Fondots

@Fondots@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What purpose do carbohydrates OTHER than sugars serve in the body?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  True, I did think about mentioning that but decided to skip over it to keep things simple.

  Animals like cows for example, can get by almost entirely on fiber. Stuff like grass doesn’t have much in the way of carbs we can use, but it contains a ton of fiber, and cows digestive systems are set up to actually do something with them.

  The extra “stomachs” they have allow for some extra fermentation and such to happen so they can break down that fiber into simpler carbs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What purpose do carbohydrates OTHER than sugars serve in the body?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Gonna try to give a very general ELI5 sort of answer

  There’s basically 3 main types of carbohydrates

  Simple carbs- basically sugars (mono- and di-saccharides)

  Complex carbs- starches, whole grains, etc. (polysaccharides)

  Fiber- arguably these are just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down

  In general, sugars are the source of energy your body actually runs on, especially glucose.

  Your body can pretty much use simple sugars as-is or can easily break them down into a form it can use. There’s some variation just how quick and easy it is for your body to use different sugars, but in general your body will start to feel the effects of eating sugar in the space of a few minutes, and the effects will peak within about an hour or two.

  Complex carbs take a little more digesting to break down into a form your body can make use of. They’re basically being turned into simpler sugars, but that process takes a while. You might hear about athletes carbo-loading with a big spaghetti dinner or something the night before a big competition. The idea there is that the energy from that big, complex carb-heavy dinner won’t really hit them for a few hours or even until the next day, and it will keep providing that energy for a longer period of time.

  Fiber is, for the most part, indigestible, your body can’t really break it down into simpler sugars that it can make use of. It goes in your mouth, through your digestive tract, and out the other end relatively unchanged. That doesn’t mean it’s useless though, it still plays an important role in digestion. It takes up space in your stomach helping you feel more full. It absorbs water and helps keep your stool soft and helps waste move through your intestines, and it minds to things like bile acids and cholesterol so that they can be passed as waste.

  Again, this is meant to be a very general answer, there’s a lot of details I’m glossing over both just to keep things simple, and because I’m not a doctor or anything of the sort and I’m not 100% sure myself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tub drain help⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  When you say it won’t loosen when turned, do you mean it’s totally seized up or it spins but the part doesn’t come off?

  If it’s totally seized up, have you tried dousing it with some sort of penetrating oil? WD40 might do it a pinch, but a specialized penetrant like PB blaster or liquid wrench would probably be better.

  Soaking it with some CLR or something might also help to break up and rust, lime, or other crud that might be in there.

  Still won’t come loose? Get the beefiest screwdriver you can find that will fit the slot. Maybe give it a couple good love taps with a hammer and see if that helps bust it loose.

  If you can find a suitable bit, an impact driver/wrench may do the trick too.

  Get a big ol’ set of channel locks, vice grips, a pipe wrench, etc. that you can gray onto it with to give you some extra leverage, and go to town.

  Sometimes a little heat will do the trick, you can try hot tap water, boiling water, heat gun, and blowtorch if you’re willing to accept a bit of a risk.

  If it’s spinning but you don’t seem to be making any progress

  Do you have access to the back of the tub? Often there’s an access panel so you can get at the plumbing. If all else fails you can try to take the drain apart from the back/underneath

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should naming your children stupid names be illegal?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe in Iceland’s case it has to do with how the Icelandic language works and certain names just kind of don’t work with the rest of the language. I’m far from an expert on the Icelandic language, but my understanding is that nouns, names included, sort of get “conjugated” (I’m not sure if “conjugation” is the correct term, I think that’s specifically a vowel thing, but it’s similar in that the word changes depending on how it’s used in a sentence and most of us are familiar with the concept of conjugation.)

  There’s a few random things in English that do it, like depending on the sentence, you might use I/me/my/mine/etc. when you refer to yourself refer to yourself, but in icelandic all nouns do that in a regular predictable way, so they have to be pronounceable with certain suffixes tacked onto them.

  I think they also do the old school patronymic/matronymic name thing instead of family names. So if you meet someone in Iceland whose name is something like “Steve Robertson” then “Robertson” isn’t his family name, his dad is literally named “Robert” and so he is “Steve, Robert’s Son” so names kind of have to work with that kind of naming convention as well.

