Fondots

@Fondots@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Growth⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My wife generally says that she’s bi, but if she were coming out today she’s said that she’d probably call herself pan, that just wasn’t really a common term when back when she did come out so she’s spent most of her life calling herself bi, and she just kind of identifies with that label more at this point.

  To her, the term bi does kind of imply that someone is attracted only to males or females and would tend to exclude non-binary gender identities (though not necessarily trans people, being MtF or FtM does still kind of line up with a traditional gender binary, a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman)

  Which doesn’t really describe her, she’d be cool with any identity, which to her is more pan, but again she’s just been calling herself bi for so long it just feels weird to change that, and since she’s off the market at this point it’s a little bit of a moot point anyway since she’s not trying to get in anyone’s pants but mine.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People who work in medical offices, has anyone ever called to verify a doctor note for work or school?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  1. Why is this some research? Shouldn’t this just be a it allows or it doesn’t allow?

  Research can sometimes be as simple as “I googled it”

  But have you ever looked at the full text of HIPAA? Or really just about any law for that matter?

  HIPAA is something like 150 pages long, with a lot of specific details about what’s forbidden, permitted, and required under different circumstances. There’s a lot to comb over there.

  And it’s written in legalese, and there’s good reason that laws are written that way, but it is often difficult for the average person to parse.

  And there’s places where laws reference other laws, and then you may have to go look up the relevant parts of those laws to fully understand what the law you were initially looking up is trying to say.

  Point is that laws are complex and difficult for most people to understand, there’s a reason we have professions like lawyers and paralegals whose whole jobs are basically to understand what laws apply under what circumstances. Understanding the nuances involved is rarely as cut-and-dry as looking up the law and seeing it spelled out in plain English that “X is/isn’t legal” and when you see a law explained like that, there’s a good chance that it’s leaving out a lot of nuance about certain circumstances where the opposite might be true.

  3. If you are the person answering the phone, why do you care?

  Because being gainfully employed is how most people afford basic necessities like food and shelter, and if your boss finds out you’re doing that you’re not going to be keeping that job for very long.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PC Games like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  No Mans Sky comes to mind

  I wasn’t exactly crazy about the story personally, but its there, and the game feels fairly Minecraft-y to me since you also mentioned that game.

  I didn’t play it at launch, and I know that left a bit of a bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths, but in its current state I think its pretty amazing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did we get "bike" from "bicycle"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m betting on some language or accent just sort of dropping/mashing syllables together and that pronunciation just kind of catching on or getting passed along to someone else who further mangles to pronunciation until it finally ended up at bike.

  Personally, as a Philadelphian, when I say “bicycle” I’m usually not fully saying 3 syllables like “bi-sih-kul” it usually comes out more like “bise-kul”

  Take that a step further to maybe something like “bi-kul” and then finally onto “bike”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do people really give a shit on what a US President wear? I just see from time to time that they bring up the Tan Suit Incident with Obama. What is or was the big deal? I slept since then.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Most people do not consciously give a shit.

  Most people also subconsciously kind of do. People are going to tend to treat a guy wearing jeans and a hoodie, with bit of stubble differently than they would treat the same guy if he was clean shaven, in a well-tailored suit, than they would if he was in a grimy work clothes than if if he was wearing slacks and a polo… And that’s going to depend on you and the kind of experiences you’ve had and what kind of associations your brain has made with people who look certain ways. You almost certainly have some biases about this even if you don’t realize it.

  But those opinions can also be manipulated.

  Let’s look at John Fetterman, who is somewhat famous for wearing shorts and a hoodie whenever he can get away with it instead of the suit we normally associate with a politician.

  (And let’s pretend it’s 2019, before the stroke and he went mask-off as the piece of shit he’s always kind of been.)

  Democrats, overall, tended to look at him as a bit of a breath of fresh air. This wasn’t some well-groomed schmuck in a suit like all the other politicians we’ve come to know and hate. He looks like that guy you see at the local bar or riding the bus with you or out buying something at Walmart at 10pm to fix his leaky toilet because the hardware store is closed. He was sold as someone more like us, who shares our frustrations, and who was going to fight for us, and for a lot of people that worked.

