Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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3 yr. ago

How much of that is still a reaction to their upbringing though?

Say someone is raised in an abusive situation, and because of that they decide to be nothing like their parents when they grow up and become the epitome of a loving, nurturing parent, or maybe decide to not have kids at all to make sure they break the cycle.

Would that same person make those same choices if they were raised in a more "normal" household?

We can't really know for sure, but I suspect in a lot of cases the answer would be no.

And of course there's all kinds of little butterfly effects.

For example, I've known one of my best friends since preschool. We attended the same public school from kindergarten through graduation, but after pre school I never had a class with him again until 10th grade. If my parents had decided to send me to a different preschool, it's very likely I'd have a different best friend, and who knows how that might have affected my life?

Or later in life, when my grandfather was no longer able to drive, my parents ended up with his truck, they could have sold it but instead they held onto it and when I started driving it sort of unofficially became "my" car that I used to commute to community college. If they hadn't kept that truck, or just didn't let me use it, I probably would have had to take the bus and would have had to arrange my class schedule differently and never sat next to a guy in a history class who would eventually introduce me to the woman who is now my wife.

So those two little decisions made in my upbringing had big effects on the trajectory of my life. I'm quite happy with where I've ended up, but I had no say in either case, so I think you could definitely argue that I'm a "prisoner" to those decisions they made. I'll never know what twists and turns my life might have taken if they'd chosen differently. Maybe there's an alternate timeline where my best friend from a different preschool convinced me to buy a bunch of Bitcoin in 2009 and I could be a retired multimillionaire right now.

Richard Attenborough

Is it actually a dedicated gay nudist beach, or is it a nude beach that the gay community frequents?

There's a nude beach not too far from me, and it's pretty well-known that the one end of the beach is the "gay" end. There's no official demarcation, it's just a regular public beach where nudity happens to be allowed, and the one end of it is where the gay people tend to congregate, if you're not already in the loop about the local nudist community, you'd have no real way of knowing that until you found yourself there and maybe noticed a lot of rainbow flags and same-sex couples holding hands or something.

But that end of the beach does also sometimes get a bit raunchy, which isn't really legal though usually police turn a blind eye to it as long as they stay down that end, it wouldn't bother me too much personally if I stumbled onto it without knowing, but it probably would a lot of other people, and I'd still generally consider it trashy and inappropriate at best.

If you were actually at some sort of private gay club where public sex is allowed, all good, but I feel like you probably wouldn't be questioning and trying to justify it if that was the case.

Not trying to be contrary, but I've gone down this rabbit hole a lot over the years

As far as the donation goes, the argument I keep running up against is usually that they want me to "have something to unwrap" that isn't just cash or a gift card (no matter how many times I tell them that I don't care about that) I feel like a little "a donation has been made in your name" note would probably feel like even less of a present to them

maybe point out that it is tax deductible.

Unfortunately I don't think any of my family are itemizing their deductions.

And as far as vouchers and gift cards go, I hate those things enough that in retrospect they probably should have been point 10. I never remember to use them, I have probably over $200 in various gift cards sitting around in my house right now that I'll probably never think to grab when I'm running out to the store or making an order online. And I hate being forced to shop at specific places. And of course the amount always ends up not being exactly what I need, so either I'm left with like $2.37 left on a card that I'm really never going to bother using, or I still have to pay something out of pocket in which case I'd really rather I be able to shop around to get the best deal possible but can't if I want to use the gift card.

Cash would be great, but again they want to give me something besides cash or a gift card.

And as far as personal vouchers go, my home/family life is mercifully pretty harmonious. Except for Christmas I don't have many complaints, I see everyone pretty much exactly as much as I want to, get to do the things I enjoy doing, etc.. About the only thing I would want there is a "get out of Christmas free card" which feels like a weird Christmas present.

And we're sort of the cooks in the family, so I am the source of good bread and cookies and such, and I don't really go through a lot of snack foods. I just recently threw out a bunch of candies and such from last Christmas to make room for what I surely have incoming this year, and my soap and such needs are pretty minimal, my preferred brand comes in gallon jugs that lasts me a good long time, and other consumables tend to last me a long time and I never seem to run low around the holidays, nor do I have the storage space to really stockpile a bunch of extras.

