Fondots

@Fondots@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you have to wake up to to be considered a heavy/light/normal sleeper?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  My all accounts, I’m a heavy sleeper, there are basically only 3 things that will reliably wake me up

  My alarm clock
  Having to pee
  My dog throwing up or whining to go out (usually an indication that she’s gonna have diarrhea)

  I sleep through my wife’s alarm going off (usually several alarms, she like to hit snooze,) showering, turning lights on, listening to podcasts while she gets ready, the sun coming up (I work partially overnight, I’m usually in bed by about 4 or 5 AM,) landscapers mowing the lawn outside my window, kids screaming at the nearby playground and school, fireworks, thunderstorms, construction (although I was not able to sleep through the siding repair I had done with a guy hammering on the wall directly behind my bed)

  One time my wife was able to get me out of bed and stand me up so she could fix the sheets without me being fully awake.

  When I was a kid my mom could vacuum in my room without waking me up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I have/had a good friend who is a devout Muslim, was born in Egypt but moved to the US when he was very young. His father was from there, his mother was American, white, and I’m not totally clear whether or not she converted but was definitely not Muslim when they met. From what I understand his father got a lot of shit from his family over that.

  Over the years, my friend butted heads with dad a lot. At one point his dad wanted to move the family to Egypt, basically because he never fully adjusted to life in the US. My friend stood up to him, because all of his younger siblings had only ever lived here, they had friends and lives here and it would be kind of shitty to uproot all of that, so he kicked my friend out of the house, and wouldn’t let him see his siblings for probably over a year.

  So that was always a threat he kept dangling over my friends head- Fall in line or I’ll move the family back to Egypt and cut you off from your siblings.

  He also disapproved of any sort of american style dating, and forced my friend to break up with several girlfriends, even if they were Muslim.

  One day my friend just totally ghosted all of us. Unfriended everyone on Facebook, leaving pretty much only people with middle Eastern names, stopped replying to calls or texts, etc. a couple of us went to his house to check on him, and did actually make contact with him there but he refused to answer any questions, basically just leaving it at her wasn’t going to be friends with any of us anymore.

  We know at that point he’d been seeing a girl he’d been keeping secret from his dad, she later reached out to us because he also ghosted her.

  We’re pretty sure what happened is that his father found out that he was dating her and had another blow-up, threatening to kick him out and cut him off from his siblings for good.

  Not every Muslim family is the same of course, some wouldn’t have any issues with this sort of situation, in some it will cause varying degrees of family drama, in some it can even get physically abusive, and in a small handful of cases we might even be talking about honor killings.

  Where you have different cultures and religions coming into play, this kind of thing can get complicated, it’s not always so simple as “it’s a free country” although it should be.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨My mom tells me I should cut dad off for cheating on her, am I a bad person for not wanting to do so?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Mist people cheat,

  Assuming that’s supposed to be “most people”

  There have been a lot of studies on this over the years, and the data is of course easy to skew because a lot of people are going to be reluctant to admit to their cheating, or people having different ideas about what constitutes “cheating” but every study I can find that seems credible, it seems to hover at more like 25% of people cheat, give or take maybe about 10%

  Even when you look for people who have experienced a partner cheating on them most of the studies I can find have it at below 50%

  You can get into the weeds and probably find some cases where most people in certain demographics cheat if you want to cherry-pick your data a bit.

  So no, most people don’t cheat.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can deliberate noise harassment still be a crime if it's done every day from 7:30 AM till 10:30-11:30 PM?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  And I do want to just reiterate that the harassment angle is really what you want to play up with the police.

  I don’t know the specifics of how policing and such works in your area, but there’s a pretty big difference between “my neighborhood is an inconsiderate jerk who plays his music too loud” and “my neighbor is intentionally targeting me with loud music and sirens to disturb our sleep”

  The first one is a noise complaint, that’s low priority for the police and depending on where you are maybe not even a police issue but something like code enforcement.

  The second one is a police issue, it’s harassment. This will vary from one jurisdiction to another, but where I work depending on some of the details I might enter that as “suspicious activity” or even a “disturbance” (basically a fight) which should get police there with some urgency.

  And some of the other things you’ve said, like him walking around outside with a frying pan, I could definitely make an argument for putting in those calls as a “wellbeing check” or “suspicious person,” and if he’s acting particularly threatening maybe even “armed subject,” or possibly as a psych emergency to also send EMS to hopefully get him taken to a hospital for a psych eval.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How to get to Santa Claus beard status⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I have a long, bushy beard (and curly handlebar moustache)

  First of all, the hard truth is that not everyone can grow a decent beard. Vitamins, diet, etc. certainly won’t hurt, but at a certain point you’re up against genetics, and if your DNA says your beard is going to be thin and patchy, there’s not much you can do about that except maybe hair transplants.

