You Should Know

A lot of people are about to be hit with a big winter storm who are not used to this kind of weather. Here are some tips from a Minnesotan:

Keeping warm:

• avoid cotton fabrics.

• Use layers, take them off if you start to sweat.

• I like tight gloves with thick mittens, which allows use of your hands sometimes without skin exposure.

• A face mask works as a scarf or another layer in a pinch

• Warm up your home in case you lose power. Power outages may happen after the snow/freezing rain stops

Snow removal:

• Lift with your legs, not your back.

• Don't save all of the shoveling for the very end of the storm, it'll be more difficult and will start to create an ice layer (especially where walked on)

• if you have a car, lift up the windshield wipers before it starts snowing/freezing rain

• Completely clean your car soon after the storm. In most places, it's illegal to drive with a lot of snow/ice on your car and super dangerous.

• If you're parked on a street, move the car to a plowed area when possible so they can plow where you were parked

• If you have a driveway, clear off part of the street in the direction the plow will come from, so that doesn't end up blocking your driveway

Driving

• stay home until streets are plowed if possible (thank you healthcare workers and emergency responders!)

• Turn on ABS brake and traction control settings, if available

• accelerate and take turns slowly

• Have more time/distance to brake

• Speed up before going up an incline, getting stuck and sliding back down is not fun

Sliding on ice:

• If walking, keep your feet underneath your center of gravity

• If driving, switch to neutral and steer in the direction that the back of the car is sliding, but don't overreact on steering. Slamming brakes will make sliding worse.

Car stuck in snow:

• turn off traction control

• don't just let the tires spin out

• try shoveling, sand/kitty litter, and rocking back and forth

• Once you get moving again, don't stop

Edit: if you do lose power, have a faucet or two drip water to prevent the pipes from freezing and bursting

Edit 2: if you see ICE, follow these steps

The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs also wiped out all songbirds, except for in (ark) Australia. Australian songbirds then spread out to rest of the planet.

The closest living descendents (aka basal lineages) are the Lyrebird and the Rufus scrub bird. The lyrebird's song is a mixture of its own song and other birds songs. They have been also been known to mimic chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters, and human speech.

Professor Jay Van Bavel (New York University) convened 120 researchers and had them evaluate claims about smartphones and social media.

The panel was able to identify a series of statements that essentially all of them (more than 90%) agreed were true.

🔵 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/5256747.pdf?abstractid=5256747&mirid=1

These included:

1. Adolescent mental health has declined in many Western countries over the past 20 years

2. Smartphone and social media use correlate with attention problems and addiction.

3. Among girls, social media use may be associated with body dissatisfaction, exposure to mental disorders, and risk of sexual harassment.

These consensus statements are damaging for those who still maintain the belief that data on these issues is mixed at best.

Why YSK: Even if you don't own a gun, there is a chance you can encounter one at the home of a friend or family member. These are the four core rules of gun safety, but the same can be used with airsoft/paintball guns, nerf or even chemical spray bottles!

First, treat every firearm as if it were loaded. Even if it was clear the last time you saw it. If looking at a gun with someone else and they assure you it's not loaded, you can respectfully ask them to clear it in front of you before you handle it yourself.

Never point a gun at anything you are not willing to destroy. Pretend there is a lazer beam coming from the barrel. Don't let that "beam" point at anyone. That is known as "flagging". In nearly all cases keeping the barrel pointing down between your feet is a good move.

Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire. This includes the whole trigger guard area. Most people keep their finger on the frame well above the trigger guard, pointing their finger in the same direction as the barrel. This is known as "trigger discipline".

Finally be sure of your target and what's behind it. Bullets can still travel a long way even after they pass through a target. If you are target shooting make sure there is a solid backstop. If in a real life situation you must positively ID the threat, no shooting at shadows or noises.

When you use your car’s built-in speakerphone feature, the speakers in the car door reverberate, sending the sounds outside of the car. Maybe don’t do this while your car is parked. Everyone in the neighborhood or store parking lot can hear your very intimate or business-related conversation.

It also, consequently, makes the advertisements which they show to you far less valuable. So this feature is not widely advertised.

I've seen alot of calls for violence in America. Whether it be directed at the president or Federal officers, many people are advocating for an escalation in response to the current situation.

