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Last Notes

2026-10-23 02:50:00 UTC

2026-09-28 20:33:00 UTC

I've watched a [couple videos](https://youtu.be/zljWYb0TkTM?t=339) recently showing use of a Majohn Q1—a Chinese knockoff of the long-discontinued Tombow Egg—with a fude nib for sketching. The idea here is that the pen is so short that if unposted, it's practical to to hold it for long periods of time at a low angle to the page, taking advantage of the fude nib to do very broad strokes.
I thought that I'd give a Q1 a shot, see if it could be used to fill in large areas instead of using a brush or brush pen. I'm a sucker for high-contrast black-and-white stuff, and it sounded to me like it'd be great for doing large, filled-in black areas.
Platinum Chou Kuro has a reputation for—while expensive—being the blackest fountain pen ink out there, and sounded like it'd be a great idea to pair it with that pen and nib to fill those areas in, maximizing that contrast.
This wasn't as good an idea as it had initially sounded to me.
The problem is that while Chou Kuro *is* very black, it's a pigmented ink and dries atop the paper. Using a fude nib and going back over one's strokes causes the ink to be pushed around, varying its thickness and making the pen strokes visible.
Once the ink has dried, the pigment appears to prevent more ink from being wicked onto the paper, so one also can't go back and then darken areas with another coat.
The image of the man with the dog was done with a fude nib Majohn Q1 with Platinum Chou Kuro on Iroful paper.
For contrast, here's an image of the USS *Constitution* done with a TWSBI Eco EF nib with TWSBI Black, also on Iroful paper:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/84b808f0-c6b5-40a0-82e3-ed945fb64124.avif
![](https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/84b808f0-c6b5-40a0-82e3-ed945fb64124.avif)
TWSBI Black is a dye-based ink, not a pigment-based ink like Chou Kuro. While you can still see pen strokes, it's much less pronounced and was possible to go back and clean them up (and I imagine that it's even possible to use a water brush or something and to smooth it out, since once Chou Kuro dries, water does very little to it). TWSBI Black also isn't particularly prone to shading in online tests that I've seen compared to other blacks, which should also help.
I think that, for filling in areas, having more-consistent lightness within an inked area is more-desirable than having a bit darker ink.
WebP versions of each, for anyone who might be using a client that can't handle AVIF:
[Man and Dog WebP](https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/ac7c2e87-19e9-4714-b62c-38ba6b9d170a.webp)
[USS *Constitution* WebP](https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/67db1e6d-783f-4ba9-87da-8cacf33031cf.webp)
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/e4dfb338-de1c-4d40-bb66-270418af47d1.avif

2026-09-06 00:08:34 UTC

Just a warning to anyone else who thought that flex nibs looked interesting and, like me, didn't realize the requirements of needing to use one with existing scripts. Maybe this is obvious to a number of other people, but it wasn't to me.
I like the look of [Spencerian script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script):
![](https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/869a6bcc-0ebf-499b-9631-83c492ef5c49.jpeg)
I figured, hey, I'm using a fountain pen, which unlike most other writing instruments, can take flex nibs and with them, do variable-width lines. Why not give Spencerian a shot?
I finally got a nib that has decent line width variation, a Fountain Pen Revolution EF Ultra Flex, and put it on a pen, and started practicing letter forms.
I promptly sliced through the paper. Repeatedly.
I took a closer look and realized what was going on.
Usually, when writing in cursive, the pen is at something like 45° from the line of text. I was doing the same when trying to write in Spencerian.
If you intend to write in Spencerian or Copperplate script, the nib must be *perpendicular* to the line of text so that a vertical downward stroke is pulling directly towards the pen.
The calligraphy crowd typically uses [dip pens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dip_pen) that amount to just a nib, and can stick the thing in an [oblique holder](https://www.amazon.com/oblique-nib-holder/s?k=oblique+nib+holder), so they can have their hand at a 45° angle to the paper, like normal, but still keep the nib aligned perpendicular to the line of text.
But a fountain pen user can't do that. They'd have a huge, unwieldy fountain pen hanging off an oblique holder. If they want to write in a script that requires that nib alignment, they must rotate their hand relative to the paper, and retrain themselves to write that way.
If you aren't really wanting to retrain yourself to write at a 45° angle from normal, you probably can't use flex-nib fountain pens to do Spencerian or Copperplate or similar.