  So it’s less of a “this name is stupid” and more of a “this name breaks our language”

  It also seems like they’ve eased up on some of the rules in recent years, first names are no longer gender restricted, and they’ve added a nonbinary suffix for the patronyms/matronyms so now you can be a -bur instead of just -son or -dóttir

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would the world look like if every worker got together and Unionized for a universale wage that helps everyone? Instead of one country trying to screw over another?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  In a sort of abstract sense, there are some parallels.

  In a system like the US, corporations and those with a lot of money hold a lot of power, and unionization is a way for everyone else to take some power for themselves to make sure that their voices are heard.

  In a system like China however, most of that power is instead concentrated with the government and upper echelons of party, so attempts at democratizing fill a similar role of giving regular people a voice.

  There’s a lot of nitty gritty details, cultural differences, etc. and I don’t really want to gloss over those, but the root in either case is common people trying to make sure their voices heard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨There's no such thing as a wrong number any more⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of the 10 digit non emergency lines also redirect to our center, we get a lot of wrong numbers calling into us

  One of those numbers is just one digit off from a pizza place, which is always fun because once in a while someone is a domestic calls in pretending to order pizza because they don’t want the person they’re with to know they’re calling police, so we kind of have to grill those calls with are you having an emergency/do you know you’re calling the police/are you safe to talk kind of questions

  Pro tip for anyone who finds themselves in a situation like that, most dispatch centers are aware of those types of calls, but some posts online will tell you that there’s a code that pepperoni = they have a gun or something like that. No such code exists, at least not in any way that’s universally recognized. Maybe some departments have that standardized but it certainly wasn’t part of my training.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Famous Antikythera Mechanism Was a Mechanical Disaster, New Research Suggests⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep, I actually mentioned his videos in another comment on here. I thoroughly enjoyed them (and all of his other videos for that matter)

  Definitely worth checking out for anyone who likes this kind of stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I already addressed your first paragraph pretty well in my comment.

  If you’re touting something as an alternative to the Global Positioning System, I think it’s reasonable to expect that it’s going to cover at least most of the globe.

  It also doesn’t really seem like it’s intended to be an alternative, more like an extension or backup to GPS. If I available you should still be using GPS, this is just something you’d fall back on if regular GPS goes offline. Sort of like how you wouldn’t want to run your house off a generator 24/7/365, but if a tree falls on the power lines by your house you at least have the generator to keep your fridge running.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It does sound a lot like LORAN-C, which I admit I forgot was a thing that once existed.

  I know that in areas it covered, LORAN was supposed to be pretty accurate for positioning. I don’t know exactly how well this would compare to that, things like what frequency they transmit on, how much power, digital vs analog, number of transmitter sites, etc. will all come into play, and I don’t feel like digging into exactly how the two systems would stack up against each other. Could absolutely be the BPS totally blows LORAN out of the water, they might be comparable, it might be markedly worse, we’re well outside of my pay grade now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BPS is a GPS alternative that nobody's heard of⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I understand it, the title while technically accurate, may be a little misleading.

  And to be clear, it’s very possible I’m misunderstanding it, and a brief Google search doesn’t turn up a whole lot of good information in a format that’s easily digestible to me.

  When most people hear “gps alternative” I think most of us are picturing some kind of system that will tell you where in the world you are.

  It seems to me that BPS is mostly concerned with time and not location.

  Gps relies on having very accurate time information, you need to know exactly where the satellites are supposed to be at any given moment, and since they’re whizzing around the earth every 12 hours or so, you need to know exactly when it is to know where those satellites are supposed to be in order to properly triangulate a position from them.

  So since we have these super accurate clocks flying around overhead beaming out time information, a lot of other critical infrastructure that relies on accurate timing has just latched onto using those time signals because they’re already there, no need to reinvent the wheel and come up with your own timing system.

  But since GPS is theoretically susceptible to jamming, anti-satellite weapons, etc. we need a backup time signal in case gps goes down.

  And since we already have television stations everywhere already broadcasting all kinds of digital data, we can just kind of piggyback off of them to broadcast the same sort of timing information you’d get from GPS.