  Age plays a factor, I have a friend who couldn’t grow a decent beard until he was about 30.

  Now assuming you’ve actually got enough hair growing in the right places

  Most important is keeping it trimmed and neat-looking.

  Until you’ve got a couple inches of beard going, I think it’s best to keep your neck shaved, pick a point maybe an inch or two above your Adams apple, and keep everything below that shaved. Once you’ve got some beard going you can stop doing that, no one can see it anyway and at some point the neckbeard just becomes more beard.

  Similarly, clean up your cheeks. You probably have a few scraggly hairs growing up above the rest of your beard, shave those off.

  If you’re a little brave, a straight razor is pretty nice for making some clean lines, you can be really precise with them. They make ones that use a disposable Blade if you’re not into all the sharpening and stopping that goes with a traditional straight razor, I have one that uses a double edge blade snapped in half (they break very cleanly) but most of the time I just use a regular safety razor, or a disposable or cartridge razor would do the trick just fine

  Especially when you’re starting off, a beard trimmer or hair clippers are gonna be your best friend so you can trim it all down to an even length.

  Figure out what you’re doing with your sideburns. I shave my head, and ideally I like to have them fade into that, but I’m cheap and lazy so I only go to my barber to have that done a couple times a year when I need to look good for a wedding or whatever. Most of the time I just take my clippers to them and try to make them shorter up top and longer towards the bottom, it takes some practice and playing with the guards and such, and I’ve actually gotten pretty good at freehanding it, but it’s not the fancy fade my barber can manage.

  Once you’ve got some length, things get kind of easy, I tend to go for a longer, sort rectangular shape to my beard, I brush it out, and basically just cut off anything that isn’t where I want it to be and any split ends d notice.

  For soap/shampoo/conditioner/beard oil/balm, etc. you kind of need to figure out what works for you and your hair/skin type. My hair and skin are pretty forgiving, I could probably just about shower in acetone and be none the worse for it. I shower with doctor bronners for no particular reason other than I find their peppermint to be refreshing and I can buy it in a gallon jug, and since it’s pretty concentrated a little goes a long way and I don’t have to buy soap for a couple years, and I don’t personally find any need to use any conditioner or beard balm/oil, etc. Other people find that Dr Bronners it really dries out their skin/hair so YMMV. I also find that it’s pretty good at stripping the wax out of my moustache.

  I do sometimes use beard balm/oil for special occasions to help tame my beard and give it a little extra shine. I rarely buy it for myself, I find that once you have a beard it tends to be one of those things people gift you at Christmas or whatever.

  I use Firehouse Moustache Wax (specifically their Wacky Tacky) to curl my moustache. That’s a very stiff wax if you don’t intend to curl it. I haven’t tried their other waxes but I’m sure they work fine for general styling. It’s the second wax I’ve tried, I find it works well, and I haven’t felt the need to experiment further. The first one I tried because it was readily available at CVS at the time was Clubman, that stuff is garbage. Doesn’t hold well, and if you get even the slightest bit wet or sweaty it washes right out. I also remember it having some sort of scent, which I’m not particularly a fan of for something that lives right below my nose.

  If you’re not going for a full Snidely Whiplash curl, some other lighter wax or maybe pomade is probably worth keeping around to help tame and style it a bit. I have a tin of Murray’s pomade I keep around for that purpose though rarely use it. A little goes a long way with that, otherwise your beard gets kind of greasy and sticky.

  I spend very little time on my beard. I brush it every day, wash it when I shower (usually every day, but I’ve been known to skip a day or two here and there,) clean up my cheeks when I shave my head (once or twice a week) and style my moustache mostly every day (it only takes a couple minutes, the Wacky Tacky is very stiff, I rub some into my 'stache, run a comb through it to help distribute it through a little better, and then pretty much just mold it into place with my fingers,) and do a little trimming maybe every couple weeks or when I notice it’s getting a bit wild looking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can deliberate noise harassment still be a crime if it's done every day from 7:30 AM till 10:30-11:30 PM?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t know the laws or systems in place in the UK for this, but I work in 911 dispatch in the US, and I can’t imagine that something like this is too radically different across the pond

  As long as the cops in your area are fairly responsive (I know a couple departments in my county will take their sweet-ass time responding to a noise complaints) call every time he does something.

