Not a Catholic but fairly knowledgeable about the religion. I believe your transition would be accepted as long as you don’t live in sin by performing any acts of sodomy. The Catholics study theology relentlessly, and I’m sure they already had a way of dealing with the fair number of intersex babies born without dooming them to a life spent in unintentional sin.

The church has never expressed an issue with homosexuality, only homosexual acts. And even those acts aren’t a sin due to the homosexual intent, they’re a sin because of the sodomy.

Remember though, sodomy is a blanket term here for “sex acts not capable of producing children” so for you that would be… All of them I suppose.

I suspect that the suggested answer would be the one they give to all gay men, for you to live as a man, but be celibate. Devote your life to God, maybe even become a monk back in the old days. A lot of monks were “confirmed bachelors”

I think this is what makes Fallout a love it or hate it setting.

Fallout tells often whimsical stories against the horrific backdrop of nuclear annihilation, and that’s what gives it it’s charm IMO.

I actually feel like it’s more realistic in a sense than overly grimdark settings. People are goofy, and with over 200 years since the bombs fell it’s believable that people will have some laughs and some motivations other than pure survival.

Right, but the problem is that anarchy by its nature isn’t “enforced”. So it exists in an ecosystem alongside other ways of living.

If others choose to accumulate resources and use them to destroy their anarchic neighbour to seize their resources, the anarchists will obviously have to defend themselves.

How do you defend yourselves against such a threat? To do so you are forced to accumulate resources. And thus anarchy ends up progressing to feudalism. While I like the concept of anarchy and believe it works on a small scale, in practice just about every society that is in conflict with others has followed the same path from anarchy->monarchy->democracy->oligarchy, almost as if it’s forced by game theory principles.

I feel like anarchy does work, but only in isolation from competition.

I agree that this is the end state of our current system. Megafarms raking in vast profits and everyone working on the land is a “hired man” which is just a serf as you say. I’m just unsure if there’s any way to stop it.

The problem I see is that once again without a state to enforce that non-ownership, there’s nothing to prevent groups from organizing to take resources from others. Instead of being slowly bought out, you’ll be run over by a warlord and slaughtered. This tends to happen in 3rd world countries, you have a period of peace and cooperation, a building up of little farming communities until the power vacuum attracts men with balaclavas and AKs.

Resource accumulation always leads to power, and that seems to be a fundamental weakness of anarchy. It works great in a society of small players with small goals, but how do you deal with those that would own the entire world and the followers they accrue?

Where I live out in the remote countryside functions very much like one of these anarchist societies. However it’s hard to imagine doing away with the fundamental concept that keeps peace, the ownership of land.

The megascale farmers are always chewing at the borders of “the hills” and snapping up anything they can get. They used to ignore our rocky and rough land but their greed knows no bounds, and they already own everything else. Without the law to enforce our ownership we would be quickly run over by their much greater resources.

Aside from that all of us small farmers work together and share and help each other only because we can and for the benefit of all.

However I did get called out on a visit to a friend in the city as a “Vault dweller” who would acquire the things I need, return home to my little society, roll the door closed and continue to watch the rest of the world slowly collapse. I feel like anarchy really only works for this sort of small isolated community and unfortunately in a world of 8 billion, it’s simply not workable as organized states will simply run over any group that doesn’t collect taxes to maintain a military or other means of projecting power.

Without that “vault door” to protect you I just don’t see an anarchist society surviving in today’s environment.

Just bought and installed 20kWh of gently used AGM batteries, hopefully by the time they wear out they’ll have been the last lead-acid cells I own. Nice to see sodium actually hit production.

The claimed 10x C rate of lithium would be insane as lithium already has great power density. At that point it’s practically a capacitor, and could even be used to replace the much hated automotive starting batteries. Wonder how it handles low temperatures.

EDM / techno is kind of an exception with many albums that were designed to be played from start to finish, going hard all the way.

If you like techno or funk at all check out Griz, almost all his albums can be put on and listened to straight through, especially if you’re out driving or something.

In particular Good Will Prevail and Ride Waves are almost entirely bangers with only a couple duds. Funky as fuck

Geez someone’s been drinking lead pipe water

This would make a good explanation for the bizarre biblical angels, especially having parts of their “body” that aren’t connected to each other. They only appear disconnected in the 3D projection we see, and are actually parts of a 4D organism.

Off road gasoline is rare and varies by district, here in Canada I grew up in BC and we had “purple gas” and “red diesel” but purple gas was only sold at very specific stations, usually near parks where people would put it in ATVs and boats.

Now I live in SK and we only have “dyed diesel” which is your standard red farm stuff. You can get a discount on gasoline delivered to a farm tank, but there’s no colorant added and almost nobody does it anyways, since gasoline goes stale and isn’t used in farm equipment.

Myself I converted my remaining gasoline equipment to propane and run heating propane in it. The only gas burners left are lawnmowers, quads and a farm truck.

