You can easily kill yourself with a water overdose (and it’s actually fairly common),so yes.

Nutmeg was already mentioned - high doses can easily kill someone, sadly even without hallucinations simply by killing off ones liver and dying an agonizing death a few days later. The same goes for cinnamon, but with a much lower dose.

There are a few more, but I don’t want to give people too many ideas.

To make it short: Yes, possible,but it’s mostly a very slow death over multiple days that fucks you up really bad and is a horrible way to go.

Sadly the hallucination effect does not correlate with the toxicity,especially the hepatotoxicity with nutmeg… You can absolutely kill of your liver and die an agonizing death a few days later and have no hallucinations at all.

Often enough the credit card payment still is done through PayPal, though

Dude, Brother is not even an US company - like most big printer companies it’s Japanese and traded at the Tokyo stock exchange.

So… You’re arguments are invalid and only show your americentric world view.

That was once very common in Europe and is currently gaining traction again. Big companies did provide accommodation for their staff - from dorms style accommodation for bachelor’s to full houses. E.g. there are huge urban wards in western Germany (coal mining, steel production), Ludwigshafen (BASF), Berlin and Munich (Siemens) but also smaller towns (e.g. Singen - Maggi/Nestlé) which were build this way. Initially meant as a way to accommodate the huge amount of workers drawn from more rural areas it became a huge competitive advantage after the war as housing was scarce - and the company which was able to provide such had a better chance to recruit the required staff (which,due to the huge losses in some generations were scarce).

It fell out of favour in the 70/80ies but especially municipal corporations continued to provide it sometimes and some industries,mainly healthcare, continued to do so. (e.g. most hospitals in central Europe have a “nurses home” - a cheap apartment block next to the hospital that is often rented out to junior nurses and doctors)

Nowadays, due to the massively increasing prices to rent and own the whole idea gains traction again for other branches as well - e.g. Mercedes Benz and BMW are planning to invest heavily in these things, so does BASF. E.g. one of my clients (ambulance service) does provides (very high quality) fully furnished temporary flats both for travelling paramedics but also for new hires so they can settle down in peace.

I am a CEO of a small company and while my staff works 100% remote (exclusive of direct appointments at the offices of our customers - which we try to avoid) I do offer paying for a real estate agent upon hiring staff if they need a new flat for working Home-Office full time. (E.g. due to having small kids at home and wanting a separate office) It does cost me around 3000€ - which is a small amount compared to the overall hiring costs - a new staff member costs me around 30.000€ after adding recruitment costs, induction, initial training courses, hard& software,etc. If I manage to retain 1 out of 10 staff members due to that it’s worth it.

Reminded me of the company a friend worked for. They had little parking space but the price one had to park was reasonable - and most people used public transport anyway.

Then they moved their office to a commercial area with no public transport within a few kilometres. And multiplied their parking prices by 10.

… surprisingly the staff retention and recruitment rates dropped.

Surprised Pikachu face Leopards ate my face

Affinity publisher can be a reasonable alternative for a lot of people - while it lacks a few features in terms of multi-user collaboration it is far better in the actual graphical design area.

I added two points that might be relevant.

• Proton is not an Email app but mainly an email provider that locks you into its own app.

• Proton does not provide e2e encrypted email outside its own environment (so any mail within proton will be encrypted but not outside - and it’s far harder to do the later due to point one)

• Proton is heavily run by US citizens living in the US - and therefore to some extend fall under the homeland security act and similar laws, including pressure by the current administration.

• Proton claims to be based on Swiss privacy laws. One should be aware that Swiss data protection laws are amongst the weakest in Europe, that service providers can (and mostly are) forced to monitor cross border traffic and that Swiss intelligence services have a long history of unlawful overreach and extremely close cooperation with US services. To what extend Proton is affected by this is unclear, unlike other Swiss based service providers they refuse to comment on this(and they would be allowed to comment, don’t get me wrong)

Just to be aware. I know there are a lot of fans of proton on Lemmy,but there are far better services available nowadays. If the Swiss privacy law does not bother you Infomaniak is an option, alternativly mailbox.org is an option within the GDPR sphere. (Can be bad or good depending on your own situation)

Neither of them is an app, nevertheless,but they work with any major app,e.g. thunderbird.

Yeah,one of the few drawbacks they have. Most people can live with it, but it’s indeed one of the things they should be providing by now but don’t

Hetzner

You know that famous twitter post when someone mansplained an author her own book?

I had a heated discussion about a topic that has been my professional center of interest for two decades now and who I often hold lectures about,etc.

The guy basically claimed I was totally wrong by citing a single study - which he grosly misinterpreted and which showed that he was missing a lot of basic knowledge about the topic. (Which is okay,but then don’t tell others they are wrong. I actually just jumped into the discussion to defend someone else) So…a definition of an armchair general.

Funny thing is: I was literally sitting in the lecture of the professor who is the main author of this study and who I already had an deal to publish a follow up study together with him as coauthors.

