I very much doubt that the .io TLD will vanish, too many big companies use it. Seen as non-country TLDs are allowed, I suspect that as soon as the country code goes away an existing registrar will buy it and .io domains will carry on.

meat chunks in my drink

I just want to remind you that you absolutely did not have to type that in, let alone post it! Bleugh. None-the-less, beautifully evocative writing.

You really can't beat Lidl when your shopping list is something like:

• Bread
• Cheese
• Milk
• Eggs
• Kayak
• Plasma cutter

The staff all seem pretty relaxed too, the cashiers have seats and chat to pretty much everyone, but especially the older regulars. I know they squeeze their supply chain hard, but from the customer perspective it's a pretty good experience.

A suitably large catapult would deliver the necessary delta-v, not release pollutants into the atmosphere, and would make a satisfying 'sproing thump' noise in doing so.

Bend them the other way. Start with all fingers open for zero, and curl them as needed. You only need to move them a bit, so even twenty (thumb and ring finger back, the others curled) isn't too hard.

Isn't that basically just a PAC with a refund option if it doesn't pay a candidate? Could be good if you could get enough participation.

This is good advice. If you can bring yourself to, linked-in can be a good place to find names; try to find someone "too important" to be dealing with you; a director or C-level. As the previous poster said, they'll delegate dealing with you. I've had months long wrangles dealt with in hours by a CEOs secretary that way. Make sure you provide a good contact phone number and be prepared to answer calls from unknown numbers.

Edit: typos

I'd say it needs a couple of people thoughtfully looking at the canvasses, but then get thee to a gallery! You have a great future as an artist.

NATO's having a presence in a member state is protection. It reduces the chance of opportunists like Putin invading.

Putin tried to call NATO's bluff, using Ukraine as a bargaining chip. NATO didn't blink, and so he started a war. He doesn't get to do the abuser thing of saying "see what you made me do". This is on him, and him alone.

He can demand that NATO withdraw all he likes, and I'd have some sympathy for that if it didn't involve invading another country as leverage. Note, I say some sympathy, not that NATO should actually do it, especially as Putin's regieme has threatened other countries already.

So, you're saying that Putin sent demands to NATO, saying they either bend to his will by removing their protection from a large portion of their member states or he'd start a war, and by not signing it NATO are responsible for starting the war? I just want to fully understand your position on this.

I've found HSBC to be ok using Firefox on Linux. I don't know if they have integrations with any accounting software, but the web access works well, and you can export your transactions for processing locally.

ETA: I've run small business accounting on Gnucash, I found the learning curve a bit steep, but once you 'get it' it's handy.

Sorry for the slow reply, life occurred.

I think I understand where you're coming from with the desired to be productive and not reinstall. I think I've been there too! One thing that I can suggest, if you do have the time, is to learn a system like Ansible and use it to setup and configure your machine. The discipline of keeping all of the config as source rather than making ad-hoc changes reduces the chance of thinking you'll make just one little change and breaking something, and, if something does go wrong, you can get back to your working configuration quickly.

Bearing in mind that there really isn't anything you can do to stop yourself if you're really determined to not lose the data, because if you can read it at any time you can back it up, the closest you are likely to come is something like creating new key with GPG then using the TPM to wrap your secret key and deleting the original. That way the key is only usable on that specific machine. Then use the key-pair to encrypt your 'guard' files. You can still decrypt them because you have the wrapped secret keys and you're on the same machine, but if you wipe the drive and lose those keys the data is gone. The TPM wrapping prevents you from taking the keys to a different machine to decrypt your data.

There's an article with some examples here,

Having said all of that, this still doesn't help if you just clone the disk as all of the data, including the wrapped key and the encrypted files will be cloned. The one difference there is that the serial number of the hard drive will be different. Maybe you could use that, combined with a passphrase as the passphrase for your GPG key, but we're getting into pretty esoteric territory here. So you could generate a secret key with a command like:

( lsblk -dno SERIAL /dev/sdb ; zenity --title "Enter decrypt password" --password) | sha1sum | cut -c1-40

Where /dev/sdb is the device your root partition is on. zenity is a handy utility for displaying dialogs, there are others available. In this use it just prompts for a passsword. We then concatenate the drive serial number from lsblk with the password you entered and hash the result. The hashing is really only a convenient way to mix the two without worrying about the newline lsblk spits out. Don't record the result of this command, but use it to set the passphrase on your new GPG key. Wrapping the secret key in the manner the article above suggests is a nice extra step to make it harder to move the drive to another machine or mess around in that sort of way, but not strictly necessary as that wasn't in the scope of your original question.

Now you can encrypt your file with: gpg -e -r <your key name> <your file>'. That will produce an encrypted version of <your file>called<your file>.gpg. To decrypt the file you can get gpg` to use the hashing command from above to get the passphrase with something like:

gpg -d --pinentry-mode=loopback --batch --passphrase-fd 3 <your file>.gpg 3< <( ( lsblk -dno SERIAL /dev/sdb ; zenity --title "Enter decrypt password" --password) | sha1sum | cut -c1-40 )

Once you've tested that you can decrypt the file successfully you can remove the original, plaintext, file. Your data is now encrypted with a key that is secured with a passphrase made of a string you know and the serial number of your disk and optionally wrapped with a key from the TPM that is tied to your physical machine. If you change the disk or the machine the data is irretrievable (ignoring the caveats discussed above). I think that's about as close to your original goal as you can get. It's rough around the edges, and I'm not sure I'd trust my data to it, but I believe it'll work. If you do something like this, please test it thoroughly, I can't guarantee it!

