Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

What are the other issues you care about?

Because personally I see Israel as a side effect of the other issues I care about.

I don't think we're going to make much headway trying to just tackle the Israel problem on its own.

However if we can put a dent in the military industrial complex and reduce global dependence on petroleum, having an "ally" like israel in the middle east starts looking a lot less attractive. Israel can only do so much without the US backing them up unconditionally, and once the government and arms manufacturers stop caring so much about them it becomes easier to turn the tides of public opinion and get the government to reverse course.

As long as there's money to be made in the middle east, we're not going to get the people in power to reverse course on Israel. We need to change the world around them so that it no longer makes sense to support them.

Same as it's been since I got my first smartphone circa 2010

Ringtone is the Trololo song, and my text sound is a murloc from WoW

I haven't played WoW in about that long, but I think it makes for a damn good notification sound, always gets my attention when I have my ringer on (which isn't super often, but I often don't feel my phone vibrating so it's on at least occasionally)

They also make for a good chuckle from nerds in my age bracket when they hear it.

A little thought on drawing district borders that I've had kicking around for a while.

Putting aside all thoughts of gerymandering, let's start with: What is the point of dividing a state up into congressional districts?

And the answer, of course, is supposed to be to make sure that there is someone in Congress who is looking out for the interests of people in your community.

But what is your "community?"

Sure, it's the town, or the part of town you live in. But giving each individual town or neighborhood a representative isn't remotely feasible,

And odds are you probably don't spend all of your time within that tight little bubble around your home. You probably work, go shopping, and/or spend at least some of your leisure time in places outside of that bubble.

I know in addition to the town I live in, I work in another town about 10 miles away, I shop at stores in about 3 other towns at least once a week, I regularly visit my parents and sister who live in a town about 20 miles away, I go hiking, biking, and kayaking in a few different parks around the area, I have a membership to an independent movie theater in another town I regularly go to, I go to bars and restaurants in a few different towns, and to get to all these places, there's probably a half dozen or so towns I drive through but rarely have any reason to stop in.

All-told, it's maybe about 20 towns where I spend probably 90+ percent of my time, those are the areas that are important to me, and ideally if the world revolved around me, that would be one congressional district to make sure that my interests were being represented.

In my case, that's a pretty neat, compact little district, it more-or-less encompasses the towns along 3 major roads that run roughly parallel to each other, and it also happens to be roughly ⅓ of the county I live in.

And for a lot of people who live here, their home range is probably pretty similar. Like I said, it's along some major roads, and basically everything you could need or want can be found within those 20 or so towns.

That's not really enough people to make a congressional district out of (since the number of seats is capped at 435 currently, although when the nation was founded each district only represented about 30,000 people, and if we'd stuck with that ratio it would probably be enough to make about 3 or 4 districts)

I don't hate how my current district. It probably makes a lot of sense on paper, it's basically my county with about a third of a neighboring county tacked on.

That other county is somewhat rural and divided up into thirds. One third is with our county, one third is with another neighboring county, and those are probably the most urban/suburban parts of that county, and it kind of makes sense that they'd be lumped in with our largely suburban counties, the last third is the most rural, and it's lumped in with a few other very rural counties, so that makes sense.

However, I rarely go to that county, if the maps were being drawn specifically for me, it would probably include parts of 2 or 3 other counties before that one. I'd probably even be willing to cede parts of my county to another district in exchange for those parts.

And I think a lot of people here would agree with that. Those other areas I'd include are along major roads and easily reachable from our area, so a lot of people probably shop, work, etc. along those major arteries.

So my ideal district would kind of end up looking like a weird blob with some squiggly branches and nodes along major roads.

And I suspect it would be similar for a lot of people around the country.

So I kind of feel like the ideal way to draw these maps is to just ask people what they feel like their district should be.

Maybe present them with a map of their general area on a computer screen, and have them select towns they visit and drive through regularly until they've selected a big enough population to be a district

Then take all of those maps and sort of average them together and see what most people consider to be their community

Do it maybe every 5 or 10 years when people go to vote.

Anecdotally, the highest altitude I've ever been at hiking was around 11,000ft, and the group I was hiking with started feeling it a little bit around 9000-10,000 ft.

