Fondots
@Fondots@lemmy.world
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
There was already some amount of cultural awareness about the Titanic prior to the movie, after all they pretty much started making movies, plays, documentaries, etc. as soon as it happened and kept right on making them
It also got a pretty good bump in popularity when the wreck was found in the 80s
Even if the movie weren’t made, there’d probably be a pretty decent chunk of people who would know about it from the scene in Ghostbusters 2 if nothing else.
It probably wouldn’t be something that pretty much everyone knows about, and certainly not in the kind of detail we do now, but you’d probably still have a pretty good chance of people who’d at least know that it was a big passenger ship that sank.
It’s hard for me to be impartial about this though, I was in elementary school when the movie came out, prime age to learn how to play “my heart will go on” on the recorder in music class and to see that big brick of 2 VHS tapes for rent in blockbuster. To this day I actually haven’t seen it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world that people don’t know about the Titanic because the movie was just so omnipresent in my formative years.
- Comment on Is it generally safe to walk through a field of cows? 6 days ago:
There’s probably a lot of different variables, cows vs bulls, the breed, how they’re being raised, if they have calves with them, how you’re behaving, etc.
In general though, safest bet is always going to be to give them space and not approach them. Not to say they’re necessarily going to be aggressive or anything, but that’s just kind of rule number 1 with any animals you’re not familiar with.
Annecdotally, when I was a teenager, I did Philmont, which is a big property the Boy Scouts of America (now changing their name to Scouting America) owns in New Mexico, where scouts can go backpacking. They also maintain a working cattle ranch there, and I believe so e of the neighboring ranches allow their cattle to (grave? Free range? Roam? I’m not sure of the correct terminology) the Philmont property, so it’s not uncommon to encounter cows in various places there.
They give pretty much the same lecture, don’t approach them, don’t do anything to spook them, and give them some space.
At one point my group was hiking along a trail coming to a junction, and a few dozen cows came down the trail we were about to head up and went into the woods. We weren’t super close to them, but it was probably about the closest I’ve been to a cow outside of a petting zoo in my life, and there was nothing but a few yards of open trail between us. We just stood back and watched them go about their business, the cows didn’t pay any attention to us, we hung out for a couple minutes after they passed in case there were any stragglers, and sure enough there was a lone cow that came running down the trail trying to catch up with its friends.
I’m no cow-ologist, but my general understanding is that they tend to be fairly laid back, and if anything curious. That said, they’re big, powerful animals and you don’t want to spook them.
- Comment on Helium-3: Mining the fuel of the future on the Moon 1 month ago:
Even if it was for batteries, unless we get fusion factors down to something that can fit in a car, power drill, smartphone, etc. batteries are still going to be a big part of the equation.
Sure, you can generate enough juice to power whatever you want, but only as long as it’s plugged in, anything that needs to get detached from the grid is still going to need batteries, and you probably don’t want your car hooked up to a 10 mile long power cord for your commute.
- Comment on How to get wood sealant off of a window 2 months ago:
Like others have said, I’d give scraping it off with a razor blade a try, glass is actually significantly harder than the steel of the razor so it’s difficult or impossible to scratch your glass with the blade. Razors are cheap and readily available (if you don’t already have some kicking around) so you have basically nothing to loose by trying it. Also mentioned we’re magic erasers/melamine sponges, also a pretty solid bet, they basically work like micro sandpaper.
Failing that, I’m no chemist, but from googling around a bit for siloxane and solvents, I think your best bet for solvents youre likely to find at most hardware stores are mineral spirits, turpentine, and xylene, which should all be readily available in most hardware stores in the paint section with other paint thinners. From what I could find, it kind of looks like you’re going to want a non-polar solvent, not a polar solvent like acetone. They may dissolve it outright, or may at least soften it up enough for you to scrub or scrape it off easier.
Also what I gleaned from Google, is that siloxanes are basically silicone, so you may also have luck with products to remove silicone caulk, I know goo gone makes a product for that purpose (although it looks like the main ingredients in that stuff are acetone and benzyl alcohol, which are both polar solvents, so I have no idea how that jives with what I was getting from my other Google searches that suggested non-polar solvents, so again, I’m not a chemist and I’m out of my element)
Any solvents you end up trying, just make sure you’re following proper safety precautions, and be careful about anything else you may spray, drip, splash it on, you might ruin finishes, strip paint, damage plastics, etc.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
On the other hand, they also believe that we were created in his image, so perhaps he created atoms because he himself is made of atoms.
- Comment on YSK: it's not just Tesla, 1/3 of cars in built in the last ten years have passenger/rear windows that are almost impossible to break in an emergency. 3 months ago:
I don’t know how common they actually are, but I see car window breaker & seatbelt cutter gizmos being sold all over the place. I know I keep one in my car where I can easily get to it, though my car emergency kit is probably better stocked than most people’s, and most first responders also have them in their kit.
Also an automatic center punch will usually do the trick as well, it’s a fairly common tool, though in an emergency it may not be practical to go rooting through your toolbox to find one.