And my family is already really good at moving around stuff we're not using, my brother in law (sisters husband) was kind of astonished at how often we end up moving furniture from one relatives house to another and handing off random things to people who can use them. We could maybe save some of that for Christmas, but then it becomes a problem of "where do we store this second couch we bought in August until we can give the old one away in December"

And handmade stuff I don't need is still stuff I don't need.

I think we're going to need a little more context on who he is and how he's using the word "goy"

It comes from Hebrew/Yiddish, so it's a word used predominantly by Jewish people, and so not inherently antisemitic. It basically means non-jew, it's roughly synonymous with the term "gentile" that you might be more familiar with if you've had a Christian upbringing.

How Jews use it of course varies a lot, plenty just use it without any particular deeper meaning, just a matter-of-fact statement that the person they're referring to isn't Jewish.

Some of course do use it with a bit of Malice if they value non-jews less highly than their fellow Jews.

I've also heard it used, usually somewhat jokingly, by Jews to refer to other Jews who aren't acting in a way that they think is in accordance with Jewish customs. I remember one time my one Jewish friend who keeps kosher (kind of, he definitely bends the rules more than a bit) was teasing another Jewish friend who had ordered a bacon cheeseburger or something while we were out grabbing lunch, calling him a goy and lumping him in with the rest of the non-jews sitting around the table. It was all in good fun, just a bunch of guys joking around over a couple beers.

Again, I'm sure there's some Jews out there who would do something like that and mean it as an actual insult.

If the person saying it isn't Jewish themselves, that's where you might have a case for their use being antisemitic.

I'm not Jewish, I could definitely see myself using goy or a handful handful of other jewish words and phrases I've picked up when I'm joking around with my Jewish friends. I might even call one of them a goy jokingly like in that bacon cheeseburger situation. Mostly though I'd probably use it to refer to myself, like if they were talking about, let's say a Chanukah celebration, and I didn't understand what they were talking about, I might tell them to need to explain it again in "goy" for me.

But if I'm not with friends that I have a good rapport with, I probably wouldn't joke like that, I don't want to give the wrong impression that I'm genuinely criticizing them for not being Jewish "enough," as a non Jew I really don't think it's my place to be making that kind of judgement.

And I certainly wouldn't be using it seriously to criticize Jews. I wouldn't call Israeli Zionists goys (goyim I believe is actually the proper pluralization) based on their Zionist beliefs, there's plenty of totally secular terms I can come up with to criticize them.

I could also see an antisemite using Jewish terms like goy in a mocking fashion, which, yeah that's pretty antisemitic, basically the same thing as a white supremacist making fun of a black person for using AAVE.

And of course, depending on the person, the tone, how they're using it, their target audience, etc. it could be totally non-problematic.

1. Deep down I'm still an edgy militant atheist, and really want nothing to do with religious celebrations.
2. The only things I really want are things I'm not realistically going to be gifted. No one's going to buy and install a new heater/windows/deck for me for Christmas, or pay down my credit card, etc. I have too much junk already, I have all the clothes I need, I don't really need more snacks in the house, and I'm pretty much set up with everything I need/want for my hobbies. I don't need gifts. Inevitably I'm going to get a bunch of junk I don't need or want, and I'm gonna take it straight home and throw it out or donate it or otherwise I'm going to spend the next eternity shuffling around my house because I don't have anywhere to put it.
3. I'm probably a bit autistic or maybe just a bit dead inside, so even on the rare occasion I get a gift I'm really excited about I don't really have much of a reaction to it, which I feel is disappointing to the people giving it to me.
4. I really hate decorating and then having to take it all down a month or so later, having to haul all this crap down from the attic and then back up again is a real drag. It's part of the reason I get a real tree, it's easier to just strap it back onto my roof and haul it to my friend's house to burn in their fire pit (which is very cathartic) than to try to wrestle it back up the ladder. My wife likes it, so I suffer through it, I just wish she'd do more of the work.
5. I don't want to spend money. I have things I want to save for and dropping a couple hundred bucks on presents isn't helping that. I don't mind getting people gifts if it's something I think they really need or wound like, but thats usually not why I'm buying them stuff for Christmas, I'm getting them stuff because I feel obligated to get them something.
6. Family gatherings suck. As far as families go mine isn't too bad, I'd even say I kind of like most of them, but getting all of them in the room together and having to spend most of the day with them is too much. There's too many people, it's too loud, and while they're generally all good people, I don't really have enough in common with most of them to make it worth the aggravation, they're best enjoyed in small doses. My wife's family is smaller and quieter, which would be great, except they want the gathering to go on all day, my wife is bringing stuff over to make breakfast and it sounds like they plan to keep things going until at least dinner, so thats probably gonna be a 12+ hour ordeal when you figure in the time it takes to go over the river and through the woods to grandmothers house. Also, most of our family just aren't great cooks, and even if they were there are some picky eaters in the family, so family meals are pretty lackluster. I think my wife's family's dinner plans are a stouffers lasagna. Luckily I have to work this year so I have a good excuse not to go.
7. Christmas music can be good, but not the stuff that's been piped into every single fucking store I've had to go to for the last month, and I'm sick of it.
8. This is mostly just a me-problem, but I have way too much shit going on this time of year. My anniversary is in November, then thanksgiving which we usually do with my father in law who's about an hour away, my wife's birthday, my mom's birthday, christmas even which is usually with my family, usually about 45 minutes away depending on who's hosting, Christmas day is usually with my mother in law about an hour away, and then after that I usually host a new years eve party and between work and holiday obligations it's kind of crazy trying to get my house ready for that.
9. I work in 911 dispatch, we always get some really crazy/sad calls around this time of year. I deal with it just fine personally, but it doesn't exactly put me in a holly jolly mood.
10. I don't know, I made it this far and just kind of wanted to leave it on a nice round number I guess... Maybe I find tinsel distracting?