2026-08-20 20:32:12 UTC

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There was a point in the past when society was concerned about people wasting their time on television instead of on social media or short-form video or whatever's *du jour* now.

2026-08-20 20:30:18 UTC

Also including a WebP for any clients that can't handle AVIF:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/e85170c1-828e-49fa-942c-2d23e7a34845.webp
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/33bd3f66-8597-42a5-a06f-7ad1af2b6de7.avif

2026-07-06 17:25:00 UTC

I got inspired and decided to try out a few fountain pen inks the other day. I picked up Oxygen Studio's Nitrogen.
This is a popular saturated blue ink that has a lot of red sheen to it, looks almost like metallic foil when written on sufficiently ink-resistant paper.
I used it with a broad-nib TWSBI Eco. And in that, that, I agree. It does show a lot of sheen.
One really needs video to see the effect, since one needs to tilt it relative to a light source. A static image doesn't really convey the effect:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEsHNIn1c7w&t=1460s
But there were some big caveats.
**It dries out very quickly on one's nib**
My big surprise was how extremely quickly the ink dried on my nib, producing a delay until the ink is flowing and a hard start after just a short time out in the air without ink flowing. People do talk about this online, now that I've gone looking for it, but I wasn't aware of it when getting the ink, and I doubt I'd have gotten it if I'd known about this going into it. One can't just stop and think for very long without needing to start writing to keep the ink flowing. For me, this is frustrating, and really kills the appeal of the ink for me. None of my other inks do this.
**One really needs ink-resistant paper to see sheen**
Another thing that I hadn't anticipated --- not having played around with inks with a lot of sheen prior to this --- is that one really needs ink-resistant paper to see the sheen. On ordinary copy paper, it just looks like a blue ink. I knew that there would be a difference, but not that there would be *no* sheen. On an inexpensive composition notebook I've had sitting around for probably thirty years in my desk, it looks all right, if not quite as shiny as on Iroful paper.
This probably isn't a huge surprise to people who have used inks with sheen, and it's not going to be specific to this particular sheening ink. But I'd expected some sheen to still be visible on more absorbent paper, and it isn't.
**It tends to smear and get on things**
In the above video, Brian Goulet *does* mention this and how the ink is infamous for doing this --- which I find puzzling, given how quickly it seems to dry out on the nib. So I was expecting to see this. But I still managed to get smearing and blue blotches on my hands multiple times, despite being careful. I haven't seen anything like this with the other inks I've used (though I don't have a huge collection, admittedly).
**Other**
It has a reputation for staining clear pens. I haven't tried cleaning it out after exhausting my current fill, so no first-hand experience with this, but I thought that I'd also mention this, in case someone runs across this post.
**Summary**
The ink is pretty, if one wants something with a lot of sheen. I don't dispute that. But it really is a pain in the neck to use.
I don't know of a good "Nitrogen alternative" that performs better, but I have to say that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they are aware of what they are getting into.

2026-03-20 05:56:16 UTC

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>but not individual instances.
You can. If you're using a Lemmy home instance, as you are currently (lemmy.world), in the Web UI, go to your user menu in the upper-right corner, click "Settings", click the "Blocks" tab, and then you can choose instances to block in a panel there.
If what you want is "I don't want auth-left stuff", avoiding hexbear.net, lemmygrad.ml, and lemmy.ml can help. You aren't going to get some kind of ironclad avoidance, but that'll avoid the great bulk of it. lemmy.world is defederated with lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net for exactly the reason you mention (in fact, I see people who don't like lemmy.world because they consider it liberal, which they don't like) so you already won't be seeing stuff from the first two instances.
I don't think I've personally seen fascist material on the Threadiverse (though there are some people with quite broad definitions of the term), though there are or were some far-right instances out there, based on defederation lists. Most of what little I've seen seems to be on the Fediverse seems to me to be on [Pleroma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleroma_%28software%29), though I haven't spent much time on non-Threadiverse Fediverse stuff.
>moderate conservative
The instance that I use, lemmy.today, has one user (@npub1vsy…2q8t) that posts a bunch of Trump stuff and a conservative community, !conservative@lemmy.today, which is considerably more active (due to his own activity) than !conservative@lemmy.world. I don't know if your definition of conservative and his match up, but maybe you'd find it to your taste; it's probably the closest to mainstream US, Republican material that I've seen with much activity on the Threadiverse. The instance isn't going to be just moderate conservative and moderate liberal users though.
EDIT: My own personal take is that the long term solution to having people with disparate positions on what content they want to see, above-and-beyond use of communities, is to have "curator lists", where people can basically "share" lists of blocks/subscribes/votes or something like that, and other users can subscribe to them. Then you have a list that --- for example --- excludes or includes content on various grounds without requiring effort on a per-user-who-wants-curated-content basis. I think that Usenet pretty much established that killfiles don't really scale well in combating spam and stuff like that, because there was never a mechanism to share content like that among users. Anyway, today, there isn't support for something like that on the Threadiverse. I understand that BlueSky has something along those lines.