So… I literally asked him after the lecture what he would say. …and quoted that in my post. (We get along quite well)

The response? “Sometimes a science is not about facts but is about believe and not classical knowledge. And you are definitely a fat fuck who hopefully gets chocked to death by an overweight trans prostitute!”

… That was…Odly specific, was quite specific and well…was the strongest wrong that one can write about science.

Not arguing again,but technically that’s correct. The German SS was split between the “military part” (SS Verfügungsgruppe, later Waffen-SS) that were front line/fighting formations and the “Allgemeine SS” (regular SS) that was more modelled like a “executive branch”, having absorbed the German police forces, customs and having tasks like concentration camp guarding, “behind the front line work”, etc. (On the other hand this is a matter of definition,the Carabinieri are also military but also executive branch - but the definition mentioned above is the one the SS used for itself)

Von Braun was an (voluntary and quite keen) officer of the later, so one could indeed argue that he was not part of the military (and actually the SS almost executed him for that as he leaned towards the Wehrmacht at some part).

So…one could indeed argue he was not a military officer. Does that make him less of an asshole? Absolutely fucking not. It makes him worse. Because he voluntarily and quite happily joined the far more evil side and had other options all along - and his fellow “Allgemeine-SS” members were actually the ones who were responsible for most of the real fucked up shit the SS did (which does not mean that the Waffen-SS guys were nice, they did almost as horrible shit…comparing evils here…). So…in the end one should probably compromise on “he was a fucking asshole with a lot of blood on his hands. No matter if he was military or not.”

As usual Hetzner is always a solid choice - their Object storage is more than solid and comparably cheap - Personally I would not transfer to your VPS though as Immicg can get funky when latencies are too high. Just run the cheapest VM there that can take Immich.

Alternatively IONOS is doing a lot of good things as well these days,but they are slightly more expensive.

As you correctly wrote newborns/very small babies heads need to be supported urgently - the head to body ratio of babies is very different from older kids and sadly the neck muscles are not that developed in utero. (Dark note: One of the reasons it was not uncommon - and still happens extremely rarely with underqualified healthcare providers- that newborns were sometimes decapitated when trying to facilitate a forceps birth 70+x years ago) Failing to do so can lead to various injuries, from muscular overextension (painful,can lead to chronic issues), ligament or nerve damage (can paralyse) or even vascular damage. I have seen a kid who suffered a fatal vascular damage from a sudden “falling back” of the head after insufficient support was provided and two more with rather complicated injuries - while these cases are super rare,they happen. (And kids are not all the same. My own kid came out and lifted its head 2h after birth and tried to roll onto its belly before we left hospital. Others take months just for the first thing)

When they get older this becomes less of an issue, but they are still suspectable to another thing: External force and exhaustion. It’s a big difference between a kid sitting in a stroller or being on a flat surface and holding its own head and a kid being forced to stabilise its head against external movement by the carrier moving around, especially over longer periods of time. This can,in some rare cases even lead to the classic “shaken kid” syndrome (where repeated acceleration and deceleration rupture small vessels within babies brain,leading to a often fatal haemorrhage within the skull). I am fairly sure I read a case report once that reported about a case of a kid who suffered this while Mom was jogging with a unsuitable backpack like carrier, but sadly as PubMed is down at the moment (thank you,Orange and Elmo) I can’t find it.

Nope. They literally are. See answers below my post and various others here.

Yes. And I am old enough to have attended my first protest without a mobile phone - because I simply didn’t have one yet back then. And my first one I organised actually was a failure because it was impossible to communicate a change of venue.

And before my time protesting was suddenly much harder once the other side had the option to mobilise their forces and react to protesters much mor fluidly. (Mainly when handheld police radio became widely available)

The point is: There is always a force, intelligence and information disadvantage between the different sides - a state actor will always be in a better position. This is even more true in times where mass surveillance is very easy to achieve. A developing world country nowadays easily can achieve a level of surveillance of protests that surpases Stasi levels in their best days for 1% of the resources. Proper and secure communications are one of the only ways to level the playing field at least a bit.

Sure,you can go to plain old “we meet there at XY” protests. Have fun doing that. Your chances to be a victim of repression if you do so within repressive circumstances are far higher,but if you like that?

Gosh, how many people here, who are proposing that people leave their phones at home have actually been to a protest in real life?

My strong guess is: None. Neither has the author of the article been to one.

As someone who attended my fair share protests,including ones in fairly oppressive countries: Take a fucking phone with you, but please use a designated burner phone.

Reasons to have a phone:

• Communication is necessary and paramount - from reorganisation (we are blocked here, so we meet there)to warning (the cops are coming from there and block us off here) people communication is the major aspect that has enabled people to protest effectively and not fall into traps. We can only protest effectively if we are united. And that requires information.

• Let’s face it: Pictures and videos are important. Not only in a “the cops are beating us to pulp situation” (their use there is limited), but also to mobilise others, show the extend of the mobilisation (the other side will usually downplay the size of the protests), feed social media (which is important), etc. As long as basic precautions are taken (no faces/identifiable information, no crimes, change position after you post it) this actually helps the cause and maintains the narrative (it’s mighty hard to brand protests “full of rioters” when social media shows 100k people protesting peacefully). Mainstream and foreign media relies on this as most media outlets to not have actual coverage of critical protests (and if they do, they usually are behind police lines).

