems bizarre that the odor only manifests occasionally.

    The big branches meet at a main Y connector. That Y connector is new. The basement had a serious leak under the concrete a couple years ago. The basement floor was dug up and new pipe was installed. I doubt there would be any issues with this new pipework. I think the only segment that’s quite dicey is from the kitchen sink to wherever it joins the bathroom.

    (edit) are you perhaps thinking that the clog has moved along and will clog again downstream? I doubt that, because the diameter of the kitchen drain is 40mm and it eventually joins a branch that’s like 90mm in diameter. If this thing were to snowball for some reason, it could probably be reached from the cleanout at the main Y fitting, no?