Fondots
@Fondots@lemmy.world
- Comment on How high would my blood alcohol have to be to impair/kill a mosquito? 1 week ago:
You are right, I admit that I’m Americans so I’m used to thinking in football fields and bananas as my units, so I grams doesn’t inherently mean much to me. Not sure if Google steered me wrong with the weight of mosquitoes or if I missed a metric prefix or didn’t move a decimal point somewhere. Don’t have time to go back and fix my math right now but I did throw a little disclaimer in my comment. I’ll try to fix that later.
- Comment on How high would my blood alcohol have to be to impair/kill a mosquito? 1 week ago:
Just kind of thinking this through
A typical beer is around 5%, so about 25x higher than the concentration in your blood if you’re at .2
A Google search tells me a mosquito drinks about .001 to .01 milliliters of blood per meal, let’s just go with the higher number. Just gonna assume the density of blood is close enough to water which is a nice 1:1 conversion, so that’s about .01g of blood.
A mosquito weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3grams
So after eating, a mosquito has drank about 1/200 to 1/300 of it’s body weight in blood.
Gonna mix units now, sorry science people.
1 pint weighs around 1lb. If you weigh about 200lbs, and have one beer, you’ve drank about that same ratio of beer to your body weight in terms of just how much liquid youve drank.
But again, the concentration of alcohol in a beer is much higher than the concentration in your blood.
So 1 mosquito bite is roughly the same in terms of volume to one beer, but in terms of alcohol content, it would be more like 1/25th of a beer.
So if a mosquito really gorged itself and drank 25x the normal amount of blood at once, it might start feeling a tiny buzz, but that might just be the fact that it’s a mosquito (because they buzz, get it?)
So that’s sort of drinking a whole case of beer but only one of them actually had alcohol.
If you’re a hardcore alcoholic you might be able to double that BAC to about .4%, which is about where most people would be unconscious and possibly have some significant medical complications.
But that would still only get the mosquito to about 2 beers worth of alcohol if they drank way more than they normally would in one meal.
This is all assuming mosquitoes process alcohol similarly to us, things don’t always scale up and down so nicely and mosquitoes are of course different animals than humans, so that could throw things off quite a bit.
- Comment on Hiccups just fucking suck 2 weeks ago:
You can’t really do it to yourself, but I’ve had really good luck ending other people’s hiccups by offering them $5 if they hiccup again
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 2 weeks ago:
I’ve read what you’ve linked and plenty of other info about NG911, and like I’ve said multiple times I’m looking forward to the new capabilities it’s going to give us.
I still don’t see how any of it helps with the sorts of things I end up needing to look around on Google maps for.
I am very willing to be proven wrong about that. All you need to do is point out what specific parts of NG911 you think will help, and this conversation will end and I’ll admit I was wrong and you were right and you’re not doing that. Instead you’re just being a miserable asshole while I’m trying to have a conversation with you and understand what you’re trying to say.
So excuse me for matching your energy. I kind of relish the opportunity to be honest, I spend 12 hours a day at work talking to assholes like you who won’t listen to me when I’m trying to tell them how to not fucking die, and needing to be polite and professional to them. It’s pretty damn cathartic to call you out for being a dickhead and I’m not going to apologize for that.
I like my job, I like talking about it so that people understand how it works and how to access the help they need. I can only assume that you hate what you do and that’s why you’re acting this way. Sure, you make more money than me. I don’t give a fuck, my needs are met, I’m happy, and you clearly aren’t. Find a job you want to tell people about and help them understand what it is you do.
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 2 weeks ago:
So much for
we know what we’re doing because we fucking read.
Guess you don’t actually know what the fuck you’re doing.
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 2 weeks ago:
And not a damn part of that has anything that would keep me from having to look around on Google maps or something similar trying to match up a vague description of a location that my caller may not even be at to something that I can enter into our system.
For someone so hung up on reading, you’re really fucking bad at comprehend what the issue is that I’m describing.
Sure, I may getter more accurate location info, maybe even good enough to tell what side of the street my caller is on now, but I’m still going to need to figure out what side of the road they were on when an incident actually happened to figure out jurisdiction, because they may have turned around, pulled over 2 blocks away, turned I to a parking lot across the street, or waited 6 hours and went home before calling.
So one way or another I’m going to need to look for landmarks on a map or something like Google street view that my caller will recognize and get them to describe where they were in relation to those landmarks.
