*shrug* I'm excepted from withholding as well as the individual mandate and I definitely don't have the $200k+/yr Obamacare surtax. I have the joyous experience of filing as head of household with a dependent, refusing overtime because "fuck you, EITC pays me to sit on my ass." I get a 10% bonus to my "refund" by taking it as an Amazon GC and Michigan even refunds my property taxes.

I'm kind of confused on all the fuss over Obamacare. It doesn't appear to affect me or most other people living in the US except the government now endorses a wide range of private firms and advertises them on it's healthcare.gov site.

Before, I had a wide range of insurance options, but health insurance for my family would cost >20% of my monthly income, so fuck it.

Today, I have a wide range of insurance options, but health insurance for my family would cost >20% of my monthly income, so fuck it. (I'm not subject to the individual mandate fees because insurance would cost far more than "allowed" in applying the fee)


The only difference now is that people with high incomes and/or no children are now subject to an annual fee (the IRS claims they'll enforce this by withholding income tax redunds, but most people subject to the mandate fees aren't going to be getting a refund, so...) if they don't buy a particular financial service the government mandates. I don't understand the fuss over this... is there some beloved insurance company not being included on the government's health insurance Craigslist, or....?

I mean, yeah, I guess I can understand being offended that the government claims it has a right to do "this," but "this" doesn't appear to be anything significant. I'm working 40h/wk @ ~40% over minimum wage per hour, and shitty health insurance is still completely out of reach because.... well, I don't even know... because it's worth preserving the life of one person with a terminal illness for two years vs. extending the life of 1,000 people by two years each?

Naw. He needs more regular buyers before buying dry ice in bulk. You generally don't want the stuff on-hand without shipping for more than ~3-5 days from the time it leaves the factory. At ~7-8 days, the ice is basically "expired" because it's lost too much to sublimation. It'd still be usable, but you'd probably need to use 3-4x as much because since air doesn't/shouldn't escape the poly-seal bags, you end up with big CO2 puffs in bags with a little ice, decreasing contact/effectiveness (simply poking a hole in the bag with a knife might fix this, but the -119*F bags become somewhat brittle and a poke might cause it to fully open during shipping, especially if the ice should crack and shard, where it could have a sharp edge poke through the bag). We do offer unsealed poly bags, but that's generally not suitable for shipping food... customer would be in a for a nasty surprise if they went in to grab another package of beef and ended up grabbing a chunk of dry ice. Dry ice burns don't hurt quite like hot burns, but the skin's severely scarred forever.

In our smallest container, we ship out ~115 2"x5"x5" cuts, which'd need a Hell of a lot of beef ordered.

I've been in talks on it... the account has a lot of *potential* value, but it's value I have to "co-produce" with, which I don't have enough time for, now, or seem to have enough focus for. Still, the worry's there that the account might be mis-used if sold, and I feel an obligation to ensure that doesn't happen. If I knew it wouldn't be mis-used, there wouldn't necessarily be a "finality" associated with it, if I could later buy it back if I wanted without the account being molested.

USG is going to need a "reset" in 2-3 decades, so a crash really wouldn't be that bad, right? It's not like people take on boat-loads of debt, then hold onto the cash - they use it for major one-off expenses, generally. I don't really see why the "dollar" is looked at as something we have to protect, as if it magically *is* the economy. If the dollar died, industry would move on to a new currency, pay off their near-worthless debts (hope you don't have an ARM!), and rev up the economy like it's the WW2 boom again.

However, the US as a whole is in a pretty good position compared to many other countries because while it does hold a lot in debts, it also has an exceptionally high relative amount in free, productive assets which are not currently "taxed into money" (that is, sold to cover taxation). The US government's going to have trouble paying its bills, but if the government's prevented from collecting that from the people and businesses, turning productivity into government expenditure, I think a USD collapse would end up being a net benefit for a majority. The longer we keep tax rates low, the longer we can prepare our industry for the boom, and the stronger it'll be. To get things restarted "right," though, the government will need to start taxing at rates which cover its expenses, and hopefully that comes with some massive budget-trimming and an overhaul of how our legislative system works, where lawmakers stuff hundreds or thousands of unpopular appropriations (and worse) into bills which "must" pass.

I think a lot gold bugs and the like look at things like PMs and recognize how valuable hard assets would be in the event of a USD crash, but then don't recognize how much more valuable it is to have machines and other infrastructure to convert hard assets into something usable -- rather, they undervalue the actual US economy because they spend so much time looking at scary numbers indicating bad times for the USD or USG. A USD crash doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be a US economy crash, as far as the productive, non-parasitic economy's concerned. I could be way off-base, though... I'm kind of trolling just so someone can show me where my thinking's wrong. There're so many variables, it's difficult to get concise explanations.