  And let’s be real, have you ever looked at the fetterman-looking guy next to you on the bus and thought “yeah, this guy seems like he knows what he’s doing, I’d vote for him?” No, probably not. You probably didn’t think much about him at all. But based on how he dressed, you probably still subconsciously made some assumptions about him, like maybe whether or not he looked like someone you’d get along with, you may not have gotten as far as thinking about what he does for a living, but odds are that if you were asked to guess you probably wouldn’t have said that he’s a politician, you’d probably have guessed he works some sort of normal, dead-end job like the rest of us. If you saw a guy in a suit who wasn’t at a funeral or something, you’d probably be more likely to assume he works in, maybe not politics, but maybe a law firm, or in some sort of finance, that wherever he works he’s probably not the lowest guy on the totem pole, etc.

  Republicans, on the other hand, played things up the other way- that he showed disrespect to his office, if he can’t even be bothered to put on a suit and clean himself up a bit, can he really be trusted to do his job as a politician, etc. and that also worked for a lot of people on their side.

  But to a lot of those same Republicans, you could also easily spin things differently and they’d eat it up just as readily. If Fetterman ran as a Republican (and as we’re seeing now, he sure could have) the spin machine would probably have been more like:

  “This is what a real man looks like. He doesn’t wear skinny jeans or purple hair, he’s wearing shorts, not a skirt. He’s not some out-of-touch politician in a fancy suit from a metropolis like Philly or Pittsburgh, he’s a real working man from Braddock in the heart of pennsyltucky, where people are farmers and loggers and harvest clean-burning natural gas from the same earth that our forefathers worked for generations until those gay commies from the big city tried to take it away. He owns a shotgun and he’s not afraid to point it at the first black guy who cares to run past his house.”

  Fast forward a few years, if Fetterman was just entering politics now, saying he’d vote the way he has been, a lot of us would probably assume he’s a Republican, and be outraged that they’re not even trying to hide what they are by trying to install some skinhead-looking motherfucker who’s not even trying to look like a politician, they obviously just want some puppet who will vote for their bullshit.

  So those opinions are malleable and can be shaped by the context and what other people are saying about them.

  And politicians and the media are aware of that and try to use it to their advantage.

  If some talking head never pointed out that Obama was wearing a tan suit, most people probably would never have given it a second thought.

  For most of us a suit is a suit and we’re not looking into it a whole lot beyond that. Maybe, maybe we notice if the suit fits well, or is wrinkled, or is a really outdated style or otherwise a particularly unusual style choice, but so few of us wear or are around people in suits often enough that we just don’t have an eye for those kinds of details. We might clock a lighter colored suit as somewhat less formal than a darker colored one, but we’d still think that almost any suit is still appropriately dressy for just about anything but a funeral (in which case the suit should be dark,) a tan suit wouldn’t exactly turn heads in any board room or what-have-you, and previous presidents have worn tan suits without a lick of controversy.

  Some people do have stronger opinions about style and what level of formality is appropriate for different occasions, but most of those people aren’t in any position where we’re going to give much weight to their opinions.

  But some talking head latched onto that idea one way or another and realized they could spin up a bit of controversy over it, and their base was already primed to hate Obama for any reason they could come up with, so they latched right onto that idea. If it hadn’t been pointed out to them, I doubt anyone would have even noticed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ada Lovelace⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless… it is like for a space suit

  Fun fact, the space suits used in the Apollo program were made by Playtex

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why have we as a society just accepted the increasingly blinding bright lights of cars?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I sometimes borrow my dad’s truck, a '93 ranger, when my car is in the shop or I need to move something big

  And the headlights on that thing are terrible, after driving around in more modern vehicles it feels like they barely light up the road in front of you. It’s actually almost a little scary to drive at night sometimes.

