Fondots

@Fondots@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it better to leave a country, or stay behind to fight for it? And what about the ethics of fleeing instead of staying behind?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think there’s any easy answer here.

  If you stay, are you able and willing to fight and to what degree under which circumstances? What do you have to offer? Will you be more of a liability than an asset? How do you weigh your personal safety and wellbeing or those of your family and friends against the country or world? What do your prospects look like in whatever country you choose to flee to?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why can’t HVAC be made smarter?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My friends family has a shore house we’ve gone to a few times. It’s an old house, built before a/c was a thing, and still doesn’t have any. We throw open some windows and the house stays pretty comfortable, it’s warm but not at all unbearable even when the temps are in the 80s, 90s, occasionally even over 100 (fahrenheit of course)

  It does help that it’s at the shore so there’s basically always a nice breeze.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would we choose a "world language" in a fair way, for a hypothetical one world government?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I don’t think it’s ever exactly been a widespread movement among the general world population, but there have been a few interesting examples of groups that have adopted it, and at times it’s been big enough to draw the notice of some fairly influential people, both positive and negative, and you can kind of imagine that maybe if things had gone just a little differently at a couple different points that it might have been able to gain some traction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would we choose a "world language" in a fair way, for a hypothetical one world government?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think your first sentence got a little butchered by autocorrect, I assume it’s supposed to say “so many people”

  But I agree that America (and honestly many other primarily English speaking countries) would be a big holdout if anything but English was to be adopted as the auxiliary language. Many other countries would probably be somewhat more open to it, but it has been tried before and never seems to gain traction (esperanto almost had a moment in the early 20th century where an esperanto-speaking county was almost established and where it almost became a working language for the League of Nations- the latter never came to pass basically because the French threw a hissy fit over it.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How would we choose a "world language" in a fair way, for a hypothetical one world government?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I agree to a point, different languages and experiences can help to shape your mind in different ways which is overall a strength

  However, if you’re not able to effectively communicate those thoughts to the people who need to hear them, it’s not doing anyone any good

  I like the idea of an international auxiliary language, not to replace anyone’s primary language, but basically to be everyone’s second language.

  Day-to-day I want everyone to keep using their native tongues, and where possible I’d like them to learn each other’s languages too. But there are some 7000+ languages in use around the world, no one can learn them all, and having a common language to fall back on could be incredibly useful for facilitating communications between different people

  There have been a few attempts to come up with one over the years, either by selecting an existing language, or coming up with a constructed language, probably the most famous example of the latter is Esperanto, though that didn’t exactly take off the way its creator might’ve hoped.

  Full disclosure - I’m teaching myself Esperanto. I am under no delusion that it’s ever going to fill that role as an international auxiliary language, and I’m not sure I’d want it to be, there’s plenty of valid criticism of it, and I think there could be better options

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did you get your job?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Personally, I’m happy to just chill where I am for a couple decades until I can retire. If I have to work, this honestly feels about as good as it gets for me. I don’t have any desire to climb the ladder or go hunting for a new job.

  I like the hours/schedule, we do 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation, which is pretty common in this field, so it’s a long shift but it’s a long shift sitting in an air conditioned bunker, and unless you come in for overtime you never have to work more than 3 days in a row without a 2 day break. Now those 3 days are weekends, which sucks, but the flip side is every other weekend you have a 3 day weekend. And if you plan your vacations and such right you only need to take 2 days to get a whole week off, so my PTO can go a long way. Here we start off with about 2 weeks of vacation time (“about” because it’s based on 8 hour days and we work 12, it more or less works out the same but you’re always kind of left with some fraction of a day carrying over) then after 5 years you get another week, and again at a couple other milestones years. I actually really struggle to use up all of my PTO personally because nearly everything I do fits into a 3 day weekend.

  Benefits are solid, pension, decent medical plan, sometimes you can qualify for first responder discounts, etc.

  Different places have different policies on this, but where I am what you do between calls is pretty much up to you, as long as you’re not bothering anyone or making a mess, you can bring in a laptop and play video games or watch movies, read, work on some crafts, whatever as long as you can put it down when the phone rings.

  I work night shift, so things can get pretty dead and you get a lot of downtime between calls. Most people work 7-7, but I managed to snag myself a 3pm-3am shift, which I think is great- I get to sleep in until noon every day, but I don’t have to turn my schedule totally upside down if I need to do something in the morning.

  We’re not union in my county, and while normally I’m all for unions, it’s worked out well for us so far, because one of the first concessions that tends to get made in contract negotiations is mandatory overtime in some form because like I said everywhere struggles with staffing issues, and so far they’ve done a decent job of keeping our pay competitive without it (probably because I think the dispatchers in most if not all of our surroundings counties are unionized, so they know we might jump ship to them if they don’t pay us competitively)

  And for all of those practical reasons, it also feels good to know I’m helping people. I have absolutely saved lives in my time here, I’ve delivered babies, I’ve helped people through disasters and all manner of scary situations.