- Comment on What makes fishing as a hobby so appealing that people will fish all hours of the day and in nasty weather? 4 months ago:
I have a couple reasons
It’s a good excuse to be outside either alone with friends, get a little fresh air and sunshine, enjoy nature, etc. it often doesn’t involve the same sort of investment or level of physical fitness that, say, hiking does. It can be damn close to doing nothing, but it’s enough of a thing that you don’t feel guilty for doing nothing all day. The initial cost investment can be pretty low, you can probably get out and go fishing with less than $50 worth of gear from Walmart, and ongoing expenses are pretty low too, a couple buck every trip or could trips for bait, and a couple more bucks here or there for some extra bits of tackle.
You can put as much or as little time, money, or effort into it as you want. A $20 Walmart rod catches fish just fine, or you can spend hundreds or probably even thousands of dollars on a rod that also catches fish just fine. You can go out once or twice a year when the weather is nice, or you can be out damn near every day, rain or shine. You can learn a lot of different techniques, use different baits, lures, rigs, etc. to catch more/bigger/different kinds of fish, or you can have a worm on a hook at the end of your line that you just throw out in the water and let whatever’s gonna bite bite. There’s skills to learn if you want to, or you can coast by on just luck, sometimes the fish just aren’t biting, sometimes they’ll bite anything you put in front of them.
And because of that, fishing is kind of a great equalizer, you will meet all kinds of people out on the water or in the fishing aisle at Walmart, people of all races and classes fish.The techniques, targeted species, equipment, locations, etc. may all vary, but at the end of the day we’re all out there trying to outsmart fish and coming up empty-handed as often as not. If you meet someone else who is a fisherman, you’ve got common ground and something to talk about even if you have nothing else in common. We all love to talk fishing, trade fish stories, share our tips and tricks, ask people we see fishing as we walk by how they’re biting, etc.
There’s also a meditative aspect to it for sure, repetitive motions, silence, solitude, nature, a certain amount of mindfulness, etc.
Fish are cool, and catching them is a good way to get an up-close look at them.
There’s a lot to be said about being connected to where your food comes from, the environmental impact of commercial fishing, the health benefits of eating fish, the cost of buying or catching fish, etc. that frankly could probably be the topic of several whole books, and I’m not going to go into all of that, and just kind of leave it at fish are food, and catching fish yourself is one way to get food, and it comes with its benefits and drawbacks.
As for the weather, I’m a strong believer that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear. With enough of the right kind of layers, you can be perfectly comfortable. Sometimes it’s nice to be out experiencing that, it’s a side of the world you may not often see or take the time to appreciate. For some fish, that weather may be ideal for catching them. Some people can’t or won’t brave the elements, so the places you go may be less crowded, which is nice if you’re seeking solitude.
- Comment on A dangerous Washington 911 staffing crisis was averted with a simple fix: remote work | Kitsap County, in Washington State, is the first to prove that 911 dispatchers can work from anywhere 4 months ago:
It’s useful, but a lot of places have a central dispatch that covers an entire county, or in some rural areas even a couple different counties. The center I work for covers almost 500 square miles and about 70 different towns, I’ve lived in this county my whole life, I know about half of the towns pretty well, the others not so much, and there’s maybe about 2 or 3 that I’m genuinely not sure if I’ve ever even driven through them, let alone spent any time there, so any familiarity I have with them is only from my job.
My personal familiarity with some areas does come in handy from time to time, but it’s not absolutely necessary in most cases, you pretty quickly learn what questions to ask and how to use the tools that are at your disposal to work around the gaps in your personal knowledge.
- Comment on A dangerous Washington 911 staffing crisis was averted with a simple fix: remote work | Kitsap County, in Washington State, is the first to prove that 911 dispatchers can work from anywhere 4 months ago:
I’ve heard of some area where the dispatchers are technically considered LEOs and sometimes end up doing stuff like assisting with searching incoming prisoners and such.
It also kind of highlights another issue with the field, on the federal level we’re classified as clerical staff, basically just basic office staff. Different states, counties, and such may make different classifications, but it’s a bit of a crapshoot. That can have an effect on what kind of benefits we’re entitled to, how much we get paid, when we can retire, etc. There’s a bit of a push to have us reclassified to the same category (I believe it’s called “protective services” or something along those lines) as first responders (I believe the most recent version of that bill was called the 911 SAVES act, not sure what the current status of that is.) One of our little propaganda slogans is that we’re the first first responders. I don’t necessarily think we should be in the same category as cops and firefighters and such, were not on location putting ourselves physically in danger, but the kinds of stress and such from the job are probably more in-line with what they do than what some clerk working in an office at the courthouse experiences, IMO a 3rd category is probably most appropriate, but it’s probably a lot easier to just reclass us as first responders than to creat a whole new classification from scratch.
And depending on where you work, dispatch may be part of the local PD, it may be part of the county sheriff’s department or state police, or it may be part of your county’s department of public safety (that’s the case where I work)
- Comment on A dangerous Washington 911 staffing crisis was averted with a simple fix: remote work | Kitsap County, in Washington State, is the first to prove that 911 dispatchers can work from anywhere 4 months ago:
A whole lot in this profession can be summed up as “it varies from one jurisdiction to another” so I can really only speak for where I work.
Some places do much more complicated background check processes than others. Whatever the background check process at my county is, it was pretty streamlined and out-of-sight, out-of-mind for me as an applicant, so I can’t give too much detail on it.
