I’m up voting because that’s exactly what this thread is for

But man, do I think that’s a stupid take.

I’m not gonna say you need to become a good swimmer and do it regularly with great form, or even enjoy doing it at all.

But I think everyone should learn at least how to do an acceptable doggy paddle, tread water, and float. Swimming should really be regarded as a basic life skill like basic first aid or knowing that you should get the hell out of a burning building.

Do you ever find yourself near any lakes or rivers, the ocean, swimming pools, etc? Walking along them, riding over them on a bridge in a car or train, etc. Then there’s a chance you could end up in that water, and if you can’t swim you stand a very real chance of dying, and possibly of dragging someone down with you if they jump in to help.

Hell, even if you don’t live anywhere near a body of water, flash floods can happen in some pretty unlikely places, including in the middle of a desert.

Unless you have some physical disabilities that genuinely prevent you from swimming, you can probably get the basics down in less than an hour, then you can get out of the pool and hopefully never need to use those skills again if you really don’t like it.

I think a lot of Linux people really do more harm than good when they try to sell people on Linux. Some of it is because they wildly overestimate how much the average person knows about computers, and some of it is just over sharing.

I’ve been using Linux for about half a year now. I’m a slightly above-average computer user, but not some kind of programming prodigy. I’ve had one significant hiccup when I was first installing it, which you probably won’t have because that was a weird quirk of my specific 10+ year old motherboard.

After that everything has pretty much been smooth sailing. 99% of my general computer use is exactly the same as on Windows (though to be fair, I’ve been big on free software for a long time so I was using stuff like libre office and gimp instead of Microsoft office and Photoshop already)

I haven’t yet run into a steam game that won’t run for me. One or two of them I had to add a launch option or choose a different proton version, and I figured that out by basically just googling “steam Linux game name” and a couple keywords about the problem I was having like “audio stuttering,” and the first search result had the fix.

Some games even run better for me now (mostly they’re about the same, some are very slightly worse)

If you use a lot of mods, they can be a bit of a pain in the ass to figure out how to get them running, but it’s usually doable, and once you do it’s done and you don’t have to do it again.

If you rely on specific windows-only software, usually you can get it running with WINE. That does take some figuring-out. But again, once it’s done, it’s done.

And overall my computer runs better and boots up faster without all the windows bloat.

It also breathed new life into my parents computer, and they’re tech-illiterate, retired, old people. They’ve had no issues with it so far.

–

In case that convinced anyone to give it a try, here’s my recommendations.

1. Think about what software on your computer you use. See if there’s a Linux compatible alternative. Try that out, see if you can live with it. Do this before you ever even think about making a Linux USB.

2. Pick a Distro - here’s where a lot of guides fall apart I think. I’ll make it easy. If you’re primarily a gamer, go ahead and choose bazzite. If you’re looking for a general computer to browse the web, do your homework, etc. choose whichever flavor of Ubuntu (Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.) or Linux Mint (which is ubuntu-based) looks prettiest to you. Don’t think too hard about it, don’t do too much research about the pros and cons of different desktop environments, don’t listen to the people who have some moral and philosophical bones to pick about Ubuntu. Just go by vibes. It’s stable, it works, it’s about as well-supported and documented as it gets, and if you do have a problem, you’ll find the answers in the Ubuntu forums without too much searching.

3. Put that on a flash drive, and just run off of that for a week or two. See if you can live with it. Bear in mind it will probably be a bit slower running off the flash drive than it will be once it’s actually installed. Play around with it, you can’t really break anything unless you purposely go rooting around in your windows hard drive and start deleting shit willi-nilly. If you absolutely hate it, just pull the flash drive out and forget about it.

4. If you decide you like it, take a deep breath and go ahead and install it.

I’ve always felt like the wrong sports are popular (both to participate in and to watch)

Since the Olympics were on recently, I found myself watching a lot of luge, skeleton, etc. That looks like a fucking blast.

A well put-together marching band or drum corps show is something to behold.

Once in a while you can find a lumberjack competition - log rolling, 2 person crosscut saws, climbing trees with an axe, etc.

But instead of cool stuff like that, we want to watch people fight over a ball.

“Libertarian” is a pretty broad category that gets used in a few different ways. Most anarchists could be considered some sort of left-libertarian if you’re working off of sort of a “political compass” model where the two axes are left/right, and libertarian/authoritarian. The people and organizations (in the US at least, can’t really say much about the rest of the world personally) who call themselves libertarians tend to skew more towards the right end of the spectrum (and often aren’t actually all that libertarian and skew more authoritarian)

Because of that, most anarchists probably aren’t too keen to label themselves as libertarian (barring some outliers like anarcho-capitalists, InB4 “those aren’t real anarchists”)

For starters, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone say “anonym” in that sort of context before, so if that’s something you say regularly, change that habit, either leave it at “anon” or fully write out “anonymous”

And I’m not saying that to be a dick, I’m illustrating a point, if you have a unique style of writing, that’s something that can be used to fingerprint you. That’s how the Unabomber got caught after all- someone noticed that in his manifesto that he said “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” instead of the more common “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” and said “hey, that sounds like Ted.”