  Yes, you’re going to get sick of it, but more importantly the cops are going to get sick of it too. They really don’t want to be out at your neighbors house over this every day/week/month/8moths, or however often he does it. Before too long he’s going to get hit with fines and other consequences. Once or twice they might issue a warning

  Speak to the officers every time. Make sure they’re seeing and hearing what you’re seeing and hearing, get it on video if you have to, don’t give them an opportunity to write it off because they drove by the house and “didn’t hear anything.”

  Tell them he’s schizophrenic, refusing to take his meds, tell them he’s harassing you, that last part is important, tell them you want to file a report for harassment, discuss what your options are- pressing changes, restraining orders, whatever they may be, and pursue them. You’ll probably have paperwork and court dates and such, it sucks, but that’s how the process works.

  Be prepared for retaliation from him in some form. Get security cameras, try to avoid any contact with him if you can avoid it. He already has delusions that you’re conspiring against him, and having the cops show up at his door repeatedly are going to feed right into that, it’s not out of the question that he might get violent, or start vandalizing your property.

  Continue to report anything he says and does to you, no matter how small, each incident you document builds a stronger case for more consequences. Every time he accuses your brother of making wolf noises, or hacking his phone, any weird interaction at all, make sure you’re documenting it with the police.

  Try to catch his niece when she’s over, explain the situation, explain that you’re going to have to take legal action if it doesn’t stop, see if she can possibly talk sense into him, or possibly if she or other family might be able to pursue some sort of involuntary commitment for him (read up on your local laws about that, I have no idea what they’re like in the UK except that I think it’s called “sectioning” over there, I suspect that you wouldn’t be able to start that process, it would probably need to be done by a relative, the police, or a medical/mental health professional)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF is a rural town in the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a few other weird situations that can come into play too, like mailing addresses, census designated places, neighborhoods, etc.

  My town doesn’t have its own post office, so my mail gets handled by the post office in a neighboring town, so my mailing address says that town instead of the municipality I actually live in, so more often than not if I have to give out my address that’s what I’m saying.

  I also live in a 'census designated place" basically an area that’s officially recognized as having its own identity. It’s basically just a fancy nickname for my neighborhood, so some people in this area will say that instead of the name of the municipality or the mailing address.

  It’s actually pretty rare for anyone to give the name of my municipality when asked for what town they live in unless we’re talking about local politics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WTF is a rural town in the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of this is going to be subjective and depend on your personal frame of reference, as well as local laws and customs that can vary a lot around the country

  In general, in normal casual conversation, most Americans are going to refer to a municipality as a “town” unless they’re in a big city. Legally, that municipality might be considered a city, town, township, borough, home rule municipality, village, etc. but unless it’s a big city we’re probably going to refer to it as a town most of the time

  There’s also, in some areas, unincorporated communities that don’t have an actual municipal government, but if there’s a relatively dense area, we might go ahead and refer to that area as a town.

  Some parts of the US do have some sort of legal definition for “village,” in others it might be used informally to refer to a small “quaint” town, or part of the town.

  There’s also the distinction of, for example, being “in a town” vs “in town” or “downtown”

  Most of us who don’t live in a big city would say that we live in a town, meaning the municipality we live in. Somewhat less of us live “in town” meaning something more like the denser, more “urban” parts of town, probably resembling what you think of as a village, and “downtown” would refer to something like the area around the main street or main commercial area where you might find stores, restaurants, bars, etc.

  So a “rural town” is basically any sort of town in a rural area. I’m not sure if there’s any sort of a legal definition for a rural town, but in general I’d say that if a town is surrounded by woods and/or farmland and you can’t trace an unbroken path of suburban sprawl from it back to a major city it’s rural.

  Some of those rural towns can actually be fairly big and urbanized, but they’re otherwise in a rural area in their own little bubble so we’d still consider it to be a rural town.

  As far as town vs “small town” that’s kind of subjective.

  The town I grew up in is often referred to as a small town, largely because it’s physically pretty small, almost exactly 1 square mile, but that 1 mile is pretty densely populated, I think the population is around 9-10k people currently, it’s just a couple miles outside of the nearest major city, and pretty well-urbanized itself, connected to several major highways, was once a big manufacturing town but is now pretty gentrified, with a solid handful of 10+ floor office buildings. People from more rural areas probably wouldn’t agree that it’s a “small town” but people from a bit city probably would think so, and for those of us “townies” whose families have lived here for a few generations still feel like it has a small town feel, even if the newer transplants don’t all share that feeling.

  The town I currently live in isn’t quite rural, but it’s getting there. I’m towards the edge of the suburbs now, maybe even into the exurbs. The town is physically much larger, but only has about half the population. That small, less dense population makes it still feel kind of small-towny.