2026-01-20 17:32:43 UTC

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/24313827
> Seriously, what the fuck is going on with fabs right now?
>
> > Micron has found a way to add new DRAM manufacturing capacity in a hurry by acquiring a chipmaking campus from Taiwanese outfit Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC).
> >
> > The two companies announced the deal last weekend. Micron’s version of events says it’s signed a letter of intent to acquire Powerchip’s entire P5 site in Tongluo, Taiwan, for total cash consideration of US$1.8 billion.

2026-01-10 12:30:20 UTC

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> All frontpage is filled with memes and shitpost, again are you saying that this is what most people want to see?
I mean, I don't know how I can be clearer than I was in the above comment:
>The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).
It will have *everything that people are posting on any communities that any single user on your home instance subscribes to*. This means that the proportion of traffic on All will generally reflect what people want to *post*.
There are some social media websites that try to profile you based on your viewing or commenting habits or other such things and then do recommendations of content. Some of these, like Twitter, have caught flak for recommending content that someone is likely to engage with, which causes them to tend to recommend ragebait material.
But regardless of the merits of one recommendation system or another, mander.xyz is running Lemmy. Lemmy doesn't, in 2026, have some sort of system to profile you, try to predict what posts you want to see, and then show you only that. Maybe it should and someone should write that, but today, it gives you three choices:
* You can view All, which is all of the posts in any community that anyone on your home instance has subscribed to.
* You can view Local, which is all of the posts on your home instance alone. Unless you are only interested in using the Threadiverse for highly-specialized content and on a home instance dedicated to that content, this probably isn't what you want.
* You can view Subscribed, which is all of the posts in any community that you personally have subscribed to.
What I'm saying is that it is very likely that the third option is going to very probably provide you with a higher proportion of content that you want to see. "All" will probably never reflect what you in particular are most-interested in. It's maybe a way to help expose new users to a sampling of what's out there, reduce the barrier to start them using the Threadiverse, but you're probably going to want a Subscribed list tailored to your interests.
But what I can say with utter certainty is that people who are posting memes will not stop posting memes because you don't want to see as many memes in your feed, and All is going to reflect what people post. Getting upset about what people are posting and then complaining about that won't solve your problem. Writing a recommendation system to profile users and provide recommended feeds for Threadiverse servers might, if you can code, but I'm guessing that the most-practical solution is going to be just doing a set of communities tailored to your interests, and then browsing Subscribed.

2026-01-10 12:07:56 UTC

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> It’s easier to create a meme than writing a title?
It's easier to create a meme than it is many other sorts of content.
>I’m asking why is it filled with this content, are you saying that this is what most people want to see here?
The All feed will reflect what people want to post, as it all shows up there (well, all the stuff in communities that at least one user on your home instance subscribes to).
That's why I'm saying that you're probably going to be happier whitelisting the content that you are interested in, rather than complaining that people on the Threadiverse as a whole aren't posting what you want. There are many different takes on what people want to see, so no one person is going to be happy with traffic as an aggregate. There are a bunch of furries here, who are happy with furry content. One of the first threads I ran into when I first joined --- Kbin sent people to random posts to try to help them discover new communities --- was a post talking about technology issues. Another user there, who also appeared to be a new user sent there randomly by Kbin, was upset that there was so many furries there and complaining about the fact. It was in a community on pawb.social, which is a furry instance. There's no reasonable way to make the guy who didn't want to see furry content and the people who do want to see furry content simultaneously happy with any one single collection of content. Gotta produce user-specific feeds for that.
EDIT: There are also some people who prefer to blacklist rather than whitelist. Like, browse All, but then just keep blocking every community that they don't want to see. I think that this doesn't scale well --- I mean, there are tens of thousands of communities out there. Some people can create shit-tons of communities, and I suspect that sooner or later someone is very probably going to set up an instance that has auto-generated communities for one reason or another. Maybe to mirror RSS feeds somewhere or something, who knows. There's already one that mirrors Reddit subreddits, [lemmit.online](https://lemmit.online/). Then it's going to flood the feeds of the blacklisters. But, well, that's another way to curate content.