And believe me, I do understand. what I see happening in America is horrifying. But all I am imploring is to really think about what your asking for. Because you can't put the genie in the bottle once you've left it out.

If you're really gung-ho about it, go and ask a Veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan about it and see what they think. If anyone will know about it they will.

I am going to link a YouTube Playlist. Its the Associated Press Archives of the Bosnian-Serbian war. Because THAT is what will happen if wide scale violence breaks out. Except what will happen in America will be a hundred times worse.

The Bosnian war was pretty much broken up along ethnic lines. "Well it's going to be Conservative VS. Liberal" you say. Except it won't be. It will be anyone having a grudge against someone going after them.

ALOT of personal animosity will be taken out in the first few weeks I feel.

And I think the Seige of Sarajavo will be writ large in American cities across the country. Imagine having to dodge sniper fire on your way to get to your job at Wendy's.

Because that's the other thing no one is thinking about. You are still going to have to make a living while this is all going to be happening. And the cost of everything will skyrocket. Shipping will probably have to be escorted from place to place because people will be stealing or even blockading locations because they're "damn dirty libs" or "Fascist Conservatives" Fresh produce will become a thing of the past.

Canada and Mexico will close their borders due to all the refugee's trying to cross. so if you thinking of doing it, do it the moment everything pops off because otherwise you won't get in.

Basically Civil war is going to the worst thing to happen in America in a long time. and the only good that comes out of it will be Americans will finally have first hand experience of real war torn violence. And maybe that will hopefully last for another two hundred years or so.

If America even survives the outcome that is.

DDG has a noAI portal that filters out AI images and doesn't bother you with summations and things. it's available at noai.duckduckgo.com and you can add it as a separate search engine to Firefox thusly.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/53581443

YSK You can count past 1,000 on your fingers by using binary, instead of just 10

With just one hand, you can count to 31, and with both hands you can reach a whopping 1,023. This is because the placement of the held up fingers matters, rather than the amount.

It can be very useful in everyday use, being able to count to huge numbers when you don't have your phone or pen and paper nearby.

For fellow Americans living in cities where ICE is active, many people, especially those of Hispanic descent, are already carrying around passports on their persons at all times because they're rightfully afraid of being forcibly disappeared or deported to some random South American country.

A passport card can be obtained for $30 from the Department of State. It is considered exactly equivalent to a passport within the US, but it's the size of a credit card. It is a valid travel document for land and sea travel within North America and the Caribbean. It also counts as a Real ID. The card is good for ten years.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/need-passport/card.html

Do not do this if you are transgender or have an X gender marker. They will cancel your passport and tell you to apply for a new one with your sex assigned at birth.

Fuck you, buddy.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41402945

By "Erik Prince", I mean belligerently and dramatically overreact to an attack — actual, perceived, provoked, planted, or otherwise. They could do what Blackwater did in Fallujah in 2004. Or, in Nisoor Square in 2007. Or, in Kabul in 2009.

They ~~could~~ are terrorizing a population. At home. In Minneapolis.

They could kick-in home, school, and business-place doors, lurk in public buildings and streets, employ flash-bang grenades, tear gas, body-armor, fully automatic weapons, SUVs, trucks, and tanks in the streets, terrorizing a population into submission.

ICE is being funded at the same rate as the military of Poland. Or, the entirety of US military spending in 1917, on entering World War I. Nice work on that big, beautiful bill.

Btw, have you seen ~~Civil War~~? Yes, you have, yeah, that A24 movie.

They could prod a population into employing IEDs, RPGs, and assault weapons. From bats, to boards, to bricks, to and bottles alight. We've seen this before. Inside America, and outside America. This is a wavefront of a war.

The world, meanwhile, burns. Storms rage. Fires consume. Ice recedes, collapses, and melts.

Please. Prove me wrong. Peacefully, impeach, convict, jail, try, and imprison the President who is trying to have the American people pay — in taxes, tariffs, and blood — for his coup d'etat.

Please.

note: Erik Prince is the CEO and founder of the private security company Blackwater, now Akademi, once XE.

Never take health advice from individuals such as Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, PewDiePie, Elon Musk, Doctor Oz, Doctor Huberman, Bill Gates, JD Vance, Barack Obama, Jensen Huang, Hassan Abi...

Some of these people are fools.

Some of these people are snake oil salesmen looking to sell you stuff.

Some of these people happen to be rich. And they think that because they are rich, they can figure out anything.