  It does have halogen bulbs, not significantly different from the ones in my own car, but the way the reflectors and such are designed around those bulbs is clearly very different,.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When traffic comes to a standstill, drivers instantly shift left and right to create a Rettungsgasse, an emergency corridor right down the middle, so ambulances⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Anecdotally, 40-ish years ago, one of my mom’s relatives came to visit from Poland. There are a whole lot of wild stories about that visit and from when my mom visited Poland around that same time that highlighted a lot of differences between life in the US and from behind the iron curtain at the time.

  While he was here, her relative was amazed to see cars pulling off to the side to let emergency vehicles pass, that was apparently something totally new to him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The real shame is that the coffee table isn’t really visible because it’s pretty cool itself, it’s a hatch from a ship (I believe a WWII Liberty ship)

  Bit of family history with it too. My dad originally had it, but my mom hated it, so eventually it went to live with my grandfather. He died, and it ended up back in our basement. My sister and I both really liked it, and we had a bit of an agreement that whoever moved out first got the table, and I won.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m not totally sure where the bottles came from, we don’t really drink chianti, and they’ve just kind of been hanging around on a shelf somewhere, but they ultimately ended up on this chandelier

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My friend got an ouya, I think he mostly got it as a bit of a curiosity since he was a game dev student (and now does it professionally)

  It absolutely didn’t do anything particularly different or better than any other gadget we could have hooked up to the TV to game on, but we did have a lot of fun with it for a while. It was kind of nice that it was so small so he could carry it around easily if he wanted to take it somewhere for a party or something.

  And a few of the games we first discovered on the ouya are still mainstays of our parties when we manage to get together as busy adults.

  Through a series of moves, roommate swaps, and marriage, that ouya (though not the controller) has actually now ended up in my possession Image

  It’s on the left with my small collection of retro consoles and handhelds. Couple other cool bits of geeky paraphernalia scattered in there too. Disregard the mess on the coffee table and such, this was taken in the middle of some renovations, turns out I don’t take many pictures of my entertainment center.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should I do after discovering a collection of baby spiders in my home?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have some friends who used to have a really shitty apartment, first floor and basement of a shitty rowhome that by all rights should probably have been condemned.

  The basement was two rooms, a larger room with nothing much but an old claw foot bathtub (that appeared to be hooked up to a drain but had no faucet or any obvious pipes nearby where it could have ever had water running to it)

  And the spider room. I shit you not this room was almost nothing but floor to ceiling spider webs. Being a bunch of broke college kids with little enough use for the basement in general, they decided that they weren’t going to do anything about it. They just placed a sheet of plywood in front of the doorway and let the spiders do their thing.

  And the spiders, accepted and respected this arrangement. They lived there for several years and not once did they ever see a single spider in any other part of the apartment.

  The centipedes were another story, they frequently ventured into other parts of the house. One of those friends still likes to go on about how you can reason with spiders but not with centipedes.

  But, I can only assume due to the high spider and millipede population in this apartment, there was basically no other bugs to be found there. The house was in the sort of perpetual state of squalor that you’d expect from 3 guys living on their own for the first time. The pipes leaked, everything was drafty, there was often a thin coating of grime on nearly everything, they had mice and maybe the occasional rat, but there was not a single roach, beetle, or fly to be found.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Alright, so what do we do with that “slightly” (infact quite a bit) warmer water?

  Can’t just discharge it into a river. That hot water is gonna cause all kinds of havoc on the environment. Even if the temperature doesn’t outright kill things, warm water holds less oxygen so that’s going to harm fish, it’s probably gonna fuck up their spawning cycles because suddenly they have warm water in the middle of winter, it might cause algae blooms, etc.

  So we have to cool that water down. How are we gonna do that? We can spend even more money and energy to refrigerate it I suppose, but of course that would be stupid since these data centers are already using ridiculous amounts of energy.