  I’m unclear whether it could actually be used for navigation, the name (Broadcast Positioning System) would seem to imply that it can, but I can’t seem to find anywhere that’s talking about it being used in that way.

  In theory I suppose it can, no reason you can’t triangulate your position from some radio towers. In at least one sense it’s probably easier than satellite because those towers aren’t moving much (maybe swaying a few feet in the wind or so, but otherwise they’re about as stationary as anything is on this rock hurtling through space) so they make for a nice fixed reference point.

  On the other hand, I suspect there’s kind of a line of sight issue. In general there’s not much between you and a gps satellite except for a few thousand miles of atmosphere, that signal is coming in a straight line down to you from space. That makes the math nice and easy.

  That may not be the case with a TV signal, theres a good chance that there’s all kinds of buildings, hills, valleys, etc. between the tower and you, and so it’s harder to know if that signal is coming to you in a straight line or if it took a longer route and bounced around off of some hillsides and skyscrapers.

  If it does bounce around, it takes longer for the signal to reach your device, which would make the calculations show that you’re further away from the tower than you are.

  It’s also not at all a global system. It’s part of the ATSC 3.0 standard, which is mostly only used by North America and South Korea, the rest of the world uses different broadcast standards (that may or may not have similar provisions, I haven’t looked into them) so if you’re not in one of those places, you’re probably not going to be able to make use of BPS in any capacity.

  Again, I’m a bit out of my depth here, I’ve said a lot of words, but I don’t have great confidence in a lot of it, I didn’t do any deep research into any of this and a lot of this was just me throwing thoughts out there. If anyone knows this stuff better than I do I’m excited to hear from you and for you to tell me what I’m wrong about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Famous Antikythera Mechanism Was a Mechanical Disaster, New Research Suggests⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m no archeologist, watchmaker, engineer, or anything of the sort, but it occurs to me that the archeological context it was found in kind of points to the thing working as intended.

  Metal and labor isn’t cheap, even less so in the ancient world, you’d probably be looking at a few hundred bucks at least to rebuild this mechanism between materials, design time, manufacturing time, etc. using modern tools and techniques.

  If you’re some ancient Greek proto-watchmaker who’s just spent probably hundreds of man-hours working on this thing, cutting hundreds of gear teeth with hand files, fitting things together, engraving it etc. and it’s not working what are you going to do with it?

  I know what I’d do, I’d either keep working on it until it does work, or I’d cut my losses, melt the damn thing down and turn it into something I can sell.

  In either case it’s not leaving my workshop until it’s a finished product.

  So unless it got looted after my town got sacked or something, which is a possibility of course, it’s probably not ending up on a ship to go somewhere unless it’s a working device. And since it was found on a shipwreck, that’s pretty telling to me.

  Also it seems to have been built into a wooden frame. I’m not certain of the details of it’s construction, that could have been a structural piece that holds the whole thing together, but to me from the pictures I’ve seen of the device and attempts at reconstructing it’s it seems like a largely decorative element, probably the last thing I’d make for it after I’m done troubleshooting the mechanical issues. And if it was structural and the thing didn’t work I’d expect the thing to be more disassembled because the maker was still working on it.

  Just my 2¢ on the matter.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Famous Antikythera Mechanism Was a Mechanical Disaster, New Research Suggests⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a guy on youtube- clickspring, who made a replica of it, and used a lot of homemade tools that could have been available in ancient Greece. I don’t think he strived for 100% accuracy, but it definitely seemed like he put some thought into how such a device could have been built in the ancient world.

  I’m certainly no archeologist, engineer, watchmaker, etc. but it left me feeling pretty convinced that such a device could be made to work with tools and techniques available at the time.

  I think he had it spread out over about 12 main videos probably about 15 minutes each, give or take, so it’s a bit of a time commitment to go through them all, but I found it pretty interesting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What if there is an equal alien civilization also incapable of light speed travel but developed a telescope that could view planets like ours.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a short story that kind of touches on this, and I’m pretty sure it’s pretty readily findable online. “The Road not Taken” by Harry Turtledove