A while back there was a post on one of the food communities here where someone made a post about the “salmond” they cooked, and I immediately thought “is this the same guy who misspelled ‘salmon’ that same way like a week ago” and sure enough it was. Those stupid little things can stick out to people.

And if you carry those quirks around to different websites, it’s possible for people to connect the dots if they really want to. Search around for different accounts across different websites that say “anonym” and they might be able to piece together a profile on you.

Hypothetically, let’s say maybe somewhere on Lemmy you say that you’re a fan of the Chicago Bulls, and on xitter under a different username you mention that you grew up in New Jersey, but both accounts have used the word “anonym” and they figure they might be the same person. Then on still another site with a different name where you’ve also said it, you mention that you were in marching band and went to Catholic school.

So now the profile is for bulls fans from New Jersey, who went to Catholic school and were in marching band. That is fairly specific. That might have narrowed down who you are to just a few hundred, or maybe even dozens of people.

So the most important lesson is to just be really aware of what information you’re willingly putting out there about yourself and think about how it could potentially be used to identify you. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Tor and a VPN and all of the other technical measures you can take, because you’re still just putting information about yourself out there.

Possibly the best thing you can do is to not to log ino post, comment like, subscribe, or otherwise interact with anything if it can be at all avoided.

For most people, most of the time, that’s of course way overkill, I’m here writing this comment after all, and I’m sure there’s plenty of information about myself on this account for some to build a pretty good profile about me if they really wanted to.

So really you need to consider why you want to be anonymous, and just how much you’re willing to sacrifice your online experience to meet that goal.

Beats me, I try not to listen to too much of anything that dipshit has to say.

It’s been a while since I’ve encountered it, which is why I wasn’t totally sure of the usage

But anecdotally, the handful of times I have seen the term in the wild, it was always from someone inserting themselves into a conversation where obviously people aren’t going to be open to hearing about veganism.

Like if they hopped into a thread about, for example, a BBQ or hunting forum, and started berating people for eating meat, and when they get told to pound sand, they go off about how that’s “typical carnist behavior” or something.

Which I think you can probably agree is pretty CHUD-y

Not saying that’s how it’s used in regular vegan circles, but that’s how I’ve personally seen used it as a non-vegan

I believe “carnist” is used by more radical vegan/vegetarians to refer to meat-eaters

And I’m pretty sure “foid” is incel for “women”, femoid became f-oid became foid.

Feeling’s mutual.

If you need someone to teach you how to ride a bike, hit me up.

Alright. If that’s what you want to nitpick here

The average adult (in the US) can ride a bike, whether or not they ever actually do is a different matter, but the majority of us learned how to at some point, and there’s a reason “it’s like riding a bike” is a saying.

From being able to ride a bike to being able to ride it a reasonably long distance just takes time and work to build up to it, which is what he said.

Now a lot of people won’t put in that kind of work, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t.

I’m fat, I won’t sugar-coat that. In a couple weeks when it warms up a bit I’ll hop on my bike, and I’ll probably manage around 5 miles, and by the end of the summer I’ll probably work my way up to around 15 miles, and I’ll still be fat. I do this pretty much every year (and worth noting, I didn’t even learn to ride a bike until I was in my 30s)

There are parts of the world where damn-near everyone gets around on bikes, they don’t have some sort of unattainable genetic advantage because they grew up in Amsterdam or whatever that gives them some “dormant athleticism” that Americans don’t have, they just ride bikes.

The average adult can ride a bike. They just don’t or won’t.

He was replying to a comment about e bikes, and concluded his comment talking about them. The whole comment was building up to that fact. Just because every sentence didn’t explicitly mention e-bikes doesn’t mean that they weren’t the point of the entire comment.

He spent a couple paragraphs talking about his own struggles building up to riding a regular bike and then concluded by basically saying “or you can skip all of that hard work and get an e bike”

And if you finish reading, he talks about ebikes and strikes helping to fill that gap

People don’t really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.

God damn do I feel that.

I recently replaced my dryer. It suddenly started making a really alarming banging noise.

I’m a DIY-minded guy, spent maybe an hour taking the damn thing apart.

And I found the issue- a bad drum roller. Theoretically an easy enough fix once you have the whole dryer apart like I did (which wasn’t really hard, just time-consuming)

I went online and searched out the part, and it was going to cost me almost $200 (granted I was going to replace all 4 rollers, if one went there’s a good chance the others weren’t far behind)

For a bit of plastic and rubber that looks a hell of a lot like a scooter wheel.

And while I was in there, there were a couple belts and pulleys and such that I also wanted to replace. Stuff that was bound to wear out eventually, and the dryer was about 15 years old.