  And it’s always interesting. When the phone rings I never know what’s going to be on the other end, which of course has its ups and downs, but it’s always interesting. Some of the people and the things they call about are absolutely infuriating of course, but no matter what it is I always get a great story. I never come home to my wife asking me “how was your day” and have to answer with some boring “same shit, different day” kind of answer, there’s always something interesting. Sometimes it’s something I’m proud of, sometimes it’s something I’m pissed off about, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, and sometimes it’s “can you believe somebody actually called about this?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How did you get your job?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m a 911 dispatcher, basically every dispatch center in the country is always hiring. There’s a lot of turnover, obviously it’s not a job everyone is cut out for and people get burned out, but also people use it as a stepping stone or career builder to move onto other things, a couple of my coworkers want to be cops and this looks good on that application, one went to work for FEMA, a couple have gone to be the dispatchers at local stations, people get promoted or transfer to other county positions (my agency is part of our county department of public safety, in some areas it might be part of your sheriff’s department, local PD, etc) or just go chasing higher paychecks or dream jobs (pay varies a lot around the country, we make decent enough money where I am, but some places really pay peanuts)

  I saw an ad on social media somewhere that they had a hiring event going on, so I went. I was working in a warehouse at the time, and a job where I could sit down in the air conditioning sounded really attractive.

  Civil service type jobs were already on my radar, I looked into becoming a park ranger for a while, and I’m an eagle scout, so I had a solid grounding on first aid and such.

  I showed up, filled out an application, took their aptitude test (we, and a lot of other agencies use something called criticall if you want to get an idea what that test was like. Some typing, reading comprehension, map reading, listening to some sample calls and answering questions about them, etc.)

  I passed the test, so as part of the hiring event I got an interview on the spot. If I applied outside of that, I probably would have had to schedule separate times for the test and interview.

  I did alright in the interview so they scheduled me for a job shadow to come in and sit in the room to listen to calls and radio dispatch for a couple hours.

  Then a while later I got my conditional offer. I had to get a hearing, vision, and drug test, and schedule a psych eval with the county psychologist.

  You all know what hearing and vision tests are like I hope, for the drug test they did a hair test. I shave my head, so I was expecting them to take some beard hair, but apparently their policy is to do underarms if that’s the case.

  The psych eval wasn’t anything too in depth, sat down with him for a few minutes, chatted about my mental health (no real issues there) then I got handed a very long test booklet to go fill out, lots of multiple choice questions that seemed to basically be gauging if I can play well with others.

  And I assume at some point in there they ran background checks and such. Some places get really in depth with that, interviews with the sheriff, polygraph tests, etc. but mine was all pretty out of sight and out of mind.

  Then class started. About a week into it we had to go to the county detectives office to be fingerprinted. But otherwise after that it was just all training.

  Requirements here are pretty minimal, clean background check, high school diploma/GED, ability to pass all the pre employment screening, etc. At my agency past drug use isn’t necessarily a disqualifier, as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired and don’t get caught lying about anything you have done. Some other places are of course more strict about that.

  If anyone thinks they may want to pursue a dispatch job, your local agency may list the job under a couple different names, dispatcher, calltaker, telecommunicator, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to cylindrical plugs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The first words in the body of his post are “barrel jacks” so to me it definitely reads like he knows exactly what they are and they are what inspired his post.

  Since other, probably more common, names for “coaxial power connector” include things like “barrel plugs” and “barrel connectors” and such terms are used pretty frequently in the article you linked.

  The rest of it feels like he’s just trying to explain the concept to people who aren’t as familiar with them.

  But otherwise I agree with your comment, the lack of a standard is a big reason. In my various bins of wires, cables, and adapters I can find plenty of different mismatched wall warts with the same connector but otherwise wildly different specs. You don’t really want to be mixing and matching those all willy-nilly.

  Also they’re overall a fine connector if all you need to do is deliver power to something, you only need a hot and neutral wire and the corresponding part of the inner and outer part of the plug (I feel like I’ve seen some that have a ground too, but don’t quote me on that, I’m not going to go digging through my bins to confirm that)

  But nowadays we also often need a way to carry data to/from the device in addition to charging it. So to carry those data signals in addition to power you’d need more connections in the plug. You’d need to either have a couple pins inside the barrel which would need to be lined up properly which kind of negates the convenience of it being omnidirectional like OP wants (think maybe something like a ps/2 or S-Video plug) or you’d need to have multiple concentric rings which would make the plug bulky, probably too much so to conveniently fit into something like a cell phone.

  Now a lot of the devices we’re charging by USB don’t necessarily need or even support any sort of data through their ports, and so could be charged or powered just as well through a barrel plug. So why USB?

  IMO a lot of it comes back to iPods. For a lot of us who were around in the pre-smartphone days, that was our first experience with something that charged over USB. I seem to recall that apple didn’t even include a wall charger with them (pretty sure I remember a Foamy the Squirrel flash animation where he ranted about that) you just got a USB cable and either charged it off your computer or you went out and bought a wall adapter.

  I’m sure that was a cost-cutting/cash-grab attempt by apple. They could sell you an iPod without a charger and save a few pennies there, and then also sell you a charger for even more money.

  Around that same time, phones were also getting USB ports, or some proprietary connectors that you could buy an overpriced cable to connect it to a computer via USB so that you could pull your .5 megapixel flip phone photos off of it and post them to your Myspace. Often they came with a charger that had a mini or micro USB port or the proprietary connector on one end and was hard-wired to a wall wart on the other end.