  Spoilers, I guess

  The basic premise is that the secret to FTL travel is ridiculously simple,and most civilizations stumble onto it fairly early, and it just happened that humanity never did. Every other civilization once they discover it tends to pour all of their resources into developing that technology, but because of that they don’t really advance in other aspects, so aliens arrive on earth expecting to face a primitive civilization because they didn’t detect any signs of FTL travel, but it turns out that we far surpass them in every other aspect. They attempt to invade earth with basically flintlock muskets, and are met with tanks and fighter jets and such.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I pronounce "slava Ukraini"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe it should be something along the lines of “slah-vah oo-kra-ee-nee”

  The “oo” part almost wants to be a “yoo” but doesn’t quite get there

  the “kra-ee” almost slurs together into a single “kri” sound

  And the “nee” almost drops off into “neh”

  Disclaimer- I don’t really speak a word of Ukrainian, there’s a pretty big Ukrainian immigrant community in my area so I’ve been around Ukrainian speakers and heard it spoken probably slightly more than the average American, but I’m probably missing the mark on that a little bit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In one sense, the egg. Animals had been laying eggs for millions of years before anything like a chicken evolved.

  If we’re limiting our scope to just chicken eggs though, things get a little murkier.

  When we talk about chicken eggs, are we talking about eggs laid by a chicken, or are we talking about eggs from which a chicken can hatch? Or do both need to be true for it to truly be a chicken egg?

  In the first and last case, the chicken obviously needs to come first, a non-chicken can’t lay a chicken egg if that’s the criteria you’re going by.

  That middle ground though is interesting.

  The chicken is descended from the red junglefowl. Look up some pictures, they’re pretty damn chicken-y, I might even say they may look even more like a chicken than some modern chicken breeds. If I was out walking around and a junglefowl ran across the street in front of me, I’d probably chuckle to myself while I pondered the age-old question of “why did the chicken cross the road?” If one showed up in my friends’ backyard flock of assorted chicken breeds, it wouldn’t look at all out of place.

  But it is not a chicken.

  Chickens, however, are junglefowl. We consider them to be a subspecies of junglefowl- Gallus gallus domesticus

  Chickens did not emerge in a single instant. It took many years of selective breeding and evolution for the modern chicken to come into being. Countless generations of junglefowl gradually becoming more chicken-y until the modern chicken emerged.

  At one point in time, a bird was hatched that checked all of the boxes for us to call it a chicken instead of a junglefowl. The egg it hatched from was laid by a bird that was just on the other side of the arbitrary line from being a chicken. Unless you sequenced the two birds genomes you would probably be pretty hard-pressed to say which was the chicken and which was the junglefowl.

  So the first chicken hatched from an egg said by a junglefowl.

  However, that is one true chicken in a flock of not-quite-chickens. Odds are that chicken did not breed with another true chicken, but instead one of those near-chicken junglefowl. So its eggs would not hatch into a true chicken, but instead a chicken-junglefowl hybrid.

  And there was probably a long period of time where things teetered on that line, the occasional true chicken hatched, and then laid eggs that hatched into non-chickens, those non-chickens getting closer and closer to the line over many generations.

  Until finally it happened. Two true chickens bred, and lay an egg that also matches into a true chicken. The first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken.

  But again you’d be pretty hard pressed to pinpoint which bird that was in the flock. It was probably a wholly unremarkable bird that looked pretty much the same as all of the chickens and non-chicken junglefowl around it.

  The lines we draw separating different species and subspecies are pretty arbitrary. It’s more for our convenience to categorize things than it is to reflect any absolute truth about the animals around us. That line could have been drawn just about anywhere in the history of chickens and it would still be valid.

  There’s also potentially a nature vs nurture angle here. Chickens are social creatures who raise their young, they’re not running on pure instinct, to some extent they learn how to be a chicken from other chickens. A true chicken raised by junglefowl may act more like a junglefowl than a chicken in some ways, and vice versa. Is that important when determining what the bird is? When the differences between them are so small, I think it might be. As they say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

  So there’s perhaps an argument to be made that maybe the first true chicken didn’t appear until at least a generation or two after that first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken. After all, if the young aren’t being raised by and around other chickens, maybe they’re not really chickens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should a movie released in 1995 be considered an "old" movie?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it depends on the movie

  If, after 30 years it still has a lot of cultural relevance, I’d think of it as a “classic” movie.

  If it doesn’t, if it hasn’t aged well and/or faded into obscurity, I think it’s fair to think of it as an old movie.

