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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Any regular hex nut works just fine as a jam nut. Basically, a jam nut is when you jam two nuts together. (It is gay, because the nuts do touch.)

    And note that those nylon inserts kinda only work once. The bolt carves a thread into the insert when you insert it, so it will be weaker the second time you insert it.

    Honorable mention: cage nuts. A square nut, permanently attached to a fastener that can snap into a special square hole in a 19 inch server rack. When you tighten the bolt against the nut, it tightens against the fastener, so that the nut, bolt, and fastener are secure against the square hole.





  • For anyone who honestly believes in third party stuff: try supporting ranked voting at the local and state level. Once we have more ranked voting at local and state levels, it will be easier to push that at the federal level, which is the best way to solve strategic voting problems in presidential elections.

    Nobody would support ranked voting for presidential elections if that’s the first time they hear about it. But if people use it already in local elections, and see that it works better, then extending it to presidential elections is a logic choice.






  • Limonene@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldNevar Forget
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    21 days ago

    Third parties certainly know what effect they have. Their motivation is not to make the second party candidate win. Their motivation is to change the first party candidate.

    According to Hotelling’s Law, a two-party political system with FPTP voting results in candidates that are very similar. This is why the Democrats won’t run real progressives for most offices, and why Sanders was forced out in 2016 with the excuse that he wasn’t “electable” enough.

    Third parties running for president aren’t trying to win. They’re trying to eat some of the votes on their side, thus pulling the main party candidates toward that third party candidate to reclaim those votes.


  • Limonene@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldNevar Forget
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    21 days ago

    But I didn’t want Clinton to win. My picks were: 1. Lessig, 2. Sanders, 3. Stein, 4. Johnson (Gary), 5. blank. Knowing only what I knew in 2016, I disliked Trump and Clinton equally, and would never have voted for either one.

    (And yes, I did know that Sanders had endorsed Clinton.)






  • Unfortunately this won’t happen until October 31st 2600. Starting on March 1st in the year 2600, the Julian calendar (popular in centuries past, and still used in a few places) will differ by 18 days from the Gregorian calendar (the current worldwide standard calendar).

    It happens that October 31st in the year 2600 lands on a Friday, and so the Julian October 13th, which lands on that same day, is also a Friday.

    There may be a sooner Friday the 13th that lands on Halloween, if you know of other obscure calendars like the Hebrew, Islamic, or Chinese calendars. I don’t know enough about those to check.



  • The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

    To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

    If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

    Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.