It depends on what types of books you like.

For sci fi I would recommend The Murderbot Diaries, Bobiverse series, Children of Time, and Gideon the Ninth.

For fantasy I would recommend The Nightrunner series, The Farseer trilogy, The Scholomance series, and A Conjuring of Ravens.

For something weird and gripping I would recommend Perilous Times by Thomas D Lee, absolutely awesome modern imagining of Authurian legend, and those damn Saxons!

For mind blowing, There Is No Antimemetics Division. Nothing I can say will do it justice, now that I can’t unread it I envy you. Well and truly worth it, absolutely gripping, such a cool book.

Also, consider reading an audiobook. It is less demanding on your visual processing which can help if you are struggling to actually read the text. It works for me because I can speed it up to double so my rampant ADHD brain doesn’t get distracted because it is having trouble keeping up.

No disrespect meant, but the term unskilled in actually part of corporate propaganda. If someone who starts working there today is not as good at it as someone who has worked there for 2 years then there are skills which take time to acquire and thus it is a skilled job. Unskilled labour is an invention of capitalists who want to pay as little as possible and will use whatever weasle words they can to convince other workers that either they are better than the unskilled or that they themselves are unskilled and replaceable.

In Australia you would be looking at minimum wage under the Restaurant Industry Award 2020. Under this award you can be one of three types of employee, a full time worker, a part time worker, or casual.

A full time employee is defined as

An employee who is engaged to work an average of 38 ordinary hours per week over a period of no more than 4 weeks is a full-time employee.

A part time employee is defined as

A part-time employee is an employee who: (a) is engaged to work at least 8 and fewer than 38 ordinary hours per week (or, if the employer operates a roster, an average of at least 8 and fewer than 38 hours per week over the roster cycle); and (b) has reasonably predictable hours of work.

If you don’t meet either of those you are a casual employee, which means less guarantees and protections but a higher pay rate.

If you are a casual you get paid 25% more than full time and have a maximum of 38 hours in a week, averaged over 4 weeks, and a maximum of 12 hours on any day.

A casual employee must also be engaged for at least 2 hours per instance of work, so you can’t have single hour shifts here and there, it must be 2 hours minimum.

If a casual works over 38 hours in a week they are to be paid overtime rates, and breaks are still required for casual workers with penalties (increased pay rates) for situations where breaks are not possible.

The base rate is $26.44 Australian so $18.69 USD. The casual will earn 25% more per hour, so $33.05 AUD or $23.37 USD. This is the minimum for a casual server at a restaurant or similar venue. The casual does not get leave or similar but gets paid more, the part or full time workers get leave and regular hours with the lower pay rate.

We don’t do tipping here. The very rate occasion someone does it is generally seen as showy and a little gross. We sometimes have a tip jar at the counter which is split between all staff on a shift, but usually people only drop a bit of change in there and most people pay by card anyway.

You absolutely can’t live here and buy a house on that income. You can survive on it if you are living with other people, but living on your own is not really an option at that pay rate. Also we don’t have to pay for medical insurance here, we have Medicare which is actually really good, and we also don’t have to pay for school for kids, the fees are optional and you can say no. It isn’t perfect, there are tonnes of issues, but it is better than the US system of paying as little as possible and relying on the kindness of strangers and social obligation to keep people alive.

If someone serves me food and my food needs to cost a little more for them to be able to actually live a dignified life I am happy to pay that. Instead corporations find every way of cheating workers out of the fruits of their labour to increase profit. Nobody should live in poverty and without dignity, working or not, and no work is below respect, excluding exploitation of others. I personally think they should be paid more than they are by a significant margin, maybe 50% more, maybe more than that. If we raise the floor we raise everyone above them and live in a society without abject poverty, win win in my book.

Ah, great, I would recommend looking at the donut tutorial to get a sense of the whole system of blender. Also, you’ll have a cool donut wallpaper at the end of it.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgGUwGwXlj9kBe7TrVWNjkyv

If you are early on in learning blender I would recommend putting many of your subdivision surface modifiers on the render only and working with the less divided surface. The performance benefit is insane and the actual render can take all night if it has to without slowing your progress.

Looks great so far, have you tried the Donut tutorial? Absolutely awesome.

