This is like the wholesome flipside of prepperism.
It's like the guys who carry expensive pocket knives everywhere hoping someone will need to cut something.
I always go out with my HP 50g in case someone needs to solve a numerical integration and I'm the only one with a graphical calculator.
I used to work next to this guy. If a box came in, I would just cut the packing tape open with a house key from my pocket… unless he saw me looking like I was about to open the box.
Then I needed to wait for him to walk over with his damn leatherman and flip it to just the right thing. Whole ordeal usually added time to the stupid box opening.
Relevant: https://youtu.be/YAD0a6wWFrI
What's wrong with preppers?
- As Tar_Alcaran said, most of them are really really right wing.
- ...and neck deep in 7 conspiracy theories and get-rich-quick schemes of the week.
- As Cory Doctorow puts it, "Prepping is a way of playing out a fantasy in which you are elevated to savior status, not an exercise in disaster-mitigation."
- The prepper market is absolutely rife with grifts.
Prepperism is a rabbit hole that your uncle falls down that makes Thanksgiving awkward and makes the whole rest of the family worry about them. Not a benign hobby. And certainly not effective disaster preparedness.
There's of course nothing wrong with having a kerosene heater in your garage or owning a generator in case your power goes out for a few days. But luxury bunkers full of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of MREs bought from Alex Jones' online store? That's someone who thinks the government is all disguised extraterrestrials who drink child adrenal fluid to stay young and and inebriated. Except Trump who is prophesized to throw them all in jail.
Theres also one on lemmy c/flashlight
Checked.
Subscribed.
Hooked.
Thank you, kind stranger.
I love the small but powerful LED lights that can light up an entire room. Was able to impress a few people in just the right moment with those and always have one with me.
Every time I see them on my feed I always misread the name of the community. Really weird when I see one about how their dad used the same one and I think they are talking about fleshlights....
Where the heck y'all live where the power goes out so often?
I'm in the middle of the frozen tundra in Canada, we're powered entirely by renewable energy, we've got snow storms, blizzards, floods and some serious thunder storms and I can't even recall the last time we lost power for any noticeable amount of time. If anything having to reset the clock on the microwave is the only reason I'd know it went out. There's talk of moving to a smart grid system because ours is dated, so wtf are you people working with?
I do love me a good flashlight though, I've got a couple around the house just in case and one in my bag at all times.
The US hasn't invested in infrastructure since the 50s, with a few exceptions
Likely Texas, they have a private grid(as far as I last checked) and are prone to rolling blackouts.
I am also in Canada. Our province runs the power grid on coal and sold the utility to a private company that doesn't bother with the expense of upkeep on infrastructure. They built a sweet skating rink though.
Florida. You’ll be out at least a week or so every year. The summer sometimes can cause outages.
Looking back at the last two years, the causes of power outages lasting long enough to do something about were caused by drivers hitting and damaging power poles, the annual winter ice storm, severe thunderstorms sending trees down on the line, and those idiots who shot out the substation last year.
Power interruptions for a fraction of a second are a weekly to daily occurrence. Lights slightly dim and the stove forgets what time it is and that's about it.
In Florida we lose power during storms very regularly. After one particularly bad hurricane we lost power for weeks.
Weeks? That's fucking insane. A neighbourhood might lose power for a few hours during a major storm up here but I can't think of the last time it was a day. I was probably a kid, 30 years ago.
Where the heck y’all live where the power goes out so often?
we’re powered entirely by renewable energy
That's probably why. For example, Hydro One uses old equipment and doesn't give a fuck about maintaining their aging equipment so it all just breaks catastrophically eventually, especially during bad weather. Transformers blow fairly often in bad weather tbh.
Most of the time power outages are causes by power lines getting taken out by falling branches, cars crashing into utility poles, ice build up, wind. I think it's great you have renewable energy sources but pretty sure it's irrelevant.
Renewables are more evenly distributed, which means power transfer/substations can reroute more easily than when all the power comes from a single point of failure.
It's not as relevant, but it is relevant.
I get so aggravated by video games with weak flashlights. Like, we live in an age where my keychain flashlight can light up the nearest mountain.