2026-01-10 11:48:30 UTC

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Probably because they're easy to make, so there's a lot of traffic there.
I think the real question is "why does the content I see not reflect what I want to see", and I'd guess that that's most-likely because you're browsing "All", which combines all traffic from all communities on any instances that anyone on your home instance, mander.xyz, subscribes to. This is, for any given person, unlikely to be specifically what they are interested in.
I'd generally suggest finding a list of communities that you are interested in, subscribing to them, and then having your webpage/client/whatever set to show "Subscribed" rather than "All".
If you want a convenient way to browse a list of communities on all instances (even ones that nobody on your home instance has subscribed to yet --- you can be the first one!), I recommend https://lemmyverse.net/ and clicking on "Communities". If you see one you like, say, !strategy_games@piefed.world, then just search for it on your home instance (like, the text `!strategy_games@piefed.world`), and if your home instance doesn't know about it yet, it'll tell your home instance about it. Then subscribe to it, and traffic there will show up when you browse "Subscribed".
EDIT: Note that Mbin and PieFed communities are, somewhat-unintuitively, shown in their own lists, probably because the three software packages don't provide the same pieces of information about communities and lemmyverse.net wants to let you be able to search using all available search criteria, rather than just the least-common-denominator stuff. If you want to search for communities on Mbin or PieFed, select those from the menu in the upper left.

2025-11-15 13:15:00 UTC

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I mean, there are some legitimate reasons.
* Non-rechargeable alkalines do have very low self-discharge rate, so they work well if you're gonna stash a flashlight somewhere for a long time for emergencies.
* The voltage on different types of batteries is not the same, and there are some devices with power supplies that cannot handle a wide-enough voltage range. I have a Grundig G6 shortwave radio, for example, which will not run on NiMH AA batteries (1.2V, rather than 1.5V alkalines or lithium). I suppose that I could get rechargeable lithium-ions, but I don't really want to deal with rechargeables with different battery chemistry floating around, and my current battery charger can't handle lithiums.
I just remember the 1980s, where the norm was alkaline, and people had to buy the things all the time for all kinds of battery-powered devices. Was nice to be able to just recharge batteries at home. Can't imagine wanting to do that today.

2025-11-15 11:54:34 UTC

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Outside of specialized uses like wanting a very long shelf life for rarely-used devices, I kind of thought that everyone had switched to rechargeable AA and AAA batteries years back.

2025-06-06 23:07:53 UTC

Original post by Crul@lemm.ee:
> Source: [A M A T E U R I S M ™ on Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/cassette-amateur/724928599308877824/1986volkswagenorbit)
>
> Desiged by Italdesign: [Project: Orbit - 1986 - Italdesign](https://www.italdesign.it/project/orbit/)
> [Thanks](https://lemm.ee/comment/5481485) to @npub1a3n…arrm for the reference.
>
> Tumblr archive: https://www.tumblr.com/archive
> RSS Feed: https://www.tumblr.com/rss
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/31596fde-ebcc-4293-8183-ac127f5279b0.jpeg

2025-05-30 01:03:23 UTC

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Oh, good catch.

2025-05-29 22:36:49 UTC

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> a $100 certificate they could use to purchase a new Bluetooth speaker or couple Keurig coffee makers,” said Pew pollster Dana Felder, who
I do not for one minute believe that $100 is buying a couple of Keurig coffee makers, unless those guys are going ridiculously hard on the razor-and-blades model.
*checks Amazon*
Yeah. The least-expensive Keurig coffee maker on Amazon is $60:
https://www.amazon.com/Keurig-K-Mini-Single-Serve-Coffee/dp/B07GV2S1GS
It looks like they go up to $126.
Maybe a couple of Mr. Coffee coffeemakers.