I don’t remember them calling any of my references, though I was able to get someone who already worked here to put in a good word for me so that may have given me a leg-up on that. There was a psych eval, I wouldn’t exactly call it extensive, it was a quick sit-down with the county shrink and then a long multiple choice personality test thing that seemed more like it was measuring ability to play well with others than screening for any significant mental issues.
I did have to pass a drug test, and it was a hair test which I believe has a longer window of detection than a pee test, but as long as you can pass that they don’t really care about past drug use if you’re up-front about it, and honestly I’m pretty sure a pretty decent amount of my coworkers and at least one of my supervisors like to smoke up occasionally, if we ever cause a significant incident or they have reason to suspect that we’re intoxicated at work, we are subject to drug testing, but it’s not like we’re getting regularly tested, and I’ve never heard of anyone having to get tested in the 5+ years I’ve been here. Of course we are subject to a lot of different federal and state regulations so of course pot is officially forbidden,but you’d kind of have to really fuck up to get caught for it. Certain things like a DUI could lead to your certifications being revoked.
I’ve heard a lot of places have you do a polygraph test, mine doesn’t (which is good because polygraphs are all kinds of bullshit)
We also did get fingerprinted by our county detectives and I assume that got ran through the background check as well.
We did have one or two hires with some kind of sketchy things in their past that probably shouldn’t have made it through our background checks but did, though I will say they were weeded out pretty quickly during training.
As far as pay goes, again it varies a lot. I think I make ok money, I’m not rolling in it by a longshot but I’m staying afloat and managing to save a bit. The benefits are solid of course. Last I checked, I think we’re one of the lowest-paid dispatch centers in our immediate area, although we’re also one of the only non-union ones around here too, which is probably to be expected. That has its pluses and minuses, one of the first things that usually that comes with the contract negotiations is mandatory OT since every dispatch center struggles with staffing so we’ve managed to avoid that.
I made about 66k last year after my shift differential (night shift gets paid a bit more,) overtime (I rarely come in for unscheduled OT, but the way our regular schedule works we go over 40 hours a week every other week) etc. people who have more certifications than I do can make a decent bit more than that at my center. I think it’s decent pay for the actual work we do, but not necessarily for the amount of liability we take on. There’s a lot of places that definitely pay a lot less than that. Some of the higher-ups in our department and county government have really been going to bat for us and wrangled us some pretty substantial raises over the last couple years and I’m making substantially more than I did when I started, so at least here the situation is definitely improving.
- Comment on A dangerous Washington 911 staffing crisis was averted with a simple fix: remote work | Kitsap County, in Washington State, is the first to prove that 911 dispatchers can work from anywhere 4 months ago:
I work in a 911 dispatch center, were starting to do some remote trials, but I’m not part of the test group, so I’m not totally clear on all the details about how we’re handling it.
But some concerns I’d have are
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Backup power supplies, phone and Internet connections, etc. our dispatch center has massive generators, several redundant phone and Internet lines, etc. You wouldn’t want to be on the phone with your call taker and have your call drop in the middle because there’s a storm and they just lost power or Internet to their home.
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Radio equipment- phones and call taking are only half the game, the other half is on the radio with our field units. If somehow everything else goes offline, the dispatchers still have walkie talkies to communicate with the units in the field.
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Security concerns, both physical and cyber. We’re handling a lot of sensitive information, have access to various local, state, and federal databases, etc. I’d be a little sketched out by some of that going over someone’s home WiFi. Yes, you can do a lot with vpns and virtual machines and such, but it still introduces a whole lot of variables that need to be accounted for. Also if something really crazy happens, most dispatch centers are fairly secure places, I personally work in a underground bunker on the property of a prison, tall fences, armed security, multiple security doors, etc. You also have less control over who is in the room and what they’re doing. We’re not allowed to take any pictures or video in the room, some dispatch centers go so far as you can’t have your cell phone out at all, no one can just walk in unless they have business in there, it’s a pretty controlled environment.
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Physical proximity to other people is useful, we’re always turning around and asking other people sitting near us for help with something or another, whether it’s asking them to call another agency while we’re on the phone with someone, look something up for us, asking them how to do something in the computer (there’s a lot going on in our system, and they’re constantly adding and changing how some things work, so I’m not sure anyone really knows how to do everything off the top of their head.) If our computer freezes up while taking a call, we can still yell across the room to the dispatcher that they need to send someone to a location because something is going on there (there’s a famous story in our dispatch center from a few decades ago when we were first getting computerized where someone called in that a cop was getting beaten up and couldn’t get to his radio, the person taking the call couldn’t find the location in the system and had to yell over to the dispatcher for that zone to get backup started for him over the radio.) Also about half of us are working night shift and our hours are long, having people around you and keeping an eye on each other is some easy insurance to make sure no one’s literally falling asleep on the job.