And sure they’ll be able send me pictures or video call me to show me where they’re talking about. If it’s live video that combined with location data while they’re still on-scene that would certainly be great, but otherwise I’m still gonna have to be hunting around on a map trying to figure out which of the 6 Sunoco gas stations in town they sent me a picture of.
And they can text me, which is something we’ve had in my county for a while. Great for people who aren’t able to talk for one reason or another, but not exactly a dramatic upgrade over asking the same questions and getting the same answers verbally
PSAP registries, better interoperability with other PSAPs, etc. is nice, but totally besides the issue here. Both sides of the border could be departments we dispatch for and I just need to know which one to send
And better address lists, ALI info, phone records and such are nice, but if they’re not at their home address, they don’t know the name of the business they’re calling about, and all they can give me is that it happened “in the park with a statue that looks like a dick” or “that vacant lot where Bob’s Deli used to be” (Bob’s Deli, as it turns out, burned down in 1983) none of that is particularly helpful.
Again, there are really good use cases for NG911, and I’M not denying that. Every day I find some circumstance where I’d love to have those promised capabilities that are allegedly just around the corner for us.
But none of them solve this problem.
And you’ve been sold on the idea that ng911 is some sort of magical pill that’s going to give every dispatcher $10,000, a pony, and a blowjob while the calls practically handle themselves, and that’s just not the case.
So get your head out of your fucking ass.
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 2 weeks ago:
You’re a fucking corporation stooge who’s huffing your own farts.
There’s a lot of places where ng911 is going to be very helpful, this isn’t one of them and if you had any actual confidence that it would be helpful I this situation you’d be singing it’s fucking praises explaining how.
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 2 weeks ago:
Those the vibes you’re giving now. How about you actually try to explain how NG911 is gonna help with those scenarios I gave, because I don’t see any way the technologies involved that I’ve been told about are going to save me from having to manually look around on Google maps (or similar kind of service) to figure out where I need to enter a call.
Sure, I suppose they’ll be able to send me a picture or a video, instead of trying to describe it to me, but I’m still going to need to match that up to the real world somehow.
And sure, maybe our location data will be a bit better, but if they’re driving 5 minutes before pulling over to call, that location data won’t tell me what side of the road they were on when the accident actually happened.
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 3 weeks ago:
I really don’t see how NG911 is going to help when all my callers can tell me sometimes is something like that they’re near some trees, a big rock, and a brick wall. That’s not exactly something I can punch into my CAD. Or when it’s a 3rd party caller for their grandmother in a different town who needs help, but all they can give me is that it’s a big yellow house about 2 blocks from the elementary school with a statue of a cow on the front lawn.
There’s a lot of cool things that NG911 can help with, some of it is already implemented in my county, but they’re largely not the things I use Google maps for.
- Comment on google's getting pissy about using their shit while logged out 3 weeks ago:
I work in 911 dispatch, we’re not really supposed to log into our personal accounts on the work computers, there have been a couple incidents (not specifically in the 911 center but other parts of our county government) where people have gotten viruses and such from opening links in their personal emails on county computers.
A lot of us in dispatch make pretty heavy use of Google maps. When a caller doesn’t know where they are and we’re not getting a good location from their cellphone, we can sometimes see a lot of details on Google maps that we can’t see on the maps on our dispatch software.
There have been a couple times a caller has described a house to me and a general area that it was in but not the exact address, but I was able to get that address from looking around on satellite view and street view.
Sometimes we can see businesses and other places on it that aren’t in our system or come up as something slightly different, like maybe everyone calls a school “the Smith School,” but the actual name of it, and how it’s listed in our system is the “John Q Smith Preparatory Academy” so if I search in our system for “Smith School” I won’t find it, but if I look on Google maps I might see that pop up.
There’s cases where like if the call is on the border between 2 towns and I need know which department to dispatch, I can look on maps for little landmarks that probably wouldn’t be listed in any map software so that I can ask something like “are you on the same side of the road as the house with a big statue on the front lawn, or are you across the street from that house?”
Point is, it’s a very valuable tool for my job in situations that can actually be life-and-death sometimes, and since I can’t log in to it at work, I worry about getting shut out from features I use or even out of the service entirely.
- Comment on Correlation == Causation? 5 weeks ago:
My wife and I have kind of turned into eclipse chasers, we did TN in 2016, Montreal 2024, and in a couple days we’re off to Iceland for another.