  Probably around '95, I would have been watching Star Wars for the first time. It didn’t feel like an old movie to me then and it still doesn’t to this day. Other movies from that same era haven’t aged quite as well and felt “old” to me.

  Looking at some of the top movies from '95, some of them are just as enjoyable or relevant today as they were when they released, others feel dated and not relevant to me today.

  It’s going to depend on your personal tastes and experiences of course. I can also sprinkle in a lot of platitudes like “you’re only as old as you feel” and “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”

  I think there’s also room for some overlap. There’s classic movies that also feel dated. I think some movies can be both old and classics. You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t agree that, for example, Casablanca, isn’t old, but I think that just about everyone agrees that it’s also a classic. Where the line is is pretty murky.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GameCube Coming To Nintendo Switch Online With 3 Games At Launch⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t exactly keep up with the latest in emulation, and who knows how Nintendo is going to do things, but my understanding that in a lot of ways GameCube (and WII for that matter) emulation has been in a better place than N64 for a while now, so I’m not too concerned about the switch being able to run it.

  While the console itself was less powerful, the N64 is kind of a monster to emulate, it basically speaks a totally different language than any computer (or phone, console, etc) you might try to emulate it on, and there’s a lot of weird special code in individual games that the console needs to deal with, so there’s a lot more for the emulator to do and so you kind of need a comparatively beefy device for the emulation to run well.

  GameCube and later consoles work a lot more similarly to how your computer and other devices work, so it’s a lot easier to emulate them.

  I’ve seen it explained sort of like if the N64 spoke Chinese, the GameCube spoke Spanish, and your computer speaks Portuguese.

  If a Spanish speaker slows down and throws in some hand gestures, a Portuguese speaker will probably more-or-less get the gist of what they’re saying, and Google translate can pretty much fill in the rest. That’s your computer emulating a GameCube game. There’s not too much the emulator actually needs to do, just some minor corrections here and there but mostly things translate pretty cleanly 1:1 between the two languages.

  Spanish and Portuguese are wildly different languages though, almost no shared vocabulary, different languages families, even some of the hand gestures may have different meanings, and Google translate is probably going to spit out some weird garbled nonsense if you try to translate anything too complicated through it. It takes a lot more to facilitate communication between the two languages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s cockney rhyming slang, it’s best not to think too deep about it

  Americans are called yanks, yank rhymes with tank, and septic tanks are a type of tank, so Americans are septics. It’s not exactly flattering but it’s not really as much of an insult as it sounds.

  The same kind of logic has them calling “stairs” “apples and pears” because pears rhymes with stairs and apples are kind of similar to pears.

  Or “cherry” meaning “lie” because lie rhymes with pie, and cherry is a type of pie.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And the n-word is synonymous with “black person,” doesn’t make it any more ok or less hurtful to use it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have many gen z people in my immediate circles, but something I’ve noticed online re-emerging in the last couple of years is the use of “retarded” as an insult.

  I can’t definitively point to gen z as the culprits, I can’t really know who’s behind a username in most cases, it could just be that older generations have found their way to the parts of the internet that I inhabit, or may I’ve migrated to theirs as I’ve gotten older, or that overall attitudes have shifted, but it does sort of coincide with when I figured the younger half of gen z would be hitting the sort of “grown-up” internet.

  Maybe I was in some sort of bubble, but for around a decade it felt like that was something we managed to mostly scrub from our vocabulary. It was honestly a little jarring to see it again, like I’d suddenly been transported 20 years back in time surrounded by assholes from my middle or high school.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Enshittification of 3D Printers – Are We Losing What Made Them Great?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you genuinely believe that, you are either living in some kind of serious tech nerd bubble, or you have no idea what replacing the OS means and you’re talking about doing software updates, tweaking settings, and installing apps.

  The vast majority of smartphone users probably don’t even realize you can replace the OS, and if they do they probably don’t see the need.