I suppose this is the most appropriate thread for this... I had a dream inspired by Hal.

There was a cryogenics corporation which went around trying to dig up fresh bodies - or where a privatized police force does this in the future. When it's possible to unfreeze people where they're alive without tormenting pain, they'd then be given living quarters and a job, working as indentured servants to pay off their bill. However, the company charged a 5% APR on unpaid fees each year (very reasonable!). When people started "being woken up" a century later (and with appropriate cybernetic implants!), they'd end up with the equivalent of >$1M today's dollars in debt, working the rest of their lives as .

... I wonder what people will do in a century.... will have to sleep on it for the dystopian vision.

I love WSR so much, I was able to get Mr. Jenkins to allow me to sell WSR for bitcoin at a slight discount over retail ($19.95 vs $21.95) and we share the proceeds. Unfortunately, nobody's taken me up on it, yet. BitMit suddenly shuttering threw a wrench in the plan, but I hope to use OpenBazaar for this, soon.

It is terribly ugly (even the webpage is an almost-impossible-to-read abomination of Web 1.0), but this comes from it being repeatedly modified from a DOS version he made way, way, way back (the DOS version is still available for purchase and was last updated in 2001 -- it doesn't look *too* much different, though compared to the unreasonable complexity and depth available in current WSR, it seems feature-barren). WSR may actually be the longest-developed (and still reasonable to call "actively developed") game for the PC. It's so exceptionally massive, a proper port at this point would be absolutely insane in terms of dev time.

Wine won't contain enough methanol to damage you (unless you're a full-retard drunk). The issue comes in distilling since, like ethanol, methanol has a boiling point significantly below water's boiling point (side-note: the boiling points given for ethanol, methanol, and water need to be used with a grain of salt, since the boiling point will change given the liquids are not divided up in pure forms and thus will not exactly "conform" to the boiling points for the pure substances). This is why you want to dump the alcohol as it comes up to temperature (if you're only doing one pass, you'll want to dump out a bit more at the beginning). Even though it's probably the highest-proof alcohol you'll distill in the pass, it's largely methanol -- no good. Anyone with enough knowledge to set up a still should know this. The reason why we talk about methanol not as a theoretical problem but a real problem is because the US government blinded and murdered thousands by requiring methanol as a pseudo-denaturuant in alcohol production as an attempt to enforce prohibition.

Wall Street Raider
Battlefield 2
Jagged Alliance 2
Everything from Paradox incl. M&B
Don't Starve
7 Days to Die (is it Alpha 10 time, yet? Is it Alpha 10 time, yet?!)
Bioshock
Dwarf Fortress
Everquest (p1999, though I'm one of maybe 4 people there who wish SoL would be introduced)

... and yeah, I'll play through the PSX FF games every two years practically as a religion. Thank God for a poor memory. I've been able to run FFX on a PS2 emulator for over 4 years on what was then a mid-grade PC... it's not that demanding. PS3 emulators are finally a reality... still buggy and extremely demanding... will take another year or two of plugin development for many with mid-grades to be able to use them reliably, I'd guess.


If CS:GO ever goes on sale, I'll probably be playing a LOT of that.

Solar balloons are a REALLY cool idea, and completely compatible with both centralized WISPs and the theoretical mesh-WISP talked about here. Google is actually experimenting with this, but wants to do things like include active propulsion, which seems a bit crazy to me. Instead, I'd rather want to tether the balloons to the ground and only use the solar to power the amp/router (and the relatively little LiPo battery). The big issue a lot of rural WISPs have is with penetration through trees and hills - and this, of course, also hampers cell coverage (so there's a market with solar balloons here, too). Balloons are fantastically cheaper than giant radio towers and allow many more trees and hills to be bypassed so they aren't impeding signal -- radio towers become more expensive the higher you build, generally, so cell companies generally skimp here, giving the unfortunate residents shit service (actually, I ended up plopping down >$100 on a special amplifier for cell signals just so my connection wasn't frequently dropping with ~10kb/s speeds).

I mean - you're not going to be looking at 50+mbps speeds like with a land-line venture, but like freedom's articles mention - that option's bloody expensive and particularly difficult unless there's a fast connection nearby you can run into town (while you can use wireless ptp for tens, possibly soon - hundreds, of miles to get into a fast connection a couple towns over without running underground lines using solar balloons or even conventional towers). -But I think we'll want to wait for 11ah, still. It's what I'm waiting for, anyway. -And if there are home routers coming out which support simultaneous 2.4GHz g/n and 900MHz ah broadcasting, shit's going to get really, really cheap to implement.

Well, I think it generally involves dirty socks, fruit juice boxes, and a whole lot of unintentional vinegar production - but yeah, basically.