It wasn't dramatic, where we really noticed it was after we'd made camp, we had a little downtime and there was a bit of an open area, so we started throwing around a Frisbee, and running around chasing the Frisbee we could feel we were getting winded a bit quicker than we usually would.

Age, fitness, genetics, etc. will of course factor into that, but I suspect that most reasonably healthy people sitting in an airplane probably wouldn't feel much at 7000ft. Maybe they would if they were jogging up and down the aisle of the plane, but even then it probably wouldn't be anything too obvious, and if they didn't know anything about altitude sickness they'd probably chalk it up to being tired from the mental stress of air travel- getting to the airport, making the connection, security, lost baggage, etc.

Yes, but they wouldn't have access to it in the first place if humans hadn't existed, since corn is a new world plant, and the aurochs that domestic cattle descended from were from Eurasia.

And corn as we know it today is very much the product of thousands of years of agriculture. The wild teosinte plants that corn descends from didn't have the big ears of sweet starchy kernels we know as corn today, it looked a lot more like grass that hasn't been mowed in a long time that's starting to go to seed, except scaled up a bit. If you look up pictures of "Zea diploperennis" or "Zea perennis that's more like what natural corn looked like before humans started fucking with it.

And even if wild cows had access to wild corn, which they didn't, they probably would have been chowing down on the whole plant, so mostly fiber with a bit of starch and sugar from comparatively few and small seeds, instead of just all corn kernels.

Naturally, cows wouldn't have access to a limitless supply of corn that has been selectively cultivated over the years to have higher sugar and starch content. They don't tend to have this issue when they're eating primarily grass and can easily release it on their own by burping.

There would surely be some odd cases here and there of cows getting bloated on a less grain-heavy diet, but not nearly as common

You've probably heard at some point in your life that cows have 4 stomachs (or a 4-chambered stomach)

The purpose for that is because in their natural environment cows eat grass (not that there's really "natural" cows anymore, the aurochs is long-extinct, but other ruminants like bison are similar)

Grass is kind of a shitty food source for most animals, it has very little sugar and starch that your body can use for energy.

But it is full of fiber. Most animals can't really digest fiber very well, but ruminants with those extra stomachs and the help of some bacterial fermentation can. Grass and such basically gets churned around in those extra stomach chambers with some bacteria to ferment and break down into something the cows can actually use for energy.

Fermentation, of course, creates gases like CO₂ which is why beer is fizzy and bread rises.

And while that bacteria can and will ferment fiber, it will ferment sugars and starches even better.

So grains like corn end up creating more gases than if they were eating grass.

I have one idiot coworker who cited this as a reason she liked trump.

I'm unclear if she actually bothered to vote for him. She was proud of never having voted (we work for the county, that's basically saying "no" to the question "do you want to choose your own boss?" Like I said, idiot)

She's as far as I know, doesn't particularly want kids.

She's also a polyamorous wiccan divorcee. You'd think all of the "traditional christian family values" stuff would be more than enough to scare her away from anything having to do with the republican party.

My first exposure to cast iron was through boy scouts with cast iron griddles and Dutch ovens cooking on an open fire.

They got left out in the rain, blasted with heat hot enough to melt lesser metals, had all manner of acidic foods cooked in them, got scrubbed clean with steel wool and dish soap, spent most of their lives when they weren't in use in a garage with no climate control where the humidity often got pretty gross, and generally got used, abused, and neglected. Never had any issues with the seasoning, rust, etc. I think one time after a camping trip by the beach where they sat out getting lightly twisted with salt spray all weekend, they picked up a bit of rust, so someone's dad got them sandblasted at his job, and after a trip or to through the oven for reseasoning they went right back in service, and that was the only special treatment they ever got.

So it was really weird to me when I got older and got some pans of my own to see people talking about babying their cast iron like they do. I'm a little more careful with my pans than I was with the ones we had in scouts, but not by much. And when I take them camping I'm not above throwing them into the fire to burn off any really stubborn, burnt-on crud.

And at the end of the day, there's not much that you can realistically do to a cast iron pan that you can't fix with some sandpaper and elbow grease and a quick reseasoning.

At one point, we somehow ended up with an aluminum griddle in one of our cook kits. It was a pretty much indistinguishable from our iron ones except that it weighed less, it was a pretty solid griddle. On one camping trip it was left on the fire after breakfast, and I don't know exactly how it came to pass because it was another patrol, but they somehow got the fire up hot enough to melt it. I still have a blob of aluminum somewhere that we fished out of the ashes.