2025-02-20 19:34:19 UTC

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> “I’d like to also just send a message—like, because, as the president said, like, this—there’s a lot of rich people out there,” Musk said. “They should be caring more about the country because—the reason they should be caring about—more about country is: America falls, what do you think is going to happen to your business?”
>
>“What do—what do you think—do you think you’re be going to be okay if—if the ship of America sinks? Of course not. Like, what—what I’m doing here, what the president is doing is it’s just long-term thinking. The ship of America must be strong. The ship of America cannot sink. If it sinks, we all sink with it.”
Okay, sure. But let me ask this: if Biden had had a second term rather than Trump, *would ship America have sunk*? I don't think so. I can maybe see some areas where someone who favors Republican policies would say "American might be weaker", but it seems pretty wildly unreasonable to get from there to "sunk". Trying to claim some sort of imminent, existential crisis seems pretty unreasonable for pretty much anyone.
I haven't paid much attention to Trump's people speaking to the press recently, but I saw a video the other day from one of his advisor crowd, and he was doing the whole "America has to be saved" thing too, and it was pretty over-the-top.

2025-02-19 00:03:10 UTC

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I mean, there are sources there. It's just...not people who would have current, inside information. John Bolton hasn't been in government since he was National Security Advisor under Trump in Trump's first term and the two fell out. He's been asserting that Trump doesn't like NATO or alliances at all for some time, though, based on his interactions with Trump in Term 1.
*kagis*
Here's him in 2022, back before he expected Trump to actually make it into a second term:
https://www.businessinsider.com/bolton-putin-waiting-for-trump-to-withdraw-from-nato-in-2nd-term-2022-3
> Former National Security Advisor John Bolton says 'Putin was waiting' for Trump to withdraw the United States from NATO in his second term
>"I thought he put his foot over it, but at least he didn't withdraw then," said Bolton, who wrote in his memoir about Trump's consideration of withdrawing from NATO in 2018. "In a second Trump term, I think he may well have withdrawn from NATO. And I think Putin was waiting for that."
>
>Trump viewed NATO as a liability during his presidency, believing that European countries were not paying enough of their fair share of the burden of providing defense to the alliance. Bolton, a State Department official during the George W. Bush administration, was brought on to be Trump's national security advisor in 2018 only to be ousted a year and a half later.
>
>Bolton's latest comments come just days after he told Newsmax that Trump "barely knew where Ukraine was," pushing back on a host who said the former president had been "tough on Russia."
>
>Asked whether he was satisfied by how the Trump administration handled Ukraine, Bolton criticized his former boss.
>
>"I think it went very badly," said Bolton. "It was hard to have discussions on geostrategic issues when the president's main interest was getting... Rudy Giuliani in to see [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky so they could go find Hillary Clinton's computer server.
>Bolton said on Friday that former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper were concerned by Trump's behavior at the time. "All of us felt that we needed to bolster Ukraine's security, and were appalled at what Trump was doing," he said.
EDIT: It'd actually be interesting to see whether Trump *can* withdraw from NATO. Remarkably-enough, this is a part of American constitutional law that has never been legally-resolved: does the President, acting solo, have the ability to terminate a ratified treaty without action from Congress?
The question was raised with SCOTUS in [*Goldwater v. Carter*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_v._Carter), but that case was dismissed on a technicality, so we don't really have a ruling on the matter.
>*Goldwater v. Carter*, 444 U.S. 996 (1979), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Senator Barry Goldwater and other members of the United States Congress challenging the right of President Jimmy Carter to unilaterally nullify the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty, which the United States had signed with the Republic of China, so that relations could instead be established with the People's Republic of China.
>
>Goldwater and his co-filers claimed that the President required Senate approval to take such an action, under Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution, and that, by not doing so, President Carter had acted beyond the powers of his office. While dismissing the case the Court left open the question of the constitutionality of President Carter's actions.
To *enter* into a treaty, like NATO, the Senate's approval is required. So it does seem reasonable to me that going to the Senate should be required to *exit* a treaty. But...we haven't actually established what the rule there is, even after nearly two-and-a-half centuries of being a country.
EDIT2: The UK recently had to fight out a similar question over Brexit in their Supreme Court: could the Prime Minister, without action from Parliament, withdraw from the European Union?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_%28Miller%29_v_Secretary_of_State_for_Exiting_the_European_Union
In that case, their Supreme Court ruled no, that the Prime Minister couldn't singlehandedly leave the European Union, had to go back to Parliament.
EDIT3: I'd also add that I am dubious that Trump would leave NATO, even if Europe refuses to spend another cent on defense. I do think that he would potentially retaliate in other ways. I think that most policymakers in the US want the US in NATO -- but that there is a lot of agreement on Europe and defense spending and that the US has been ignored for a long time on the matter.
EDIT4: In the hypothetical that the US did leave NATO, it could theoretically rejoin under a more-sympathetic administration, but there would be two obstacles.
* **The US Senate**. The US has a very high bar for entering into treaties compared to most countries -- a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate, plus the President. There is a reason that the US is not party to some important treaties that many other countries are party to (no ratification approval from the Senate) but still is a signatory to the treaty and *acts* as if it is a member, like [UNCLOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_the_Law_of_the_Sea). So it'd require a supermajority in the Senate to rejoin. And for NATO, "pretending to be in" doesn't really have the same effect -- under UNSC rules, war is legal, whether or not the UNSC is onboard, as long as it's defensive and the justification is actual membership in a collective security arrangement. That is, normally a country isn't supposed to go to war without UNSC approval (on which Russia has a veto which it would probably use) *unless* it is in defense of itself or an allied member who has been attacked. While the US probably has the practical ability to go to war without UNSC approval if it really, really wants to -- who would stop it? -- and has certainly come up with rather tortured legal justifications in the past when it couldn't get explicit UNSC sign-off (e.g. the Iraq War), it does establish political and legal barriers. In the past, the US has not shown a lot of willingness to enter into major direct conflict in Europe without a treaty commitment -- like, say, Ukraine or Finland in the Winter War. That being said, the US did enter the Korean War without a treaty commitment, so...*shrugs*.
* **Other NATO members.** This requires unanimity among all NATO members. If you remember how difficult it was to get NATO approval for Finland and Sweden, the bar is the same for the US...but the impact of the US being in or out is a whole lot more consequential than Finland or Sweden being in or out. I mean, if I were the Kremlin and decided upon a confrontation path, I would pull pretty much any lever available to me to ensure that at least one member did not approve the US re-entering.