We always plan on not doing much the day of the eclipse, figuring that traffic and such would be a nightmare, and leave ourselves a couple days on either side of the eclipse to hopefully avoid even more traffic.
I don’t remember exactly what days we did for TN, but I remember on our way home a couple days later we still hit what seemed like a weird amount of traffic for the area we were in.
Day of the 2017 eclipse we really lucked out. We stayed at a little campground a little bit outside of Nashville, and about 10 minutes away from there we found some sort of wildlife conservation area. It was gated and I’m not totally clear if it was really supposed open to the public, but as luck would have it just as we were pulling up to the gate some sort of conservation officer/ranger/game warden type guy also pulled up there. We asked if we were allowed in, he asked what we were gonna do and we said we basically just planned to set up a couple camp chairs and a camera on a tripod and look and watch the eclipse and he gave us the go-ahead, so we had a big open field to ourselves.
For Montreal, we took the train up from NYC, and the AirBnB we booked had a really nice rooftop deck, so we just posted up there.
We’ll see where we end up in Reykjavik, fingers crossed the weather cooperates.
- Comment on This shit's stupid as hell 5 weeks ago:
I’m not really a jewelry-wearer, and certainly not an expensive jewelry wearer
That said, I think it’s kind of fun. If I were the kind of person to wear jewelry, I might consider this. I’m a pretty hands-on, DIYer type of guy, I find myself fucking around with hose clamps pretty often, and hell, I might even say I have a bit of affection for them, I’ve solved a lot of problems with them.
That price seems steep to me, but I feel that way about most jewelry. I don’t know what material it’s made out of or how big it is, maybe that’s a fair price for how much silver or whatever is in it, maybe it’s horribly inflated.
- Comment on Can someone explain, calories, carbs, glucose, and gluten? 1 month ago:
This will all be a bit of a simplification
Calories are a unit of energy. When were talking about food we’re usually talking about kilocalories, in the US we usually just say Calories (with a capital C) some other countries may list them as “kcal.” It’s the same thing, 1000 calories (with a lower case c) is 1 dietary Calorie/kilocalorie. The calorie is defined as the amount of energy it takes to raise 1ml of water 1 degree Celsius. That might feel like a weird way to think about energy from food, but energy is energy, whether you’re using it to think, move, or just keep your body temperature where it’s supposed to be
The fuels your body uses for most of its energy are sugars. Sugars are a type of carbohydrate, which are chemicals that are basically just chains of different amounts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.
We general group these into 3 main types
Simple carbs (mono- and di- saccharides)- basically sugars. Glucose is a sugar and the one your body primarily uses, most other carbs basically get broken down into glucose. Sugars are easy for your body to break down and use almost immediately. Sucrose (table sugar) fructose (from plants) maltose, dextrose, lactose, basically anything you might see on a food label that ends in -ose.
Complex carbs (polysaccharides)- these are things like starches. They’re basically just a bigger molecule that your body needs a little more time to break down into simpler sugars, so you’re not really going to be getting energy from them for a few hours or even the next day. This is why you might hear about athletes “carbo-loading” with something like a big spaghetti dinner the day before a big event, the energy from that dinner will be available to them in time for that event.
Dietary fiber - these are basically just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down like cellulose (there’s that -ose ending again.) Some other animals can break them down for energy, like cows do some extra fermentation in their guts which is why they have 4-chambered stomachs that lets them break it down, but we can’t. It’s still important to other aspects of digestion for us but we’re not burning it for fuel.
Related to that is the glycemic index, which is basically a measure of how fast your body can process those carbs. Sugars have a high glycemic index and raise your blood sugar rapidly. Complex carbs have a lower glycemic index and raise it more gradually.
It wasn’t part of your question, but I feel like that obviously leads to some discussion about insulin and diabetes. Insulin is a hormone that regulates how fast glucose (which remember is the basic sugar that your body runs on and everything else pretty much gets broken down into) is absorbed from your blood into the rest of your body. People with diabetes don’t produce enough insulin, which means that sugar just kind of builds up in their blood and doesn’t get absorbed by their body, which, putting it mildly, is very bad. Not gonna go into too much detail on that, because it’s outside of the scope of the question, and we’re also dancing around the limits of my own knowledge.
