exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on business is business 1 day ago:
Wedding images are challenging because venues, decor, wardrobe, etc., are chosen for real-world regular eyeball beauty. In darker settings (many churches, nighttime), or settings lit by bad lights for photography (fluorescent bulbs, LED bulbs without good wide spectrum light, random dance floor stuff), adds a lot of post processing work, and wedding clients tend to be very demanding clients (for good reason). It’s all real work, well beyond what can be seen in the day-of interaction between photographer and client.
- Comment on business is business 1 day ago:
Exactly.
There is real skill involved in photography, and it takes real time even after being skilled. A 1-hour shoot in a new location still requires probably an hour of planning, maybe an hour or two of logistics, and maybe 2-3 hours of work after the fact to get the photos processed and distributed. And it’s basically the opportunity cost that will eat up the entire day, because you can’t double book the same sunset or other lighting conditions or whatever. There’s seasonality, too, if you want specific seasonal conditions in the shot, if you want to book the Saturday that other clients want, etc.
That’s before expenses like insurance, the amortized cost of the software and hardware (including the cameras and lenses and computer), web services for distribution of the files, etc.
It’s fair to charge a full day’s fair pay for a job like that, and that might mean wanting to charge something like $1000 for an experienced photographer, maybe $500 of which actually represents “profit” for the sole proprietor. But that only happens at that price if there are clients willing to pay that price.
For bigger jobs like parties or weddings, it gets a bit more involved, which is why a 2- or 3-shooter wedding job can cost several thousand, or even above $10k.
But for easy jobs like anything in a high volume studio where the lighting is already known, and there aren’t any logistics involved, it should be much cheaper. It just all depends.
- Comment on business is business 1 day ago:
But Doctor! I am Nataliacci!
- Comment on Oh how the turn tables 1 day ago:
I thought now most became:
- Comment on Chef 4 days ago:
Why does this get repeated so much
Because of the longer feedback loops. If you aren’t an experienced baker, you might not notice that the hydration is off, or that you’re not building enough strength in your dough, or that the temperature will cause the dough to rise slower than normal, and then you’re left asking why your loaf didn’t rise as much as you’d like, why the end result is dense, why the dough stuck to the pan instead of cleanly releasing, etc.
Once you’re experienced you’ll know when you need to add more water, when you’ll need to adjust times, whether the dough is too sticky, whether you’re tearing the gluten strands too much, whether your finished loaf is going to be more or less sour than you prefer, what adjustments should be made with the new flour you’re working with, etc.
But until you know how each step feeds into the next, being unable to taste the steps in between makes it a lot harder to learn quickly, and requires a longer working memory to connect how you handled the dough during an autolyse versus how the bread loaf turned out hours later out of the oven, and eventually learn the lessons of smell, touch, feel that aren’t easy to learn from written recipes.
- Comment on Painful to recover from 1 week ago:
There’s plenty of people who embrace an absurdist mentality and openly reject anything that requires actively using one’s brain.
I think they’re old, fat, unathletic, and unattractive.
I know Trump voters. For the minority who are actually young, they’re much more likely to be loser incels who are both bad at sports and didn’t get a college degree (much less post graduate educations). It’s aggrieved losers trying to make sense of the world, who are generally unattractive on most metrics: poor, unhealthy, unathletic, not very smart.
It’s like looking at people who work in the trades. Plumbers and welders and carpenters. They tend to be in worse physical shape than, like, lawyers and doctors, who obviously have better intellectual and academic credentials.
So if you’re surrounded by losers, I’m just gonna ask that you stop being impressed with them.
- Comment on Painful to recover from 1 week ago:
I’m not aware of any culture in which hiding one’s strengths is a common response to one’s own surroundings. Placing value on a particular characteristic does not imply that a completely unrelated characteristic is undesirable. Plenty of beautiful smart people out there, and even in a society where beauty is prized above all else, why would someone beautiful hide their intelligence?