  I’m sure some bean counters at Nokia or Motorola or wherever decided “why the hell are we going to add 5¢ to the production cost of a phone to have a charging port and a USB port for data when USB already can deliver 5v of power? Just build the phone battery around that and nix the charging port”

  And I’m sure that played out with plenty of other devices that needed power and data connections- GPS, PDAs, etc.

  And so from there, people started having an iPod and cell phone in their pockets that both charged over USB, and before long they’d have a USB charger at home, at work, in their car, in every room in their house, so other devices kind of latched onto that as sort of a marketing thing “you don’t need to keep track of a separate charger just for this thing, you can use the same one you charge your phone with”

  And of course before too long TVs, game consoles, AV receivers, etc. all got USB ports too.

  As I recall, it mostly started with things that made sense, things you were probably using with your phone or computer anyway- Bluetooth earpieces, mice, keyboards, etc. then sort of branched out into everything else over the years.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨are terfs actual feminists or do most transphobic women just call themselves that?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re going to get into some “no true Scotsman” territory here pretty quickly, there’s not exactly a worldwide organization that determines the “feminist agenda” or a universally agreed-upon checklist that determines that you are or aren’t a feminist if you check so many boxes. It’s going to depend a bit on who you are, where you come from, etc.

  For example, if you come from some sort of backwards ultra-conservative Christian background, it might be fair to call you a feminist just because you think women should be allowed to wear pants instead of a dress, because in that context you are, even if most of the rest of the world has long-since moved past that stage of feminism.

  I think most if not all TERFs probably hold some amount of views that could be called feminist from certain perspectives. Whether or not they mesh with any of the more mainstream views on feminism is a different matter entirely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a metaphor you like in your language?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Esperanto

  krokodili- verb, literally something like “to crocodile”

  It means when an Esperanto-speaker speaks in a language other than Esperanto while amongst other Esperanto-speakers.

  No one’s quite sure why that’s the term for it, most likely because crocodiles have a big mouth.

  When I learned that, it suddenly made a lot of sense why Duolingo taught me the word for “crocodile” so early.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨In some countries (such as the USA), sending encrypted communications via Amateur Radio is illegal, but how likely will the government actually enforce it, and how severe would the consequences be?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m maybe not the best person to answer but I think the general idea is that it’s supposed to be an open communication for any licensed person to use and any that anyone is allowed to listen to, and it’s supposed to be used exclusively for non-commercial purposes, and there’s some additional regulations about who can use it and how

  If you’re sending encrypted transmissions, no one can tell if you’re using it appropriately or not. You may be transmitting on frequencies your license doesn’t give you permissions to use, you may be using it for commercial purposes, you may not be identifying properly, etc.

  Radio frequencies are a somewhat limited resource. There’s only so many frequencies allocated to amateur use or to different commercial uses, etc. If someone’s using amateur frequencies in a way they shouldn’t, they’re tying up those parts of the spectrum so that properly licensed users can’t use them for the purposes they’re reserved for

  And if they’re encrypted you can’t really differentiate the lawful from the unlawful users making it harder to police.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is there anything stopping constant impeachment votes?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  it would need a majority vote to even get started

  Which seems to imply that the absolute first step is for there to be a vote.

  So I think OP’s question is really- “Even though it’s not going to go anywhere, why can’t democrats just keep asking for that initial vote for different chargers to clog up the house?”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For French origin words like "meter" American English inverted the last letters of "metre" to better match the pronunciation. Why isn't it also the case for other similar situations like "possible"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If we inverted the last letters of “possible” to “possibel,” that wouldn’t really match how we pronounce it

  I’d probably try to read it as something like “possi-bell”

  But our actual pronunciation is more along the lines of “possi-bull” not exactly, and I feel like different dialects might maybe lean more towards the last syllable being more like bill, ball, or boll, but I can’t really imagine any dialect where the pronunciation would match a “bel” spelling.

  It’s sort of an unintentional half vowel sound that just happens after making the “b” noise, and not really something we’re intentionally trying to put into the word.

  Linguists probably have some specific terminology for it, but I’m no linguist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could Jim Henson modified Kermit the Frog slightly to be like Lorne Michaels?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure kermit drew some inspiration from Lorne and probably many other people that Jim knew

  I kind of think of Kermit as almost a stock character.

  I’m sure someone with some sort of Clown College degree (meaning actually professional clowning education, not something goofy and useless like, you know, a Harvard law degree or what-have-you) could probably chime in about how Kermit exhibits some aspects of one or more of the stock Commedia dell’arte characters or something along those lines.

  Unfortunately that sort of high-level comedic theory is beyond my education, but I’ll do my best

  He’s the everyman, the straight man, he’s you

  He’s the embodiment of when your friend was supposed to come pick you up a half hour ago and they’re nowhere to be found and not answering their phone

  Or when you’re trying to schedule your next D&D session but 2 people have scheduling conflicts you’re trying to work around, one guy ghosts you and you’re not sure if he’s coming or not, another wants to bring 3 friends and a dog for some reason, and the last one is just blowing up the group chat with his insane homebrew magical gunslinger succubus character idea and their 14 page backstory.