  So most likely we’d just put it in some giant holding tanks and wait for it to cool off or maybe run it through a massive radiator to cool off. That’s even more land being taken up by these monstrosities, more maintenance needed, and at the end of the day, that’s still water sitting around somewhere besides in our aquifers and waterways where it’s needed, and we’re probably going to be losing even more to evaporation in the process.

  And while it’s being pumped around in those data centers, I’ll bet you it’s being run though all kinds of plastic pipes and such, maybe coming into contact with lead solder and such because these aren’t potable water systems, sounds like a great way to introduce more heavy metals and microplastics into the environment to me.

  And that 2% or so that’s being lost to evaporation? Some of these large data centers are using well in excess of a million gallons a day, so that’s 20,000 gallons a day lost to evaporation, so roughly every month you’re losing an entire Olympic sized swimming pool to evaporation. Again, that’s water that’s supposed to be in rivers and aquifers that’s now not.

  And what doesn’t evaporate? Well now any minerals, heavy metals, etc. that were in the water are now concentrated by that much. Hope your water treatment is prepared to handle that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is time ~25% faster now?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A whole lot of people just seem to have absolutely no sense of timing/rhythm.

  A really weird place I’ve noticed that is at my work as a 911 dispatcher.

  Once in a while we have to give CPR instructions over the phone, and a big part of that is counting with the caller to make sure they’re doing the chest compressions fast enough (100-120 beats per minute)

  I was in band back in high school, I can keep that sort of rhythm in my sleep (though my throat starts getting pretty dry depending on how long it takes responders to arrive and take over)

  But a handful of my coworkers really struggle with it, they count too fast or too slow, speed up and slow down, it’s a little terrifying to be honest.

  The ones who do manage to keep good time have mostly had at least some music training, or are at least keeping an eye on the seconds counting by on the clock on our computer to keep time.

  I just tried counting Mississippis with my eyes closed and a timer going, and I nailed it within a second. But I think I definitely went a little faster for the first 19 and then slowed down a little after that because there’s just less syllables in the numbers until you hit that point, and more after it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How prevalent are cash transactions in the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Until you have received the product or service, there is no actual debt. They don’t have to serve you if you won’t pay cash, don’t have to let you walk out of the store with merchandise, etc.

  Arguably at a sit-down restaurant where you’re ordering and being served before you pay, then there is a debt and they may have to accept cash payment

  But, and I’m not a lawyer so take this with a big grain of salt, I think it’s still their right to only accept payment in whatever form they want to, you’re effectively agreeing to their rules when you choose to patronize their business, and the thing about it being legal tender only really comes into play when they get the courts involved to collect on that debt- if you refuse to pay with electronic payments, gold coins, crypto, shiny beads, or whatever they insist on, and they take you to court over it, then they have to accept cash to settle that debt once that’s all sorted out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ireland is a Catholic majority country. Yet all the Americans I know who identify as Irish are Protestant. Why is that?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Appalachia

  That’s going to give you a big selection bias. A lot of Appalachians are “Scotch-Irish” (also called “Scots-Irish”) who came from Northern Ireland, which is more heavily Protestant than the rest of Ireland.

  Before that, their ancestors were from Scotland and northern England before immigrating to Ireland. In the UK and Ireland. I believe people with similar ancestry are usually called Ulster Scots (for the Ulster region of Ireland, if that wasn’t obvious)

  And in addition to that, there were probably a lot of Catholic people/families who converted along the way after arriving here since the US is overall mostly protestant of one flavor or another, and they just sort of assimilated into that or wanted to avoid anti-catholic discrimination (which has been a thing at different times and places around the US, the KKK for example has historically been very anti-catholic, and even as recently as JFK there was a decent amount of people concerned that since he was a Catholic that he’d be taking orders from the Pope or something)

  In other parts of the country you’ll probably find more Catholics of Irish ancestry. Anecdotally, growing up in the Philly suburbs, myself being partially of Irish Catholic descent, I only remember one protestant Irish family being in school with me, but plenty of Irish Catholics (there may have been others, but I only remember them, we didn’t exactly go around discussing religion all that often)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Truck is Stupid Big⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s one way to say you don’t understand how tires work

  Sure the tires are expensive, but replacing a valve stem is only going to cost maybe about $50, if you call around a little you might even find somewhere that will do it for like $20.