For whatever it’s worth, in my circles (urban white collar millennial professionals in dense cities), most people are both athletic and intelligent. There are plenty of finance bros and tech bros who have Ivy League degrees (sometimes Ph.D.s, M.D.s, J.D.s) that represent real academic achievement and can also turn around and dominate on a basketball court or in a fighting gym. Lots of smart people like gyms, whether we’re talking resistance training, Olympic lifting, CrossFit/Hyrox, endurance cardio sports like marathon running or biking, winter sports like skiing, etc.
That’s also consistent with what I saw in my high school. Most of the top students headed towards Ivy League or similar caliber schools were also athletes who were very good at a competitive sport for the school. The “nerd”/“jock” dichotomy we expected from John Hughes movies never really materialized, and the popular kids tended to be people who were both good at school and good at sports.
- Comment on So Healthy 1 week ago:
It’s not just convenience alone. Plastic over soil reduces the use of water and energy. Plastic in packing and shipping even in-season local produce extends its life and reduces waste, can help keep things sanitary/safer longer.
We use plastic not just because it’s cheap (even though it is), but also because it’s really easy to form impermeable barriers for water/moisture, air, contaminants, microbes (both wanted and unwanted). We can debate whether those uses are worth the ecological or even health cost, but we have to acknowledge that refusing to use plastic also carries a cost, too.
- Comment on Painful to recover from 1 week ago:
I wouldn’t put too much stock into the jock versus nerd stereotypes.
Life isn’t an RPG with stats that come at the cost of other stats. Being bad at sports doesn’t make someone more likely to be good at school (if anything, the correlation might run the other way). And charisma, ambition, intelligence, physical appearance, athleticism, work ethic, are all distinct factors that sometimes feedback on each other, and feed into things like wealth, happiness, attractiveness, etc.
- Comment on Anon is 23 3 weeks ago:
Where are you that plumbers don’t get paid well?
I’m in the U.S. Here’s an interactive, searchable table of U.S. stats for all job codes Note that you can dig around the site by state, as well.
It shows the mean, median, 10th percentile, 25th percentile, 75th percentile, and 90th percentile wage, plus the number in each job, by both hour and by year.
For 47-2152, “Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters,” we have 465k people making an average of $72k. The 10th/25th/50th/75th/90th percentiles are $44k/$50k/$63k/$85k/$108k. Those numbers are exactly what I’m talking about: a high floor and a very flat trajectory, where the 75th percentile doesn’t even double the 25th percentile.
Compare to something like Human Resources Specialist, one of the more unremarkable college-educated office jobs. They’re averaging $82k, with $47k/$59k/$76k/$99k/$129k on those percentiles. And they have a clear pathway towards Human Resources manager, where the average is $164k and the spread is $88k/$111k/$149k/$199k/$268k.
Note also that the U.S. employs almost twice as many HR specialists (912,000) as plumbers (465,000) in our job market. And HR Managers are over 200,000 people.
Start digging into different jobs and you can see a lot of the same trends. Non-college educated white collar jobs (secretaries, assistants) don’t pay well, and jobs requiring a bit of a certification but not full blown bachelor’s degrees (paralegal) are comparable to plumber incomes.
But my general point is clear: the trades have a high floor, very flat trajectories, and a low ceiling. They deal with higher unemployment rates and the jobs are harder on the bodies. The college educated pathways have a huge up front cost (tuition and late entry into the workforce), and take up to a decade to actually catch up. But most of us work 30-50 year careers, so a 10-year break even point is actually pretty good.
And if you want to work with your hands, the educated blue collar job fields can be super lucrative: field engineers, outdoor researchers, even things like surgeons.
- Comment on Anon is 23 3 weeks ago:
An electrician certification proves that you can do something. A bachelor’s degree is just a checkbox to prove you went through the motions.
Why is it that you think that an electrician certification is less about checkboxes than a 4-year university degree? Or that the checkboxes are somehow more difficult to game? Most trade schools themselves are a joke, so you have to play the meta game of getting the cert and networking your way to a job. You know, same as your university degree.
