You are confidently incorrect on this. Currency == money. Money is, for we hoi polloi, a barely consentual conversion and exchange system for our labor, hypothetically allowing us to convert our labor into readily fungible exchange units. Money, at the Capital Class level, is debt, and therefore control, i.e. power. Money is just how they keep score.

There are plenty of barter and Communist (“from those of ability to those of need”) economies, just on scales that fly below the radar of most economists. Your sweeping assertion leads me to believe that you may simply be ignorant of those non-monetary exchanges. Would you be willing to add more context to your assertion?

Wampum was used by Eastern Costal tribes as a storytelling aid.

In the Salish Tribes, dentalium shell necklaces were used as a status symbol/indication of social rank. Some tribes used the necklaces as a type of currency, but I’ve only heard the “some tribes did this” part; never anything about which specific tribes used dentalium as currency.

Obviously, anything that holds perceived value can be traded.

Source: went to junior high in a school that taught two full years of Haudenosaunee (also called Iroquois) history.

Salish source: I’ve been a volunteer naturalist in the Puget Sound for eight years with an annual training requirement, with entire days allocated to history of the original Salish tribe for the area where we’re working.

So… like running a blender in reverse? 😁

The Salish Tribes existed in the PacNW for over 13,000 years without money.

Holy hell! This was the most succinct, concise, and “yeah, your high school history textbooks whitewashed all this shit” summary of the modern Conservative political machine. It’s like Robert Evans, Matt Taibbi, Jake Hanrahan, and Kurt Andersen had a love child that came out as a summary text.

If anyone got to my comment here, but only skimmed parent comment, please do yourself a favor and bask in that bit.

I wonder how much of a role palate refinement is for this trend. For example: Starbucks, for as terrible as their coffee is, did a lot to elevate the overall regard of coffee; bean juice was no longer just a bitter stew we tolerated to get our caffeine fix. Starbucks broke trail for craft coffee roasting more general popularity.

Could it be the same with alcoholic beverages? I used to think Maker’s Mark was the best bourbon going. Now I know better, but so many of the craft bourbons are expensive or just plain hard to find. Ditto for my favorite hazy IPAs. Why binge drink the good stuff when your palate is going to be wrecked after three beers? And since I’m not going to drink swill, welp, guess I’m not going to get drunk tonight!

I have long pondered a comedy set in the Star Wars universe. Maybe some beer-swilling, rowdy Jedi. And fortunately Auralnauts fulfilled my dream: https://youtu.be/WSCm8yAxBr8?si=QC1SNiLAMAu1rE0T

Some of the later entries in the series are a bit weak, but there are always worthwhile punchlines.

:( indeed. This got me right in the feels.

Ever see a toucan in person? I had an employee with a toucan he would sometimes bring into work. It could throw things, especially round fruit, with uncanny accuracy. Like it could easily play catch from at least 2m away.

Glaucous-winged gulls also seem to have uncanny accuracy with defecation, but that’s not quite throwing.

ADHD + tinnitus here, and my tinnitus frequencies shift around too. I made white and brown noise clips in Audacity, then notched out the frequencies of my varying tinnitus. I play it on repeat and found it very helpful. Although the tinnitus always comes back, I can focus while listening.

If you want help with creating your own files or just want me to make them for you, DM me.

We will see this in a federal court case before too long. In the US cash is legal tender for transactions, but plenty of businesses are moving to card-only. This is kinda legal gray area now, but when I still owned businesses it was quite illegal. I consulted my business attorney about going to card-only because of too many hold-up attempts. That was a complete non-starter.

I felt this way too viscerally.

TIL Commode Door is a rank. Is that role tasked with containing the dark humours?

Inb4: yes, I know it’s “commodore.”

Mashing the upvote for Shadow Tactics and Shadow Tactics:Aiko’s Choice. And agreed, their controller scheme is so spot on. Aiko’s Choice adds some deeply bittersweet context to the first game.

I fully agree with all of your points, which is why I limited my comment to the “best snipers in the world couldn’t do this” part. More agreement with adrenaline is a huge factor. Just ask any hunter what their first takedown was like. Even sighting in 800m paper target shots still gets me a little hit of adrenaline. :D

Okay, wait… I’ll take a little bit of issue with one little point about controlled conditions. I grew up on a farm and was surrounded by farmers and ranchers. We’re used to shooting in less-than-perfect conditions: standing; just grabbed the rifle off the rack; exhausted from a rough day of baling or herding; blah blah blah taco (totally a technical term). Still nowhere near career snipers, though.

The best snipers in the world couldn’t stage something like this, a gust of wind could have decided his fate.

I call bullshit on this particular statement. I am not a sniper, but I AM a pretty shit-hot target shooter. I can always put three rounds through the same hole at 100 meters, sometimes five rounds, regardless of weather. The final hole diameter equate to 0.4 minute of accuracy.

I have acquaintances and a close friend who were okayish snipers in the Army and Marines. Their personal rifles are all 0.25 minute of accuracy. And we’re just talking about the hardware here. The shots that trained snipers can perform are astounding.

Probably most famously, the three Navy snipers in the Maersk Alabama hostage hijacking managed three headshots from one ship to a boat, both bobbing on the water.

Punch card stock makes amazing paper airplanes, both individually and laminated into larger stock.

Oh, right! I forgot about all of the LIDAR-equipped planes in maritime communities! Those are way more economical to fly than any sUAS. /s in case that wasn’t obvious.

In case you, or anyone else, were vaguely interested in learning:

-kelp extent mapping needs to be done in repeatable fashion, specifically at low tide; we can put up an sUAS any time

-the communities most in need of monitoring absolutely cannot afford to send planes up monthly

-many of the kelp beds in the PacNW are in restricted airspace; it is much easier to get an FAA clearance to perform low-altitude surveys using sUAS

-that restricted airspace I mentioned? Some of these kelp beds are on approach paths for the airspace. Even if a plane were the preferred choice for surveying, the planes are unable to fly in the pattern we need

-(drifting a touch off your point of LIDAR-equipped planes) satellite imagery with the required resolution is prohibitively expensive

-most construction projects wouldn’t use a plane for tasks such as volumetric or area analysis

Consumer drones are quickly becoming the preferred, economical means for kelp health analysis, especially for communities that can’t afford planes or purchasing satellite imagery.

This “lonely adult” uses drones for aerial mapping and survey. This Summer’s huge project is a workflow I developed to map the extent of PacNW bull kelp forests in order to provide year-over-year health metrics. Using sUAS for this is way more automated, economical, repeatable, and granular than using airplanes and satellites, therefore within reach of those communities monitoring kelp health.

DJI hits the sweet spot of capabilities, compatibility, and cost. Skydio (go USA!) has abandoned the consumer/enthusiast market that built their business. And even before they turned their back on the consumer market, Skydio couldn’t come close to DJI’s hardware. Additionally, Skydio, in true capitalist fashion, locked capabilities away behind software licenses, capabilities that are already built into the drone.

It’s important for countries to have domestic drone manufacturing in the current conditions. But the USA’s actions here smack of protecting companies that just can’t hang.

Stainless steel that gets coated is no longer stainless steel. Stainless steel requires exposure to sufficient oxygen in order to maintain the protective oxide layer.

These are rudder bolts from the same gudgeon on my sailboat. The black stuff is anoxic corrosion.