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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • No idea why they’d want those tethered caps. My speculation (and that’s 100% unfounded, so take it as you will) is that they are lobbying for something simple and cheap (tethered caps, plastic straws, etc), to blind people from the real environmental issues that are far more costly to tackle. Kind of like the plastic recycle logo, which is a total scam, but makes people feel good enough to not further question the big corps’ recycling practices.







  • Not OP, but I did the same, when I first realized the US was on a slippery slope towards idiocracy (and, in fairness, I realized it three decades after many intellectuals already warned about it). In my case, I was fortunate to work for a multinational, which agreed to transfer me to a country within the EU, and to take care of the paperwork. Over a decade later, I have citizenship here, my own house, and I feel fully integrated into the local society. And I don’t need to worry about college tuition for my kids. They’ll have a choice of free education anywhere within the EU, and by the time they’re old enough, they may have access to a wide variety of educators who left he US.



  • I was permabanned from r/worldnews for this, due to racism, so I’m risking the same here. But there is a theory among armchair historians–which I tend to agree with–that Russians had been targets of regressive selective breeding for the past 450 years. Those who display any kind of individualism or independence (mainly educated, intellectuals, etc) have been selectively eliminated from the gene pool: via exile (best case scenario), or through prisons, labour camps or executions. After centuries of this, the share of independently thinking Russians in Russia is far lower than that of native population in Western European countries.

    This is very prominent in science and technology: many of the top inventors weren’t ethnic Russians, but were born or had ancestry in countries that have been under Russian dictate (and regressive evolution) for a much shorter time period. Sergei Korolev, the father of Russian space program was ethnic Hungarian. Russia “boasts” only 15 Nobel laureates in STEM fields since 1917, and only one of them (Nikolay Semyonov) was an ethnic Russian who wasn’t in exile.

    All this helps to explain why Russians are so passive in the face of authority. It also points at the fallacy of thinking that we can push them towards accepting western civilization and democracy in the short term. It will take a very long time and a lot of effort to bring them to the moral ideal of Western Europe.











  • My old FR 110 is still working. Since then:

    • Vivoactive HR - 2 years in, the casing broke at one of the points where the wristband is attached. Material fatigue. Out of warranty.
    • Vivoactive 3 - 2 years in, altimeter went haywire. Also, battery life decreased to one day. Just out of warranty.
    • Fenix 6 - 1.5 years in, GPS got really bad. As in, drift of over 200m from route. Within warranty, so I contacted them and they sent me a replacement watch. That one is still working, and I hope it will for a long time.

    By now, I developed a certain expectation of the life of Garmin watches. I divided their price with expected lifetime, and compared that with similar data for Coros. Coros is simply better value for money.