2025-02-10 07:38:18 UTC

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> Too bad there aren’t any non-profit search engines you could promote instead of the one that charges people money in order to make a profit.
If I remember from prior discussions, you prefer Duck Duck Go. If you want to mention that you use Duck Duck Go, I have no problem with that. I think that that's great.
>giving a corporation that would happily fuck you over in a second like every other corporation
I think that Kagi has considerably less-incentive to do so than Duck Duck Go does, because they have a viable revenue model that *doesn't* involve datamining me the way Google does or showing ads to me the way Duck Duck Go does. Yes, you can use an ad-blocker on Duck Duck Go, but then you're offloading the costs onto other users who don't do that, and in the long run, Duck Duck Go has an incentive to block users using ad blockers.
You may disagree with my assessment. But I've made that decision, I'm happy with it, I like the fact that Kagi added a Threadiverse search feature, and I am not going to change search engines to your favorite search engine, nor do I intend to stop telling people that I use Kagi.

2025-02-10 07:28:33 UTC

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You're free to comment every time if you want. I have no intention to change what I am doing, because I happen to like them, and my use of the term predates my use of that engine -- I wrote *googles* prior to this.
If you want to ban me because you cannot tolerate my writing style, do so, and I'll go use communities other than those you that you moderate. Trying to harass me into changing what I write is not going to have an effect.

2025-02-10 06:38:51 UTC

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I'm fairly sure that I've read some articles by this guy on *Forbes* before, because I remember that he had some article on something, many years back, that I really liked and I distinctly remember thinking that his thumbnail looked kind of frumpy. I believe that he's British. Looks like he hasn't been at *Forbes* in almost a decade, though.
*kagis*
Yeah, was apparently born in Torquay, England.
https://www.timworstall.com/2008/07/about-tim-worstall/
> I was born in Torquay in 1963, grew up mostly in Bath (with a couple of years in Naples, Italy as a result of my father\’s Naval career) and was educated at Downside Abbey.
EDIT: Also, a "ton" and a "tonne" aren't the same thing -- that's not just dialect. A "ton" here in the US means a short ton, 2000 US lbs. A "tonne" is a metric ton, 1000 kg. I don't know what Brits normally mean if they write "ton", whether it's a short ton or a long ton. In the US, we'd normally write "metric ton" instead of "tonne".