  Now if it’s not just a stem and has a tire pressure monitor, that gets a little pricey, that might be over $100. Most of those aren’t just a rubber stem but made out of metal, so not as easy to just “snip.” But usually it can still be replaced with a plain stem as long as they’re willing to ignore the light on their dash.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Even if we found a feasible way through physics to travel through time, wouldn't it still be impossible due to the evolution of bacteria and our immune systems?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  We can probably make a pretty good guess, but we don’t know everything

  Let’s say 10,000 years ago, some giant asteroid passed close enough to earth that its gravity nudged the earth a couple centimeters out of its previous orbit

  Maybe since then, that asteroid has continued on its merry way and left the solar system or crashed into Jupiter, or broke apart, or is just out still orbiting the sun somewhere in a place we haven’t detected it, or we have detected it but just haven’t done all the calculations to figure out where that particular space rock was 10k years ago to know that it probably nudged the earth a tiny bit.

  Now we transport you back in time and account for all the other movement of the earth, but not that little nudge.

  So you’re appearing a few centimeters off from where you should. If you’re lucky, you still end up with solid ground under your feet, or maybe you end up a couple centimeters in the air and you fall on your ass once you blink into existence in the past.

  Or maybe you end up with your foot trying to occupy the same space as a rock because you’re a couple centimeters lower than you should be. How does that even play out? Does your foot and the rock explode? Does your foot get stuck inside of the rock? Do they merge into one horrible mess of rock and flesh?

  And even if we account for all of the earth’s movements through space, what was at the exact point on earth you’re currently existing in some arbitrary amount of time ago?

  Tectonic plates have been drifting around, you gotta account for that, the spot on the north american plate that I’m standing on right wasn’t in the same spot relative to the rest of the earth.

  And even accounting for that, which I don’t think we can really do super accurately, there’s erosion and a million other random environmental factors to consider, go back far enough, and the space I’m in right now might have been inside of a mountain or a glacier or something. There might have been a tree growing right where I’m standing. It might have been in the middle of a wildfire or a flash flood, or there might have been a dinosaur standing right where I am now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nerve-controlled prosthetics⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know if these are or aren’t nerve controlled, I suspect it’s going bad the muscle movement you described

  But let’s assume they are in fact controlled by nerves

  Most of the movement of your fingers actually comes from muscles in your forearm pulling on tendons that go into your fingers.

  So assuming you wanted to hook a prosthetic up to the same nerves and such you’d have used for your real fingers, you’d still probably end up flexing your forearm muscles because that’s where those nerves go

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Think Bold⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a lot of outdoorsy hobbies, most people who are serious about camping and hiking and such are also pretty good about leaving no trace.

  But there’s also a lot of people out there who aren’t serious about it, they just think it would be fun to go out in the woods and have a party or whatever and they leave a lot of litter, start fires in inappropriate places, etc.

  And at least around me, that’s generally a pretty safe thing for them to do. Theres no really no large predators left for them to be concerned about.

  And I sometimes think “maybe if we just reintroduced wolves, that might be enough to dissuade some of these assholes from making a mess in the great outdoors”

  Those of us who spend a lot of time outside know there’s usually not too much to worry about as long as you’re taking some basic precautions, but almost every time I talk to a non-outdoorsy person, it seems like they’re always afraid of getting attacked by wolves or bears.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I actually find a job that isn't retail?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My first job was pizza delivery for a local shop. My mom knew someone who worked there, and I got the job through her. They weren’t exactly hiring for the position yet, but they knew they were going to need someone seen because their current delivery guy was going back to college in a couple months. She knew I was looking for a job, floated my name to the owner, and he called me.

  Second job was a warehouse shipping/receiving position. Again, got it through a family friend who was their accountant or something. He mentioned they were looking for someone, I said I might be interested, and he basically set everything up for me to come in and interview and I was basically hired on the spot.