  For desktops and laptops, around 71% of them are running windows, somehow I doubt people are buying Linux or Mac laptops just to turn around and install windows on them. Then around 16% of them are running MacOS, and I doubt that any significant number of those are hackintoshes. A fair amount of the remaining 13% or so are probably people who have installed their own OS, but not all, some of them are using ChromeOS, I don’t hear much about people deciding to make their own Chromebook, and some people are buying an off-the-shelf Linux device.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK that if you lose your Social Security Card (USA) more than 10 times, the Social Security Administration will have to, by law, refuse to issue anymore replacement cards, for the rest of your life.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My understanding (and it’s very possible that this is just urban legend) is that they’re intentionally made of paper so if they do get lost they’re more likely to fall apart instead of getting stolen.

  They’re not really intended to be something you carry around with you all the time, it’s not like you’re usually going to be expected to produce on the spot during your daily routine. It’s more the sort of thing you’d keep at home with your birth certificate and other such personal documents.

  IMO the real boneheaded move was making it a wallet-sized card instead of something more like a birth certificate. If you make something in that form factor, people are going to stick it in their wallets and carry it around with them and it’s going to fall apart.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it better to leave a country, or stay behind to fight for it? And what about the ethics of fleeing instead of staying behind?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think there’s any easy answer here.

  If you stay, are you able and willing to fight and to what degree under which circumstances? What do you have to offer? Will you be more of a liability than an asset? How do you weigh your personal safety and wellbeing or those of your family and friends against the country or world? What do your prospects look like in whatever country you choose to flee to?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DNA testing firm 23andMe files for bankruptcy⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah, you mean the original “razor and blades” business model that ensures repeat customers.

  (Yes, I’m aware that many people who use safety razors these days are not necessarily buying from brands that make both the razor and the blades, I am such a person myself, I’m somewhat joking on that)

  But even in the realm of “buy it for life” items, you can still end up with repeat customers. Maybe you want a second razor for your travel toiletry bag, or to keep in your second bathroom. Maybe you just see one that looks cooler, or the handle is more ergonomic, or the way you change the blade seems more convenient.

  And BIFL items still do sometimes get lost, stolen, given away, thrown out, or sometimes even broken and need to be replaced.

  And unless the world’s population starts shrinking, there will always be new shavers hitting puberty who will eventually need their own razor.

  With a DNA test, unless you’re questioning paternity or testing for specific genetic traits like cancer risk and such, once your parents have taken a test, you and your siblings don’t really need to, you know what your parents are so you know what you are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can’t HVAC be made smarter?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My friends family has a shore house we’ve gone to a few times. It’s an old house, built before a/c was a thing, and still doesn’t have any. We throw open some windows and the house stays pretty comfortable, it’s warm but not at all unbearable even when the temps are in the 80s, 90s, occasionally even over 100 (fahrenheit of course)

  It does help that it’s at the shore so there’s basically always a nice breeze.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨E-waste or Linux? Charities face tough choices as Windows 10 support ends⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, steam has definitely done a lot to improve the situation and I’m very impressed with the current state of things.

  I just have a bit of a mental block from the last time I seriously tried to use Linux (circa 2009 probably) that I need to get over. A lot has changed since then

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨E-waste or Linux? Charities face tough choices as Windows 10 support ends⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11.

  I cobbled it together from spare parts as my wife has upgraded over the years. It was a pretty beefy computer when she first built it, and it’s gotten a couple upgrades along the way, but the CPU and MoBo are probably about 10 years old if not older (it’s an AMD FX-something, I’m unsure of the exact specs, it’s whatever parts were in her bin of cast-offs stuck with a new case and hard drive)

  And I’m happily gaming on it. I may not be maxing out the latest AAA titles in glorious 8k epic quality 120hz HDR VR yadda yadda yadda, but I can still run pretty much any game out there on some acceptable mid-to-high quality settings and decent performance.

  I’m probably going to have to either upgrade the MoBo and processor come October, or make the jump to Linux (which I’m not exactly opposed to, but I do like not having to fuck with wine and proton to run my games)

  It’s a perfectly serviceable board, still doing just fine by me, and there’s no reason it can’t give someone at least a few more good years of use, even as a gaming computer if you’re not a graphics snob.

  But if I decide to upgrade, unless I find someone who wants to run Linux on it, or understands the risk of running win10 with no security updates, it’s probably going to become e waste.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did you get your job?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I’m happy to just chill where I am for a couple decades until I can retire. If I have to work, this honestly feels about as good as it gets for me. I don’t have any desire to climb the ladder or go hunting for a new job.