I'm sure that's probably the case, but that's kind of my point.

Even if I landed another, better, job between my initial interview and my job shadow, I probably would have still shown up for the shadow because when else are you going to get a chance to peek behind the curtain like that?

I may not have pursued it any further from that, but to me being able to just show up and listen to 911 calls being handled for a bit would be too cool of an opportunity to pass up. I'm pretty sure I would have jumped at the opportunity to do that even if I wasn't trying to get hired.

But again, I'm biased, I work here and like my job so of course I think it's kind of neat.

A lot of things vary from one agency to another, but where I work I don't think most people would consider this a last resort job. Most of us are here either because this is what we want to do or because it's a good career builder towards other public safety/law enforcement type jobs.

For my part, if I have to work, I think this is about as good as it gets for me. I like the hours, the pay isn't amazing but it's livable, benefits are solid, and it's interesting and satisfying work.

It's also not the quickest hiring process since they usually wait until they have a few people to run a training class, it's been a few years now but I believe I did my aptitude test and interview in mid August (same day because they were doing a hiring event, sometimes they have to get scheduled separately) did my job shadow a week or two later with another short interview, got my conditional offer around mid September, had to do a drug, hearing, and vision test and a psych eval, and class started in about mid-late October, so about 2 months start to finish.

I have a friend who tested at the same time as me and got picked up for the next class they ran, so it was a couple extra months for him.

And some other agencies have extra steps in the process. More rounds of interviews, really in-depth background checks with interviews with the sheriff and a polygraph test and such (thankfully the agency I work for isn't like that since polygraphs are bullshit)

No not ideal for someone who really needs a job ASAP.

I don't think death note ever quite fully explored the possibilities of what it can and can't make happen.

My mars colony example is probably more than a 20 day project no matter what, so that's probably out.

But I don't think it's totally clear whether it would be able to make someone have an out-of-the-blue eureka moment about cold fusion, hole up in their bedroom writing out the scientific proofs for a week not eating or drinking, then keel over dead of dehydration (I figure that's maybe a bit more realistic than my heart attack from shock example)

It can certainly make people do things they otherwise wouldn't, but I don't know if it's clear that it could plant that kind of knowledge in someone's head.

In addition to the economy thing that everyone else has already pointed out (and is totally valid)

I think it's worth pointing out that in the northern hemisphere it's summer right now, so if that's where you're located there's a lot of people going on vacations and having parties right now.

My social circles aren't exactly rolling in it, but at any given time over the summer, there's still at least a couple people I know are the beach, camping, having a BBQ or bonfire, or hanging out at a pool somewhere on their downtime when they might have been at a bar or something otherwise.

If you live in a touristy area, yeah, that's the economy, bars should be booming there.

I remember a couple years ago on a whim a couple of friends and I decided to go to a bar that's usually packed with a line well out the door of people waiting to get it. But it just happened to be a holiday weekend so lots of people had other plans, and we got in no problem.

Does our choosing a cause of death preclude them from dying of other causes? Because you could potentially do some wild stuff to postpone death of loved ones by, for example, deciding they'll die 60 years in the future of old age.

And how much control do you have around the circumstances surrounding their death? Could I specify "dies of heart attack brought on by shock of working out the key to practical cold fusion on paper" or "head trauma due to fall while adjusting to lower gravity in main living area of self-sustaining mars colony" to force us forward in technology and science?

Because that's basically what I'd do.

Only very tangentially related to this

I work in 911 dispatch. Part of our hiring process is after the initial interview and aptitude test, they have applicants come in to do a job shadow with us for an hour or two. Basically just sit with us while we're answering and dispatching calls, see what the work we do is actually like, gives them a chance ask us questions, and we can kind of feel them out to see if they'd be a good fit.

And a shocking amount of people make it to that stage and then don't show up for their job shadow.

I'm admittedly biased, since I work here, but I feel like even if I didn't actually have any interest in the job, that would be an interesting peek behind the curtain that I'd still want to see regardless.

I played a lot of it back in the day and thoroughly enjoyed it, and I'm certainly not above admitting that it was kind of corny but I can appreciate corniness for its own sake

But I recently picked it back up and it's just not clicking for me anymore.