2025-02-10 06:00:05 UTC

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If we want to have artificially-generated demand for zinc -- if we really need to ensure domestic production capacity -- there's no requirement for it to be the penny. I'm sure that we can find something else to make out of zinc.
The penny itself wasn't always zinc. I don't remember the changeover year.
*checks WP*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_(United_States_coin)
>The current copper-plated zinc cent issued since 1982 weighs 2.5 grams, while the previous 95% copper cent still found in circulation weighed 3.11 g (see further below).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc
>Zinc is most commonly used as an anti-corrosion agent,[123] and galvanization (coating of iron or steel) is the most familiar form. In 2009 in the United States, 55% or 893,000 tons of the zinc metal was used for galvanization.[122]
>
>Zinc is more reactive than iron or steel and thus will attract almost all local oxidation until it completely corrodes away.
We can just subsidize zinc production, or purchase something that requires those anti-corrosion properties.
I also am not at all sure that this was in fact the rationale. I can't find a reference online to this being the rationale. I do see reference to zinc being useful because it's particularly inexpensive. And the numbers given on this article seem to support the idea that pennies don't really work out to generating a very substantial demand for zinc.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/01/03/its-not-big-zinc-behind-the-campaign-to-keep-the-penny/
> It's Not Big Zinc Behind The Campaign To Keep The Penny
> To run through the numbers, a penny coin weighs 2.5 grammes. Let's call that all zinc (it's not, but close enough). There's 5 billion made a year, meaning that we've got 12,500,000,000 grammes, or divide by a million to get 12,500 tonnes. Now, if that were 12,500 tonnes of gold being made into coins every year, with global virgin production being around 3,000 tonnes, then sure, that would be a contract worth, umm, influencing the political process, to secure and keep running. The same would be true of many metals in fact. But it's just not true of the zinc industry. Using the USGS, the correct source for these sorts of numbers, we find that US production of zinc is around 250,000 tonnes a year, global production 13.5 million. Even if we assume (as we might, sounds like the sort of thing that might be true) that US coins must be made of US produced metal this is still a very marginal part of the total market.
>Further, zinc runs about $2,200 a tonne at present, meaning that we're talking about maybe $25 million a year as the zinc cost of our pennies. And we're told who and how much is paid to keep lobbying for the penny:
>
>>But his written statement did not mention that Weller is actually a lobbyist and head of strategic communications for Dentons, a law firm representing the interests of zinc producer Jarden Zinc Products, a major provider of coin blanks that are made into currency.
>>...
>>Jarden Zinc Products spent $1.5 million from 2006 through the first quarter of 2014 lobbying on such things as “issues related to the one-cent coin” and represented by Weller when he worked at B&D Consulting and, more recently, Dentons.
>No, the important point here is not the zinc industry, nor "Big Zinc". The important part is this "a major provider of coin blanks". If your business is making coin blanks then obviously you're very interested in the continued existence of coin demoninations that are made from coin blanks. That they're made from zinc is an irrelevance compared to that.
> Believe me, you don't spend the best part of $200,000 a year in lobbying expenses in order to sell $25 million's worth of zinc. This metal is a commodity, you can sell that amount in one ten minute phone call to any London Metals Exchange ring member. Heck, give me a couple of days to get organised and I could sell it for you at the market price. I'd also charge rather less than $200,000 to do it.
EDIT: WP seems to also support the author's argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jarden_Zinc_Products
>The company has resisted past efforts to eliminate the penny in the United [1] through an astroturf lobby organization called [Americans for Common Cents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents).
> The company's largest source of revenue comes from the production of coin blanks, having produced over 300 billion blanks at their Tennessee facility.

2025-02-08 16:41:24 UTC

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Yeah, I dunno, man. I mean, I do feel that the community could maybe use a more-objective take sometimes, but these guys aren't it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitchy
>Twitchy was founded by Michelle Malkin in 2012. In December 2013, the website was sold to Salem Media Group, a conservative Christian broadcasting corporation that had purchased Malkin's political blog Hot Air in 2010.[3][4]
> Twitchy is a conservative website "revolving around provocative commentary on Twitter."
If you just want the quote, maybe this:
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/federal-workers-express-frustration-over-cuts-during-loudoun-county-town-hall/3834911/
> "In the last week, we had Elon Musk in our building, and after he visited the building he called for a 50% cut of the entire agency,” another attendee said. “My colleagues are getting 15-minute one-on-one check-ins with 19, 20 and 21-year-old college graduates asking to justify their existence."

2025-02-07 03:59:25 UTC

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I'm not saying that they couldn't improve on it, but honestly, that bar chart doesn't look too damning to the UK to me:
![](https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/165f31a7-7984-4e4e-8ac5-8b1e83d481b1.avif)
So, okay, they're behind the EU-14 (though not the EU as a whole) and North America/Oceania, but they're also ahead of every other listed entry.