As an employee at an established electrical contractor, there are some tools that I use every day and am expected to purchase myself (pliers, multimeter, etc). Other more specialized (and often expensive) tools that only get used every now and then are usually bought and owned by the company. This is reasonable because if you only use something a couple of times a year, it is more efficient to just have one that gets passed around the various jobsites as needed. It would be unreasonable to expect every last employee to own, say, a tap and die set. They are expensive. However, I like to own my own shit. I don't like borrowing, and I don't like sharing with others who don't treat tools with the same care and respect that I do. Company tools get trashed over time, it's just the way things go. Thus, I was not required to buy this, but when society falls apart I'll be the guy who can cut his own threads, and maybe yours too, if you've got value to trade.

View quoted note → View article →

Feyn's Sunday Reads | Week 1 A Lodging of Wayfaring Men by Paul Rosenberg First published in 2007, before the GFC, before Bitcoin. Nevertheless, should be required reading for any serious bitcoiner. Libertarian AF. Strong cypherpunk vibes. Dialogue can be a bit wooden at times, but the ideas are what elevate this book to greatness (kind of like Atlas Shrugged IMO). Highly recommend. "What happens if a thousand free marketplaces spring up all over the world? Governments will lose their revenues. How far will they go to protect their power? Will they start searching every home and computer? Will they use terror and intimidation to keep people out of free markets? What happens when their power slips away... how many types of crises can they arrange, so that people won't complain about having the last of their privacy taken away? And how many people are left who can muster half a care?"

Every now and then when I'm trying to login to an account or app, my password won't work and I have to reset it. Annoyingly, to do this I must click on a button that insinuates that I "forgot" my password, which I didn't. I use a robust, paid password manager so I never have to remember any of my passwords, much less forget them. Unless it's my password manager that's getting corrupted somehow and changing what's stored in it, it would seem that these apps and services just arbitrarily make you reset your password sometimes. I have never had this issue with seed phrases, passphrases, or nsecs. Shit just works.

If you're thinking about getting into the trades, or maybe one of your kids is interested, understand that it's not going to be what the trades colleges sell you in the brochure. It will be dirty, it will be hard physical labour, and no matter how careful you are you will get hurt from time to time. But it is also more mentally stimulating than many civilians might imagine. There's a reason we're well paid. Even as the foreman, I got chased out of a janky hole by a pack of angry wasps yesterday; stung twice in the head. Every day brings new adventures... (If you're wondering what's going on in that sloppy trash-hole, those three pipes will eventually be coupled onto by the local electric utility and will hold one high voltage cable each. Those cables will enter the unit substation in the basement, where 25 kV (delta) gets transformed into 600/347V (wye) and 208/120V (wye) for utilization in the building. At this stage, I'm just mocking it up with couplings between our rigid steel pipe and the plastic pipe that that the utility uses, along with drainage tees. The hole will be cleaned up and filled with crushed rock below (for drainage), then sand around the pipes (for protection). Eventually this will resemble a clean, professional installation but it doesn't start out that way; we must make it so.)

Alright partner, keep on rollin' baby. You know what time it is...

The Electrician's Gauge for Societal Decline When all your copper is locked up so people start stealing scrap aluminum, you know things have gotten to a bad place. Aluminum, by weight, will sell for about 1/5 the price of copper. Additionally, aluminum has a density approximately 1/3 that of copper. That means that for a given volume of aluminum, you will receive about 1/15 the amount of money that you would for an equivalent volume of copper. My site was raided again last night. The assailants were unsuccessful in their efforts and were arrested on site. As they were being intercepted by police, they dropped what they were carrying, shown in the upper right of the attached picture. That is about $20 worth of aluminum at the scrap yard. The blue stuff of the reel is Cat6 data cable and will fetch perhaps another $8 as scrap. That's where we're at in my city; people are willing to risk arrest, jail, and a criminal record for $30, split between two guys.

With all the awful stuff going on in the Bitcoin ecosystem these days, it felt like a good time to do something positive with a bit of mine. 21k sats to @Hope With ₿itcoin hopewithbitcoin@blink.sv, if you feel inclined to chip in as well to what I think is a tiny, but worthy project doing some good in the world. If, in the future, hackers end up stealing everything I own, well, there's 21k sats that they won't get, that will instead go towards feeding some kids I will never meet. That much would buy me, a guy in a relatively wealthy country who could stand to lose a few pounds, maybe one meal. Or, it could buy about four meals for some kids in a relatively poor country who could probably stand to gain a few pounds. Seems like a good deal to me. Keep the hope alive 🤘

When I clicked on the link in search results, that was me communicating that I wanted to "jump" to your recipe. I'll let you know when I want to jump to self-absorbed walls of purple prose.

Sometimes love is expressed through the teeth. #catstr

One thing about the Pacific Northwest that brings me immense pleasure is its cuisine. It is a culinary tradition with a unique dedication to local ingredients and simple preparation. There is a heavy emphasis on seafood; salmon being the most obvious ingredient (smoked, seared, raw, you name it), but also other fish like halibut, sablefish, and tuna, shellfish of various kinds (scallops are my favorite), even seaweed. Things like seaweed and raw fish also point toward an Asian influence, particularly Japanese, that carries with it flavours such as miso, wasabi, and sake. The essence of the Pacific Northwest is most keenly felt at the coast, where its majestic forests meet the vastness of the mighty Pacific Ocean. From those forests, our local cuisine finds inspiration in a broad array of wild mushrooms, eclectic edible plants like nettle, huckleberry, and fiddlehead fern, tree essences including douglas fir and spruce, and game meats such as elk and grouse. Duck, a less common commercial poultry, also features to my great satisfaction. Due to the uncommon and seasonal character of many of the ingredients, restaurants that pull off this unique style of cooking are few and expensive, but well worth it. I consider myself priveleged to live in this time and place, and to make enough money, that I can indulge in such sublime tributes to this wild land that I call home.