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Space for the computer equipment. Where I work, call takers have 5 monitors, dispatchers have 6, and we make use of all of them, we have a lot of information we’re constantly shifting through, and all those screens are very useful to us, we could, in a real pinch, make do with 2 or 3 screens, but it would be a pretty big hindrance. I don’t have space in my home to squeeze in a 5 or 5 screen setup, and I wouldn’t really want to work without them long term (once in a while we’ve had to use aour backup center which has 1 fewer screen at each console, and it’s a pretty big pain in the ass)
Some of these are weird edge cases, but that’s also kind of exactly the sort of situations that 911 exists for. I do think if done right working from home can add extra redundancy, hypothetically if someone blows up our dispatch center or something it’s better if half of us aren’t even in the building and can continue working, but on the other hand if there’s widespread power and Internet outages, it doesn’t do us any good to have half of our staff sitting at home in the dark either. There’s a balance to be struck, I’m not totally sure what it is, but it’s something that needs to be approached carefully to make sure we’re still able to provide an acceptable level of service.
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- Comment on Canada to ban the Flipper Zero to stop surge in car thefts 4 months ago:
Pen-testing: penetration testing, basically good guy hacking to find security vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed, basically finding out how easy a security system is to penetrate.
Debugging: fixing problems in hardware and software
RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification), radio, NFC (Near Field Communication,) infrared, Bluetooth: different forms of wireless communication.
RFID is used for stuff like security tags on merchandise, car key fobs
NFC is similar (you could probably make an argument that NFC is basically a type of RFID) with a very short range used for things like making payments with your phone
Bluetooth you’re probably somewhat familiar with, in used for a lot of consumer electronics, wireless headphones, speakers, computer mice, etc.
All of those use radio waves in some form to pass information from one device to another.
Infrared uses a infrared light to send information, the most common use you’ve probably seen is for TV remotes, which is why you have to point the remote at the TV to work, you’re basically flashing an invisible flashlight at the sensor on the TV
This device can basically mimic any of those kinds of signals allowing it access, control, or bypass devices and systems that use those protocols.
This can be useful for people working on those kinds of systems, you don’t need to have the actual key card, remote, device, etc. to test it out, you can try a bunch of different configurations without needing to reprogram the card a bunch of times, and gives you a lot of options to test for different vulnerabilities and issues.
But those same capabilities make it attractive to people who would use it maliciously. If they don’t have the right security measures in place, something like this device could be used to gain access to secure areas by spoofing a key card, unlock cars, interfere with cell phones, snoop on wireless communications, gain access to a someone’s devices, etc.
- Comment on Gen Z is choosing not to drive 5 months ago:
I think there’s also the issue of where do kids have to go hang out anymore?
By and large, malls are dead/dying, and some don’t even allow unsupervised kids anymore.
Movies are expensive. Restaurants are expensive. Concerts are expensive (if you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with easy access to concert venues, if you’re in the suburbs you probably have an uphill battle trying to convince your parents to let you go wandering around the city unsupervised to go to a concert) Arcades basically don’t even exist anymore.
They can barely even go hang out in a park without being harassed by some Karen or the cops, and of course parks usually close at dusk and kind of depend on the weather being decent so in many places there’s a good chunk of the year where parks are undesirable.
You can hang out at your friends’ houses, but depending on your area there’s a decent chance that they may be in walking or biking distance so no need for a car, and if you’re just going to be hanging around the house, not a big deal for Mom or Dad to drop you off/pick you up, not like you’re going to really need a car while you’re there, you got nowhere to go anyway. And of course we get some parents these days who are really weird about their kids going over to other people’s homes, which leaves staying home and hanging out online.
About the only thing I can think of that I used to do as a kid that might still be accessible for kids and might necessitate them having their own car is to go hang out at the local comic/game shop to play magic, d&d, etc. Because most of them are pretty cool about people just coming to hang out, but even that could really be a “hey parental unit, can I get a ride?” kind of thing. 23rd
Plus, if you have a tight group of friends you always hang out with, you may only need a couple drivers. Even going back to when I was a teen/young adult, a lot of my friends didn’t have a license and many of them who did didn’t have their own car or couldn’t count on borrowing their parents’ car. I know the core group I hung out with was probably around 6-10 people, and one other guy and I did 99% of our driving whenever we went to do something because we were the ones with cars. Probably up until I was about 23 I spent a lot of time picking friends up and giving them rides places because I had a car and they didn’t.
- Comment on Is there a difference between customers/consumers? 5 months ago:
Customer is who purchase the product, consumer is the end-user, the actual person or entity that will use it.
If you buy, for example, a Samsung TV from Walmart. Walmart is Samsung’s customer, but they are not the consumer. Walmart, in some fashion, is paying Samsung for that TV and reselling it to you. You are the consumer of that TV and a customer of both Samsung and Walmart.
Hypothetically if you’re gifted a Samsung TV and spent no money on it yourself, you are technically a samsung consumer, but not a customer.
In common usage, the terms are often going to be used as synonyms, if you have a problem with your TV you’re going to call Samsung customer service, whether or not you actually are technically a customer.
- Comment on Has there ever been an attempt to do a modern "novelisation" of Shakespeare's plays? 5 months ago:
I can confirm that such a thing exists, because I once owned such a book, though I can’t give you any specific detail about it because it was probably 20 years ago and I have no idea where it has ended up since then and my memory is a bit fuzzy.
