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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • I am also a bicyclist with three different bikes. One watch replaces three bicycle computers. I can track performance metrics, longevity of components, and service intervals… for all of my bicycles.

    My watch also has functions for sailing performance metrics, kayaking, hiking, running, and lots more sports.

    That’s ignoring the other watch functions: timers, find my phone (great for when the phone slips between cushions and I didn’t notice), compass, barometric trends, notification filtering…

    My partner has the same watch. The longitudinal health stats from her watch was one of the key factors in getting her health complaints taken seriously. One medical facility completely, repeatedly dismissed her concerns as “nothing serious.” Turns out she had Stage-IVb cancer (now recovered).


  • Having seen firsthand what happens when someone unknowingly enters a hypoxic enclosed space, I think the difference is foreknowledge. Thrashing sounds like acidosis from holding one’s breath. I was helping an acquaintance work on his old steel boat. There was a watertight compartment. The risk of steel-enclosed spaces is that rusty steel in an enclosed space can consume all of the oxygen, leaving only nitrogen rich air.

    He opened the hatch and, before I could stop him, he just strode on in like it was nothing. He was unconscious before I could get to him, maybe ten seconds. Fortunately, he was near enough to the hatch that I could just reach in and grab him, rather than trying to find an air tank and regulator, and then put it on.

    He recovered just fine, but had a terrible headache. He didn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t thrash. There was no drama. He walked in and fell unconscious. Lucky for him it was a small space, so the bulkheads kept him from doing a full header into the steel deck.



  • You are confidently incorrect on this. Currency == money. Money is, for we hoi polloi, a barely consentual conversion and exchange system for our labor, hypothetically allowing us to convert our labor into readily fungible exchange units. Money, at the Capital Class level, is debt, and therefore control, i.e. power. Money is just how they keep score.

    There are plenty of barter gifting and Communist (“from those of ability to those of need”) economies, just on scales that fly below the radar of most economists. Your sweeping assertion leads me to believe that you may simply be ignorant of those non-monetary exchanges. Would you be willing to add more context to your assertion?

    Edit: I misspoke; crashfrog raises a valid point, and I meant gift economies.


  • Wampum was used by Eastern Costal tribes as a storytelling aid.

    In the Salish Tribes, dentalium shell necklaces were used as a status symbol/indication of social rank. Some tribes used the necklaces as a type of currency, but I’ve only heard the “some tribes did this” part; never anything about which specific tribes used dentalium as currency.

    Obviously, anything that holds perceived value can be traded.

    Source: went to junior high in a school that taught two full years of Haudenosaunee (also called Iroquois) history.

    Salish source: I’ve been a volunteer naturalist in the Puget Sound for eight years with an annual training requirement, with entire days allocated to history of the original Salish tribe for the area where we’re working.