So all in I was looking at probably close to $4-500 in parts. Couple hundred more and I could just get a whole new dryer, which seemed like the smart choice because who knows what else might have been about to go- the motor, the heating element, any of the electronics

So that’s what I did. And I hated it. There was something I could have fixed, I wanted to fix it, but it just didn’t make financial sense to fix it.

This wasn’t a dryer from some oddball fly-by-night unheard of AliExpress brand, it’s an overall respectable company that makes a pretty reliable product. And this wasn’t a particularly specialized part, it was basically just a wheel. It should be the kind of thing that’s pretty much standardized, used by every company in countless models of different appliances, and available for cheap off the shelf at any hardware store. I should have been able to walk into Ace hardware and go buy something like a generic “3 inch roller wheel” for like $5, took it home, and slapped it onto my machine.

But instead it was some proprietary bullshit and I couldn’t find any readily available off-the-shelf part for a reasonable price that would have fit quite right.

They literally reinvented the wheel so that some years down the line I’d have to shell out money for a new dryer instead of fixing the one I had.

I’m honestly a little conflicted about how people like you who are still actively involved in scouting should react to this.

On the one hand, yeah, screw the organization, they don’t deserve support for this kind of stuff.

On the other hand, it’s about the kids, and I do overall believe that the core values of scouting and the kind of structure it can provide are great things for a lot of kids to experience. There are other ways to provide that sort of program, but scouting is already there, and it makes more sense to me to try to preserve and improve that than to try to start something else from scratch.

And good adult leaders can do a lot to insulate their units from the bullshit from higher-up. I know my troop wasn’t at all afraid to bend or even outright break the rules when it made sense to do so (I actually remember first learning the term “plausible deniability” from one of my leaders,) and being active at the district or council level can help put pressure from the inside (back in the 90s my local council actually tried to force the issue and allow gay scouts to join, they got shot down by national but imagine if more councils would have stepped up to do that.) Good leaders with their heads on straight leaving scouting will just result in the organization collapsing into exactly what we don’t want it to be.

I’m not currently active in scouting, I don’t have kids and my schedule doesn’t really work with it these days to be active as a leader, so all I can do is try to make some noise from the outside leaning on my experience as an eagle scout and former leader. I have nothing to lose but also very little leverage. People like you have more leverage, but also not much to lose- absolute worst case scenario they find an excuse to kick you out, but if you don’t succeed at making change from the inside you were probably going to leave anyway.

Maybe you’re right, and I’ll have sent my medal away for nothing, in which case I’m down a prized but essentially useless trinket.

Or maybe I’m right, in which case I’m either ridding myself of a symbol of an organization I’ll no longer wish to be associated with soon, or maybe, just maybe I’m doing something that helps to prevent that from happening.

If you’re right, I’ll feel a little silly and otherwise continue my life as normal, content that I at least stood up for something I believe in.

But what will you do if I’m right? How would you feel knowing that you brushed this off as a non-issue if girls and trans youth, and maybe eventually other “undesirables” are eventually kicked out of scouts, when their commitment to dei wavers, and maybe they’re even twisted into a militaristic, nationalist organization like some modern Hitler Youth?

Also thank you for showing real scout spirit and taking this seriously.

I’ve been talking to a lot of other eagles and other former scouts, and so far none of them have been happy about this. I have a couple other people also planning to return their medals, and a few who can’t find their medals or who are (understandably) reluctant to do so but are at least planning to write some letters and make some noise over this.

“DEI” is baked throughout the scout program

And do you really think that they’re not going to try to come after that too? They’re already leaving the door open for them to come back and put more pressure on scouting in a few months, and Drinky Pete has pretty clearly said that he hopes the organization will go back to being the boy scouts.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

Also really convenient of you to just ignore the concerns about trans youths. I’m sure you’re not pushing an agenda here /s

I don’t have a specific link to share, I’ve been following this whole situation for a few weeks now since it was all first announced. There’s a lot of articles being written about it now, your best bet is probably just to see what your favorite trusted news sources are saying.

They didn’t change much, but there were changes made and not insignificant ones

They have done away with the Citizenship in Society merit badge, which was a relatively new badge, but was also a required badge to earn eagle. This was a badge that basically focused on the importance of DEI.

They’ve also agreed to add a “military service” merit badge. Not a whole lot of details yet about what exactly that will entail or if it will be a required badge or not.

It also sounds like they’ll be making youths register accordingly to their biological gender as opposed to the one they actually identify as, and will need to use facilities like bathrooms and share tents and such with other scouts that corresponds to that.

It’s not massive changes, but it’s certainly enough that you should be pissed about them. And hegseth has indicated he wants to reevaluate in a few months and likely will be pushing for even more changes.

I’m an eagle scout, I’m fucking pissed about this, it goes against all of the good values I learned from scouts for them to give into this pressure, and I’m sure that when kegsbreath comes back around in 6 months or so they’ll cave even more.

I’m sending my eagle medal back in protest.

Could always fly the Verda Stelo as long as you’re ok with the possibility of someone trying to speak to you in esperanto because of it