I was in probably about 5th or 6th grade, but a pretty advanced reader, and I don’t remember where I picked it up, but maybe that might give you some idea where I might have looked for books. The majority of books I had back then either came from Barnes and Noble or scholastic book fairs. It was definitely a softcover book, and I’m fairly certain the cover was black with one of the usual portraits of Shakespeare you’ve probably seen in 1000 different places. I am far from certain but if I had to guess it may have been published by penguin.
I believe more or less all of the dialogue from the plays was there and mostly intact, but padded out with extra descriptions and such so that it read like a regular story and not a play.
I want to say it had a couple of the better known plays, but there’s a chance it only had Romeo and Juliet, my memory is very fuzzy on this.
Dialogue was still very Shakespearean, so you do have to be willing to wade through that a bit, but it was definitely still far more approachable than as a play.
- Comment on Arizona's first all-electric fire truck pumps 750 gallons per min | Mesa unveils Arizona's inaugural all-electric fire truck, prioritizing firefighter safety and environmental sustainability, align... 5 months ago:
Diesel is of course flammable, it’s used in internal combustion engines after also but as far as flammable liquids go it’s not very easy to ignite, you need higher pressures and/or heat to get it to burn, under normal conditions you’d probably have a hard time setting a puddle of diesel on fire with a regular match or lighter, diesel engines use higher compression ratios than regular gasoline engines. Sometimes you can actually even put out a small fire by pouring diesel on it the same way you could with water (I don’t recommend trying this) And when you do get it to light, it can be put out with fairly ordinary firefighting foams and such. In an intense wildfire I’m sure there are plenty of concerns about a tank full of diesel in a truck, but significantly less so than an equivalent amount of gasoline.
Lithium batteries, like most EVs use, are kind of heat sensitive, have a lower flash point, burn hotter, and heat can cause some pretty significant efficiency and longevity issues even if they don’t catch fire, and when they do they’re almost impossible to extinguish.
I’m not saying this to dis EVs, I’m all for them and think this is exciting news, but there’s probably some very valid concerns about big battery packs in firefighting equipment that need to be taken into account. That said, the danger of lithium battery fires and other issues having to do with heat and such aren’t exactly secrets and I’m sure the people designing these sorts of trucks are well-aware of them and hopefully took those concerns into account, figured out how to minimize the risks, etc. and made guidelines on how, when, and where they should or should not be used (there’s a lot of different types of fire apparatus out there, not everything is designed to respond to every type of fire.) I’ll admit I haven’t read the article, let alone done any research into these particular trucks, so maybe they’re even using some other battery chemistry that has less fire risks than common lithium batteries do.
- Comment on Does anyone wish they could go back to the beginning of schooling and re-live their education/school experience from the start? 5 months ago:
Honestly, no.
I learned a lot in school and I retained a hell of a lot of it, but from middle school onward I wasn’t a good student because I had absolutely no interest in doing homework, reports, reading the books I was assigned, projects, etc. so I scraped by skipping as much of that as I could.
I ended up in a profession where I don’t need a degree, and I’m not rolling in it, the job security and benefits are amazing (county government job,) I’m making an OK living, I enjoy the work I do as much as I’m capable of enjoying any job, and I’m happy to stick this out until I can retire.
The things I wish I learned better in school are things like trig, which would be nice because I’ve developed a little interest in things like machining, but would only ever want to pursue that as a hobby, not professionally, so no great loss there. Frankly though, my school’s math program sucked and I’ve probably taught myself more math from casually watching a couple YouTube videos than I would have learned in a decade of high school math classes there.
The things people love to complain about not learning in school- finance, politics, etc. I think I have a pretty solid handle on. Maybe I’m better wired to put those pieces together than they are, maybe my parents did a good job of teaching me that themselves, maybe those people are idiots, maybe some combination of all of those things or none at all.
A lot of my best friends today and even my wife I can trace directly back to sitting next to and goofing off with one guy in a history class at community college before I dropped out. If I’d been a better student I may have gone to a 4-year college, or maybe would have taken different classes, or just fucked around less and never hit it off with him, and my life would be drastically different. It’s probably even likely I wouldn’t have found the current job that I really like, I stumbled onto it by chance while I was living in an apartment with my wife (then girlfriend) and a roommate.
And without a lot of those life experiences I had in the decade or so after school, I don’t know that I’d be able to do the job I do now, I don’t think I would have been able to cut it fresh out of high school, I definitely needed those shitty jobs, misadventures, etc. to mold me into the person I am, and I’m overall pretty happy with that person.
Not that there aren’t things I’d do differently given the chance, but not enough that I’d want a total do-over. Just give me a chance to go back and slap younger me upside the head once in a while to get him to exercise more or brush our teeth a little more diligently and I’ll take it, but there’s a lot of mistakes I had to make along the way, and I don’t want to interfere with any of those cannon events.
- Comment on Mercedes-Benz debuts turquoise exterior lights to indicate the car is self-driving | A visual indicator for other drivers 6 months ago:
Exactly, we left it mostly up to the manufacturers and they’ve kind of abused that freedom and made them kind of shit for their intended purpose.
Now in the modern era, with backup cameras being standard equipment on new cars, you can maybe make an argument for them being a little redundant since most if not all backup cameras have some night vision capabilities, but a little redundancy isn’t a bad thing, if your camera gets fucked up you still probably want to see where you’re going when you’re backing out of your driveway to get it fixed.