  He’s you when you’re the only one who did their part of the group project and you’re fumbling your way through the presentation you cobbled together on your lunch break

  He’s when your girlfriend is upset with you and you don’t know why

  Or when you look around and it seems like everyone around you is an idiot, an asshole, or maybe just clinically insane.

  And he puts up with it because despite all their flaws and quirks, these are his friends and he wants to spend time with them and help them to achieve their dreams, and they all feel the same about him, and he’s not perfect himself, he’s got his own weird bag of insecurities and neuroses that he carries around with him. He yells, he loses his patience, he can’t always get a word in edgewise, he runs around flailing his arms and screaming like we all want to do sometimes, he gets depressed and thinks that everything is fucked, but with a little help from those crazy assholes he loves he pushes on and usually things work out alright in the end, even if they didn’t quite go according to plan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it ethical for a parent to distribute inheritance based on the child(ren)'s mental capacity (aka refusing to give an inheritance to child(ren) with reduced mental capacity)?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is true, and I did think about mentioning that but decided to keep it brief because once I start talking about trusts I’d find myself out of my depth pretty quickly and probably open up a rabbit hole of other financial strategies I’m not prepared or qualified to go down (and also to keep my comment at a more readable length)

  But since we opened that can of worms (and like I said, this is getting out of my depth, so there’s a very real possibility that some or all of what I have to say after this is wrong, so take it for what it’s worth)

  We also don’t know how much money we’re talking about here. The line between qualifying for benefits and not can be razor thin sometimes, and while we might assume that we’re talking about 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars or even more where a trust would absolutely make sense, we might actually only be talking about a couple thousand bucks, maybe not even enough to afford a couple months of rent depending on where you are, but potentially enough to fuck up someone’s benefits depending on where some government bean counters drew the line. It might be difficult or impossible to find a financial institution willing to act as a trustee for such a small amount, and there may not be any individual they trust to fill that role, and once the lawyers and such are paid there may not even be much left over.

  There’s also the possibility that the parents are counting on the sibling(s) to sort of act as trustees without putting it in writing. We don’t know what their relationships and personalities are like, or what conversations they’ve had with their parents that maybe OP isn’t privy to. There could be an understanding there that they’re getting everything so that they can continue to provide for their disabled sibling after the parents are gone, and OP hasn’t been made aware of that (some people are really uncomfortable talking about this kind of stuff and avoid it even though they really should) or misunderstood what the intention is. That of course depends on the siblings being trustworthy and generally having their shit together well enough, which isn’t a given of course and their situation could change drastically.

  There’s also the possibility that a trust is exactly what’s happening and OP either misunderstood it or just plain doesn’t like it. A lot of people out there are pretty clueless about financial matters. If the siblings were named as the trustee (it’s often not a good idea to have the trustee be a close relative, but that’s neither here nor there) I could see some people viewing the situation as “they left all the money to my siblings” because they’re not getting a big one time payout and the money has to go through their siblings in some fashion.

  Again, I’m talking all in hypotheticals, there are countless “ifs,” “ands” and “buts” here, we don’t know the specifics of OPs situation so we can only speculate.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did people in the 90s/early 00s say that the internet "couldn't be taken down"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t recall ever hearing that specifically

  Somewhat similar though, I remember being told that anything you put out on the internet is out there forever. Which may not technically be true, there’s a lot of lost pieces of internet history, but the core of that statement isn’t really to be taken literally, it’s more that once you put something online it’s out of your control what everyone else who might have access to it does with that data, you can’t really control what people download, screenshot, save, repost, or when it may resurface.

  But back to what you’re saying - even with China and Russia, and other attempts at censorship, the internet still carries on. You can take down, wall off, censor, etc parts of the internet for a lot of people, but taking the entire internet down would be a massive undertaking, probably more than what any country or even any realistically feasible alliance of countries could hope to achieve, as long as there are people with computers linked together somewhere, the internet endures in some fashion.

  There’s a lot of redundancy in the internet, there’s no one big box to blow up or one cable to cut that carries the entirety of the internet, it’s millions of devices all linked together in millions of different ways that make up the internet. You can take down parts of it, maybe even most of of it, but it would be nearly impossible to never every last thread of the internet without some truly apocalyptic event happening, even if all that’s left at the end of the day is two nerds on opposite sides of the planet with ham radios hooked up to laptops sending emails back and forth, or some friends sending memes back and forth on thumb drives via carrier pigeon, you could still say that the internet is alive, if not exactly thriving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it ethical for a parent to distribute inheritance based on the child(ren)'s mental capacity (aka refusing to give an inheritance to child(ren) with reduced mental capacity)?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s also worth having frank discussions with your kids about their inheritance and encouraging them to work things out themselves ahead of time.

  My family has maybe a bit unusual but I think very healthy relationship with death. It comes for us all eventually, no sense dancing around it.

  There’s no complicated inheritance situations in my family, everything gets divided up evenly among them. If they don’t have kids it gets divided up evenly among their nieces/nephews.

  So for example my parents estate gets split between my sister and myself, my uncle who doesn’t have kids gets split between us and my cousin, my cousin gets his parents’ all to himself.