There’s a reason I farm with old relics, they aren’t “optimized” like the new stuff but they’re cheap and reliable to keep running.

Most of my implements don’t even have an electrical connection and some of the tractors have literally a starter motor, alternator, battery. Maybe lights if you’re lucky!

Yeah I know, but have you seen their site? It’s like an old 90s static HTML page. The main thing I see is that it’s clearly not a glossy “marketing first” service. They’re surviving off of their actual product.

I draw the line at “overpopulated” when our resource consumption is unsustainable to the point where we are becoming the sole consumer of the planet.

It’s commonly stated that we would need 2 planets the same size to sustain our current population in a way that doesn’t result in eventual collapse.

We’ve cleared vast land areas and scoured the sea of fish in our quest for calories. Eating bugs will not be the solution that makes us sustainable.

It’s been proven our population increases every time we increase our carrying capacity, such as through the invention of nitrogen fertilizer, mechanized agriculture etc. And there has never been a time that there were not people starving somewhere.

If we carry on this path we will be eating bugs and people will still be starving while ecosystems continue to collapse. It sounds like there is no net gain, IMO.

Might be something patched in Tiny10 but it even activated fine for me with the usual hack and hasn’t caused any problems. I had to take it online momentarily on install to activate, but that was all.

Here in Canada, we have a loophole in the law where indigenous have the right to use tobacco without taxation due to tradition. Which is totally fair - but it also applies to modern mass produced cigarettes for some reason.

As a result of ever increasing taxes on tobacco, I would reckon that at this point 80% of cigarettes smoked in my community have been smuggled off of a reserve. The black market is booming with “Rez smokes” selling for $5-10 a pack while legal cigs go for ~$30.

The federal government recently introduced a regulation mandating a health warning printed on every cigarette. Most agree it’s a transparent attempt for the police to spot an illegal smoke in your hand, as Rez smokes don’t have warnings on them. They are losing a ton of revenue to the black market, and are trying to crack down with heavy fines for even possessing a pack off of a reserve.

I trust Mullvad and Proton at this point for VPNs, nobody else.

Any reason you can state not to use AirVPN? I switched to them from Mullvad because they support port forwarding. So far I’ve been very happy with their service.

Having ads and sponsors blocked I can’t be 100% sure, but I don’t think they advertise at all. I only tried them because of a recommendation on Lemmy. Their site design is very old school which really says “run by nerds and not marketers” to me.

Could you run fossilized and sandboxed in a VM? I run Tiny10 for a couple Windows applications that can’t run on Wine, completely offline so that there’s no need for updates. The system continues to work exactly how I want it to with no Microsoft Surprises.

One of the applications is for tax filing, so I finish the taxes, clone the VM, put the copy online and file. After it gets confirmation, I copy the database back to the fossilized version and wipe the copy. Been doing it for years now.

Some of the concepts in this book really stuck with me, but I had no idea what the title was! Thanks!

“Some days you’re the original, some days you’re the copy” or something like that

Valid point. When I grew up fishing for shrimp as a kid I was quite terrified of them until I was taught how to eat them.

I can assume they taste bad, because otherwise we would all be eating them already. Humans eat just about everything on the planet if it’s tasty, even if it’s really weird. Example: shrimp, lol.

Personally I don’t see the need for it when we have plenty of plant sources of protein like pulses, and we can raise ruminants on otherwise useless land (like my hilly, rocky farm).

It seems to me just an excuse to continue overpopulating the planet. Sure, we could develop new protein sources to feed 10 billion - but if we had kept our population to the 4 billion it was in the 1970s we could all be eating thick beef steaks and salmon without worrying about straining the carrying capacity of the planet.

Maybe we should focus on getting our population down to a sustainable level before we worry about new and exotic foods.

I still think that, environmentally consciously, we should all switch to a mostly plant based diet and explore meat alternatives without fear.

I don’t have an issue with this statement, in fact I have friends who grow beans and lentils and I cook and eat dry beans every day in addition to my lamb. Plant proteins are healthy and delicious, and they easily stand alongside other standard dishes on our plates. Everyone I know eats a lot of beans.

My issue with the bugs is the same as I have with soy protein. Soy protein has been snuck into all manner of processed foods to boost protein numbers while replacing the higher quality proteins that you would expect in those foods (i.e. many cheap chicken breasts are injected with a solution of salt water and soy protein to plump them up and make you think you got more “chicken”)

I feel like using insects this way just is another step in adulterating our food supply, separating those like you and me who know what we are eating from the “commoners” who will not.

I have no problem with explicitly eating bugs outright if you choose to, I just don’t want to have them snuck into my hamburger at a restaurant.

Interestingly my ex-wife was from Taiwan and had never eaten insects except as a novelty - so it must be a different part of Asia where it’s common. Taiwan tends to like fish, pork and chicken as well as tofu and black beans.