Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

The only thing that surprises me about this is that it didn’t happen earlier.

I'm way out of the dating game at this point, and also a man, so it's very likely that I'm just out of the loop

But I hadn't heard anything about this app until a couple weeks ago when I saw an article or two about it

Then about a week later this happened

So I kind of feel like maybe most of the assholes who did this were similarly unaware of it until it got some exposure and then it was on their radar.

I would certainly imagine that most women using this app probably weren't telling the angry misogynists in their lives about this app.

Also depends on what type of heat you use

I have a heat pump, so my air conditioner is my heater, heat pumps are basically just an AC running in reverse.

In general, my wife and I don't mind it being cold, we're willing to let the temperature in our house get down to about the mid-low 50s (F, obviously) in the winter, so we do end up using a lot less electricity in the winter. But if we tried to keep our house at a warmer temperature that most people would find comfortable, it would probably be about the same.

There's a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there's a much bigger part that doesn't want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those "I've become my dad" moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who's ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I'm giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.

At work I once received a call from someone who worked at a tree service company- trimming trees, tree removal, relocating trees, etc.

She identified herself as the branch manager.

I think of it like this

Let's say 3 families each have a magic book they can use to communicate with each other. Anything someone writes in one book appears in all 3 books.

Each book is a Lemmy instance. In the real world it would be a server running the Lemmy software.

The family members are the users of each Lemmy instance.

And the spell that binds the books together is federation.

Now let's say family 1 and 3 have a falling out and break the spell connecting their books. That's defederation.

Everything they wrote in the books before then is still there. But nothing they write going forward will sync to each other's book. They can both still see and write on family 2's pages, but won't be able to see what each other write. Family 2 can still see all of both of what of them are writing because he's still federated with them both.

Now let's add some of the other fediverse services into the mix. Lets say mastodon, it works pretty much the same way, but instead of a book, let's say it's more like a stack of index cards, but otherwise you can see whats in everyone else's stack of cards as long as you're federated with them.

Most of the fediverse services federate to some extent or another with the other services. It can be a bit weird sometimes, index cards of course wouldn't have a page number in the book, and pages in the book wouldn't be indexed in the card catalog, so searching out the content from those other services can be a little wonky, but if you know where to look you can find those cards tucked into your book, or a crumpled up page from a book tucked into your card catalog, and you can interact with them, so you'll sometimes see, for example, someone from a mastodon instance commenting on a Lemmy post, which is kind of like taping one of their index cards to the page of your book to leave a comment.

I've known muskies to do something similar- swim around at the surface with their head out of the water.

I remember looking into it, and it's definitely a thing, but no one seems to know why exactly they do it. There's a few theories that have to do with the oxygen concentration at the surface, regulating temperature, buoyancy, etc. but the one I personally like to subscribe to is the same as this, that they're just looking around.

It makes me feel a little less bad about not being able to catch one if they're at least more intelligent and curious than the average bass or bluegill or whatever else I'm pulling out of their lake.

I grew up in a small suburb just outside of a major city, overall a pretty liberal and urbanized place.

The town had it's own garbage trucks, all the years I lived there I never remember them missing a trash pickup. The neighboring towns didn't have their own trucks but still provided municipal pickup just contracted through some company and they were similarly pretty good.

I now live towards the more rural end of that same county. I'd still consider it to be in the suburbs, but it's a much less densely populated area, with some woods and a handful of small farms around, and while still fairly liberal, it definitely skews more conservative than the town I grew up in.

So this town does not provide trash service for its residents. It's pretty much up to everyone to make their own arrangements with any of a half dozen or so trash companies in the area.

And it's an absolute shit-show. They're all constantly missing trash pickups, constantly raising their prices, one time the company I was with got bought out by another company and they decided they were going to stop providing residential pickup service in my area so I had to find another company to take my money, and because we have all of these different companies with different pickup schedules it seems like anywhere you go there's constantly a trash truck slowing down traffic.

Because the libertarian dipshits in my area would rather pay more for worse service than abide by a smaller bump in their taxes to get reliable municipal services.

Similarly a lot of roads in my area are bullshit tar & chips instead of proper paving, it doesn't last long, loose stones are always getting kicked up, the motorcycle riders in my area complain that they're dangerous, etc.

A lot of my town is on wells and septic tanks instead of city water and sewer. There are allegedly plans to expand the parts of the town that can get hooked up to the municipal water and sewer lines, but they've been saying that at least since I moved here about 5 years ago and I haven't seen any real progress on that. I am hooked up to the municipal lines, but I have some friends who aren't and are hoping to get hooked up to it, and every time they ask they get told that their street is on the list to get hooked up but no one seems to know when, so they're constantly juggling whether they want to do some overdue maintenance on their aging septic system or if it's worth toughing it out until they eventually can get hooked up.

And probably the worst is the police department (InB4 ACAB) it's a part time department so they're not actually on duty overnight or most weekends and our area gets covered by state police when they're not on duty (which I believe the town actually pays for)

Now if there's any town that could probably get away with just not having its own police department, it's probably mine. I work in the county dispatch center, I know what their workload is like, if they handle a dozen incidents a week, including traffic stops for speeding tickets and such, they've had a busy week.

But of course most of what does happen in town is overnight and over the weekend, because that's when people are home. We don't exactly have a lot of businesses in town, so most people are just straight-up not around during the day.

The state police coverage is terrible. They cover a pretty large area of other semi rural departments without their own police or part time departments like mine, so often when they're needed the only available troopers are a couple towns away.

They also will only enforce state laws, and won't bother themselves with any local ordinances, so if you have, for example, a noise complaint, you're SOL, because odds are your neighbors are having loud parties and shooting off fireworks after the local police are off-duty for the night. They might be able to cite them for it later, but no one's gonna be going out to shut them up right now while you're trying to sleep.

No one likes the state police coverage, but they also don't want to pay the taxes it would take to have an actual full-time police department. A couple years ago there was talk of joining up with a couple neighboring towns that are currently covered full-time by state police, to form a full-time regional department that would cover all 3 towns, but those other towns also didn't want to increase taxes to pay for it.

We're at or reaching a tipping point where I'm not sure that's true anymore.

Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we're talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn't already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.

And we're running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren't really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I'm not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don't really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.

There's a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.

But overall, I don't think there's as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.

Before I was born, my grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack

Common enough story, except

They were visiting family in Poland, we're American

And this was the 1980s

So the problem was how to get a corpse back to the US.

Embalming was not common in Poland at the time, not sure what the current situation is there, but in this case it was kind of needed. Shipping something the size of a casket across the atlantic on short notice is kind of a lot to figure out for normal people in the best of times, but especially tricky for a bereaved family, in a foreign country, where they barely speak the language, and a whole host of Cold war political bullshit, and this was no small feat.

So they managed to find one of the few local funeral homes who were able to embalm him

And stuffed him into the cheapest wooden coffin they could acquire to ship him back.

And of course, there were some customs hold-ups that delayed things to make sure they weren't smuggling anything back with him I suppose.

I believe the whole process took a few weeks.

Luckily American money went a long way in Poland at the time. My family is not wealthy, but they were basically treated like celebrities there, flash a little American cash and you were bumped to the front of the line and got preferential treatment for everything, and from the US perspective, everything was dirt cheap.

A couple stories to illustrate that- one day they're out in Warsaw with their relative Wojtek, and they're looking for a place to eat. My grandfather spied a nice-looking restaurant. They go to the door and Wojtek is told that they wouldn't be able to seat them. My grandfather gets a bit angry and points out that the restaurant was almost empty. When they found out they had Americans with them they were welcomed in with open arms.

My grandfather ordered a steak, Wojtek got a bit of sticker shock seeing the menu and ordered a hot dog. When my grandfather found out that's what he ordered, he called the waiter back over and told them that Wojtek would also have a steak. He said it was too late and they'd already started the hot dog, so my grandfather said to wrap them up and they'd take them to go, and ordered the steak. A steak dinner there for the whole group, probably around 4-6 people, cost peanuts for an American at the time, but the Polish relatives they were staying with had been saving up things like sugar rations for weeks or months in preparation for hosting my family, and steak was definitely not on their regular menu.

There's also the story of when Wojtek visited the US (coincidentally at the exact same time as the USSR fell apart, but that's another long story) and literally broke down in tears at the sight of an American grocery store. I know the grocery store they would have went to, it was not a big or particularly impressive store, today it is a kind of small-ish CVS.

Another time while in Poland (they visited several times back in the day) my grandmother went to get her hair done while she was there. She worked as a hair dresser for most of her life, so while she was waiting in line she was watching them cut hair, and pointed out one lady and said that she wanted her to do her hair. She was told that's not how things worked there and that shed get whoever was available when it was her turn. Until she flashed some American cash and they bumped her up to the front of the line so she could have her hair cut by the hair dresser she wanted.

Anyway, circling back to my dead grandfather, they eventually got his body back to the US, stuffed him into a nicer casket, had a funeral, and there he is to the ground to this day.

But the story doesn't quite end there. What became of the casket they shipped him back in?

It sat in the funeral homes attic for a couple decades. It was cheap, but it wasn't a bad casket, just not what's in-demand for the American funeral industry, and believe it or not, there's not a lot of demand (or supply for that matter) for second-hand caskets.

Then one day, some guy, who actually happens to be a second cousin or something of mine, decides he wants an actual coffin to use as a Halloween decoration. So he calls around to the local funeral homes to see what they can do for him.

He calls up this place, and they basically say "we have just the thing for you" and so that's where that is now.

I have no doubts in my mind that trump and Epstein were as good friends as two narcissistic assholes are capable of being.

But it's also pretty damn clear to me that trump isn't exactly the letter-writing type.

I suspect how this all played out is that Maxwell was putting together this book for Epstein, and reached out to trump for his contribution

And so trump had some lackey throw together something appropriately sleazy for it and just signed it wherever he was told to sign.

And I don't think that's even just a trump thing, I'm pretty sure just about any celebrity, politician, etc. has staff whose job is to answer mail for them.

And he's too much of a moron and narcissistic asshole to say that, so instead he's going all-in on it being forged.

But if he were someone with a half functioning brain, that's all he would need to say "I am a very busy man, so I can't remember every piece of mail I sent 20 years ago, I probably had an intern write it for me, and I just signed where they told me to, I probably didn't even read it, I trusted my staff to write a good letter because I have the best people working for me"

And boom totally plausible, keeps the whole thing at arms-length from himself, and probably pretty damn close to the truth.

I figure you have 2 main options

1 is to either cut out the sides of the old panel and reuse them there or to fabricate a new part (3d printing, like someone else mentioned, might be a good choice, or maybe something you could hack together with some sheet metal or plastic and make a new piece)

2. Fill it with bondo, sand it down, paint it black.

For your average d&d party, stuff like getting zapped to another plane of existence, potentially including literal hell or a plane made up entirely of gears, isn't an entirely unexpected circumstance. I played in a game one where due to some crazy shit happening to us in the feywild we ended up in sort of the backrooms of the D&D multiverse with an impossibly long tapestry hung on the wall that was a physical manifestation of the weave.

Between those sorts of hijinks and flying around on spelljammers through interplanar space with crystal spheres and all of that mumbo-jumbo, aliens, space travel, and alien technology almost look tame in comparison.

I feel like your best bet to really confuse the characters is probably to have aliens simulating a normal d&d environment for them- maybe the room they wake up in on the ship looks very much like a stereotypical d&d tavern, but little details are wrong. Maybe there's a bard strumming away on his lute but his fingers don't quite match up with the notes he's playing, and the bartender asks if the party would like a "brewed and fermented barley beverage" instead of an "ale"

And the clothing the rest of the people there is all strangely generic and maybe a little dated and things are just generally not adding up, like why is there a red wizard from thay happily playing cards with a waterdavian city guard, and why is that guard drinking in his uniform? and are we even in waterdeep right now? because the elf at the table over there is reading a baldurian newspaper, and also holding it upside down. And is it just me, or are there a whole lot of twins and triplets here?

But things like detect magic aren't turning up anything fishy because it's not magic, it's science.

And maybe when you try to tap someone on the shoulder to ask what the hell is going on, you phase right through them because they're all holograms. A simulation orchestrated by the alien abductors to help the party feel more comfortable and so that they can study them in something close to their natural environment.

If you don't mind getting into the weeds here a bit

A "heart attack" is normally understood to be a myocardial infarction, where blood flow in the coronary arteries is blocked leading to damage to the heart muscle.

And the most common cause of cardiac arrest is arrhythmia, and most specifically ventricular fibrilation (v-fib)

Now that damage to the heart from a heart attack can and frequently does cause v-fib and other arrhythmias, which can lead to a cardiac arrest, either relatively immediately, or further down the line from that heart attack.

But there's a whole host of other conditions, risk factors, and just plain bad luck that can also cause them.

Picking apart what percent of those arrhythmias are attributable to a heart attack vs those that were caused by other issues isn't something that I'm willing and maybe not even able to do as a layperson, so I won't begin to speculate on that.

But that's kind of the root of my issue here. A lot of people just kind of casually lump all sorts of heart issues together into the same basket. We all have hearts beating away in our chests, and they're pretty damn important if you want to go on living, so it's best if we all have some decent level of understanding of what these terms mean and how to treat, manage, recognize, and avoid these issues, and I think that just kind of casually throwing terms around like heart attack, heart disease, heart failure, arrhythmia, cardiac arrest, etc. like they're interchangeable does a lot of harm to people being able to properly understand what's going on with this weird pumpy muscle thing in our chests.

I never expect an apology when I've been wronged

However, an apology is a necessary step towards rebuilding whatever trust/respect/relationship we had prior to that wrongdoing.

And it is just a step, on its own an apology is just meaningless words unless it is backed up by concrete actions to show that you do intend to do better and try to set things right.

The point of an apology, as far as I'm concerned, isn't just what it says on the surface, a statement that you're "sorry" or that you "feel bad," or however you choose to phrase it.