  We’ve already got things divvied up amongst ourselves pretty well. As long as my sister signs over her claim to our parent’s house, I’ll sign over my third of our uncle’s house to her, and she’s happy to buy our cousin out of his third or trade him for her current house (which would also have the benefit of getting all 3 of us in the same town, cousin has some disabilities and it would be nice to have us all nearby in case of emergencies, or the payout from my sister or money from sale of her house plus his own inheritance from his parents would set him up pretty well)

  We also occasionally call dibs on some other desirable belongings, like my uncles skillsaw

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it ethical for a parent to distribute inheritance based on the child(ren)'s mental capacity (aka refusing to give an inheritance to child(ren) with reduced mental capacity)?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s no one size fits all answer here, it’s going to depend on how much money, how severe the childs disabilities are and what their care needs are, and what other sort of inheritance might be on the table ( for example one child gets the money and another child gets the house)

  If the child is able to live on their own, then yeah, it’s a dick move and the parents are just playing favorites and being ableist.

  If they have significant care needs- nursing home, psychiatric treatment, home health aides, visiting nurses, etc. then there might be some logical arguments to be made. If they’re already qualifying for some sort of government assistance then a large windfall of cash could potentially disrupt those benefits since they now have too much money to qualify.

  That can be a real headache to navigate, they may need to arrange all new care for themselves, maybe switch doctors, find new housing, etc. which may be a lot for them to manage depending on the extent of their disabilities, and unless that inheritance is incredibly large it will probably run out at some point and leave them in a position where they need to navigate the system to get back on those government benefits, which is often no small feat.

  So there could potentially be situations where it’s better for them to not leave them money and cause significant disruptions to their care and living arrangements.

  This is all totally hypothetical without knowing the specifics of the situation. There’s a million different things to consider here and everyone’s situation is unique, and at best we’re getting one side of this story and don’t really know what the parents thoughts and reasoning are since we haven’t heard in directly from them (and it could very well be that their reason is just as shitty as it appears on the surface, I won’t discount that possibility)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When leftists say "landlord are parasites" or similar dislike of landlords, do they also mean the people that own like a couple of houses as an investment, or only the big landlords?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  People need a place to live, they don’t need stocks to live. By owning more properties than you need you are contributing to a scarcity and inflated pricing for a basic necessity.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If you speak a second language better than your native language, would you describe your second language skill as "native" or "fluent"?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like that leaves a little weird wiggle room though.

  Let’s say you’re born in a Spanish speaking country, maybe Mexico, for the first few years of life you grow up surrounded by Spanish speakers, your first words are in Spanish, you only know Spanish, everyone you know only speaks Spanish.

  Then when you’re about 3 years old, before you’re even forming really solid, permanent memories, you go to live in the US, you’re surrounded by English speakers, almost everyone around you stops speaking Spanish regularly and switches to English, your English vocabulary quickly catches up to or maybe even surpasses your Spanish ability. Your first real memories are of people speaking English, and you spend the rest of your life primarily speaking English. You still speak Spanish though, you keep up with your education in that language and can speak both fluently.

  I think there’s a valid argument that both could be considered your native language, even if Spanish was your first language, you’ve still grown up speaking both.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Will the price of Freeze Driers go down? (USA question)⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It depends, some things, like freeze dried fruit may not necessarily need to be rehydrated.

  For things that need to be rehydrated, you may not need as much water to rehydrate it to be edible as would be in the regular ingredients. Hypothetically if you were to make soup from scratch, you’d lose some of the water to evaporation as you cook it. If you were to premake and dehydrate soup, it wouldn’t need to be cooked as long or to as high of a temperature - everything is already cooked you just need to rehydrate it and warm it up to your liking, no need to get it up to a boil and simmer it for however many minutes or hours so less is lost to evaporation.

  And depending on the area you’re backpacking in, you’re probably going to be refilling you water from streams and such several times along the way so you can plan around that. In the areas I normally backpack, you’re probably going to cross over or hike along a few different streams every day, running out of water isn’t a major concern.

  One time in particular comes to mind, where I did have to plan around having enough water to cook my meal. Normally we plan on our lunch being cold- jerky, trail mix, etc. and we do a freeze dried meal or something similar for dinner that requires water. Around lunch time we were by a stream, and looking at our map the area we were planning to camp for the night wouldn’t be near a water source (pretty much at the very top of a mountain) so we decided we’d have our hot meal for lunch so we could refill our water to make sure we’d have enough to last us until we were able to refill later the next day.

  It kind of sucked though, as we were getting closer to our campsite, the temperature started dropping, and a thick fog rolled in. By the time we made camp, we were all kind of cold, everything was damp, and we were generally pretty miserable, and we didn’t even have a hot meal to look forward to. So we pretty much just scarfed down whatever jerky or crackers or whatever we had and went right to bed. The next day though, everything had cleared up, and when we made our way to the summit to enjoy the view. We looked down into the valley below us and we saw a cloud, and we realized that the fog from the night before wasn’t just fog, it was a cloud passing over the mountain, and we hiked through it, so that was pretty cool.

  But the next time you go mattress shopping and the salesperson is telling you “it’s like sleeping on a cloud” run away, clouds suck and don’t make for good sleep.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Since the government can theoretically access the location of everyone's phone, wouldn't it be unsafe for an undocumented immigrant to have a phone?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I work in 911 dispatch

  The location we get from your phone isn’t exactly a magic “here’s exactly where this person is” button.