Occasional nudist/naturist here

Depends a bit on the beach you're at, but generally yeah, that's pretty inappropriate and would get you thrown out of or even arrested at any of the places I go to. Nudism isn't about sex, it's just about not wearing clothes, there are people with kids who enjoy nudism as a family, etc.

The resort I normally go to has a very lively swinger community, sometimes it almost seems like my wife and I are the only couple there not part of the lifestyle, but even still any sort of sexual activity stays out of the open, you go back to your room/tent/RV for that.

There are definitely some places that will turn more of a blind eye to it, but in general unless you're specifically at some sort of a lifestyle resort where that sort of thing is officially condoned you shouldn't be doing it in the open.

Personally, I wouldn't be too bothered by it, I'd think it's trashy as fuck and would judge you pretty harshly for it but it wouldn't ruin my day. I can't speak for everyone else in the nudist community though, and if you search around you can find a lot of horror stories of someone finally convincing their friend to try out nudism only to have the bad luck of that friend immediately encountering some creep or someone having sex out in the open and being immediately turned off by the experience never wanting to try it again

I work in 911 dispatch, so getting people to calm down, stop what they're doing, and listen to me is kind of a big part of my job. Things are of course a bit different in-person than over the phone, but here's generally how I'd approach something like this.

If you know their name, use it. A lot. People respond to their name, that's kind of the whole reason names exist. It will get their attention which is half the battle.

Getting them to calm down from there is the other half, and it's not easy, especially if you don't speak their language. Body language and tone of voice goes a long way though.

Not that they're going to understand you in this situation anyway, but remember that no one in the entire history of calming down has anyone ever actually calmed down after being told to calm down. Don't even bother trying that.

Try to get them to take some deep breaths, use some gestures.

Your hospital really should have access to some sort of translation service, either humans on location there in the room with you who speak the language, or some kind of service like languageline (not plugging them specifically, I have a lot of complaints about some of their interpreters, they just happen to be who we use at work) that you can call up and get on speakerphone. Google translate and such are wonderful tools, but they're not perfect and sometimes you really want that bit of a human touch. I've also occasionally had some great interpretors who will chime in with some helpful bits like "they're saying'this' but in our culture that usually really means 'this'"

If you can find an excuse to hand them something, maybe some paperwork, that can also sometimes kind of create a little bit of a break in whatever they're doing for you to work with. They'll probably stop screaming for a second to look at what was just handed to them, and then you can try to work on something.

It's funny that you specifically mentioned the '60s, because back then they were pretty routinely administering the oral polio vaccine on a sugar cube for school children

That's how my dad got it back then

Looks like other have covered the issues with a bull pup revolver well enough, don't think I have anything to add there

Handgun hunting is a thing, I don't really understand the appeal myself, but AFAIK .45 colt is a reasonably popular choice in that field, and with the right ammo and a reasonably short range can even be used for bear

.410 out of a revolver is probably pretty useless for hunting though. Since the barrel is rifled, that shot is going to start spinning and make it spread out a lot faster and farther than out of a smoothbore barrel, you don't have that much shot in a .410 shell to begin with so there's gonna be a whole lot of space between them when it gets to your target. You're gonna need a big target at close range and a lot of luck to make sure that shot is hitting somewhere vital, and at that point you're probably better off trying to hit it with a regular rifle or handgun.