• Especially for larger protests you will often work in uncommon areas. Cities you have never been before. You will need reliable map services and geo location (where is the next hospital? Which shops are open? Are there any shopping malls we can slip into if needed? Where can we sleep? Is there a metro station we can use nearby?) This information is not only vital,it can be time critical. A friend of mine is only alive because his peers knew the way to the next hospital - neither of them was from the city, the ambulance stopped responding hours before that,etc.

• Phones are good transmitters - the cops will find any media you have on you if they really want (and they will search very well if they want), don’t think you can hide a micro SD card somewhere. Some countries(including the US) have started to x-ray their new inmates to make sure they don’t hide media within their bodies. (Official excuse: Drug packaging and “welfare”) So often the best bet is to get all evidence, all media the other side doesn’t want to see out before they have access to your phone. (Which I wouldn’t count on to get back)

• They can also be a liveline to get one out of prison. The fact that relatives and fellow activists “know” that their loved ones are being arrested is essential for getting them out and prevent charges. Even in very democratic states the cops will be overstretched for days after a mass protest and people will be locked up without much identification and records. And none will know if Person A is locked up, in hospital, vanished due to something else (e.g. hiding or being a victim of something completely different - I know a girl who got offered a place to sleep after a protest and was locked in their basement for two days with their desire to make her their sex slave communicated), etc. Additionally,in the more oppressive countries,the other side will often use the “we don’t know anything, the person didn’t even attend” excuse to prevent people from getting legal help in time.

Now,the article has a bit of bad advice:

• It is a horrible idea to simply wipe your old phone after backup. Storage doesn’t work that way. It is a easy task for any forensic expert to restore most if not all information on the phone. And as it was not used with all data privacy considerations before,there is a good chance they will find leads.

• It can be problematic to use VPNs, especially in a situation like this and if people use public VPNs. Remember,people know that VPNs exist and the other side usually has control over the telecommunications infrastructure. In at least two cases I know of, the use of a popular VPN within a certain cell tower range was used to differentiate between protestors and average citizens. People therefore should make an informed decision if they rather use normal “semi encrypted” communication (nothing unusual in using Signal,Bluesky,Twitter or Facebook in most countries) or if they want to use a VPN to tunnel their traffic but also are more susceptible.

Some better advice:

• Get a burner phone - do not get a used phone,do use your old phone - I literally bought a old phone from a radical neo Nazi on eBay once - the restored data showed massive illegal activities. You can get new phone with a reasonable secure OS for around 100 bucks these days.

• If possible get a prepaid card that is not linked to your name. Bonus if you can use a roaming card - a card from a different country. It is far more difficult for a country to access identifying information then. Do not use that card for anything else and do not set it up at home.

• Create designated social media accounts for protesting and do not use them from home (unless proper precautions are used) and only use them for that.

• Never log into any private accounts with the burner.

• Do not store anything incriminating on the phone - in your mind you must always be treat it like a device the other side might have full access to. Because if they want to,they will. (Yeah, I know, some countries still protect that information - but even there I saw cops overstepping their borders and simply force people. And once they are in,they are in)

• Degooglefy/Desamsungfy your phone as much as possible and make sure things like location based tracking,etc. are off.

• Consider using Briar and make it popular amongst your fellow protesters. Briar can be used without any mobile phone coverage, as it works with WiFi or Bluetooth only (via ad hoc connections). A single phone hidden in a public place can be used as a relay and inform thousands. But it requires a certain amount of users to work effectively.

• Once the other side got their hands on it consider it burned. Because that’s what it is.

• Keep your phone on, charged as much as possible, but in full(!) airplane mode (unless you use Briar,then keep BT on) but keep your GPS activated (again: remove location tracking services). Preload the relevant maps onto the device, ideally with satellite picture if available, these can be helpful). Keep relevant documents (e.g. timetables, partner organisations,etc.) in another encrypted file.

• Keep a reasonably encrypted file with a minimum number of contacts - lawyer, some civil rights organisations. If you want to have the number of a loved one find one of the countless online SIP providers(ideally in another country) and forward from there.

• Most phones allow a number of numbers to be accessed without unlocking the phone. Save a lawyer/protest organisation number in there so you can access it without unlocking.

• If you can,use an app that allows verifiable proof picture taking - there are various options that are FOSS available on F-Droid. This can later prevent the opposite side claiming that pictures were manipulated.

• Please confirm everything I wrote from other source. First because there is no proof I am not a bad faith actor (I am not,but you don’t know that), second I might have made a mistake.

_Edit to add the last two points. _

As the EU mostly does not decide population based but with equal votes per country that wouldn’t be an issue.

The larger issue is the fact that the European and US regulations clash in a lot of things so it would be harder for Canadian companies to export to the US then.

But otherwise: We would absolutely welcome you.