Even when they are well-meaning and very smart, they get things wrong.

The most reliable health advice is produced by top research universities.

• Harvard University
• Stanford University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Princeton University
• University of Pennsylvania
• Duke University
• Cornell University
• Technion
• Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Ecole Polytechnique Féderal de Lausanne
• École Polytechnique Fédérale de Zurich
• King's College London
• University of Amsterdam
• University College London
• Imperial College London
• Karolinska Institute
• KU Leuven
• National University of Singapore
• McGill University
• Tsinghua University
• Cambridge University
• Oxford University

I'm not saying scientists from the University of Hawaii aren't good, but these institutions excel in cutting-edge research and academic reputation.

Let's say you are interested in eating better. Where can you get reliable information about that?

KU Leuven:

https://www.kuleuven.be/healthy/en/students/physical/food

Stanford University:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2024/12/dietary-guidelines-nutrition-what-americans-should-eat.html

Let's say you are interested in fighting depression. Where can you get reliable information about that?

Cambridge University :

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/healthy-lifestyle-can-help-prevent-depression-and-new-research-may-explain-why

Let's say you are interested in better sleep. Where can you get reliable information about that?

Harvard University:

https://sleep.hms.harvard.edu/education-training/public-education/sleep-and-health-education-program/sleep-health-education-53

Stanford University:

https://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/insomnia/documents/StrategiesforTroubleSleeping.pdf

Most of the claims you hear on social media are total non-sense. Usually, it's some doctor or some rich tech freak coming out with a new miracle stuff.

"You need to inject peptides guys I also eat raw meat. It will be significantly boost your biomarkers. The science is clear"

- Jake, CEO and software developer from San Francisco

"My advice to listeners is to take a dose of Ketamine mixed with L-Theanine and BPC 157. The science is clear"

-Doctor Phil on Joe Rogan

(He just happens to sell that 😂)

This is all junk science that is likely to send you straight to the hospital.

"I got the basics. I want to stay up to date. Where should I get recent reliable knowledge?"

First, recent knowledge is rarely super reliable.

Second, most of the cutting edge health research is actually done by top universities. And they are careful to not overhype things. Look at the bold parts.

Our digestive tract contains some 1.5 kilograms of bacteria. This gut microbiome, long overlooked by doctors, has been gaining attention in recent years as scientists discover that its role extends well beyond digestion: these bacteria can influence our immune system, metabolism and even mental health. Yet a lot remains to be learned about how they function.

The gut microbiome, also known as the human body’s “second brain,” can affect mental-health conditions such as anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder as well as neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Some of these bacteria produce dopamine, serotonin and other neurotransmitters that interact directly with the brain and nervous system. “These neurotransmitters create feelings of happiness, contentment and well-being. If they aren’t produced properly, our mental health can suffer” says Goemans

“Probiotics are living bacteria found in fermented foods and available as supplements,” says Goemans. However, their efficacy hasn’t been scientifically proven and can vary depending on the bacteria strains and patient in question

https://actu.epfl.ch/news/gut-microbiome-serves-as-a-second-brain-regulati-3/

In the future, eating citrus could perhaps be part of a strategy for managing depression that also involves these more traditional pharmaceuticals. But more research is needed before we can conclude that.

I would love to see a clinical trial done to definitively show that eating citrus can lower the risk of depression, or maybe even alleviate the condition in some cases. There’s such a huge unmet need for depression treatments, and eating citrus doesn’t really have any major side effects, so it would be great to see how much this simple treatment can help

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/02/eating-citrus-may-lower-depression-risk/

Listen to universities. You really can't go wrong with their advice.

They are usually a lot more reliable than ANY of the stuff that Jordan Peterson/Joe Rogan/Jeff Bezos/Hassan Piker may claim ###

Why YSK: if you don’t have the ability or time to devote your visual attention to reading, you can still engage your mind the same way as you do while reading by listening to an audiobook. Virtually any modern audiobook player will also let you select the play speed, so you can listen to books at whatever rate you’re comfortable with.

Personally I know as I’ve gotten older the number of hours I’m physically able to read tends to no longer be able to match my desire to read, so it’s nice to be able to keep going even if my eyes are sore.