- Comment on Mercedes-Benz debuts turquoise exterior lights to indicate the car is self-driving | A visual indicator for other drivers 6 months ago:
On that note, can we talk about how shit a lot of reverse lights are? In addition to indicating that you’re backing up, they’re also supposed to function as a sort of rear-facing headlight so you can see what your backing up towards, but their size, placement, and brightness on a lot of cars makes them pretty much useless for that in a lot of cases.
I’m not saying they need to be as bright as your regular headlights, that would be serious overkill, but they should probably be noticeably brighter than a turquoise self-driving indicator light would ever need to be.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
I think there’s a few things that can be going on
First and probably the most straightforward, there’s people who are trying to deflect criticism of themselves. In your example, let’s say the Jewish person did actually say something disrespectful and misogynistic. They don’t want to get called out and catch heat for it, so they deflect by accusing the other person of being an anti-semite.
There’s also cases where cases where the person actually is anti-semitic, their motivations don’t really have anything to do with calling out misogyny (again using your example,) they’re just playing the part to attack the Jewish person. Now sometimes they might end up actually calling out actual misogynistic language, even a broken clock is right twice a day, which is a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason, or other times they might make a mountain out of a molehill or even just totally making up reasons to be offended.
And there’s some things that can complicate it even further.
There are cases where the Jewish person may be genuinely interpreting the accusations as being an antisemitic attack. Using your example of misogyny, some (but by no means all) Jewish communities/sects do hold some misogynistic views, under their interpretations of judaism, they have strong views about what a woman’s place in society is/should be, and to them speaking out against that genuinely is an antisemitic act.
There are also cases where they have been conditioned to watch out for antisemitism (or other forms of prejudice,) which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in actuality is probably a wise thing for people to have at the back of their minds, but that’s a hell of a thing to have weighing on your mind and some people can get a little overzealous or paranoid and start seeing it in places where it doesn’t exist.
Also, as a non-jewish person, if this is something you’re experiencing regularly, it’s probably a good idea to think about what your own biases are, and try to think about what you’re saying from the Jewish perspective and why what you’re saying or doing might be coming across as antisemitic. You very well might be in the right, or you might discover some biases you didn’t know you had.
And lastly, a final thing to keep in mind, we’re living in the disinformation age, there no shortage of trolls, bots, provocateurs, and other bad-faith actors out there trying to stir the pot and sow discord either for some political agenda or even simply for their own amusement. This especially applies online when you often have no real idea who it is you’re talking too and what their motivations might be, but it also applies in-person as well.
One final thought is that these sort of negative interactions will stick with you, you probably won’t remember conversations where things went smoothly and civilly nearly as well. For every time you’ve seen someone play the antisemitism card, or the race card, or transphobia card or what have you in this manner, you’ve probably had other conversations where it never comes up at all, but that’s not going to stick out in your mind as clearly.
- Comment on Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why 6 months ago:
I’m an essential worker, so I kept commuting pretty much like normal throughout the pandemic.
During the initial lockdowns I was averaging a whole MPG better just from not having any traffic.
And the real kicker is that my schedule is kind of weird, so I already commute at times when traffic isn’t too bad, I normally start at 2:30 in the afternoon and work 12 hours until the 2:30 in the morning (before anyone asks, my job isn’t very physically demanding, and I have more and more frequent days off, so 12 hour shifts aren’t too bad) so I’m going in after people have been running out to do stuff on their lunch breaks and before schools let out so traffic is minimal then, and I usually don’t even see a half dozen other cars on the road when I’m heading home, and some of my shifts are weekends so traffic is usually even lighter during the day. And my commute is only about 10 miles/20 minutes, no highways or anything, just normal semi-rural to suburban main roads.
And so a slight reduction in traffic during my commute into work (and no real difference to my commute home) got me a small but noticeable difference in my average fuel economy. Now all told that means I probably only saved a few gallons, maybe a tank of gas myself, but think of all of the millions of people who commute in much heavier traffic both ways, possibly even further, and how much extra gas they’re burning releasing CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere.
Imagine what more people being able to work from home, better public transit and carpooling to reduce number of cars on the road, companies staggering the start/end times of their business days so that everyone isn’t commuting at the same time, etc. could do.
- Comment on I want to talk in an American accent but how can I transition into it slowly for people who know me without them noticing a sudden change? 6 months ago:
So first of all, which American accent? There’s no single accent.
Secondly, if you try to transition slowly, odds are you’re going to get made fun of a whole lot along the way for nearly every single American pronunciation you make, because each individual change will stick out more in context. so we’re talking about months or years of people thinking you’re weird, stupid, or have some kind of speech impediment instead of getting it all out of the way in one go. I have a fairly strong Philadelphian accent, and even here in my home turf I’ve had the odd person try to make fun of my pronunciation of things like “water” (wooder,) generally it’s pretty good-natured fun, but once in a while you get some asshole with a stick up their ass about proper pronunciation. You’re setting yourself up for a long time of that, and it will only get worse up until you’re actually able to pass as an American.