  For the most part, we rely on triangulation from the cell towers, which means the quality of that location is highly dependent on how many towers are around, how close you are to them, signal strength, the surrounding geography, whether you’re inside a building, in a basement, outside, etc. and the location isn’t constantly updating.

  I work in an area with pretty solid service, and at my cunter our policy is that if our ping is accurate to within about 300 meters we can use that if we can’t get any other location information from the caller, and most of the time we’re well within that, but not always. And a 300 meter radius is still a pretty big area, if that drops within a crowded downtown area, or if they’re in a high rise apartment or office building, that could be pretty much useless. And it takes us about 20 seconds to refresh the location and the new location may not be accurate when it does come in, so they’re in a moving vehicle they might well be a half mile away from where they were by the time the next ping comes in. And once you hang up we stop getting that location info and if we want to ping your phone again it’s a bit of a process that requires our officers or our dispatch supervisor calling the phone company, faxing or emailing them paperwork, etc. so not something we can just do totally on the fly, and for whatever reason the pings we get when we do that never seem to be very accurate, and it takes some time and we only get one ping at a time, and if we’re lucky we get one maybe every 10 minutes. We can also only request those pings when we have reason to believe that someone is in danger.

  I suspect that there’s a whole mess of local/state/federal laws and regulations, and department/agency/corporate policies that come into play with all of this with a million different exceptions, but overall that’s going to be broadly true in most places around the IS at least.

  We are starting to get more gps-based cellular location, this kind of depends on your phone’s capabilities and settings, what network you’re on, and your local 911 center’s capabilities. We’re generally a bit ahead of the curve on our technology and capabilities, so that’s not something everywhere can do yet. We’ve actually had it for a while but the implementation was pretty janky and not very useful, but we got some upgrades within the last year or so. It’s usually, but not always, more accurate than triangulation, the location updates faster, and we do continue to get location updates after you hang up but only for about a minute or so.

  Generally speaking, we also have no quick way of knowing who’s calling from a cell phone. Your name won’t usually come up on our caller ID, just your carrier. If you have your emergency info filled out on your smartphone and made it available we can access that, but frankly most people haven’t. If you’ve called before and given your name, we can search for prior calls (in our jurisdiction) from your phone number. Otherwise we can try our luck with some free phone number lookup websites, or try to get the subscriber information from your provider, and if you’re on some kind of a family plan that may mean we’d get maybe your parents information from the phone company not yours, and some prepaid plans don’t really seem to have much if any information on their subscribers on file so it ends up being a dead end.

  And that’s pretty much the extent of what we can do from 911. There may be other resources cops can use or other options for exceptional circumstances, but that’s outside the scope of 911 tracking your phone.

  Also if you call a non-emergency line, even if it’s one that redirects into a 911 center (we answer a lot of the departments when they’re out of the office, some of them just always come into us, and even if you reach someone at the station there’s a good chance they’ll transfer you to our central dispatch) we won’t get any location info and we need to go through the phone company to get a ping.

  And calls from TextNow numbers and other similar apps can be really hard to track down.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Would Kamala Harris have won the 2024 election if Latinos didn't shift hard to the right?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of Latinos are fairly conservative people, a lot of them are strongly Catholic with all of the baggage that comes with it, etc.

  Basically the only major policy reason they ever leaned towards the democrats is immigration, so with the Dems going further right on immigration it makes a lot of sense for some of them to be jumping ship

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are the inside parts of toilets universal?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Pretty much exactly what you probably think they are, I think they’re mostly a thing for people living off grid and maybe some RVs

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are the inside parts of toilets universal?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sort of

  For most toilets there’s universal fittings that will work just fine, you may need to adjust them a little bit, but they’re made to be adjusted, and they’ll work just fine with most toilets.

  If you have the original factory parts in your toilet, they may not be adjustable, and if you tried to swap them into another toilet they may not fit/work in other brands/models, or they may kind of work, but maybe not quite right.

  There are a handful of brands that don’t tend to play well with the universal fit parts, I want to say Kohler is one, and if you go to a hardware store, most likely they’re going to stock the universal parts, then a couple of the most common oddball brands.

  There’s also of course some weird toilets that are just totally different- pressure assisted flush, composting or incinerator toilets, etc. that aren’t even working on the same principle as most toilets, but I think the odds are that if you have one of those, you know that already.

  Also I haven’t played with any toilets that were manufactured that way, but I did retrofit one of my toilets to be a dual-flush. Those kits seem pretty universal, but probably double-check before trying to put them in an oddball toilet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why don't we have cool vending machines in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you underestimate how many Americans just want a cup of Joe with cream and sugar. A whole lot of us are out there drinking gas station/convenience store coffee or brewing a cup or pot every day of store brand pre-ground.

  And the ongoing joke about people getting frustrated with just wanting a “large coffee” and being confused by starbucks calling it a “venti” and spouting off about how they don’t want any fru-fru mocha-chino late bullshit even though no one asked.

  I think the bigger issue is that of how Americans get around and how available real estate is.

  Japan has a lot more people who can/will walk, take the train, etc. that’s a lot more opportunities for them to walk by a vending machine.

  Americans tend to get around in our cars, so if you want to sell them a coffee, snacks, hot meal, etc. they need to be able to park somewhere.

