This. They’re surprisingly energy efficient, and while they take a bit to heat up, once they get going they really radiate. I have a small one, and it gets me through the coldest days of winter without needing to turn on the built-in heaters in my apartment.

Bonus is that my cat loooves it. He posts up right next to it and is in cozy heaven.

I usually start with Calmatters. They tend to have good writeups for CA ballots when I’m looking for how candidates feel about specific policies.

Then I go to my local independent newspaper, which runs interviews with all major local candidates. I usually have a pretty good idea of who I’m going for by the time I read the interviews, but they’ll often put me the over the edge for a particular candidate and help me finalize my decision.

That’s a very cool concept. I’d definitely be willing to participate in a platform that has that kind of trust system baked in, as long as it respected my privacy and couldn’t broadcast how much time I spend on specific things etc. Instance owners would also potentially get access to some incredibly personal and lucrative user data, so protections would have to be strict. But I guess there are a lot of ways to get at positive user engagement in a non-invasive way. I think it could solve a lot of current and potential problems. I wish I was confident the majority of users would be into it, but I’m not so sure.

For sure, it’s not an easy problem to address. But I’m not willing to give up on it just yet. Bad actors will always find a way to break the rules and go under the radar, but we should be making new rules and working to improve these platforms in good faith, with the assumption that most people want healthy communities that follow the rules.

I think by default bots should not be allowed anywhere. But if that’s a bridge too far, then their use should have to be regularly justified and explained to communities. Maybe it should even be a rule that their full code has to be released on a regular basis, so users can review it themselves and be sure nothing fishy is going on. I’m specifically thinking of the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (I know, I harp on it too much). It’s basically a spammer bot at this point, cluttering up our feeds even when it can’t figure out the source, and providing bad and inaccurate information when it can. And mods refuse to answer for it.

Yeah, I agree. I don’t like touch buttons on devices like this either. Fortunately mine has temperature control knobs, but all the other buttons are capacitive. Still worth it imo, but definitely annoying.

Induction cooktop is a game changer. Water boils even faster than with gas, you have much more precise control over temperature, and you can still handle the metal cookware while it’s on the heat. Absolutely love it.

Exactly. I hop over to All maybe once every couple months just to find new active communities, but then it’s straight back to Subscribed.

99% / 0% / 1%

It varies a lot, can be as low as $110 and as much as $170. And that’s just me, a single dude in a small one bedroom apartment. It was half that just a few years ago. So painful.

I’ve been genuinely impressed by their real-time fact checking. They’re swatting away every wild thing he says calmly and with specific examples of the truth. These moderators are incredibly well-prepared.