  I like the hours/schedule, we do 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation, which is pretty common in this field, so it’s a long shift but it’s a long shift sitting in an air conditioned bunker, and unless you come in for overtime you never have to work more than 3 days in a row without a 2 day break. Now those 3 days are weekends, which sucks, but the flip side is every other weekend you have a 3 day weekend. And if you plan your vacations and such right you only need to take 2 days to get a whole week off, so my PTO can go a long way. Here we start off with about 2 weeks of vacation time (“about” because it’s based on 8 hour days and we work 12, it more or less works out the same but you’re always kind of left with some fraction of a day carrying over) then after 5 years you get another week, and again at a couple other milestones years. I actually really struggle to use up all of my PTO personally because nearly everything I do fits into a 3 day weekend.

  Benefits are solid, pension, decent medical plan, sometimes you can qualify for first responder discounts, etc.

  Different places have different policies on this, but where I am what you do between calls is pretty much up to you, as long as you’re not bothering anyone or making a mess, you can bring in a laptop and play video games or watch movies, read, work on some crafts, whatever as long as you can put it down when the phone rings.

  I work night shift, so things can get pretty dead and you get a lot of downtime between calls. Most people work 7-7, but I managed to snag myself a 3pm-3am shift, which I think is great- I get to sleep in until noon every day, but I don’t have to turn my schedule totally upside down if I need to do something in the morning.

  We’re not union in my county, and while normally I’m all for unions, it’s worked out well for us so far, because one of the first concessions that tends to get made in contract negotiations is mandatory overtime in some form because like I said everywhere struggles with staffing issues, and so far they’ve done a decent job of keeping our pay competitive without it (probably because I think the dispatchers in most if not all of our surroundings counties are unionized, so they know we might jump ship to them if they don’t pay us competitively)

  And for all of those practical reasons, it also feels good to know I’m helping people. I have absolutely saved lives in my time here, I’ve delivered babies, I’ve helped people through disasters and all manner of scary situations.

  And it’s always interesting. When the phone rings I never know what’s going to be on the other end, which of course has its ups and downs, but it’s always interesting. Some of the people and the things they call about are absolutely infuriating of course, but no matter what it is I always get a great story. I never come home to my wife asking me “how was your day” and have to answer with some boring “same shit, different day” kind of answer, there’s always something interesting. Sometimes it’s something I’m proud of, sometimes it’s something I’m pissed off about, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, and sometimes it’s “can you believe somebody actually called about this?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did you get your job?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a 911 dispatcher, basically every dispatch center in the country is always hiring. There’s a lot of turnover, obviously it’s not a job everyone is cut out for and people get burned out, but also people use it as a stepping stone or career builder to move onto other things, a couple of my coworkers want to be cops and this looks good on that application, one went to work for FEMA, a couple have gone to be the dispatchers at local stations, people get promoted or transfer to other county positions (my agency is part of our county department of public safety, in some areas it might be part of your sheriff’s department, local PD, etc) or just go chasing higher paychecks or dream jobs (pay varies a lot around the country, we make decent enough money where I am, but some places really pay peanuts)

  I saw an ad on social media somewhere that they had a hiring event going on, so I went. I was working in a warehouse at the time, and a job where I could sit down in the air conditioning sounded really attractive.

  Civil service type jobs were already on my radar, I looked into becoming a park ranger for a while, and I’m an eagle scout, so I had a solid grounding on first aid and such.

  I showed up, filled out an application, took their aptitude test (we, and a lot of other agencies use something called criticall if you want to get an idea what that test was like. Some typing, reading comprehension, map reading, listening to some sample calls and answering questions about them, etc.)

  I passed the test, so as part of the hiring event I got an interview on the spot. If I applied outside of that, I probably would have had to schedule separate times for the test and interview.

  I did alright in the interview so they scheduled me for a job shadow to come in and sit in the room to listen to calls and radio dispatch for a couple hours.

  Then a while later I got my conditional offer. I had to get a hearing, vision, and drug test, and schedule a psych eval with the county psychologist.

  You all know what hearing and vision tests are like I hope, for the drug test they did a hair test. I shave my head, so I was expecting them to take some beard hair, but apparently their policy is to do underarms if that’s the case.