I feel like it's kind of a skill issue. Years ago I got pretty good at it, and so my memories of it are colored by that. But it's been well over a decade since I've played it, so I've lost all of those skills, and when your memories are of rolling around at the speed of sound, it feels pretty janky to be back at square 1 missing the timing of everything

Just pointing out some assumptions you're making and shoehorning in a couple of my own thoughts on the matter.

1. We're assuming that there is life elsewhere in the universe. (I personally tend to believe there is something, somewhere out there that could check the boxes to be considered "life" but it's not exactly a sure thing)
2. We're assuming that whatever life exists out there possesses a soul (If I did believe in souls, which I personally do not, I don't think that every living thing necessarily would have a soul- bacteria, fungus, plants, etc. I wouldn't think have souls, nor necessarily all animals, I don't think I'd say that things like placozoans, sea sponges, coral, and jellyfish have souls for example.)
3. We're assuming that those souls operate in a similar manner to our own and are compatible with us. As far as we can tell all life on earth evolved from a common ancestor, so all souls have at least have somewhat similar biological "hardware" (wetware? Squishyware?) to run on. Would our souls be compatible with life elsewhere in the universe that might be based around totally different chemistry?
4. Even if they're technically compatible, would our souls even be part of the same system as the souls of aliens? I think that in most belief systems that involve reincarnation, the point of reincarnation is to somehow build upon the souls' prior experiences on earth, to make up for or be punished for things you did wrong, to settle unfinished business, to inch closer to enlightenment with new experiences and knowledge, etc. Can you do that effectively if your soul reincarnates on an entirely different planet? Could, for example, the Dalai Lama, be an effective spiritual leader for the Tibetan people if he reincarnated somewhere near Betelgeuse? And if we are currently operating in 2 different "soul-ar" systems (couldn't resist the pun) what happens if first contact is made? Do our two soul cycles merge into one since our two civilizations would be able to have an impact on one another? Does it happen evenly across the entire human race? Would a member of, for example, the Sentinelese people, who would probably remain unaware of and have no impact on the affairs of aliens, be part of that merged system, or would their souls remain largely in their own bubble?
5. How fast can souls travel? Are they bound by the light speed limit that everything else in the universe seems to be, or can they go faster than that? If they can, does this open up some sort of back-door to FTL travel or communication where all we need to do is off somebody and let them reincarnate across the universe to awaken their latent memories of past lives? Can we encode information on a soul somehow and transmit it that way?

Sort of tangential to parts 2, 3, and 4, the Catholic Church, while not believing in reincarnation, has actually given some thought to the idea of alien souls, and determined that it's possible, even likely, that if there is intelligent life out there somewhere, that they may not be in need of Jesus' salvation in the same way humans are. Since they're not descended from Adam & Eve like they believe all humans are, they may not be burdened with original sin. So there's at least one religion that thinks alien souls may be, in some way, fundamentally different from our own.

Mechanically, I tend to avoid spellcaster type classes, mostly because I don't want to keep track of spell lists and such.

As far as roleplay goes, it depends a bit on who I'm playing with. The actual players rotate a bit, but in general I have 2 main groups I play with, and the type of character I play tends to be pretty different between them.

In the one group, I tend to play sort of the straight man. The other players aren't exactly running murder hobos, but a couple of them skew that direction, and their characters all tend to have big personalities and I tend to be the one who's keeping things a little grounded.

One of our longest-running campaigns was a 5e game that started out as sort of a weird mix of the Rise of Tiamat and Storm Kings Thunder modules that went way off-script. We had an angsty rogue, a drunken warlock who was using some home brew stuff that was roughly like The Fathomless from Tasha's but a few years before that was officially a thing, an elf barbarian who was absent for half the campaign, and a drow (sorcerer I think) who started off being sort of a Drizzt knock-off but shocked us with an amazing plot twist halfway through that he cooked up with the DM where he'd secretly been an agent of Tiamat the whole time... until Tiamat discarded him and we had to figure out what to do with him after that.

And then my character- Randall, a relatively by-the-book military veteran, sword-and-board fighter, who was nominally the leader of the group, he had a grudge against dragons from a previous battle he'd been in, and a bad case of "just when I thought I was out out, they pull me back in" being pretty sick of the adventuring life and really wanted to retire to a quiet farm somewhere, but adventuring was all he had ever known and he kept bouncing from one adventure to another unsure how to make the transition.