This is similar to the feeling I got a few days ago when I finally got to use the shopping cart wheel unlocker that's been in the back of my mind since watching the Defcon talk about it. Instead of the misconfigured and disabled cart being a giant roadblock in the store I was able to take it and use it normally. Feels good.
https://www.begaydocrime.com/carts
WARNING: DO NOT PLAY SOUNDS ON THIS PAGE THROUGH HEADPHONES
Website is completely borked on my phone on Firefox
That's strange, trying a few permutations here and I can't get it to break. But at any rate, here's the content:
[embedded players for sound files]
About
Play the below sounds through your phone speaker and hold it next to a Gatekeeper Systems wheels to lock/unlock. Check me out on twitter @stoppingcart
How It Works
Most electronic shopping cart wheels listen for a 7.8 kHz signal from an underground wire to know when to lock and unlock. A management remote can send a different signal at 7.8 kHz to the wheel to unlock it. Since 7.8 kHz is in the audio range, you can use the parasitic EMF from your phone's speaker to "transmit" a similar code by playing a crafted audio file. Link to my original DEFCON 29 Talk
I have solar panels and a backup battery. I was actually disappointed when the power didn't go out when it got cold here in Texas last week.
Permanently Deleted
I've got one of those fuck-you flashlights from when I first found out about "enthusiast" flashlights a few years ago. It gets bright enough to burn dark colored objects if you concentrate the light on a small part, works like a giant magnifying glass/ sun combo. I need to buy a charger for the battery so I can play around with it again, it was too much fun seeing people's faces when I made it daylight for an entire street.
Headlamp master race
My pocket torch has a clip that allows it to clip to a hat, if one needs to extemporise a head lamp
It's more compact than my headlamps, and I'm more likely to have it and a hat
My headlamps hang near the back door of the house for when light is needed in the yard after dark
I value having good tools. I bring a small flashlight when I travel. How often have I needed it? Not often, but when your in some hotel and the power goes out, it's my time to shine!
Phone is flashlight enough 99.999999% of the time
I agree, but I love my flashlight.
Hell yes, it's good to be prepared!
I guess it was...
His time to shine.
YEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!
He did call it the highlight of his day.
Shine on you crazy diamond plays in the background, unfortunately the speakers are off because no power
I have three niblings (2 nephews, 1 niece). Each one is getting a flashlight and a tiny Nitecore whistles when they get to a certain birthday, not sure which age yet. I know their parents would never forgive me if I gave them the whistles now.
The power was off for a little over two days, so we used our flashlights and other lights a lot. It really doesn't take much money to prepare. A lot of the gooseneck lamps these days use USB, so you can combine a lamp and a power bank to create a task light away from the backup battery.
I can tell you from experience of being a boy scout camp counselor: Do NOT give whistles to minors!
Tho tbh, would've probably helped with what was happening in scouts in the 80s.
Yeah, I was probably going to wait until 18 for the whistle. It's not as loud as a pea whistle, but it's still annoying. The only reason I would ever give it to them earlier would be because we're in an area that is under threat of a Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake. But if they're just going to get it taken away because they can't control themselves, it's not going to be much use. For this particular whistle it is hard to produce a nice satisfying screech, though I suppose they might just take that as a challenge.
For the flashlight, I was thinking more like 15 or 16. The only risk there is losing it, but it's cheap so that's kind of their call on whether they value it enough to replace it.
15+ depends on the kid, but seriously, 15+ u/GiveMemes knows what they are taking about
The boys are little rascals, but they're 8 and 10 so they might mature by 15. I'm certainly not giving them the whistles before then.
Imalent MS03 my beloved
I'm not like a full prepper but I have a rechargeable flashlight in every room of the house in case the power goes out...
Not because it does often but because I stub my toes on shit even with the lights on and I'm not going through the gauntlet in the dark.
This is like the r/edc guys whipping out their knives at every opportunity or r/guns hoping some day they can justify shooting someone
One of these things is not like the others.
C/memes was doing so well for awhile and now all the sudden it's back to a catch-all garbage dump. Lovely.
Replace a flashlight with a dick\vag in this picture, and you can probably cover half of the most commenting nerds, me included. They visually light up once they feel THAT is coming and shine bright a long time after. That's just cute.
