flip phone

Almost all such phones are actually smart phones in a flip phone Edgar Suit. Especially if it has maps or YouTube or any kind of an App Store. I see a crapton of flip phones that run Android, which has all sorts of Google spyware piggybacking along.

I think there may be only two or three dumb flip phones or feature flip phones left on the market, and IIRC two are locked to specific networks.

If you want a bona-fide dumb phone, you might be limited to something like the rotary un-smartphone.

I had a physics professor tell me about free energy. Having a degree is not 100% effective in curing stupid.

There are physicists that don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change, and that is to be expected because that subject isn’t in their wheelhouse; it isn’t their bread-and-butter, and that isn’t their day job that they work on for 2,000+hrs a year for decades on end. So they are lacking a lot of the data that would allow them to make correct decisions regarding factuality.

But when most of an academic field is saying the exact same thing about a core subject that is at the foundation of their discipline, imma not gonna be arrogant enough to presume that they’re wrong. I’m going to take them exactly at their word.

sure thing, incel

Tell me you know nothing about that word without saying you are ignorant AF about that word, and are only throwing it around as a weapon in an attempt to publicly shame me into being quiet.

So: nice ad hominem. You clearly have absolutely nothing of substance in which to counter the message, so instead you attack the speaker.

Truly an effective way of winning arguments! /s

I would honestly say your friend misunderstood the message as well if that was her takeaway.

Unlikely - she was and still is a professor teaching women’s studies at the local university. Published, too. She’s hardly a nobody.

“Hey, want to go to spoons later?” isn’t going to result in legal action.

But making an unsolicited approach, and wholly lacking the experience and social expertise to recognize that the woman wants nothing to do with you, and is actually embarrassed by your presence, confers a non-trivial and very real risk of police presence.

And that is while also being wholly non-threatening and totally harmless. Absolutely oblivious to social conditions, sure, but also absolutely not a danger and receptive to clear and unambiguous language – which was never provided until the cops provided it for her.

Yes, actually saw this happen IRL. Poor dude was absolutely mortified, which likely made him think thrice of ever making another unsolicited approach and definitely nerfing any possibility of becoming more experienced at interacting with women.

These kinds of men don’t just spring out of holes in the ground, fully formed. They are shaped by supremely negative experiences like that one, which could have been trivially avoided by adequate communication on the part of the woman.

For the average man making unsolicited approaches, the latest stats I have seen tend to bounce between the 1-in-300 and the 1-in-1,500 range of a successful approach per total attempts. And this is just first-date-is-successful territory, it gets a good magnitude worse if you are looking for an LTR.

From what I understand, the flip side is a lot lower: an average women making unsolicited approaches to men seem to be hitting a 1-in-5 to 1-in-20 success range, depending on conditions

So yeah, being a man outside of the desirable 10% is indeed playing on hard mode. And from what I can see, things have only gotten much, much worse for the average man in the last few decades since I was young. I don’t envy young men these days, at all.

I don’t know what I’m doing wrong

You are suffering from a lack of experience.

Women have the ability to learn by proxy, when having intimate conversations with sisters, mothers, aunts, and other female role models. This gives them a massive buff long before they ever begin dating, because they are able to gain an emotional roadmap of how things go down, and then build on that with experience.

Men don’t have this same transfer of knowledge, nor are we even psychologically set up to build one, so in aggregate we are massively nerfed straight out of the gate. This means our only way of learning is via direct experience and sheer volume: you need to circulate and learn from your experiences in order to percolate. It sucks, but that’s the breaks. The rare guy will get lucky straight out of the gate. The vast majority, however, will have to approach and be rejected by many hundreds to even thousands of women before they “find their groove” enough to catch a break.

And your own insecurities are working against you: being nervous, desperate, or unsure of yourself is something that women - again, through that buff of intergenerational information transfer - are able to “smell” almost instinctively. If you want to vanquish those issues, you quite literally need to work on yourself, to focus on improving yourself and gaining confidence within yourself by overcoming obstacles and challenges that you set for yourself.

Stoicism can assist in helping you become a better version of yourself, in becoming intrinsically motivated such that companionship shifts away from being a clawing need to merely a value-added proposition.

It wasn’t “Do not, under any circumstances, speak to a woman”

Actually, as explained to me by a woman, it was exactly that.

This was well after I had married, somewhere in my fifth decade, so I was off that particular playing field for quite some time by that point. But on a lark I had asked a feminist what this “leave women alone” refrain meant. And some of it made perfect sense: don’t hit up cashiers or anyone doing their jobs, they’re just being nice and friendly because they are being paid to be polite.

But it also meant don’t approach women when they’re shopping for groceries, as they’re probably tired from work and just want to go home. Don’t approach women on public transportation, as they’re just trying to get home and don’t want to be accosted in a cramped public venue. Don’t approach women when they’re out with friends, because they are with friends and don’t want to be cleaved off like how a predator isolates a member of a herd.

This went on and on, to some pretty ridiculous lengths. Whereupon I asked, “how is any man supposed to do an unsolicited approach to chat up a woman?”, to which she said - and no, not kidding at all - “They shouldn’t. Any man who we’re interested in will understand when we’re interested in them.”

Like… telepathy.

Literal
f**king
telepathy.

Sure as shit, this is what a woman said to me.

Most men get absolutely zero life experience in decoding super-subtle hints, and now they’re supposed to miraculously become an expert in navigating a potentially life-destroying minefield, where the only two outcomes is magically getting it right, or risking a non-trivial probability of incarceration and a criminal record when they (invariably) get it wrong?

No wonder so many men are saying “thanks, but no thanks.” That the juice - the outcome - is just no longer worth the squeeze - all the effort and risk that is shouldered. I don’t blame them in the least. They’re the smart ones.

And those who are slightly less smart are at least asking the $10,000 question: why aren’t women making the first approach? I mean, isn’t that what this whole “equality of the sexes” shtick was all about? Why don’t women put their money where their mouths are, and ask MEN out, for a change? Because I can guarantee that while any normal woman will experience a certain level of rejection, it will still be several orders of magnitude less than what a similarly-normal man experiences.

or toaster can’t do its basic job offline

pats my 1962 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster

Obligatory Red Dwarf toaster scene

Go for older laser printers. They’re bulletproof, cheap on toner, free of DRM, and even if they only come with an LPT port you can always build your own print server that gives you all the bells and whistles like AirPrint.

About 3-4 years ago I took a bit of a dive into the firmware of IoT devices. The utter lack of security and the amount of information being hoovered up to the mothership made me swear to never build anything “smart” into the renovations of my current home. Sure, there will be automation. There will be CCTV. There will be solar with battery backup for essentials. There will be conveniences of all kinds. But virtually all will be air gapped, incapable of remote rooting, and under my full control.

Hell, even my laser printers are HP models over two decades old - an HP 4050DTN and an HP 5000DTN - that are totally devoid of any DRM or “smart features” and can trivially take generic overstuffed cartridges that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

I wonder if the SFP port will also allow the router to connect directly to the ISP’s fibre connection, allowing the unit to behave as both modem and router.

Ah, yes. Beetlejuicing 101.

Why are the contents of that sack shaping it into what looks like a nutsack? Are there, like, two soccer balls in there?

The MacOS link for Iridium Browser goes straight to a 404.

Anyone have a direct link to the latest DMG?