When my life turned upside down and a lot of shit happened I got interested in Stoicism to the point I even read a bit of Seneca.

I never felt it as a way to be emotionless or a way to hide or suppress emotions , but rather as a way to just accept my them and “yeah, I see and acknowledge I feel like crap, no need to go crazy about it” (in my situation). It brought an understanding to me that not everything that happens is about me personally and I stop fighting what I can’t change to put my focus where I can have an influence.

Warning: this is not a definition of stoicism, but what I took away from it for myself.

I’m living in an apartment on the 8th floor. Heating is geothermal heating (from a big geothermal plant owned by the city I live in). So no heating in winter. My second worry would be the food spoiling in the freezer. I’d probably move everything down into the car to drive to my family’s place (that’s a bit of work, 8th floor, no elevator) and then notice that my car is trapped inside the garage below our apartment block due to the electric garage doors not opening. I’d probably get some help from other people in the house opening them by hand (might involve dismounting of the electronics box).

In other words, in case of a longer city-wide outage I’m screwed.

In case it’s a shorter one and my electric window blinds in the bedroom are still closed, I wouldn’t worry and find someone to screw.

Oooh, 3D printed mole crap.

Any idiot in a car can kill me at any time, because he’s getting road rage. I’m living in Europe, grew up in the 80s where nuclear war was a very real danger that could break out any moment, vaporizing all the cities. Even though we were allies of the US, highways were prepared to be outfitted with nuclear mines so the Russians couldn’t roll all over Western Europe. We have a war right now next to our countries which could turn into WW3 at any time. A close friend of mine is Bosnian, she has seen the fighting in the Balkans few years agom

People kill each other all the time, because they consider each other bad persons. I just refuse to live in fear.

And the longer I live, the more I believe in violence as a legitimate defense. If someone shot Putin tomorrow, I would be happy. If someone had shot Hitler in the 30s the would would probably have been a better place.

So where is the line that divides killing someone is a good thing vs a bad thing? I used to believe it is always evil, but I can’t anymore.

So Germany didn’t have dictator oppression in the 30s and 40s? You think we didn’t have propaganda and we didn’t just kill people for another opinion? And we had access to outside information?

I’m talking about a moral duty to oppose, to inform yourself in spite of all that. And I know it is not easy. We Germans failed that miserably.

The plabook Putin is playing, we’ve been through it and it is was what lead to WW2.

No, not all Russians are evil and deserve to die. But closing your eyes and playing oblivious to what’s happening out there, just believing the state propaganda and living in a position “oh it’s just the bad leader” is not a morally OK position.

If there is a dictator in your country you have some moral duty to find out at least a bit about the truth.

How do I know?

I’m German.

My grandparent’s generation was the one that actively closed their eyes, that actively looked away, that everything that happend was someone else’s problem. They were the Generation that arranged themselves, that did good business as long as it wasn’t them that were deported, killed or fought at in the war.

This is not a position that is morally OK, but this is what I see of a lot of Russians. Not all, but a lot.

I had this happen a lot, then I was zapping around the TV aimlessly for hours.

It turned out I was out of energy. Mental battery empty.

One of the biggest changes was - I trained myself to have rest days where I do “nothing” every week (that is “nothing which taxes me. mentally”, so also no meeting with friends or so). As long as I have enough energy left, I can compensate for a lot of stuff - so I make sure I have enough energy. (Playing on the console is fine, watching TV is fine, cooking is relaxing me, even doing a limited number of chores)

Those undestimulated days are rare now, compared to 4 years ago.

I have a Bluetooth controlled vibrator. Reverse engineered the app (which has a chat function) and it has a blacklist of words (mainly Chinese) you’re not allowed to text using the app.

I did not check if your horny chat gets copied to Chinese spy agencies, but I suspect that will be done on the server.

https://xkcd.com/37/ oh wow, I need some mind-bleach now.

They might just try a cold pull or two before changing the nozzle. (Depening on the printer. On my Ender 3 Nozzle swaps were a no brainer - 2 minutes, on my current SV08 they are 15 min of work and 45 min of soaking the old nozzle in Isopropanol to get the thermistor out without ripping the cables)

Because behind the carrier grade NAT I don’t get a routable IPV4 at all, so no inbound connections.

With the IPV4 I use I do use dyndns now, so I can resolve it from outside.

IPV6 is already rolled out in parts of the world. My provider has a Dual Stack lite architecture, the home connection is over IPV6, IPV4 is normally being tunneled via V6 through a provider grade NAT.

As I AM a network nerd, I pay for a dedicated IPV4 address every month, so I can reach my stuff from outside from old IPV4 only networks.

So when I plug in my router, connect a windows machine and just google stuff then all this traffic will be IPV6 without me configuring anything.

It’s so great fun having the attack surface being doubled by dual stack setups.

No, but I have a device with a LCD display where I can look it up

There’s another trick - checking against street maps. When you walk/drive/ride around a corner the phone can use it’s inaccurate GPS reading and update it according to where the corner is. Of course it doesn’t use ONE corner. to fully update your position, it just nudges the position a bit closer.

In case you are navigating a lot of street corners, after a time an inaccurate GPS position will be corrected.

There’s even more input to the algorithm (location of known WIFI Hotspots for example etc) and they are all combined with a “Kalman filter”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter

I’m not trying to argue against you, I’m just trying to rally people against crappy business tactics.

Thanks for the personal attack, though.

I’m keeping a mumber of my first generation Eneloops around. Around 10% of the ones I bought in the 2010s died, the others are still duing duty in my TV remote control etc.

The ones that died mostly died because of staying in a moving box for around 6 years or so after I divorced and forgot about them.

So I’m amazed how many of them just keep working.

You don’t get cookie check boxes because of GDPR. You’re getting them because companies want to track you, and need to ask if they do so.

If they don’t want to steal your private info they don’t need cookie check boxes, even under GDPR.

Additionally, those shitty checkboxes, that take 1000 clicks and 5 minutes if you don’t want to get tracked? Illegal under GDPR. Rejected getting tacked needs to be “as easy” as getting tracked by GDPR law.

Companies hating their tracking data business going away like to shit on GDPR - and if it’s repeated frequently enough peopme believe it.

(Btw Kosa sounds really dangerous in itself, I’m not advocating for that)

I can’t relate as well, as I live in a city where things are really really aafe. But there are places where a women are afraid to walk alone in the dark, even for a few steps. (And even in safe places some people are quite afraid)

I’d be very careful with remote diagnosis. You. might be right, she needs therapy. She might just be afraid, because something bad happened to her some time.

The only way is for OP to have a good talk with her what’s bothering her - and then he may come to a conclusion. As of now, there’s just not enough information.

As gas stations have enough room for more expensive “ultimate” versions of fuel, I don’t think that’s the reason. You can frequently get two kinds of Diesel and three kinds of Gas at the pump.

O. t. o. h…maybe the whole “premium fuel” hype resulted from stations having additional tanks after leaded fuel was phased out.

Tbh, I have no idea. The whole of Europe was late to this. The first catalytic conveter cars were sold in 1973 in the US and 1985 in Germany.

Switzerland made them obligatory in 1986, Germany made them obligatory only in 1993 - because that was an EU-wide regulation.

The only thing I can imagine is the big political influence car makers have in Germany, but that’s just “what sounds reasonable to me”, no proof.