Also a bit off topic but let’s talk about fat. You’ve eaten more calories than you really need to sustain yourself, what does your body do with the excess energy/sugar? Well it will try to convert some of that sugar into fat to store for later use when you’re getting less calories from your diet that you really need. It’s an emergency store of energy. It’s sort of slow and energy intensive for your body to convert fat back into sugars that it can use, so your body really only starts burning those fat reserves when there’s no other source of energy available.
Which brings around to the last thing you asked about - gluten. Gluten is a protein found in some grains, when you knead dough made from flour which contains gluten you basically get all of those gluten proteins to get all tangled up and form a stretchy web which makes the dough nice and stretchy, let’s it trap gas bubbles from yeast fermenting or chemical leaveners like baking soda/baking powder, and gives bread a bit of a chewy texture.
Just like with fat and carbs, your body can break down protein for energy (and it kind of needs other things from proteins, but that’s neither here nor there) and for most people gluten is just fine, not much different than if they were eating meat or beans or other protein-rich foods.
But some people have medical issues that prevent their bodies from processing gluten properly and eating it makes them sick, so they need to avoid it in their diet.
Gluten-free foods aren’t necessarily low-carb (or low-calorie,) something like a potato is basically all carbs, but has no gluten.
But if you’re trying to create a substitute for something that would normally be made with something like wheat flour (which is what most bread and pasta is made from, for example, and has a lot gluten and tons of carbs) one of the obvious ways to do that is by substituting something else for that flour that doesn’t contain gluten, like maybe chickpeas, and most of those substitutes are going to be lower-carb than flour, so most gluten-free substitutes tend to be fairly low carb, which sometimes makes them handy for people who need to reduce how many carbs they’re eating even if they don’t have any real need to avoid gluten.
- Comment on While is it always the person's fault who rearended you? What about the person in front of you stopping all of a sudden in the middle of a highway? 1 month ago:
Under some circumstances, a car may need to brake suddenly, like if a kid or deer or something runs out into the road, the car in front of you suddenly breaks down, a car suddenly swerves into your lane, etc.
And so you need to be allowing enough space between yourself and the car in front of you and paying attention so that you can stop in case that car does suddenly.
When they assign fault for an accident, it’s usually not 100% one party or the other’s fault. In a case where someone slams on the brakes for legitimately no reason, they’re probably going to be at least partially at fault
But regardless of whether they were or weren’t in the right to stop suddenly, if you were following too closely to stop in time or not paying attention, you’re also at fault because the accident could have been avoided if you had been doing your part.
You can’t control what the cars in front or behind you are doing, but you can control what you are doing, and if there was something you could have reasonably done to avoid the accident but didn’t, you’re going to be at least partially at fault.
- Comment on Satan's Ballsack 2 months ago:
FYI
A “fare” is a price you pay to go somewhere, for example a bus fare
A “fair” is an event with vendors and attractions and such.
You might have to pay a fare to enter the fair.
Although classifying anything this administration is doing as some kind of price we have to pay does feel kind of appropriate.
- Comment on What are your thoughts on people who say hate speech is free speech? 2 months ago:
I think you are under the assumption that perhaps everyone critically examines everything they hear rather than just accepts it.
I’m not under that assumption, that’s why I said that part of the puzzle is strong public education so that people learn that they need to be thinking critically about everything
Due to barrier to entry you can’t just challenge whatever company or political movement you want.
Which is where the stronger social safety nets and limits on corporations come in. If I wanted to start up, let’s say my own ISP to compete with the likes of Verizon and Comcast in my area, that idea would be dead in the water. They’re in charge of a ton of infrastructure that should be public, and have shaped regulations so that it would be nearly impossible for anyone else to break into the market here. That just shouldn’t be the case and that would need to be fixed.
And as it is right now, I don’t have the time or money to invest into that sort of project, because I’m a wage slave that needs my current job to feed myself. With better social safety nets like UBI and affordable housing, I could leave or at least step back from this job and be able to dedicate myself to that, attempt to raise funds to do it (which would be easier because people would be better educated to understand that it’s really needed, and more financially secure themselves to be able to help fund it, plus the increased regulations would mean that banks couldn’t hold their purse strings quite so tightly if I needed loans to make it happen) and recruit others to my cause with the other necessary skills and qualifications to actually implement it.