Third, don’t try to be cool, it never works. The coolest thing out there really is just having the right amount of confidence. Trying to change your accent because it sounds cooler kind reeks of trying too hard, like weeks sprinkling way too much Japanese into their conversations for no good reason, or people using big words to sound smarter, or whatever the fuck Elizabeth Holmes does with her voice. It’s basically the verbal of equivalent of a neckbeard wearing a fedora (is that still a thing or am I dating myself?)
If you’re actually dead-set on changing your accent, the best way is to just live in America and immerse yourself in it and come into it naturally, and you’ll pick it up, and then it gives you a solid reason to say how/why you picked it up. You’re going to need to spend some significant time here though, months at a minimum, probably years, otherwise at best people will just think you’re an obnoxious, maybe naive weirdo who’s huffing their own farts about how well-traveled they are, or at worse think you’re some sort of weeaboo type obsessive nutjob about America (Google “Rawhide Kobayashi” and you’d get a pretty good sense of how people might think of you)
Last thoughts on the matter, if there’s American slang you like, go ahead and use it, but do it naturally, don’t force it. I sprinkle all kinds of weird shit into my speech that I’ve picked up from all over the place, things I’ve read, heard others say, movies, tv, the internet, but it’s never been a conscious choice, it just happens naturally, trying to force it never makes it feel natural. “Stop trying to make fetch happen.”
- Comment on New Drug Could Extend the Lifespans of Giant Dog Breeds 6 months ago:
Not that breeding hasn’t created a lot of issues in many dog breeds, but something I always notice with wolf stats is that their lifespan in captivity is always listed as “up to” and I don’t tend to see anywhere saying what an average lifespan in captivity is. Maybe that stat is out there but in my casual googling around I don’t think I’ve seen it.
Which makes me think that some of those life span claims may be based on outliers. You get the odd dog that lives past the average life expectancy for it’s breed too, but it would be a bit misleading to say that French Mastiffs can live to be up to 12 years old because a couple have lived that long even though the average lifespan is half of that.
And let’s not forget that the grey wolf’s native range was almost the entire northern hemisphere in just about every climate imaginable. That leaves a lot of room for different populations with genetic variations. Different populations of wolves can vary pretty greatly in size, Indian and Arabian wolves only average around 25kg, north American wolves about 36, European wolves around 38.5, and while places like Alaska and Russia have turned out a few giants in the 70kg+ range, wolves over 54kg are overall pretty uncommon. That puts a lot of wolves in the same weight class as a medium or large sized dog, not giant breeds, and 15 years, while not exactly common, isn’t quite so unheard of either for a lot of breeds in that weight range.
And trying to find specific stats on the lifespan of those different wolf populations is definitely outside of what I was able to find with a little casual googling and skimming Wikipedia.
Of course 15 years might very well be a perfectly ordinary lifespan for a wolf. I don’t know, I don’t feel comfortable saying one way or the other from the stats I was able to find with the amount of effort I was willing to put into it, and I’m certainly no biologist studying wolves or anything of the sort.
I started googling this earlier today to comment on a different post about this where someone asked about what the lifespan of dogs would be without human meddling, and I thought to myself “well that’s basically wolves.” And I started off intending to skim a few pages for the relevant numbers and say something like “wolves live about X much longer than similarly sized dogs” with “X” being kind of an average from a few different sources because I expected some variation in the numbers, but I saw a lot more variation in the numbers than I expected, and some of the way things were phrased felt like they were answering different questions than what I was asking, which kind of sent up some red flags for me, and I ended up not commenting on that time because I didn’t feel like I had a solid answer.
I still don’t, but in this context I think it’s important to stop and think about the data and ask questions like
Are the wolves that get up to 70kg the same ones that can live up to 15 (or I even saw claims of up to 20) years? Or is it maybe smaller wolves that can live that long? Are we making fair comparisons between dogs breeds and similarly-sized wolves, or are we comparing giant breeds to the smallest wolves out there?
Are these ages averages, or are they the top end outliers that are more of a theoretically maximum than something that’s likely to happen?
Is the genetic diversity of different wolf populations being taken into account properly?
How fair is it to compare the lifespan of wolves and dogs? They’re closely related to be sure, to the point they’re generally considered to be part of the same species, but there’s also very significant differences in their biology as well.
I hope someone is more dedicated than I am and can dig up the data I’m looking for, and my gut says that wolves probably do have longer potential lifespans than dogs, but I’m not very confident in just how big the difference is.
- Comment on Do guys that tip cam models hundreds of dollars week after week think that model actually likes them? 7 months ago:
I used to go to strip clubs occasionally, I never had the delusion that any of the girls were into me, but for me that was kind of part of the fun.
It removes all of the pressure, you don’t have to worry about fucking up your chances with any of them because you never had any chances to begin with, and as long as you’re not a total creep and can keep the singles coming, you’re going to have a steady stream of pretty girls coming around and acting flirty with you, laughing at your jokes, generally paying attention to you, etc. and that can feel pretty nice.
Some people can get weird about it and have an unhealthy mental idea about what their relationship with the strippers actually is, but that’s not limited to strippers either, pretty sure that just about anyone who’s worked in a bar or restaurant for any length of time has probably had that one regular customer who was a little too buddy-buddy with you and seemed to think that you were their best friend even though you kind of hate their guts and are just nice to them because that’s your fucking job.