  And vending machine food isn’t exactly a huge draw, people probably aren’t going to go to your parking lot with a row of vending machines just to grab something to eat, so you kind of need something else to draw them in, some bathrooms, gas pumps, or at least convenient parking to other stuff they need to get to, so you might as well stick a gas station there, and since you’re going to need a cashier you might as well move that vending inside and you can get more and more variety of merchandise on shelves that you can cram into some vending machines so it might as well just be a convenience store.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨why does every single flashlight have multiple settings that you have to scroll through?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like you’re describing a maglite

  Maglites are perfectly fine flashlights for most people, maybe a little heavy but sometimes that’s kind of the point (a lot of cops and security guards and such took to carrying them when their agencies started prohibiting nightsticks and batons, especially the bigger 4 or 6 cell models) for a long time they were basically the default flashlight, you had maglites, you had the big spotlight looking things that took a 6v battery, you had cheap plastic flashlights, and you had various small penlights and such (which were often mini maglites) and that was like 90% of what you’d ever encounter.

  There’s a good chance if you go rooting around in your dad or grandfather’s car trunk, garage, basement, workshop, toolbox, etc. you’ll find a maglite or 3 kicking around somewhere. I know I keep one in my car for emergencies and I’ll probably inherit a half dozen more from my parents someday.

  They still make them, pretty sure they switched over to LEDs (one of their selling points used to be they had a spare bulb stored in the tail cap) and I’m sure they’re still perfectly reliable and rugged, you can probably still find them at most of the places you’d think to go buy a flashlight, and a standard 2 D cell maglite still costs in the neighborhood of $20-$30.

  But there are a bunch of flashlight nerds out there these days, who want really specific form factors, battery types, features, led color temperatures, etc. and they’d probably pooh-pooh the humble maglite.

  I get it to an extent, I have flashlights I like better, but I’m not about to nerd out about them, and if you someone sent me out with instructions to buy them a flashlight with no other requirements listed, I’d probably buy a maglite and feel pretty confident that it’s going to be an acceptable flashlight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How modern is it to have "sympathetic" portrayals of Hell?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Historically hell has often been depicted as a rather cold place, away from the warmth of god’s love or what have you.

  Anecdotally, 20 or so years ago, that’s what I remember being taught in CCD class when my parents were still making me go.

  Dante’s Inferno (c. 1321) for example, depicts the 9th and deepest circle of hell as a large frozen lake. And many of the damned he encountered throughout the different circles are at least somewhat sympathetic, especially at the first level of where the inhabitants are by and large good people who just to not be Christians. (And to be clear, Dante often found himself at odds with the church, so his works don’t necessarily reflect official doctrine and were absolutely written to reflect his own agenda, that said a lot of our modern ideas about hell owe a lot to Dante’s depiction, and any actual mention of hell in the Bible is scarce to non-existent depending on how you interpret certain passages, so his version is just as valid as any other in my opinion)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come the US does not put a bounty on Putin like they did Bin Laden?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m obviously not planning a Pennsylvania secession movement anytime soon, but just in case it ever comes to that

  General policy, not necessarily Pennsylvania specific, in no specific order:

  Universal healthcare (including all vision, dental, psychiatric, addiction treatment, gender affirming care, etc.) constitutionally enshrined access to abortion and birth control, abolish the death penalty, legalize all drug use with pardons for all non violent drug offences, huge corporate, wealth and inheritance taxes and major tax cuts for anyone making under 100k/year per person, major investment in nuclear and renewable energy, bans on fracking, free college or technical education for all up to a bachelor’s degree or equivalent certifications, UBI, low-income housing, major police reform, a ban on homeschooling except when necessary due to medical issues and a ban on private and charter schools except for very specific magnet schools that cater to particular vocations and enormous amounts of oversight and regulations on those schools, absolute separation of church and state (Churches and religions get no more legal recognition or exemptions than any other private social club would be entitled to,) a plan to phase out all reliance on non-renewable energy, down-payment assistance for first time homebuyers, high speed Internet access as a human right, major public health spending (we will get hit with another pandemic eventually, and there’s a damn good chance it will be far worse than covid,) a ban on corporate ownership of housing, basically all government services and requirements will be free of charge, legal recognition of poly marriage, election reform with ranked-choice voting, and major gun reform (too much to go into detail here but mainstream republicans and democrats would both hate my gun plans)

  And probably a few dozen other major points, but thats what I could spout off from the top of my head

  Pennsylvania-specific (disclaimer, I’m based out of the Philly area, so my opinions are the strongest about this region, and I’d need to read up on most of the rest of the state):

  High speed rail connecting, at a minimum, Philly, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Scranton, state college, and Erie

  Commuter rail along the Schuylkill connecting philly and reading (side note/fun fact: the legal remnants of the old reading railroad company, yes the one from monopoly, that used to connect those two and other cities, is now a chain of movie theaters, with locations mostly in Australia, New Zealand, and California) probably as an extension of the Norristown high speed line which we’re also going to reroute to have a stop inside the King of Prussia Mall

  Really more rail in general, but that seems like a good starting place and we can continue building out a network from there.

  The sixers are staying put, if they want a new stadium they can put one in the existing sports complex. We’re also going to cover vine street and reconnect the two halves of Chinatown.