This couldn’t be an overnight change, if everyone got onboard and actively worked towards it, maybe we’d start to see some tangible signs of things shaping up the way I’m envisioning in 2 or 3 generations. I probably won’t get to live in the world I want to create, we just need to change too much about how people think and act. And a whole lot of the steps to get there are basically socialism, regulations, redistributing wealth, social programs, etc. to make sure that people are on a more even footing and educated enough to understand what their responsibilities are and how to effectively use their money so that we can start slowly peeling back some of the regulations to let people make those decisions for themselves.
- Comment on What are your thoughts on people who say hate speech is free speech? 2 months ago:
Hate speech is free speech
So is criticizing the assholes who say it, turnabout it fair play.
There are some cultures, religions, etc. with pretty abhorrent customs that people should be free to criticize, and if you’re not careful with how you craft and apply hate speech laws, people may not be able to speak out against those injustices like they should be.
I’d also rather have the assholes be out in the open about their shitty beliefs. If you’re dumb enough to, for example, fly a Nazi flag at your home, business, on a bumper sticker on your car, etc. that’s convenient for me because I know not to give you business, hire you, stop to help you with a flat tire, give you a friendly wave, etc. If you’re keeping your nazidom in the closet and pretending to be a decent human being, how would I know not to give you the time of day?
I have a tiny bit of a libertarian streak, I’m not a “Big L” libertarian who thinks that roads should be privatized and corporations should be able to do whatever they want, and all of that other bullshit, I like receiving government services when I need them and I’m generally fine with my tax dollars paying for them for others (not that I don’t have some strong criticism about some of what the government does with my taxes)
But I do like individual liberties, and I think that with the right guard rails in place (mostly strong public education and social safety nets to make sure that people can afford to “vote with their wallets” and the ability to make responsible, informed decisions about how they do that, as well as strong limits on corporate power to make sure that there can be alternatives that people can take their money to) capitalism can be a pretty neat and tidy solution to a lot of problems.
In my sort of ideal world if someone is spouting hate speech, they just become a social pariah, no one would want to hire them, no one would buy their products, no one would sell products or services to them, no one would give them a platform or an audience, and when they get up on their soapbox they’d be immediately shouted down off of it by everyone within earshot. And if the local bakery, car dealer ISP, grocery store, energy company, etc. happens to be owned by one of those pieces of shit, it should be within the reach of anyone to start up their own competing company and drive the asshole out of business because given the alternative everyone should want to give their business to them instead of the asshole.
- Comment on If you slipped and fell into a waist-deep swimming pool, would you refuse to stand up and let yourself drown? 2 months ago:
So that exactly is your end goal continually spamming this here on Lemmy?
Let’s assume that there actually is something fishy going on here.
Do you think that a bunch of mostly Linux nerds on the internet, mostly not in the UK, have some sort of investigative power to get to the bottom of this and hold someone responsible?
You’ve been at this for a few months now, clearly whatever goal you have isn’t working and you need to change your tactics.
Maybe start saving money to hire private investigators to look into this.
Or at least start contacting UK authorities about your concerns.
Maybe take some classes on lifesaving to better understand what happens to drowning victims to make a more informed opinion about how likely or unlikely it is that these were simple accidents and explain your reasoning.
What about this in particular is so fascinating to you?
- Comment on I read somewhere a while back that most or at least half of California wildfires are cause by faulty electrical company equipment. Is this true? And how come no one has ever reported it? 2 months ago:
You read it somewhere, so clearly someone has reported it
The issues are how do you
- Get people to pay attention to those reports and care?
- Get those people to vote accordingly?
- Get those elected officials to hold the electric companies accountable?
- Hold those elected officials accountable when they don’t?
- Keep those people engaged and doing points 1-4 consistently so that it doesn’t happen again?
- Comment on Library Apps are GOATed 2 months ago:
This will vary a lot of course, but in a lot of cases your local library may not be just your local library.
The library in my town isn’t anything too special, it’s a little small and doesn’t really have a lot of the cool things people talk about libraries having these days (though I am occasionally surprised, they have mobile hotspots you can borrow for example)
But it’s part of a network of libraries from around my county, so I can go check things out of around 30 different libraries and some of those other branches have a lot more cool stuff than mine does
- Comment on Growth 2 months 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? 2 months ago:
- 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.
- 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 2 months 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"? 2 months 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. 2 months 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 2 months 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 months 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 3 months 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 ? 3 months 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 ? 3 months 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