  The psych eval wasn’t anything too in depth, sat down with him for a few minutes, chatted about my mental health (no real issues there) then I got handed a very long test booklet to go fill out, lots of multiple choice questions that seemed to basically be gauging if I can play well with others.

  And I assume at some point in there they ran background checks and such. Some places get really in depth with that, interviews with the sheriff, polygraph tests, etc. but mine was all pretty out of sight and out of mind.

  Then class started. About a week into it we had to go to the county detectives office to be fingerprinted. But otherwise after that it was just all training.

  Requirements here are pretty minimal, clean background check, high school diploma/GED, ability to pass all the pre employment screening, etc. At my agency past drug use isn’t necessarily a disqualifier, as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired and don’t get caught lying about anything you have done. Some other places are of course more strict about that.

  If anyone thinks they may want to pursue a dispatch job, your local agency may list the job under a couple different names, dispatcher, calltaker, telecommunicator, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to cylindrical plugs?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The first words in the body of his post are “barrel jacks” so to me it definitely reads like he knows exactly what they are and they are what inspired his post.

  Since other, probably more common, names for “coaxial power connector” include things like “barrel plugs” and “barrel connectors” and such terms are used pretty frequently in the article you linked.

  The rest of it feels like he’s just trying to explain the concept to people who aren’t as familiar with them.

  But otherwise I agree with your comment, the lack of a standard is a big reason. In my various bins of wires, cables, and adapters I can find plenty of different mismatched wall warts with the same connector but otherwise wildly different specs. You don’t really want to be mixing and matching those all willy-nilly.

  Also they’re overall a fine connector if all you need to do is deliver power to something, you only need a hot and neutral wire and the corresponding part of the inner and outer part of the plug (I feel like I’ve seen some that have a ground too, but don’t quote me on that, I’m not going to go digging through my bins to confirm that)

  But nowadays we also often need a way to carry data to/from the device in addition to charging it. So to carry those data signals in addition to power you’d need more connections in the plug. You’d need to either have a couple pins inside the barrel which would need to be lined up properly which kind of negates the convenience of it being omnidirectional like OP wants (think maybe something like a ps/2 or S-Video plug) or you’d need to have multiple concentric rings which would make the plug bulky, probably too much so to conveniently fit into something like a cell phone.

  Now a lot of the devices we’re charging by USB don’t necessarily need or even support any sort of data through their ports, and so could be charged or powered just as well through a barrel plug. So why USB?

  IMO a lot of it comes back to iPods. For a lot of us who were around in the pre-smartphone days, that was our first experience with something that charged over USB. I seem to recall that apple didn’t even include a wall charger with them (pretty sure I remember a Foamy the Squirrel flash animation where he ranted about that) you just got a USB cable and either charged it off your computer or you went out and bought a wall adapter.

  I’m sure that was a cost-cutting/cash-grab attempt by apple. They could sell you an iPod without a charger and save a few pennies there, and then also sell you a charger for even more money.

  Around that same time, phones were also getting USB ports, or some proprietary connectors that you could buy an overpriced cable to connect it to a computer via USB so that you could pull your .5 megapixel flip phone photos off of it and post them to your Myspace. Often they came with a charger that had a mini or micro USB port or the proprietary connector on one end and was hard-wired to a wall wart on the other end.

  I’m sure some bean counters at Nokia or Motorola or wherever decided “why the hell are we going to add 5¢ to the production cost of a phone to have a charging port and a USB port for data when USB already can deliver 5v of power? Just build the phone battery around that and nix the charging port”

  And I’m sure that played out with plenty of other devices that needed power and data connections- GPS, PDAs, etc.

  And so from there, people started having an iPod and cell phone in their pockets that both charged over USB, and before long they’d have a USB charger at home, at work, in their car, in every room in their house, so other devices kind of latched onto that as sort of a marketing thing “you don’t need to keep track of a separate charger just for this thing, you can use the same one you charge your phone with”

  And of course before too long TVs, game consoles, AV receivers, etc. all got USB ports too.

  As I recall, it mostly started with things that made sense, things you were probably using with your phone or computer anyway- Bluetooth earpieces, mice, keyboards, etc. then sort of branched out into everything else over the years.