I've had a couple of friends ask me if I'm prepping.

Prepping for what?

I see the UK is doing a Be Prepared campaign and Fucking Dan Bongino said something on a podcast. What's that about?

Hello friends!

I am creating a gift guide and, while I have a pretty good list so far, I wanted to crowd source some additional ideas from your weird, wonderful brains.

What tech gifts would you get for your friends that are priced under $25? (Both functional and gag gift ideas welcome.)

Just as the title says, tell me your most recent dream and I will perform a dream analysis of dubious distinction. Trust me I'm an expert.

I say the first one knowing if the zodiacs antics distracted the police from boots on the ground beat work. Example of security by obscurity?

For context, I’m in the States.

I already have a Tuta mail account so I figure for mail/calendar/soon-drive I’ll stick to them but what about other services?

Ideally I can try with a free tier before committing. iOS and Android and Linux are the platforms used in my household.

Still looking for:

• password manager
• vpn
• authenticator
• less important: docs/sheets

I was all in on proton services because it was easy for my family to switch from google and still have all these services in one place but now I’m more open to spreading these services out to more than one provider in case any of them shit the bed so to speak.

Thanks!

edit:

• probably staying with proton's authenticator
• I'm sure most here won't agree but my entire household uses firefox on desktop/mobile and my wife and I just decided to use firefox's built in pw manager + sync for pw management. Please understand that convenience is top of mind for us tbh, out lives are too busy to be overly concerned with what to choose here.
• waiting for tuta drive to start using that but backed up out drives to a couple external drives and will just use that until tuta drive is released.
• vpn is still tbd

I know the word normies may have weird connotations, but I just mean that, regular everyday people.

I've been enjoying Lemmy a lot and even recommended it to a few close friends who are working in tech. But I would like Lemmy to be way bigger, maybe have those makefriends communities like reddit has, be it gaming friends, just for chatting, for voicecalls, etc etc...

But I also wonder, could growing Lemmy indiscriminately be a bad thing? As you relax filters and barriers to entry, yes, more people can come in, but I have a feeling the quality of the people might go down aswell.

Is a clique-like platform what Lemmy is supposed to be like? Or is it supposed to try and absorb as much users as possible and be just a user-managed user-owned reddit alternative with no ads and less censorship?

I believe the answer may lie somewhere in the middle, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, as I'm a total newbie on here.

(Also I understand private dms on Lemmy are not secure, but you can keep the idea of the "r4r" community and just drop a matrix or session link in dms, not perfect as the admins can be what username you sent out, but at least it ends there)

After reading this news story that half of Americans are skipping meals because of affordability and a bad economy, I have to ask how are you all doing out there?

I heard from a real estate agent friend of mine that REOs, i.e. bank foreclosures on home mortgages, are going up like crazy, which is a sign of bad times, like the recession of 2007-08.

I have heard from others about rents not being paid, lack of jobs, etc.

Every day, there’s more news of corporate layoffs, moreso than usual.

I live in the economic bubble of the SF Bay Area, where tech wealth more-or-less insulates me and mine from the most serious consequences of a bad economy, but how are things elsewhere?

how?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/53850425

Futurist Jamais Cascio calls it a BANI world. This resonates with me:

• Something I count on suddenly stops working. (Brittle)
• Worry makes even small decisions feel hard. (Anxious)
• One little thing changes my whole day. (Nonlinear)
• I read more and more, but still can't make sense of things (Incomprehensible)

Sometimes, the next step is enough. You don't need to map the whole road before walking.

What helps you when the world feels like this?

Like come on, people are otraged about the most minor stuff, but somehoe can't be bothered to boycot or change the situation with convenience pricig, where same stuff you buy at a store is 10-20x the price per unit.

"Youre taking advantage of my tiredness, making me pay more of my hard-earned money for the privilege of being too tired to prepare my own food/drinks myself, essentially making me work more hours for having worked too many hours and being tired as a resilt of it. So: making me more tired for being tired already"

What are you guys doing for Halloween? Any cool costumes!?

I have a big no soliciting sign on my door, when sales people knock anyway I make it a point to waste as much of their time as I can and not buy anything.

Note: I'm not asking for legal advice. Rather, it's a thing in some countries (like Japan or Indonesia) as I recall watching a video depicting an Australian tourist in Indonesia witnessesing people pursuing the phone snatcher by ganging up on him in which they eventually caught the dude & undercover cops managed to arrest him. Now, the question remains: are people in the US allowed to conduct a citizens arrest in the US?

Nostalgia isn't only a hell of a drug, but it's a hell of an addiction too. Chasing times when you last felt good or when you felt things were right. Getting in touch with old flames that you forgot that there were reasons you moved on from, until you read the painful endings as to why those connections died.

Having those rose-tinted shades aren't always good for you.

My cousin, through work, has access to the search history of a Fortune 500 CEO and noticed it was full of exactly what you'd expect: searching a liquor store site for their most expensive wines, private jet bookings to small private islands, that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, we all knew that! I'm not talking about luxury experiences and displays of power.

But what are the strange parts that regular people wouldn't guess?

For example, someone on reddit recently posted that their job is to duplicate a wealthy person's home items across multiple cities. Clone their house meticulously so their boss just travels with a phone. It's pragmatic but egregious.

Finally bought my first home but have no idea if my electricity use is normal or not, it seems off to me. Any electricians out there that can suggest if it seems normal?

My electricity provider says that we typically use 30-40kwh per day with some days up to 80kwh. I have no idea why the usage is so high. Almost all of the lighting is LED, and almost every appliance is natural gas. The only appliance that is electric is the clothes dryer.

Natural gas furnace, fireplaces, hot water tank, stove, etc.

It seems to be higher usage in the winter despite having three r2d2 air conditioners running in the summer time and almost all of our heating being natural gas in the winter. We have one plug in oil filled heater outside in the detached storage / workshop area.

We do have a well for our water system and that involves a water softener and UV filter and whatnot. Not sure how much power a well pump uses.

Does 30-40kwh average use with up to 80kwh sound normal or on the higher end?

I worry that something on the property might be siphoning power or something. We also suspect the previous owners of the property were probably growing pot, the outdoor workshop has a 200amp service and a breaker box with like 20 empty breaker slots that were filled in with just 3-4 remaining for the lights and plugs.

Any info appreciated!

Usually a lurker on most platforms. Never really been into social media. Even in the Msn, Myspace and early Facebook days, something just didn't click with me. Been using Reddit for years, but lately, its beginning to feel more and more like any other social media. Asked Claude for alternatives, landed here. I don't know why I immediately felt a sense of calmness that I can only remember feeling back in early 2000s internet days. If this site is so similar to Reddit (or at least what it used to be), why does it feel so different?

please dont be too personal to yourself

but mine is that i began to dislike big tech and corporate social media

i am a new user on the fediverse but what is the thing that in Big Social

but the fediverse is not prepared to replace

Heyy, I'm learning programming and trying to choose a focus, I saw you can make web/backend w node, desktop (bloatware but discord uses it so if it works it works), games (not AAA and not optimized for performance but it shouldn't matter for indie too much) Is there anything that compares? I wanna focus on one thing instead of spreading myself over a ton of languages, I do feel js is interesting for this, but I'm just starting out, so looking to hear some thoughts of people more familiar with programming.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/questions/p/1499200/why-don-t-countries-add-harder-requirements-for-becoming-a-president-like-having-a-decor

It seems to me the obvious next step.

I mean if other jobs requirements like IT and even accounting had started asking for more certifications and experience to work, then why the heck shouldn't presidents get asked to be more qualified for their jobs?