The fact is, most trades pay shit, and their big advantage is that you get to start earlier in life, and that you have more opportunities to get overtime pay. That can be a good option for your 20’s, especially during a jobs boom (most trades are infamously boom and bust cycles), but by your 30’s you will get passed up by most of your degree holding peers (and you’ll totally get left in the dust in your 40’s and 50’s).
It’s not good advice to young people. Electricians, plumbers, welders, etc. don’t get paid very much on average, and the ones who break out from that low pay are either highly specialized or climb the small business/management ladder (at which point they benefit from concepts taught in school as well).
- Comment on Hell yeah. 3 weeks ago:
I don’t think we’re talking about love here. We are talking about S-E-X in front of the C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N!
Sex Cauldron? I thought they closed that place down!
- Comment on Old but gud 5 weeks ago:
I wear colorful men’s clothes. Fun designs on things like short sleeve button shirts in the summer (Hawaiian shirts and similar things), fun sweaters in the winter.
Even my office wear usually has a splash of personality, with the amount of subtlety appropriate for the setting: suits or jackets with interesting textures and weave patterns, neckties with interesting designs, a bright color on my socks. Some settings allow for a bit more expression, and other choices can be more adventurous if you prefer, including intentionally contrasting choices in glasses, watches, shoes, other accessories. Even a pair of headphones can be a fashion accessory, although it is true that women seem to be able to pull that off better.
- Comment on Sounds beautiful 5 weeks ago:
The wonderful story? The lyrics to the Ying Yang Twins’ “Wait (The Whisper Song)”:
Hey how you doin’ lil’ mama let me whisper in ya ear
- Comment on Is it even possible to drop 20 lbs in a month? Are there any diets for people who want to go to the extreme? Kind of like celebs do for roles? 5 weeks ago:
Yup. Dropping 5+ lbs of water weight in a day or two is possible, especially when targeting glycogen stores.
Even burning fat or metabolizing protein releases retained water, although not at the same high ratio as with glycogen.
- Comment on I know exactly where 5 weeks ago:
Well, not-so-prime breeding age is still has reproduction potential greater than zero. And the social effects still matter, with the interplay between sexual attraction/ desirability and all the other social factors. So extended sexual attractiveness might be a side effect of something else that is evolutionarily advantageous (including correlation with prime age sexual attractiveness): being athletic and smart and funny and charismatic are all attractive traits that have functionality outside of just reproducing.
- Comment on Heh heh 5 weeks ago:
Throw it in the trash.
People talk about recycling and that makes a difference for restaurants, but at home quantities? Just put it in the trash.
- Comment on I know exactly where 5 weeks ago:
Genetically coded social behavior helps the genes even when they don’t help the individual. The most obvious example is how each worker bee in a hive or worker ant in a colony is a genetic dead end, with no offspring, but will do plenty of work to help the overall hive/colony survive.
We’re hard wired to raise our children, as can be shown by just how helpless our children are at birth, and how long it takes for them to form full maturity. That extends to the whole village, including grandparents.
Meanwhile, plenty of anthropological evidence shows that we form coalitions and tribes and work together to advance group interests, and that it’s been going on for our entire species’ history, including in the genealogical line that we descend from, outcompeting other hominids and even other branches of homo sapien that didn’t form such complex alliances.
Our brains are hard wired to develop complex language for communication with other humans. This is what helped us thrive as a species, to where our evolutionary success threatens to harm our greater environment.
But that just shows that humans are really good at socializing. And as social creatures, we have evolutionary value even beyond our direct ability to produce offspring.
- Comment on The end of civilization costs $5 1 month ago:
Certified gluten free!
- Comment on The end of civilization costs $5 1 month ago:
Yeah, there’s no better way than directional freezing. Either you freeze big old slabs in a way that pushes the dissolved gases (and many dissolved solids) away from the crystal structure of slowly freezing ice and then cut it after the fact, or you directionally freeze something that has an outlet to push the gases down so that you pull the frozen ice from the top compartment before the bottom compartment freezes.