Making wine at home is terribly easy and costs roughly nothing in supplies outside the actual fruit you use (assuming you're not fortunate enough to have fruits on your property or in a public place where you can pick). You can even use bread yeast if you don't want to spend extra on higher-ABV brewing or wine yeast. You can take a 2L soda bottle, or a fruit juice bottle, or a gallon jug, keep the cap very loosely closed (so at no pressure difference, there's no exchange of air, but it starts hissing at you or popping it's lid a bit once the yeast starts outputting gas) and ensure you've sterilized everything you're using (boil or freeze the fruit, use a weak bleach solution and fill the container you want to use, sloshing it around every 20m or so, then rinse thoroughly -- allegedly, hobos simply make their wine in discarded bleach containers since they're effectively sterilized already and not at a high-enough concentration to harm the yeast while having a slight anti-microbial effect on whatever nasties might try growing). That makes gross wine, though -- it needs to be filtered, preferably at least three times through a coffee filter.

Liquor is more difficult. You want to start with a filtered wine which has completely finished fermenting with wine yeast. I've successfully distilled using a large pot (with a thick, ceramic bowl floating in the center) over an electric stove with aluminum foil on top using ice on top of the foil to make the divot and encourage condensation. You simply put the wine in the large pot, turn the heat on ~medium, and check the temperature. Once the wine reaches ~172*F, dump everything from your floating ceramic bowl into the sink (it's mostly methanol) and bring the heat down until the wine temperature stabilizes at ~200*F. Keep it there for a couple hours (replenishing ice stocks as needed). Then empty whatever's left in the large pot, clean it, and dump the contents of the ceramic bowl into the large pot. Repeat this process two more times (once with liquor @ 190*F, and a last pass @ 180*F) and you should have some fairly strong alcohol. Just be prepared to get a little from a lot - similar to cheesemaking -- you start with this massive amount and you're going through multiple processes to get out the stuff you don't want. Similar to cheesemaking, good equipment is going to give you far superior results, and the ghetto pot method's a pretty shitty and cumbersome process compared to some of the stuff you can build at home or buy online (yes, you can buy little distilleries for the home, and some even work with conduction heaters).

With the end liquor, though, you can do whatever you'd like to make it into a quick, rough approximation your preferred liquor. TBH, there shouldn't be much more than a negligible amount of flavor from whatever you produced it from -- all this "vodka from [insert exotic ingredient]" bullshit is just that. You can, for example, turn rice wine to a rough version of whiskey with a mason jar and some charcoal (umm... natural charcoal -- don't use briquettes, for God's sake!) - and because you have a high amount of surface volume, you don't need to wait years for age like you would if you had a giant supply of liquor aging in traditional, giant charred barrel.



Cigarettes, similarly, can be made easily and cheaply at home, and of course, they're quite natural, too (not to say, in any way, that they're healthful). I have no idea why people are buying cigarettes at stores and gas stations these days. Use that Internet you pay for, invest ~$40 in an injection roller which lasts practically forever (alternately, some states allow you to lease time on fancy automatic rolling machines at tobacco stores, but this is an unnecessary expense and who the Hell wants to wait around in a tobacco shop with all those damned weirdos?), buy 5lbs of "pipe tobacco" and ~10 200-packs of filters, and you're good to go. It doesn't take long to get the muscle memory right to push out a few cartons of perfect cigarettes an hour, which should hopefully last an addict at least a couple weeks. I actually ran the numbers on this one... it should cost significantly under $20 to make a carton of cigarettes at home, while most people are paying $40-50, or something like $80 in the particularly tax-happy states of the US.

If you're really too lazy for that biz (and I'll admit, it can be messy, but we have an unfinished basement serving almost no purpose, so whatever), you can also simply buy "little cigars" online. Ironically, "cigarette" literally means "little cigar," but legally, a "cigar" generally only needs to be wrapped in tobacco leaves (including pulverized leaves which look just like brown paper) to avoid the punitive tax rates in most states - and yes, they companies making this do put filters on these just like "real cigarettes" because the law's that fucking stupid. I'm sure there're better brands, but the only ones I've tried are here, and they taste like shit, smoke like you're trying to suck air out of a clenched asshole.... but they're unbelievably cheap. (side-note: WCC is crazy about promo codes and clearance sales -- I've bought decent and large cigars at ~$.85/ea shipped there)

Heh, compared to mining pools, the pruning policy here (nonexistent) is radically liberal. Slush prunes after 6 months of inactivity and gives a warning. Eclipse prunes after ? months without warning. -And they keep any coins in the account, so generally much more at stake.