This is a simple way to tell ideological motivation from fact driven motivation. The facts of a situation lead to clear answers and well defined uncertainty. For example, we didn’t know how well masks would work for Covid, people working in healthcare really needed them badly, so use by the general public was discouraged. Evidence came out that showed masking was incredibly effective, the recommendation changed shortly after.

She has a conclusion, that trans women should not use women’s bathrooms because in her opinion they are not women. That is the end point, not the underlying fact of the situation, so the arguments change to slide between the facts ad they come out. They claimed trans women are a danger to cis women if they use the bathrooms, but then data came out that showed that no, there was no increased risk, in fact trans women are far more likely to be victims of abuse than perpetrators. Did this change their minds? No.

Instead their position changed to making cis women feen uncomfortable. Is this a proven fact? Is there a survey? No, we don’t actually have evidence that cis women find trans women using the same bathroom makes them feel unsafe. Does that matter? No.

Notice that this discussion never talks about men feeling unsafe having trans men in men’s bathrooms. Are trans men men but trans women aren’t women? Or do they just not care about trans men? Because cis men can take care of themselves? No, it is at its root a fascist ideology.

Men are men, women are women, and those lines must be strictly enforced. Men are better than women and women are worse than men. This is part of fascism and explains why fascists don’t really care about trans men. Trans men make sense on this view, of course anyone born into one place in society would want to raise their position, so transitioning from female to male is akin to raising your station. This decision makes sense to them. A man choosing to transition to female on the other hand is a subversion of their worldview. Why would a man give up all of those privileges to lower themselves to being a woman, it beggars belief? And don’t even get started on more complex things like agender, non-binary, or gender fluid people, those ideas don’t fit in the fascist world at all.

Remember, at home we all use unisex toilets. A single toilet with a dedicated sink and a lock on the door just like a disabled toilet has is the obvious solution. Why don’t they want people to have that privilege? Because the suffering is the point. They hate trans people, they hate LGBTQ+ people in general, they hate ethnic minorities, they hate people with too much education, they hate people who are too poor, they are just hateful bigots and fascists.

There are other suggestions, but I would recommend a different approach. Use a standard epub and something like KoReader or Librera FD. If she wants to read a bible she probably has a strong preference about which one. Using a bible app will lock her to whichever that app supports, but using an epub allows her to use the correct version for her.

It also allows her to build skills using her religious text which can transfer to other books. Lots of people enjoy books beyond their central text but still around it, think study guides, history, religious studies, and so on, but also books completely unrelated. Being as she is having trouble with malware you could solve multiple problems in one go and also give her some fun, interesting books alongside things that scratch the religious itch while building skills and reducing the chance of scamming and malware.

And by not even discussing the lack of evidence and deafening silence they are normalising the situation.

When the Prime Minister of Australia went missing off the coast it wasn’t hidden from the people, it was discussed on the news. When he was declared dead it was public information. Surely if the USA can’t match Australia for transparency about the living or dead status of a high level figure The Guardian should make note of it?

This is regurgitation of a press release. Has anyone outside of his circle actually seen him? Confirmed his status? Seen him move his eyes? No, not from this reporting. Is it possible he is alive? Yes, of course. Is it possible he is dead? Yes, of course. No evidence to say he is alive, just other people saying he is alive.

If he dies between now and the next election and there is not proof he is alive I think it is reasonable to think they hid a much earlier death for political advantage. It would be incredibly simple to provide proof of life, so simple that not providing it becomes evidence against the proposition. Not confirmation, not certainty, but on balance one should be less certain he is alive than prior to this very suspicious behaviour.

When you say oil do you also mean waxes? And is there a difference between plant and animal oils? What about wax like in candles?

The difference between oil and wax is whether they are solid or liquid at room temperature. Higher saturation fats are more likely to be solid at room temperature, and longer chain fats are the same, so a long highly saturated fat is likely to be very solid at room temperature and therefore hard and waxy.

I find that vegetable oils excluding olive oil are pretty awful on my skin, but animal fats tend to be less of an issue. Tallow and coconut oil are my favourites for texture for animal and plant respectively, and while butter is OK ghee is strangely nasty.

My partner can be made to feel ill by the sound of terracotta grinding, and I can’t handle car breaks that squeak without feeling like a fishhook is exiting my body.