- Comment on The end of civilization costs $5 1 month ago:
I need to get a bunch of “fresh, never frozen” stickers to put on bagged ice.
- Comment on The end of civilization costs $5 1 month ago:
Believe it or not some of us like pretty things to enjoy for ourselves, not to put on social media.
And big clear ice melts more consistently in a way that better maintains coldness longer while maintaining a slower pace of dilution. It does make a difference to flavor.
- Comment on That's fair 1 month ago:
the usual 8-12 range
Define “usual,” because in most strength programs I see, they rarely call for more than 5 reps in a work set (unless doing AMRAP where you need to do at least 3 or 5).
And I personally do my 1RM testing to competition form, but I get what you’re saying.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
My only hope really is that my apartment building would install some kind of central cooling solution, which is an incredibly expensive endeavour.
This comment got me wondering how apartments can retrofit their central heat into some kind of climate control that goes both ways.
For apartments with ducts and forced air, it seems like the central furnace/boiler can probably be replaced with some kind of heat pump setup for more efficient heating in the winters, and reversed to provide cooling in the summers, through the same air ducts. The total cost/complexity would probably depend heavily on the space for the furnace and its service/maintenance, I imagine.
With steam/hot water radiators, though, I imagine it’s even harder. Can these systems safely be modified to pump cold water?
Or, if they need to add ducts where none currently exist, that seems like it would be unbelievably complex and expensive, if people are going to be living there the whole time. Seems like a real challenge.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
will kick out a fuck tonne more carbon
Not if that installed A/C also functions as a heat pump that reduces gas furnace use in the winter. Especially if decent cooling also incentivizes better insulation (which would further reduce energy use at both extremes).
Carbon emissions from heating account for about 4 times as much as carbon emissions from cooling, worldwide. Replacing gas furnaces with heat pumps will greatly improve overall annual carbon emissions, even if they blast the A/C all summer.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Everyone should be installing heat pumps for winter, too. The ability to cool in the summer is basically a bonus, that they can run the system in reverse.
- Comment on Anon's lil bro goes through his first break up 1 month ago:
I’m not sure that it would, but I’d bet it depends on time, place, and other context. The ideal body looks different in different social circles, even among the very fit (swimmer versus powerlifter versus Olympic lifter versus MMA fighter versus crossfitter versus basketball player).
In my circles, the straight women seem to to mostly prefer thin endurance cardio bodies, which, whatever, let people like things. Either way, that’s not always a great body type to show off shirtless.
- Comment on I want it to slap me across the face 1 month ago:
Caffeine is very slightly negatively correlated with darkness of the roast. Dark roasts tend to have less caffeine than light roasts.
Also, drip/pourover/percolator/press coffee tends to have more caffeine per serving than espresso-based drinks. The longer steep time extracts more of the caffeine, and serving sizes tend to just be so much larger to overcome the higher caffeine per unit volume of espresso.
So in reality, the lighter pourover coffee where you have the roaster or barista talking about tasting notes tends to be higher caffeine than the dark, densely brewed bitter stuff.
- Comment on I want it to slap me across the face 1 month ago:
I like my coffee like I like my women: completely devoid of STDs.
- Comment on Anon's lil bro goes through his first break up 1 month ago:
When I used dating sites, seeing a guy’s shirtless, muscled profile pic was always a turn off, if not a red flag in itself.
So bizarre that people would do that. When I was single and on social media and on dating websites (before smartphones), I did want to show off a bit that I worked out, but I had the discretion to, like, wear a T-shirt or a polo in the right lighting to show that I had strong looking forearms and a hint that there’s something pretty solid under that shirt. Actually taking my shirt off would have felt way too desperate, and besides, just isn’t something that I’d naturally have a picture of myself in.
Just seems to be a mix of validation-seeking insecurity and confidence in one’s own muscles. Seems like a lot to unpack, and that combination probably doesn’t really send a message that “becoming intimate with me is going to be a rewarding and fulfilling time.”