Historically, this is somewhat analogous to the late 19th century lectors that worked in some factories, paid by donated workers’ wages, to read/perform popular books for bored workers. Predictably in the US factory owners tended to have a problem with their workers listening to ‘communist literature,’ leading to firings, strikes, and violent crackdowns.

You can use uBlock Origin to block certain keywords in posts!

Why

If you're like me, you're really tired of seeing the lemmy homepage and every community fill up with really bad news from the US.

How

First, open the uBlock Origin dashboard, navigate to My Filters tab and add the appropriate line.

# lemmy.world
# thanks to /u/zkfcfbzr
lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Musk|ICE|Vance|slop|Microsoft|Grok|Republican|Democrat|Republicans|GOP|Democrats/i)

# lemmy.zip
lemmy.zip##article.row:has-text(/Trump|Musk|ICE|Vance|slop|Microsoft|Grok|Republican|Democrat|Republicans|GOP|Democrats/i)

Because the Lemmy HTML is generally the same on each instance, the above should work if you change the first part to the Lemmy domain. Then replace the | pipe separated keywords with your own list.

Here are some other things you can do:

# filter comments
# thanks to /u/Free_Opinions@feddit.uk
lemmy.world##article.comment-node:has(div.comment-content:has(p:has-text(/trump/i)))

# filter posts with certain words, with exceptions
# thanks to /u/zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world
lemmy.world##article.row:has-text(/word1|word2|word3/i):not(:has-text(/word4|word5|word6/i))

Originally posted a year ago.

TLDR: Hobo Johnson did a musical rendition of some select quotes from the article. If the article is too cumbersome to read, listen to the song. It gets a lot of the point across.

This is happening online but with serious real-world consequences for people who don't support Israel or genocide.

Canary’s non-public websites promise expansion into new avenues to continue the group’s mission of punishing Americans for pro-Palestine speech via doxxing, pressure campaigns, and now arrests and deportations carried out by allies in the State Department.

BlackNest’s web development content reveals how Canary Mission thinks of its “wins” in its efforts to influence U.S. policy. The website categorizes the group’s impacts into categories: “Change of behavior,” job loss, denials of entry to the U.S., arrests, and “deportation/forced to flee.” The site also collects mentions of Canary Mission in media, mostly from U.S. news outlets, and celebrates mentions of their impact.

...

In the PDF, the group lists its core values as: Follow daas torah (a concept in Orthodox Judaism about rabbinical authority), integrity, passion for the cause, anonymity, no-ego team player, and rosh gadol (or Hebrew slang for someone “seeing the big picture”).

“Fight those who hate the Jewish people” is the listed purpose, and the group’s niche is “dismantle the anti-Israel network by attacking the messenger, not the message.”

The DHS testified in court that they use Canary Mission to choose targets for deportation, so this is a very serious threat.

Annual reminder: you may have unclaimed funds that are being held by your state (US) or other government.

There are many reasons you might have unclaimed funds: abandoned accounts, unclaimed deposits, uncashed checks, misspelled names, estate funds, incorrect addresses, misplaced inheritance and trusts, etc, and your government is required to hold your property until you claim it.

They will not seek you out, and most people are completely unaware they may have lost funds or property being held by the state.

Every state in the US and most governments have an official website where you can check whether you have unclaimed property and submit a claim. There are typically no fees, and you shouldn’t need an attorney or solicitor to claim them.

Just search ‘[my state] or [my country] unclaimed property’ (or ‘biens non réclamés’)

Make sure you’re at the official site for your government and not one of the many scam sites trying to get a cut by doing this for you. The official sites are typically easy and should not require a 3rd party. There should be no extra fees.

If you’re in the US, check every state you’ve lived in. Moving state is one of the major reasons this happens, and your unclaimed funds will not move to a new state with you.

e: Here’s my previous year’s thread on this, with more discussion. This isn’t sovcit bullshit. It’s real.

Also note that you’re unlikely to find life-changing amounts this way. Most people report a few dollars to a few thousand. Large amounts motivate lawyers to seek you out.

e2: I wonder how much this could change a government’s budget if enough people started claiming these funds at once? Would that basically do what the run on banks did? The money is hypothetically there, but it’s not really there at scale.

Also, they're sensitive to moving shadows. As with motion sensors, if you move slowly enough, they cannot sense you. Slowly circle behind them and they jump into your death mitts.

Anyway, this has worked out better for me than a Bic lighter and hair spray. But that works too.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesur