WoodScientist
@WoodScientist@lemmy.world
- Comment on This Is Why I Sit Down To Pee Pee 59 minutes ago:
I solved my issues with urinals by simply removing my ability to use a urinal.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 day ago:
And I imagine that subs in your area probably get paid proportionally less. Though maybe not.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 day ago:
It’s a maximum $45k/year job that offers no health insurance, retirement, or paid leave. Sure it’s $260 per day, but that is only for the school days that you work. Considering the number of days in the school year, and the reality that you won’t be able to find a position every day? If you max it out and sub as much as you can, you’re talking about $45k/year with zero benefits.
Not a bad gig if you’re on your parent’s or spouse’s health insurance. But if you try and work that your whole career, you can forget about ever being a home owner or retiring. Starter homes here go for $400k.
Great option for those in transition. But there’s a reason I call it decent, but hardly amazing.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 day ago:
In my area, the average monthly rent for a two bedroom apartment is $1500/month, or $18,000 per year. If you maxed out substitute teaching, teaching every day you could? That would bring in about $45k/year. And the job comes with no health insurance, retirement, or other benefits. On days you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Full time teaching positions do have benefits and pay better, but those require more extensive licensing.
You could earn a subsistence living substituting where I’m located, especially if you got roommates. But it’s not a long-term viable career if you want to have any hope of home ownership, retirement, etc. A great option for those in transition, but not a career.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 day ago:
OTOH, a paid off house is all you need for basic subsistence. If you only have to pay property taxes, insurance, and maintenance, getting a couple of roommates would cover that plus something left over for food and other essentials each month.
Remember, every home is a potential revenue stream for its owner.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 day ago:
Have to say, this is an extremely self-defeating attitude.
Yes, you’ll have trouble if you want to start a business that requires millions in startup capital or highly specific skills or hard-to-obtain licenses. But immigrants come to this country, often not even knowing the language, and they manage to start up businesses without any family help or advantages.
The key is they focus on businesses with minimal startup costs, or ones where you can start small and reinvest the profits into growing the business. You don’t try to open a car factory. You start mowing your neighbor’s lawns, possibly even using their mower. Use the money from that that to buy more equipment. Iterate. Pretty soon you’re operating a whole lawn care business.
You can search for lists of business types that require little start up capital or licensing. Research those, find something that appeals to you, and give it a go. If it fails, try something else. If everything fails despite your best efforts, at least you can sleep at night knowing you tried your best.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 day ago:
Mechanics also have the cost problem. A good mechanic will have to put an amount of money into tools that is comparable to the cost of a university degree. A career mechanic will spend tens of thousands on their tools.
- Comment on Anon is 23 1 day ago:
Honestly, if you’re in this situation, and you have any interest at all in education, or just think it wouldn’t drive you mad, look into substitute teaching. In my area the only requirement to be a substitute is to have any bachelor’s degree and to be able to pass a very rigorous background check. (Think fingerprinting.) I’m currently exploring a mid-career transition to K12 teaching, and I’m planning on doing a bunch of substitute teaching in the coming school year. Substitutes make about $260/day in my district. Not amazing money, but it still comes to a solid $30/hr or so. And there’s enough demand at least where I’m at that they often have postings go unfilled.
And hell, just getting out of the house and regularly interacting with people will do wonders for your mental health. I wouldn’t recommend substitute teaching as a permanent career. But for someone in transition or trying to get started, it’s a great option. It’s a very useful way of getting past the trap of “I need experience to get the job, but I need the job to get experience.” At least in my area, if you’ve got a bachelor’s and a clean criminal record, you can become a substitute.
- Comment on Civic duty 2 days ago:
The rate was so low in Harris County, TX several years ago that the day rate wouldn’t even pay for parking and the cheapest lunch at the courthouse cafeteria.
- Comment on An american on Reddit wrote: "I’m not sure it’s really a good idea to let legislation through on a 51-49 vote: making a change should really take more consensus than that" 2 days ago:
Exhibit A for how something can be technically correct but still false.
- Comment on Can anyone confirm? 5 days ago:
Nah, Vegas isn’t so much a city as a big theme park. Hell, the casinos aren’t even in Las Vegas.
- Comment on Can anyone confirm? 5 days ago:
In the city of Houston, you can eat any cuisine, from any nation on the face of the Earth…as long as you’re willing to do it in an old run down 1980s strip mall.
- Comment on Can anyone confirm? 5 days ago:
People have a hard time understanding that in a capitalist economy, everyone is bidding against each other for resources like housing. If two areas have comparable median income levels, they will tend to have comparable costs of living.
But that “cost of living” includes way more than just the mortgage payment. If people are paying more for property taxes, homeowners insurance, and commuting costs, there’s less money in the budget to go to the mortgage payment. Areas where property taxes, insurance, and commuting are cheap have high housing prices. Texas has extremely high property taxes, insurance, and commuting costs, so people can’t afford to bid the houses themselves up as much.
And this effect can trap people. The real value of a mortgage goes down with time - inflation helps you. But property taxes and commuting costs go up with inflation. And insurance costs rise much faster than inflation due to climate change. If your wages don’t keep up with inflation, then your total cost of housing goes up with time rather than down.
- Comment on Can anyone confirm? 5 days ago:
Please, everyone knows the most widely-recognized Fourth City is Salem, OR. 🤣
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 4x01 "Valles Marineris" 6 days ago:
I mean, they were evolved from hadrosaurs, and those only evolved in the late Cretaceous. The Voth would have had to be there at least within a few million years of the end.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 4x01 "Valles Marineris" 6 days ago:
Yeah that is the thing. Just because you know that the planet would eventually be destroyed, doesn’t mean you know that this is the particular moment it was supposed to happen. It could have happened in some unrelated event 45 million years ago instead of 65.
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 4x01 "Valles Marineris" 6 days ago:
You know, they really missed an opportunity here. Because this was a bootstrap paradox, there’s nothing they could really do to mess up the timeline. Whatever they make happen was already going to have happened.
What I’m trying to say is, they should have adopted a pet raptor, taken it back to the future with them, and just had it as a regular presence on screen for the rest of the series! 😂
- Comment on Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 4x01 "Valles Marineris" 6 days ago:
My guess is the away scene was going to be a lot different. My reason for thinking this is that oddly incongruent end sequence. They had that long CGI sequence at the end, after the entire plot of the episode has finished, where the camera does an extended flyaround on the Cretaceous Earth. CGI isn’t cheap. Someone had to animate all that. That sequence really screamed, “shit. We spent all this money on these dinosaur animations. But now the script’s changed, so we can’t use even half of it. I know! Let’s add an inspiring sequence at the end!”
- Comment on No Vaccines. No Weakness. Only Testosterone 6 days ago:
Life found a way.
- Comment on No Vaccines. No Weakness. Only Testosterone 6 days ago:
Hell, sometimes trans women need testosterone. I am, and I do. My body doesn’t really make much hormones naturally anymore. If I take nothing, my testosterone levels are lower than those in cis women. I take a very very small dose to get my T levels back up into the cis female range. Men and women both have testosterone and estrogen. And while the ratios vary, you still need both, regardless of your gender.
- Comment on thoughts and prayers for science 6 days ago:
That’s why I light this and pray to St. Carl of Ithaca every night.
- Comment on Checkmate Atheists! 6 days ago:
The problem with Kings is they don’t live up to the marketing. Royals are a group of people that claim they have some genetic superiority to the rest of the species. They deserve the right to rule because they simply have superior blood. They’re smarter, stronger, faster, than everyone else. And in an era before modern nutrition, this was a lot easier case to make. The core thesis of monarchy is “ability runs in families. Let’s find the family with the genes best for governing, and just let them run the place.”
If that idea actually worked, monarchy would be a great system. But governing is not a skill that is passed on genetically. Royals are just ordinary human beings in fancy hats. In fact, they tend to be far stupider than the average person, as they’re born into wealth and privilege.
But King Kong? His elevated position over humanity truly is an inborn genetic trait. He is not a common human, and that’s undeniable. President Kong would imply we elected him as first among equals. King Kong is more appropriate in this situation.
- Comment on Former Valve writer says PlayStation killing physical discs is no conspiracy: "You, the consumer, have made your choice, and the choice is for digital" 1 week ago:
You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did.
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
Art is the common property of all mankind. Art is the human soul. The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit. You know what is truly a modern anomaly? Copyright and all IP law. For 99% of human history, artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.
You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is the temporary right to exclusive sale of a product. And that is not a natural right. It’s not a natural right like freedom of speech, or even ownership of tangible property. Copyright violation is fundamentally different from real theft because it doesn’t deprive the owner of an original. Yes, you as an artist may feel you have some innate ownership to an idea, but that is a sense of privilege and entitlement that comes from misunderstanding the history and purpose of IP law. Hell, for most of history, artists were not even considered the source of creative works. Medieval painters didn’t sign their works, because they considered God to be the real creator. Before that, the Muses got credit.
Here is what you are missing. Copyright is not an innate right. It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made. But that’s all it is, a pragmatic compromise. Do not confuse it for a natural right like life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
No one creates art in a vacuum. Everything is inspired and derived from works that came before it. There are no original stories. Artists are only able to create works because they’ve trained and studied on the works of countless other artists that came before them. Your work as an artist is just one tiny piece of a grand cultural tapestry. And as you were able to benefit from the commons, in turn your work will return to the commons to inspire others. A drop from the ocean. An ocean from a drop. That is the nature of art and creativity.
- Comment on Can anyone tell me what type of bird this is I keep seeing? 1 week ago:
I want to believe there is not in fact porn on the internet of Light Yagami and Ryuk. But knowing Rule 34, there almost certainly is. I’ll avoid searching for it and keep my blissful ignorance.
- Comment on She's just defending her country 1 week ago:
This is pretty silly. Superhero movies constantly feature superheroes and supervillains causing mass property damage. Superman will be thrown through buildings. Cars will be used as throwing weapons, etc.
It’s a deliberate cinematic choice. Superheroes just flying in the sky punching each other doesn’t convey the power involved in these characters. No, if you want to portray superheroes in a way that actually feels real to people, you need to show them interacting with our ordinary world. You show them treating things we experience as solid, indestructible, and immobile as mere tissue paper.
This is just “show, don’t tell.” Sure, you could have some character verbally explain that “Superman has the strength of a million men!”, but if all you saw was Superman fighting in a cloud or an empty field, that wouldn’t really mean much. You can’t feel it. Watch Superman casually pick up a skyscraper, and suddenly your mind can actually grasp the scale of his power.
- Comment on this absolute bullshit from reddit 1 week ago:
I second some_kind_of_guy’s comment. What exactly do you need protection from while just lurking?
- Comment on this absolute bullshit from reddit 1 week ago:
Exactly. That’s why I mentioned lurking. I haven’t participated in reddit for quite awhile, not after getting permabanned for dubious reasons. But I’ll still lurk, especially on some of the niche community subreddits. I also cannot fathom what someone just reading text might need protection from. I can certainly see it for commenting, but you’ve always had to be logged in to do that anyway.
- Comment on this absolute bullshit from reddit 1 week ago:
You have a short while left. I heard about this a few weeks ago and just started getting the block today.
- Comment on this absolute bullshit from reddit 1 week ago:
They don’t even try to lie effectively. Why in Hell’s name would you need to log in to “keep reddit safe” just to lurk?
- Comment on Power 2 weeks ago:
Go to your bank wearing an N95 mask. Wear a hoodie and put a banana in the front pocket. Keep your hands in your front pocket, grasping the banana. Walk up to the teller and ask them to put $100 in a bag.
In tiny print at the bottom, include your bank account number. After they have a second to look at it, hand them your photo ID.