  This is very low priority, but I’d like to find a constructive use to refurbish the SS United States instead of turning it into an artificial reef.

  We’re doing away with the PLCB bullshit, you should be able to buy beer, wine, and liquor at any grocery store.

  We’re getting rid of any remaining blue laws- not being allowed to hunt on Sundays, dealerships not being able to sell cars, etc.

  An absolute ban on confederate imagery except for museums, historical reenactments, etc. I see more confederate flags being flown in parts of PA than I have in a lot of the actual south, what side of the mason-dixon line do these idiots think our state lies on? Especially in this hypothetical scenario since we’re not even going to be part of America after this is all over and I don’t want any of these shitheads getting the wrong idea that our movement is some sort of “the south shall rise again” thing.

  Really we’re just generally going to finally drag a lot of Pennsyltucky kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

  Major infrastructure spending. I’d say this should be a general not-pennsylvania-specific issue, but holy shit have you seen the state of some of our roads and bridges? You can usually tell by feel the exact moment you cross over the state border.

  We’re really going to lean into being “Penn’s Woods” and preserve our natural resources and wildlife. We have some amazing parks, forests, etc. here and I want to make sure it stays that way. You can barely drive 10 minutes through much of the state without crossing some small river or stream, and I want all of those waterways to be clean and teeming with life. I’ve never seen our state amphibian- the eastern hellbender, in person in the wild and I’d like to fix that.

  Some goofy, not totally serious proposals

  Mehmet Oz is not allowed to set foot on Pennsylvanian territory.

  Any building in Philly taller than City Hall must have a William Penn statue at the top. We finally managed to break the curse with the Comcast building and we’re really going to cover our bases.

  We may look into annexing the south jersey shore.

  An official Pennsylvanian English dictionary covering the Philly, Pittsburgh, NEPA, and other dialects, covering definitions, spelling, and pronunciations of such words and phrases as : Yinz, youse/youse guys, jawn, Schuylkill, Bala Cynwyd, Conshohocken, heyna, jeet, water (“wooder,”) creek (“crick”) and many others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come the US does not put a bounty on Putin like they did Bin Laden?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Do they control a territory? Do they claim to be the official government of that territory? Can they back up and defend those claims? Do the civilians living in that territory overall recognize their authority as the government of that territory? Do other nations recognize them as the government of that territory?

  It’s not a totally black and white issue

  If I hypothetically rallied up a group of supporters who share my views and ideals and start carrying out terrorist attacks to force the government to address the issues I’m championing, I don’t think many would consider me to be a government. I’m still acknowledging the authority and legitimacy of the government, and am just acting in opposition to it.

  If my goal is to seize control of a territory, let’s say Pennsylvania, I’m starting to look a bit like a country. But unless I have the support of enough Pennsylvanians, and have the resources and manpower to back up my claim, and can get other nations to recognize it, it’s a pretty empty claim.

  If I manage to win over the popular support of the citizenry, they may start to regard me as the legitimate ruler of Pennsylvania, however just because they’re willing to follow me, doesn’t mean that anyone outside of the state is recognizing my claim. Other countries aren’t going to engage in diplomacy with me the same way they would with other nations, they’re going to continue regarding Pennsylvania as part of the US until I manage to actually have control over the territory. That means in some way removing the existing government from power, and more importantly defending my claim from the US government, who isn’t going to just roll over and accept my claim.

  So let’s say we manage to take control over Pennsylvania, the citizens support me, we’ve ousted the previous government, and are generally filling all the roles you would expect a government to handle, and at least for now we’re somehow managing to hold off the US government and defending our claim to Pennsylvania.

  At this point, we’re the defacto government of Pennsylvania. However we still lack recognition. The US government is still trying to retake control and has not recognized our independence, nor has any other country, we’re seen as rebels, warlords, etc. by the rest of the world. We’re essentially on our own, unable to trade with other countries.

  From here let’s imagine a couple different scenarios

  1. Some countries start to recognize my legitimacy. They offer to support my regime and to open up trade. Popular support from my citizens remains high, and we’re managing to hold off the US government. At this point we’re in a situation not unlike Taiwan or Palestine. Whether we’re a legitimate government is going to depend on who you ask around the world, with answers ranging from that we’re a group of rebels trying to secede from the US to having their full support and recognition as the legitimate government of an independent nation.

  2. Our rebellion is a resounding success. The US backs off, recognizes our independence, other countries also recognize our independence, maybe we even join NAFTA. It would be hard to argue that we’re not a legitimate government at that point.

  3. I start to lose the support of Pennsylvanians, and they stop recognizing my authority, even though I still manage to maintain control over my territory by force. Some countries, especially those that are not friendly to the US, may still recognize my claim, although in the eyes of most of the world, I’m probably just a terrorist or warlord.

  4. The US government is successful in ousting me, I manage to flee to a country that recognizes me as the legitimate ruler of Pennsylvania or at least is willing to tolerate my presence, and I set up a government-in-exile. I continue to conduct myself as though I am the ruler of Pennsylvania, maybe some Pennsylvanians and other people and countries throughout the world continue to recognize me as such, but without the ability to actually exercise that authority over my territory, it’s a pretty empty claim.