It's not about you and how you feel, you're not the one who's been wronged.

But the deeper meaning, in a sincere apology, is that you're acknowledging that you fucked up, and that it was wrong, and that you will try to do better going forward.

We can continue without an apology, but things will not be as they were. I will not be able to trust you as I have before. Even if you seem to have improved, I may still find myself suspicious of your motives.

The form that the apology takes can vary, it doesn't need necessary to be an explicit written or verbal apology in all cases, actions, as they say, speak louder than words, but in some way it needs to be made clear that you have acknowledged what you have done, understand that it was wrong and why, and intend to do improve.

My wife and I work different schedules. on the rare day off that were both home, she's often out of the house when I wake up. She's not great at replying to texts. I never know when she's going to be home, and usually have no clue what she's out doing or where.

But I know who she's doing while she's gone- no one. Because I trust my wife. I know who she is as a person, I know what our relationship is like.

I have no particular desire to know her location at all times. I'm sure if I asked, she'd share it with me, and I'd do the same for her. I might occasionally do that when I'm off hiking or something in case there's an emergency, but half the time I wouldn't have a signal anyway.

We are two humans with our own lives. Those lives are very intertwined, but we're both allowed to go off and have our own adventures, occasionally some secrets, and we don't need to know where each other is 24/7

I work in 911 dispatch

Back when I was still in training I delivered my first baby, was damn glad to still have my trainer hanging out over my shoulder for that.

It was almost a perfectly by the book, no complications delivery

Except that they had their doula on another line giving competing instructions to me.

In general unless there are complications, our instructions are pretty much the classic birth position, woman on her back, knees bent, legs spread

And the doula had her on all fours, which is something we instruct for certain complications

But again, everything they were telling me was that there were no complications.

So eventually I basically had to say something like "our instructions are to have her on her back, I can't make you listen to me, but I have to give these instructions, so I'm going to proceed as if she's on her back"

Phrased maybe a bit more diplomatically

I have no idea what position she was actually in when the baby finally popped out, but he was healthy, so that's all that matters I suppose.

And they made me do a photo op with the parents and baby. I don't like babies. Not much of a fan of having my picture taken either. Not my favorite day at work. I'd rather take a call for a shooting. No one makes you take a picture with a shooting victim.

911 dispatch if we want to count it

Look, stress and adrenaline and all of that are a hell of a drug

Not to mention actual drugs

And people have all manner of mental health issues

And I get that

And obviously since I work the job I do, I can handle stress and crazy bullshit better than most, so my own standards are all kinds of skewed

And I really try not to hold that against my callers

But holy crap am I glad that there are usually miles between me and them because if they were right in front of me I might strangle some of them.

It's usually not even the real frequent flyer problem callers that get me. Don't get me wrong, they're obnoxious, but at least I know that 99 out of 100 times, there's no real emergency, and they are clearly not in their right minds so they really can't help it. They're almost an enjoyable distraction from all of the people who should know better and just won't not be an uncooperative belligerent asshole who refuses to listen to anything we say.

1. Read the article, that's why it's there.
2. The post title even says it's a French Jewish group. Not sure what kind of world map you're used to but France people don't generally come from Israel, nor Israeli people from France.
3. Fuck Israel, but shitty people come from all over the world, and 50 kids with 1 chaperone is a recipe for a bad time no matter what country you're from.

Cardiac arrest just means your heart stopped beating, which is pretty much the textbook definition of death.

That's basically like saying they're dead because they died.

The interesting thing we want to know is what caused the cardiac arrest. Any time you see "cardiac arrest" in an article, it means that they either don't know or don't want to say the cause of death.

A heart attack can cause cardiac arrest, so could an overdose, or falling and hitting your head, or getting shot in the face.

I've been a somewhat regular NPR listener for years

It of course carries from one program or station to another but my general impression is that, no surprise, nearly everyone involved in NPR is pretty solidly liberal.

But they bend over backwards so far trying to be impartial that it almost becomes a parody sometimes.

I remember one time, I'm pretty sure it was around the time of the unite the right thing, I was listening to some segment where they had some neonazi piece of shit on, I think it may have been Richard Spencer

And while it was technically a really good and informative interview, it burned me up that they just weren't tearing into this piece of crap.

And to make matters worse, Nazi boy was really confident and well-spoken, and whoever they brought in to argue the other side, some lady from a university or something, simply wasn't. If I weren't listening to the actual words coming out of their mouths I would've gotten the impression that he was someone who really had his shit together, and she was some clueless dip shit they bribed into the studio by offering her free kombucha or something.

It was like they went out of their way to make it seem like maybe this guy had a point worth listening too and didn't deserve to just be taken out back of the studio and shot.