In my other group, I have a tendency to play the wildcard. The most extreme example of that was a pirate called Lotor the All-Beard (so named because he was a raccoon, and so covered in fur, he was "all beard")

Lotor was a filthy, chaotic idiot and the dice gods smiled upon him. He was remarkably skilled in all manner of crime, including, somehow, forgery despite being illiterate (He needed someone else to put the words together for him but with that and a handwriting sample he could masterfully forge any document needed.) He didn't speak the common tongue, so couldn't directly communicate with most of the party, but had a magical talking parrot (named Polly, of course) who translated for him (the bird was far more intelligent than Lotor and kind of hated him. Throughout the campaign there were many hints dropped that there was a lot more to this bird than met the eye, but Lotor was too dumb to pick up on any of it.) He stole from, cheated, swindled, and flirted with basically everyone he met, and pretty much just always let the intrusive thoughts win. If there were shenanigans afoot, it was usually his fault.

A lot of his criminal behavior stemmed from a bit of willful ignorance and childlike naivete about laws and social norms. I hadn't seen it at the time I created Lotor, but the Guardians of the Galaxy scene where the concept of theft being illegal is explained to Rocket was pretty much Lotor in a nutshell.

It was also a bit of a running joke that he was actually a fairly formidable and well-known pirate captain who ran a very tight and orderly ship (though a fair amount of those organizational skills may have actually been Polly,) but he considered himself to be "on shore leave" and so basically on vacation for the duration of the campaign and was cutting loose.

Those are sort of the two extremes, but probably my two most beloved characters, and kind of give an overall sense of the direction my characters tend to go with either group.

Kind of depends on how you define "race" (it's pretty much scientifically meaningless, so define it however the hell you like)

But we have several currently ongoing attempts at genocide happening around the world, that to me tells me that a hell of a lot of people out there care a whole lot about race.

American racism is particularly odd to me due to how broadly we categorize race, trying to lump people into a black/white/Hispanic/Asian/etc. category based on not much more than skin color. And we're also unusuallly open about the fact that racism is a thing here. A lot of the world kind of keeps it more on the down-low.

But if you go with narrower definitions of race, you'll see the same kind of things happening around the world as in America. I've seen people from the UK talk about Polish immigrants in much the same way people here talk about Mexicans, and that's not even going into the cluster fuck of how much of Europe treats Romani people. A whole lot of people in Asian countries have issues with other people from other Asian countries, or even different ethnic groups within their own countries (like Uyghurs in china.) Parts of Africa are patchworks of different ethnic groups that are often at each other's throats, and of course South Africa is still a long way from having its shit fully sorted out. A lot of white Australians have pretty significant biases against Aboriginal people.

I could go on.

There was a pretty large, family-run business near me, it was a pretty popular local landmark, and it sat on a pretty big property, probably a handful of acres.

The owner died, his kids didn't really want to run the place, so they did everything they could to run it into the ground so that they say that it wasn't profitable to avoid some of the backlash from closing it down.

They had some sort of scheme to turn it into housing for homeless veterans. Noble enough idea I suppose, though I don't know how they thought that was going to work, let alone be profitable.

Of course there was a bit of the usual NIMBY backlash, veterans or not, a lot of people don't particularly want some low income housing project springing up in their neighborhood.

But more importantly, it just didn't seem like anyone was particularly interested in living there.

This is sort of the rural end of the suburbs. We're not out in the country, I'd hesitate to even call it exurban, but things are less dense, not much is walkable, no public transportation, there's not all that much around. A couple of the basics are nearby like a grocery store, but not much beyond that.

If you have a car and money for gas, it's not a terrible place to be, pretty much anything you could want is within about a 30-45 minute drive, if traffic cooperates, you might even be able to get downtown in the city in about an hour.

But thinking about it in the context of a bunch of homeless people, what the hell are they supposed to do? Not many opportunities for them to find work around there, certainly not anything well-paying enough to help them improve their situation by much. If they need any sort of mental health or drug/alcohol treatment, their options would be severely limited there. It's not at all convenient to the VA hospital nearest to us. And unless they manage to get their hands on a car, they'd basically be stuck there to sit at home, or maybe wander around town and do nothing in particular.

So that project never got off the ground.