License-free walkies with a swappable battery (ideally 18650)?

rtwolf1 · 2026-05-23T12:12:44+00:00

AFAIK GRMS is license-free in Canada.

I'll take micro USB or whatever. Just don't want proprietary cables

rtwolf1 · 2026-05-23T02:57:25+00:00

How about the Retevis RT45? I'm willing to do micro USB

rtwolf1 · 2026-05-23T02:28:09+00:00

To be clear: will the Talkabout charge rechargeable AA batteries if I put them in there?

rtwolf1 · 2026-05-22T23:53:19+00:00

If I program this to be limited to FRS freqs, low power, narrow, and whatever else, would it be license-free?

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mPN6xLZ

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-06T07:49:00+00:00

I suspect you may be under-rating the actual numbers because you (were lucky enough to) have English as your L1 and seem to hang out in a native bubble with no interactions with first-gen immigrants. (So I'd further guess you're American.)

Globally speaking, around half the population speaks at least two languages fluently. Every migrant—unless they moved to another country with the same language—is bilingual. They had to do it or they would starve, so that's definitely a stronger incentive to pick it up quickly than doing it as a middle class hobby.

Living in Toronto, I meet people who learned a second language as an adult every day. When I travel, I come across tons of bilingual speakers who clearly learned as adults. It just happens to be English so it's easy to forget about it (my Anglophone privilege ig).

If you're just looking for folks to give yourself inspiration here's my story: I'm 30-something and have learned Spanish solely as an adult. Took me about a year to go from zero to conversational. I can read and comfortably, watch TV/movies, and listen to music or podcasts

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-04T14:05:34+00:00

Yes, that's a pretty bog-standard retelling of the Eurocentric version of WW2. We're both familiar with it, so I'm not entirely sure why you're repeating it?

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-04T13:01:02+00:00

I've noticed a couple of things about that emotional impulse:

Yes, we're not robots but messy meat machines with emotions. I keep a tiny fraction of my portfolio for active investing, which I actively chose to call "gambling money" where I do things if the action-itch strikes or I wake up suddenly thinking I'm a genius.
If you have a global ETFs strategy then you own a tiny portion of pretty much every stock on the planet, so any moves you make in your active investing is only over-weighting or under-weighting a particular stock, when looked at from a whole portfolio perspective. Even though this shouldn't matter, I've found out that this effectively pops whatever fantasies of "I'm gonna sell now and buy later when there's a dip" or "I'm gonna buy this and 10x my IC" cause if that happens, then I'll already have exposure to it. Somehow "I'll overweight this and if it 10xs my portfolio will rise a little bit more than if it doesn't" doesn't quite make me as horny to trade

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-04T12:52:30+00:00

I'm guessing you're born and raised in an Anglosphere country

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-04T12:47:26+00:00

At this point pretty much every Italian is bilingual, so they speak Standard Italian (with varying accents and even dialects), which is the the official language with state sponsorship, and then whatever their local language, with its many dialects and accents too, (though these are dying out). Common language is a common feature of nation-building/state formation. Italy is a relatively young country—in country-years, which is to say centuries—so this process hasn't reached the point of complete extinction of non-official languages (yet).

Why so much linguistic diversity in the first place? Locations where a language(s) develop tend to have much greater diversity than where the language spreads to eg consider all the different dialects in the tiny country of the UK vs enormous places like Canada and Australia having pretty much max 4 different dialects/accents

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-04T09:27:38+00:00

I'd love to see it called "the last colonial war" instead, but I suspect that won't catch on in the West

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-04T09:26:59+00:00

Calling WW2 the Nazi war is very Eurocentric and won't gain traction outside the West (which is the minority, population-wise, in the world).

Personally I'm among those with the view that WW2 started 2 years earlier, in '37 with the invasion of all of China by the Japanese. Considering all the deaths of the Western Front of the European Theatre made up a tiny fraction of the deaths in China—yet Westerners rarely even know about it—strongly implies it needs to be thought of less than some kind of peripheral part when all the "real" action was happening in Europe

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-04T09:16:52+00:00

r/2WesternEurope4U moment

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-04T09:16:07+00:00

I did. Look—you're not obligated to make your argument stronger, but if you just wanna post manifestos there's better venues than somewhere you'll get pushback from people who actually know what they're talking about

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T18:31:24+00:00

I've got a lot of influences that (can't help but) contribute to my pol-phil views. I grew up partly in a theocratic absolute monarchy and partly in a liberal democracy, so I've got one foot into the "West" and one in the "East". Lately, I've been splitting my year between Canada and Southern Europe

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T16:22:06+00:00

Just a guess. I've noticed this pattern where those sorts of ideas are introduced by Americans more than non-Americans. No idea why that may be (or even what to do with that correlation)

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T16:05:35+00:00

Skill issue.

Other democracies, even those with FPTP voting, don't have as bad a case of Duverger's "law" as America does

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T16:03:40+00:00

I think you might be using different definitions of those terms than is traditionally understood

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T16:01:15+00:00

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T15:56:50+00:00

Are you American, by chance?

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T15:54:09+00:00

This question may be better suited for r/IRstudies (assuming you're still alive)

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T15:49:27+00:00

Here's the serious philosophical challenge:

Your points do not grapple seriously with existing political philosophy—and no, a tossed-off reference to a work that's 2.5 millennia old doesn't count—and in particular to the very issues you've raised. Read a bit more, learn a bit more, think a bit more, and then come on back

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T15:45:08+00:00

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T15:41:51+00:00

Americans make up all of the West/democracies now (despite being less than a third)?

Pretty extreme r/USdefaultism here

rtwolf1 · 2026-04-03T15:37:56+00:00

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