It's possible I missed it, but I didn't see where it said how they came up with this strain of yeast. I was kind of assuming they used CRISPR or some other kind of gene editing to make it.

Regardless of if it was edited or selective breeding and random mutation, I do share those same concerns about how fast it might mutate and lose its effectiveness.

As far as it mutating into something harmful, sure it's a possibility, but the same possibility technically exists with any strain of yeast out there in the world, untold millions of generations of yeast have lived, mutated, reproduced, and died in breweries, bakeries, and vineyards since humans first started brewing beer and baking bread, and it hasn't gone horribly wrong yet. It's certainly worth being cautious about, and I'm certainly no geneticist to make an educated statement about it, but I suspect it's probably a pretty low likelihood.

I'm kind of wondering if the plan here isn't to goad trump into retaliating by blurting out where our own missiles are pointed at.

They threw some obvious ones out there like the Pentagon (duh of course they have missiles pointed there)

And then padded out the list with some defunct sites to make the list longer because someone like Trump is going to want to one-up them by listing at least that many of our targets. Russia probably doesn't actually have missiles aimed at most of those places, but this way they don't actually have to give up any of their actual targets.

And trump will probably take the bait to beef up missile defences around those defunct sites, wasting money, time, manpower, and resources that could be better used anywhere else.

It's been quite a while since I used it but I remember kind of liking the smell.

There was a tiny undertone of some sort of funky rotten garlicky smell, but predominantly I thought it was more spicy and piney smelling

Most veggies in grocery stores are bred for things like appearance and shelf life more than actual quality.

I think tomatoes are a prime example of this.

Tomatoes bruise easily, and people kind of want to buy the perfect, round, bright red tomatoes, not a weird lumpy-looking, funny colored bruised up one.

So big farmers grow tomatoes that look pretty, and are sturdier to better handle being shipped thousands of miles, that will last better on grocery store shelves, etc.

But there's trade-offs there for things like texture and taste. That perfect-looking tomato may be bland and watery.

They may also be doing stuff like picking them before they're fully ripe and artificially ripening them with ethylene gas or something later in a warehouse.

When you get tomatoes from a smaller, local farmer though, they don't have to be shipped as far, or sit around in a warehouse or grocery store as long, so they don't need to pick varieties based on shelf life and ability to stand up to shipping, and can instead grow varieties that taste good. And they can pick them at their peak ripeness because they're going more directly from the field to the consumer and they don't have to rely on tricks like ethylene.

My wife isn't a picky eater, but when we first started dating she thought that she didn't really like tomatoes.

But she had only ever had regular grocery store tomatoes.

Until we moved in together and I grew some myself. Then she discovered that tomatoes can actually be really good. Now she can't get enough of them, as long as they're good tomatoes.

And I didn't even grow any particularly fancy tomatoes. That first year that I made a convert of her I just had some regular ol' beefsteak, Roma, and cherry tomatoes that I picked up as pre-started plants from Walmart or home Depot or somewhere like that, and grew them in pots on the patio of our apartment. Basically entry-level gardening, but that was enough to blow her mind.

Another year I grew, I think the variety was called something like "mucho nacho" jalapenos. We love jalapenos to begin with, but holy shit. That particular variety was everything we ever wanted a jalapeno to be. We had one or two other varieties going that year to have a comparison, but that one stood head-and-shoulders above the others, bigger, a little hotter, and just plain tastier.

And farmers can probably get their hands on even better varieties than whatever I could get at a big box hardware store, and have the know-how to really give them ideal growing conditions.

There's a lot of questions to be answered here but I feel like this could potentially be a pretty cool thing

He's created a strain of yeast that seems like it could function as an oral vaccine

You could just filter off the beer and eat the yeast, or maybe put it into pills or something, or purify it into a normal injectable vaccine

But there's a lot of people out there who are skeptical of pills and afraid of needles, or who just won't want to eat powdered yeast

But a lot of those same people will happily drink a beer.