Good faith isn’t just about being polite and sounding civil. It’s about actually engaging with other ideas presented.

I concur, and I have genuinely been trying to engage with the ideas people post. You're right that I have been focused on an extremely narrow framework, because that is what I see before us. I've been asking what people suggest doing in that framework because I'm trying to understand people's position and what actions they think would be appropriate at that scale. The wide points eloquently made by you and other posters involve seem extreme to me, and I accept you may see that as a failing on my part. That makes it hard to engage with them on more than a superficial level. I felt like the conversations continuously ended up with us talking at cross-purposes, which is why I kept trying to bring them back to the points I was trying to understand.

I still struggle to see how people don't see trump as a greater threat to their freedom (or whatever freedom they feel they have) than biden, but I'm not trying to change anyone's mind either, just to comprehend their point of view.

I thank you for actually continuing to discuss this with me, but I think I've tried your patience more than sufficiently, so I'm going to disengage from the various threads we have now.

Biden gunning down supreme court justices is of course a jokey image, presented by you.

This was the exact statement Sickos made at the top of the thread: 'Bro Biden is going to die in the next four years regardless; he could personally shoot every conservative supreme court justice. He chooses not to. How can you respect that?' I thought it was posted in a jokey way, and so engaged with is as such. It seems I was wrong in that, for which I apologies to both you and them.

Furthermore, given the latest supreme court ruling regarding presidential immunity, it seems I was wrong in assuming such an action it would be too extreme even for the US. I retract my statements to that effect. Seen as he's been given a green light to do anything that could be considered an official act, this would now seem like an entirely feasible approach to the problem.

I thought the entire concept was jokey, but OK, let me restate my point: Yes, the US government has killed many people, though typically individually and discretely. The president personally shooting multiple supreme court justices as Sickos suggested would be seen to be several levels above that and probably be too extreme for even democrat supporters to stomach. The dems also seem to like to be seen to be playing fair, which suggests they wouldn't even contemplate that approach.

The difference is, I don't think it would fail in the scenario you put forward, so there would be a consequence. Now if we assume it's biden, and he's unlikely to see out another term even if elected, maybe the risk/reward ration swings enough to make it a realistic possibility, but in general I suspect a president assassinating multiple supreme court justices would lead to them being impeached successfully in short order.

That assumes competence on the part of all participants, which I don't believe to be the case. Incompetence gives the same outcome, but can, theoretically, be fixed.

No it’s not. There’s more than two presidential candidates.

Maybe I should have been clearer. There are only two candidates with any realistic prospect of winning the election, and only one position to fill. There are many representatives and senators, so their individual contribution to the whole is less. The president is the head of the executive and isn't diluted in the same way.

And you can (and in some cases do) argue that anything short of voting for, capmapigning for, donating to, and never ever showing any disatisfaction with the Democrats qualifies as this. Why stop at withholding your vote? Or campaigning for change ‘at the wrong time’? Have you been door knocking and phone banking for Biden? If not, why not? If you have, why aren’t you doing it now, and in every spare moment, or quitting your job to do it full time? Have you donated every cent you own to the Democratic party? What about selling any property or other assets you have? Aren’t you part of the problem?

You're reading things I haven't said, so I can't really answer that.

Violence from the right toward the left is already happening. All that’s needed for a civil war is shooting back.

Yes, that's true, and it's not just the left but minorities of all kinds too. I would rather find a way of walking back from that brink, rather than deliberately pushing the country over it.

It has been like this since well before either of us were alive, and it will be this way until climate change kills us all unless we stop believing the grand lie of electoralism and realize that politics happens more than once every four years.

If by that you mean that the electorate need to be engaged with politics more than every four years, then yes, absolutely. That's why I keep saying people should be in contact with their representatives regularly, so they know your name and what you stand for. That should be happening in large groups ideally as it becomes hard to ignore when the numbers start putting you at risk of losing the next election.

As I said, I'm drowning in responses, and I've got to them out of order. I've seen your response to this elsewhere, but I'm talking about in this election, over the next few months, what are the options? Yes,the analogy was simple to the point of absurdity, but it wasn't me who brought it up.

I realise there is much that can be done over time, ranging from trying to swing the existing candidates further left via voter pressure to rather more revolutionary means, but I'm more focused on the next event. What happens in November? I perceive that trump would be a worse president, for the US and the world at large, than biden would. I realize that that's an arguable position, but all I've seen against it is people saying bidens bad. I'm not questioning that, he is, but that doesn't change the conclusion. Given that, from my point of view, there is only one reasonable course of action in the presidential election itself. Actions preceding that are more open, but anything that risks increasing the chance of trump getting in would be dangerous. I've mentioned elsewhere that down ticket votes are more of an insurance, so, to my mind, not voting still isn't the best course of action, but I can understand the other view point too.