Pruning no-post accounts after 6-12 months of inactivity with a warning seems pretty reasonable. It'd be a real shame if the forum started knocking off accounts like Hal's, though, but I'm sure it won't. I doubt the impact on the db is really that significant if it's not frequently being accessed, and if it is frequently being accessed, there's obviously reason to keep the account intact.

Are you sure the device is bricked, or can you still communicate via TFTP? If you have the right firmware for the device, I could only guess the issue would be from not waiting long enough for the firmware to flash before hard-booting it (I screw this part up A LOT: I'm impatient). Hard to say without being in front of it, though.

I;d guess the most reasonable term for people who hodl for extended periods of time ("long-term traders") would be "bears." They hibernate until the price is dramatically higher than their buy-in and don't wake up even if the price tanks. I've never really understood what conventional use of "bearish" was supposed to illiterate, anyway. Bears paw it down and bulls uhh... gore it up, maybe?

I think Net Neutrality is a necessary evil in a terrible, centralized market created by government. While the idea of a mesh-net is great for dense areas, I still don't even have a broadband ISP option. There's not even DSL here and current 2.4GHz routers aren't going to bring it. I bought a fancy Ubiquiti antenna and router to see how far it can penetrate, and except PtP with LoS, it's only a marginal improvement over a $20 wireless Linksys router - because it's using the 2.4GHz bands. I'd be overjoyed to see a Meshernet, but I doubt that's going to happen for me within the next couple of years, whereas net neutrality can protect me from ISP blacklisting or even (God forbid) whitelisting, as well as fast lanes (and I see no reason to trust ISPs are going to throttle based on consumption vs. arbitrary "we don't like p2p tech like BitTorrent or Bitcoin") - because many ISPs ALREADY throttle based on consumption, right? When they don't throttle, they might simply cancel a user's contract based on vague "excessive use" policies, even though they've promised they can deliver an unlimited volume of data at, say 5mbps up, because they've over-sold their service. -And then we have the problem of "up to 5mbps" because they're not just over-selling, but over-selling to an extent where the advertised speed rate is outright misleading and, I'd argue, fraudulent in some cases (esp. with regional DSL services).

What I think'll really open this meshnet (meshernet?) market up is going to be 802.11ah. Idunno if you've looked into it, but what it's promising is going to have a massive impact on WISPs (whether dedicated-business WISPs or these theoretical new home mesh-WISPs). If 11ah can be pushed as the standard almost exclusively for this new kind of mesh-net (to help minimize interference from other uses), I think this could absolutely take off. Everything about it looks exactly right for a mesh-net. Up to 20mbps on high-penetration 900MHz bands, up to 8000 connections. If we start seeing home routers operating on both 2.4GHz g/n + this new 900MHz 11ah standard, I'm confident we'll be entering the new era where TWC can take over as many ISPs as it likes without seriously threatening the integrity of the Internet.

I stack & pack dry ice. Lots of it. So far, I've only lost ~2sq. in. of previously pristine skin to deep burns. Some guys have such thick callouses, now (triple-sized hands), they don't even bother with gloves. I guess that's probably good for foreplay, but otherwise seems like a pretty debilitating modification.

Use phone for WiFi tether. I've only updated the firmware once (ICS to KK) and it left me without Internet service for two days because I couldn't find the right CWM package (Samsung-Sprint phones are a bitch, it seems). I actually found an app just to disable the OTA update nagging. Maybe I'll upgrade from KitKat in a couple years once uhhh... HeathBar or whatever is out.

John Oliver did a nice piece recently explaining how difficult it is to grasp what a gram of sugar really "means." Even growing up with the notoriously bad food of the MidWest, though, I've never eaten a circus peanut... We had those weird, colored church mints that melt, instead.

School "milk," packaged meats, and deli meats also tend to contain large amounts of sugar. I don't even think there're any pre-made red sauces on the market anymore which don't taste like chunky ketchup. It does take a while to reorient your palate to take in non-candied foods regularly, though, and honestly, I haven't lost a single pound cutting almost all sugar out of my diet for the past three years, though my blood sugar's become normal and pressure's medium-low where it was high. I'm losing lots of weight, now, though, but that's just from the most physically intense factory job I've ever held.

eBay's fees are still well over 10% on $xxx items. The %fee doesn't really become reasonable unless you're selling $5k+ items.

I tried to poke the OB team into commenting specifically on the Tor fork, but I'm guessing it's going to leak, which is why Bitcoin+Tor combo also isn't generally considered safe/private.

Didn't forget about this. I'd guess it's now officially in dev hell, though. There's a good amount of new stuff (and a big handful of fixes) ready to go, but I got a FT/OT job recently (hallelujah!) which is making this project nearly impossible to work on. I'll try to rig up the final features (ummm... I'll be excluding Putin for now) and fixes I want for the next release. I'll shoot for it being ready ~Christmas, probably this year.