That doesn’t mean you can’t have the occasional genuine interactions with them, it’s kind of hard not to, at the end of the day we’re social creatures who want to connect with one another, but that doesn’t necessarily change the fundamental nature of your customer/service-provider relationship.
- Comment on Do guys that tip cam models hundreds of dollars week after week think that model actually likes them? 7 months ago:
A few years back on Reddit I remember stumbling my way into a comment thread discussing some camgirl or Instagram model, or “influencer” or something along those lines. The OP was a gif of her bouncing her boobs (and I’m not gonna lie, I clicked into the thread because boobs)
Overall the comments were pretty much what you’d expect, but one dude in particular stood out to me.
IIRC, someone made a comment about how her boyfriend was a lucky man or something to that effect, someone else commented that they had heard she was a lesbian, and that’s where this particular weirdo came in, saying something essentially like “nuh-uh, I talked to her cam-to-cam and she’s definitely straight.”
Like it genuinely never occurred to this person that someone might not be exactly who they present themselves as online.
Now I cannot claim to know anything about that girl’s personal life, she might be gay, she might be straight, she might be neither, but I can easily think of probably a dozen reasons off the top of my head why she might want to hide her sexuality, whatever it may be, from some stranger she was chatting with on the internet, ranging of fear of harassment to trying to get money out of him.
I tried to explain that to him, and he was like “yeah, I get it, but I talked to her and she’s a really genuine person”
Everything just went in his one ear and right out the other.
I hope that dude never made his way into a strip club, he’d get talked into so paying for many champagne rooms and then probably go home and brag about his new girlfriend.
- Comment on If other countries can afford massive internet pysops why can't I find a job in the states where I get to meme and troll all day for the US military? 7 months ago:
You know years ago I heard a recruitment ad for the CIA on the radio, and that caught me a little off guard, I always kind of assumed the CIA personally reached out to specific candidates and hired through shady back channels and such and didn’t really do open recruitment.
I guess it makes sense though, for every James Bond type super spy there’s probably a hundred different random office staff, IT guys, clerks, mailroom guys, secretaries, janitors, accountants, etc. who handle boring day-to-day operational stuff and rarely or never get to see any of the crazy spy craft stuff happening.
And I guess once you land one of those jobs, maybe you can get your foot in the door for eventual promotion to International Man of Mystery.
- Comment on Wasting water with tankless heater 7 months ago:
Building on a concrete slab doesn’t exactly make a difference when I’m talking about an access panel in a wall though
- Comment on Wasting water with tankless heater 7 months ago:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shower in the US (assuming you’re in the US) without access to the plumbing somewhere, I’m sure they probably exist somewhere, but it’s not common in my experience, usually there’s a little access panel on the other side of the wall somewhere, maybe hidden in a closet or behind a piece of furniture or something. If there’s not, I’d consider adding one anyway, at some point if you’re there long enough you’re probably going to want access to it for some issue or project that comes up down the line.
They make small tankless electric water heaters that run off of regular 110V outlets for heating a single sink or shower, if there’s convenient electrical nearby you may be able to just hook one of those up.
- Comment on How is it that there are cold treatments and hot treatments for the same injuries/conditions? 7 months ago:
Cold helps to numb pain and reduce swelling
Heat increases bleedflow and can help relax muscles
Bodies are complex, there’s a lot of systems all connected together which means injuries often have multiple aspects to what’s wrong.
Probably some of the most common injuries you’ll see this kind of treatment for are things like sprains and strains, where you’ve stretched muscles, tendons, or ligaments a bit too far and maybe tore them a bit. Ligaments are tissue that connects your bones together, and tendons connect muscles to your bones.
Your body responds to this by swelling, it sends extra blood to the area to start working on repairs. It may also help somewhat to cushion and/or immobilize the joint slightly to prevent you from making it worse. Heat opens up blood vessels and gets even more blood flowing through the area, so it can help speed up the healing a bit, and if it gets your muscles to relax it can take some of the stress off of whatever’s injured, don’t want your muscles pulling on some damaged ligaments too much, you want them to relax so they can heal.
But that swelling can be pretty damn uncomfortable on top of any pain from the actual injury itself, your skin, muscles, and other tissues can only stretch so much to accommodate that extra blood so it’s putting pressure on everything around it. Cold sort of slows down your nerve cells so they can’t send as many pain signals to your brain. And like how heat opens up your blood vessels, cold makes them contract so you don’t get as much bloodflow and so less swelling.
So you can see that both have their benefits and drawbacks, overall cold is more of a pain management thing, and hot is more to expedite the healing, and depending on the type of injury, how much pain you’re in, etc. it can be beneficial to do one, the other, or alternate between both.
This is sort of an ELI5 answer, im sure there’s a bunch of special cases or ifs, ands, and buts that could be sprinkled in there, but I’m no medical professional, but hopefully that gives you the general gist of it. If anyone spots anything I got wrong, please let me know.
- Comment on Do you feel, as I do, that this adblocker ban by Youtube will harm all of Alphabet's companies? [discussion] 7 months ago:
No commercials was once one of the big selling points for cable, and we know how that turned out