  Now I work in 911 dispatch. This is basically the only job I actually found and applied for myself, I saw they were doing some sort of hiring event and I thought it was something I could do. Still though, I worked my connections, my brother in law is a firefighter, and knows a lot of people in local public safety/first responder circles, so I got him to ask someone he knows who works here to put in a good word for me. It could be that I just really impressed them, but I only had one interview and a lot of people who got hired at the same time as me, some arguably with more impressive resumes, had to go through an additional round or two of interviews.

  So as the old saying goes, it’s not so much what you know as who you know.

  When I was applying for jobs on my own back at 16-18 years old, even shitty retail gigs, I never seemed to get anywhere, online, paper applications, etc. never seemed to go anywhere, occasionally I got an interview but they never panned out. But when I know someone, or know someone who knows someone, I have a 100% success rate of getting hired and I’ve gotten to skip some of the bureaucracy to boot, and they’ve turned out to be pretty stable, reasonably well-paying jobs given my level of experience and such.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come they don't put out episodes of like Invincible, Simpsons, or whatever doing a side by side of the actor speaking into the microphone while watching what happens the cartoon?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Also, when they’re recording the audio, they’re usually not just reading through the whole script in one go

  They’re probably doing multiple takes of most of the lines, changing little things until they get the take that feels right

  So you’d end up with a bunch of choppy little cuts instead of a nice long continuous shot of the VA doing their thing in a recording booth like OP is probably imagining

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sunglasses suggestions⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve always been a cheap sunglasses guy, I buy whatever brand they’re selling at whatever store I happen to be at when I need sunglasses. I usually go through a couple pairs of them a year, they get lost or broken, or the lenses get all scratched up.

  Arguably I could be more careful with them, but $20 a couple times a year for something I use almost every single day seems more than worth it to me.

  One time I came across a good deal on a pair of Oakley’s, and I figured I’d treat myself. IIRC they were a return at an REI garage sale, they looked brand new and the tag said they were just returned because the original customer did like them or they fit poorly or something.

  It was a relatively cheap model of Oakleys to begin with, and with the discount I think they came out to like $60, which still made them the most expensive pair of sunglasses I’ve ever owned.

  I liked them, I don’t think they were in any particular way better than my usual cheap sunglasses.

  And about 3 days later I found out that if you drop them and someone accidentally steps on them before you pick them up, they absolutely break the same way a cheap pair of sunglasses would.

  So no more fancy sunglasses for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I got in a collision with a car from the 70s with a car today, would not the 70s car win out since it would primarily be metal? If so why don't people buy more 70's cars?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If I have to pick only one, I’m going to go with modern crumple zones

  But man, I do wish we had some kind of magical smart metal that could be as rigid as an old car for low speed collisions, but still crumple for more serious impacts.

  Because when you drive an old shitbox like I do, pretty much any damage is enough to total it, and having to get a new car really sucks when the accident was minor enough that no one was going to get hurt anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do office going men still wear suits in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends a lot on the field you work in, your company’s policies, what part of the country you’re in, and, to some extent, personal preference.

  The average rank-and-file, working stiff, pencil-pusher type? Probably not. They’re probably wearing business casual- slacks, maybe a shirt and tie, or maybe just a polo shirt or something along those lines. Maybe they wore a suit to their job interview, and maybe one or two important meetings and events.

  Higher-level management and executives might, certain sales positions, lawyers, politicians, finance/banking jobs, etc.

  But even then it can vary a lot. They might only wear a suit for certain meetings and such but change into more casual clothes for the rest of the day, some parts of the country are stuffier than others, I’m pretty sure you’re going to see more people wearing suits in the Midwest than on the coasts.