It could also be a way towards sort of decentralizing vaccine production. Imagine he starts selling little packets of dry vaccine yeast for people to brew beer with. Yeast is pretty forgiving in its storage requirements, keep it in its little sealed envelope and keep it reasonably dry, and it should be good for a couple years. You can ship that around the world without much fuss.

And people all over the world know how to brew beer. Get that packet of yeast into the local hooch-maker's hands anywhere in the world, and they can turn it into a bunch of 1-pint vaccine doses in a week or two. No particularly special equipment or distribution networks needed, and vaccine distribution becomes as easy as hosting a kegger.

And if they're able to reclaim some of that yeast to brew another batch, you've potentially even set them up for long-term vaccine beer production.

You might also be better able to convince people who might otherwise be skeptical about taking a traditional vaccine to just drink a beer. It's not something scary like a needle, or weird and unnatural like a pill, it's "just" a beer.

And you can focus your efforts a bit more on who you need to convince about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. You don't need to convince a whole village to trust vaccines, you just need to convince the local brewer that the people already trust, and then you can piggyback off that existing trust.

Hell, I'm pro vaccine, but I know I'd probably be a little more proactive about getting mine if it meant I got to go have a couple beers.

Again, there's a lot of questions that need to be answered, not the least of which are the basic safety and effectiveness of this

There's also informed consent, making sure that the people drinking the beer understand that the beer is a bit more than just a beer, and the risks of alcohol (although if this is an effective delivery system, I think it's likely that those risks are well-outweighed by the benefits of vaccines)

I definitely think it's something worth exploring.

New York has one of, if not the largest steam systems like that. A pretty significant chunk of Manhattan is hooked up to it.

Although it should be pointed out that those systems aren't without their own risks, there have been a handful of pretty bad explosions and such caused by that steam system. Not saying to knock it, any system where you're trying to distribute a large amount of energy has the potential for some catastrophic accidents to happen, it's all about weighing the relative pros and cons.

They're also pretty common on a smaller scale for college campuses, industrial complexes, etc. places with a lot of different outbuildings and such, it can be easier/cheaper/more efficient to have one central boiler room/house and pipe steam around than it is to have heaters in ever building.

Also, bit of a tangent, but many moons ago my dad was a pipefitter/steamfitter, and worked with a lot of steam systems, and from what he's told me about those days it sounded like absolute hell having to go into cramped service tunnels around searing hot steam pipes, all kinds of dust and asbestos everywhere, rats, high humidity, etc. that was probably almost 50 years ago, but I suspect things probably haven't improved all that much since then, so kudos to the people who are willing to put up with all of that.

It was around 2016, I was about 25, and I went camping with some friends for a few days.

Up until that point, I felt like I had managed to stay relatively "with-it"

But we had little to no Internet access for a few days, because that's how camping works.

I came back and dat boi was all over the internet.

I had no idea what was going on with that meme, it never quite clicked for me

And from there it was all downhill, more and more new memes just stopped making sense to me.

Also, funny story, I'm back at work tonight, and had an off duty officer calling in a reckless driver

Wanted to keep following them

Crossed over the border of 3 different towns

And no officers available anywhere near where they were

It's like he had some kind of reckless driver bingo card he was trying to fill out

Not exactly the soundtrack, it was fine, but nothing special and overall forgettable

But I want to give a small shout-out to Morbius for having really good sound mixing. I definitely expected it to be a "whispers and explosions" kind of movie where you couldn't hear the conversations, and action scenes blew your eardrums out, and the background music was all over the place

But no, everything was at a reasonable volume, I could hear everything crystal clear.

There was just nothing worth hearing unfortunately.

This varies by state, but where I am if no one's hurt and the cars are driveable, it's considered a "non-reportable accident"

Generally speaking, we'll still send cops to take a report if you really want one but it's not really necessary for anything. Mostly it's only needed if you're it a company vehicle or something and your employer wants it for your file or something.

Otherwise, you just exchange info and let your insurance companies sort it out, the police don't really have anything else to do with it at that point.

I believe some areas and departments have an online form you can fill out to generate a crash report.

If the police are very busy, they may tell you to just exchange info, do the online report, or go to the station later to file one, otherwise you might have to sit out on the side of the road for sometimes several hours waiting for an officer while they deal with higher priority incidents.

If there are injuries, or if the cars aren't driveable, that does require a police report and will have a higher priority response because of it.

Again, that varies a lot from one state to another, I'm only speaking about the situation where I work.