Indeed, it is a really strange level of zero care given to those who supposedly are important and valued. Protection just means control most of the time.

I listened to an audiobook recently, I can’t remember the name, but it was about intersex people. The level of horrible shit done to them is just insane. They are frequently just assigned to a sex based on the feelings of the doctor and then have their genitals surgically altered to match that decision. This decision is not based on gender presentation, given the almost total lack of any difference between male and female babies, but on what is easiest for the surgeon. They think “Would it be easier to make a penis it a vagina from what I see?” and then that is the answer for the gender of this child.

The part that really broke my heart was that they specifically don’t tell the kids. They lie to them intentionally because it would cause “undue stress” and is just a bit too hard of a conversation. I personally think they also don’t want the kids to consider their decision and think that maybe it was done wrong, assigning them to the incorrect gender.

Also, given all of the hard assigning to one of two genders, how could we possibly see a third gender or more appear? If every time biology gives us a non-binary answer they just “correct” it into a binary then of course there won’t be examples of people who don’t fit those genders, you “corrected” them all. In all honesty, I think it does meet many of the criteria of a genocide.

…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

I think we can definitely say the LGBTQ+ community has had members killed by governments, serious bodily and mental harm to members of the group, deliberate infliction on the group calculated to cause physical distraction in whole or part (AIDS, blacklisting, intentional exclusion from society, medical malpractice, legal exclusions, chemical castration, etc), the banning of LGBTQ+ people having kids, adopting kids, forcible sterilisation, and of course the harsh measures of child protective services and related organisations around the world stealing kids from LGBTQ+ families and adopting them out. I think there has been and currently still is a broad genocide underway against the LGBTQ+ community and in another 50 years we may start to see some of the awareness applied now to the horrors of Israel’s actions against Gaza or the USA and UK against, well, everyone, and eventually we may get recognition.

First, great username, absolutely love it. Second, from what I understand the two share way more than not and are both functional, just with slightly different use cases. Two cool projects, two slightly different views, but not mutually exclusive.

You’ve been on the internet too long, as have we all.

ausclusive

Ftfy

Broadly speaking laws should centre around enabling people to make choices in an informed and safe manner.

If a product is not what it says it is then people can’t mame that choice properly, so laws around quality control and labeling are a must.

Advertising often clouds decisions and frequently reaches audiences outside the target market, driving consumption by kids etc, so none of that please.

Tax should be significant on these items, but not high enough to leave illegal supply competitive or even cheap by comparison. Otherwise you get an increase in gang activity like we have had from raising our tobacco prices over the last 20 years.

Yes indeed, I wasn’t sure about the architecture for the machine and when Apple started their own silicon, everything is happening both so fast and so slow, time is a flat circle.

Yes, Asahi is for Apple silicon, not Intel, I wasn’t sure when they changed over from Intel to Arm.

That said, if you have a fully spare computer which is not something you rely on for anything then installing the OS directly can give you better performance. I don’t know how powerful your main machine is but if it is significantly more powerful than the old machine a VM may be faster on that, it just depends on the performance of each machine.

A lot of people talk about Asahi Linux as a good distro for Apple hardware, I wouldn’t know given I haven’t tried Apple hardware for decades. That said, installing on the bare metal is great, but first I would recommend a virtual machine.

Using a VM you can try different distros, test different desktop environments, and generally mess around without risk to your data or the usability of your machine in the early stages of figuring Linux out. Once you have tried a few and found a workflow that works for you you can install as a dual boot or even ditch Mac OS entirely. I would personally try a few different desktop environments including KDE, Gnome, and XFCE, along with some of the more obscure ones like in ElementaryOS and so on. Linux is all about options and choice so try some things and learn what works for you.

Ultimately, don’t take it too seriously. You don’t need the right answer, there isn’t one, just try some things and find what works for you. If it stops working you can always try something else later.

I still wear mine every day. I have a wonderful mask from an Australian company which is Marino wool and very comfortable. It has replaceable filters and a head strap so it doesn’t pull on my ears. My clients have never seen my face and I have worked with some for more than 2 years. I do it mostly because I have some health issues that covid would not help, I work with immune compromised people, and my partner could really do well to not get sicker. I was wearing a mask in 2019 due to bushfires and I’ve not stopped since, I don’t see myself stopping any time soon.