  And of course, some people just like wearing suits, I work for my county government, one of the higher-ups I saw around a lot, the director of some department or another, tended to show up in a full 3-piece suit. He didn’t have to, no one else at a similar level in the county dresses that way, and the guy who replaced him usually just wears khakis and a shirt & tie, and sometimes even just a polo, but this guy liked wearing a suit (his last name had the word “vest” in it, and I think he found that amusing)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a math professor from Nigeria

  The dude spoke like 6 different languages, but when he first came to America, he barely spoke a word of English (which is how he ended up in math, numbers work the same in any language, and probably why he was really good at teaching math)

  But the dude had seen some shit in his day, and we’d occasionally get some absolutely insane lore drops about armed militias and such rolling through his village, I’m pretty sure he spent some time as a child soldier, he’d occasionally get a little nervous if he heard a helicopter fly overhead, etc.

  I’m glad he taught math, because like I said, he was really good at it, but man, I would have just signed up for a class to hear him talk about his life.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do they still offer shadows to shadow their work and learn a trade you want to try? Or is that the old days? I thought it would be neat to be an Electrician.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re talking about apprenticeship, it’s still very much a thing in the trades. I don’t work in the trades, so I don’t really know what the process is like these days, and it likely varies a lot place-to-place, but if you’re thinking it works by just finding an electrician and saying “hey, can teach me to do stuff with wires?” Then following them around learning and doing grunt-work for them for a while, I’m pretty sure that’s just not how it works and there’s going to be at least some classroom training involved these days.

  In theory, internships are supposed to fill a similar role, though of course a whole lot of internships are kind of bullshit.

  To me, a “job-shadow” is just kind of a “come in and watch for maybe a day or two to see what the job is like” kind of situation, not really a way to actually teach you to do the job.

  That’s something that actually happens a lot in my job (911 dispatch) at least at the agency I work for.

  Part of the hiring process is for potential new hires to come in to sit with us for a couple hours, listen to us answering and dispatching calls, ask us some questions, and just kind of get a feel for what the job is like. For us this happens after an initial interview and aptitude test, and potentially before a second round of interviews depending on how many applicants we get.

  We also get some other people coming in to sit with us from other public safety type jobs so that they can see how things work on our end. EMT students, firefighters, police academy students, I had someone from I think our Department of Health & Human Services sit with me one time, etc.

  And trainees from our current class sometimes sit with us to see how what they’re learning in the classroom applies to actually doing the job.

  And then once they’re out of the classroom, for a while they’re out on the floor doing the job with a trainer sitting with them, listening to them handling calls and helping them as needed.

  And a lot of jobs have something kind of similar to that last part where with varying degrees of formality, where you have someone assigned to train you and get you up to speed. I used to work in a warehouse, and for the first few weeks I was basically following around another warehouse employee as he taught me how to do everything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone explain the Birds and the Bees to me? I get its related to sex somehow but was never told the story or where it got started or how come a plant and insect?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  True, but fathers have been threatening their daughters’ suitors since time immemorial.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone explain the Birds and the Bees to me? I get its related to sex somehow but was never told the story or where it got started or how come a plant and insect?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s probably not the origin of the phrase, but I remember seeing some sitcom where a father sat his daughter’s boyfriend down to give him the “the birds and the bees” talk

  The boyfriend said something like “no thanks, I already heard it from my parents”

  And the father replied along the lines of “not my version you haven’t, you see, when the bee stings the bird, the bee dies”

  Not-so-subtly threatening the boyfriend.

  In my head it’s Red Foreman giving that talk, but I’m not 100% on that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don;t most of us Americans only need like one foreign language to pass high school? Why not make it mandatory for like 3 or 4 languages?Would that not give us the upper hand when traveling?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It varies a lot from one school to another, at mine we did “block scheduling” so you had 4, 90 minute classes a day, and different classes 1st and 2nd semester

  Which had its pluses and minuses. You could definitely get a lot more instruction time in during a class that way

  But for something like a language, if you’re unlucky and your schedule works out that you had it first semester one year and second the next, you’re basically going a whole year where you may not have practiced those language skills.

  Other schools around me I think usually had 45 or 60 minute classes, but sometimes electives which might include language might have gotten shorter timeslots than core classes