  Also worth noting, my town doesn’t really have any sort of a “downtown” area, no real main street to go walking around or anything. We have a few businesses and stores and such roughly clustered in the same area, but it’s not a cohesive thing that feels like a “town” or what you might recognize as a “village.” I would normally may this, but if I said I was going “into town” for something, most people around me would probably understand that I’m going to one of our neighboring towns that are a bit more built-up

  So some combination of physical size, population, population density, and a curtain je ne sais quoi are what makes a town a small town.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where does technology come from in Star Wars?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  In the Lord of the Rings, what is the explanation for swords and other metal goods?

  At some point in the past, the arts of smelting, smithing, casting were discovered, refined over the centuries, different races and cultures advanced them in different ways, and eventually led to swords, within shirts, magic rings, etc.

  Same thing with star wars, in-universe they have tens of thousands of years of history, I think canonically the old Republic was founded 25-or-so thousand years ago, if you go back that far in real earth human history and you’re pretty much at the point where a handful of weird wolves are starting to get comfortable enough with humans to let us start domesticating them.

  And at that point in the star wars timeline, space travel and other advanced technology is already pretty well-established, so there’s probably at least that long again of incremental technological advancements leading up to that point.

  Basically they just got a massive head-start on us

  As far as how and where the technology is made, we get little glimpses of it here and there, droid factories on Geonosis, corelian shipyards, various mechanics, scrapyards, tinkerers, etc.

  But that’s all just kind of backdrop. Star wars is a space opera adventure thing, not a mockumentary about the history of lightsabers and hyperspace drives, or a how-its-made for blaster pistols and gonk droids. It wouldn’t make sense for most star wars media to really go into depth about that kind of stuff and probably would piss people off if they did (not that most star wars fans don’t exist in a perpetual state of being angry at star wars about something anyway)

  You wouldn’t go into a Fast and Furious movie expecting a whole history and mechanics lesson on automobiles, the movies are focusing on a handful of people who (race cars? Fight terrorists with cars? I really don’t know I’ve actually never seen any of them) there’s a whole in-universe world around them where all of those things happened/are happening out of sight and out of mind but it’s not directly relevant to the plot so it gets kind of glossed over, you can just assume most of the history and engineering stuff has been handled by people somewhere off-screen at some point in time.

  Same with star wars, there’s untold trillions or more people scattered across millions of inhabited planets working dead-end jobs making widgets that have built on millennia of science and technology, but the stories focus on a handful of freedom fighters, smugglers, soldiers, warrior monks, etc. who mostly just use those things and probably don’t have much more idea how their hyperdrive works than you do about the alternator in your car.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is Catholic dating culture often mistaken for incel-style pessimistic desperation?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I think this is going to depend a lot on where in the world you are.

  I’m from the mid Atlantic/northeast US, and was raised catholic, overall I wouldn’t say that around me there was ever a separate “Catholic dating culture” it was just catholics dating other people who may or may not have also been Catholic. Not any more problematic than the rest of the general dating pool in any particular way

  In other parts of the country or world I suspect that may be different

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What purpose do carbohydrates OTHER than sugars serve in the body?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  True, I did think about mentioning that but decided to skip over it to keep things simple.

  Animals like cows for example, can get by almost entirely on fiber. Stuff like grass doesn’t have much in the way of carbs we can use, but it contains a ton of fiber, and cows digestive systems are set up to actually do something with them.

  The extra “stomachs” they have allow for some extra fermentation and such to happen so they can break down that fiber into simpler carbs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What purpose do carbohydrates OTHER than sugars serve in the body?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Gonna try to give a very general ELI5 sort of answer

  There’s basically 3 main types of carbohydrates

  Simple carbs- basically sugars (mono- and di-saccharides)

  Complex carbs- starches, whole grains, etc. (polysaccharides)

  Fiber- arguably these are just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down

  In general, sugars are the source of energy your body actually runs on, especially glucose.

  Your body can pretty much use simple sugars as-is or can easily break them down into a form it can use. There’s some variation just how quick and easy it is for your body to use different sugars, but in general your body will start to feel the effects of eating sugar in the space of a few minutes, and the effects will peak within about an hour or two.

  Complex carbs take a little more digesting to break down into a form your body can make use of. They’re basically being turned into simpler sugars, but that process takes a while. You might hear about athletes carbo-loading with a big spaghetti dinner or something the night before a big competition. The idea there is that the energy from that big, complex carb-heavy dinner won’t really hit them for a few hours or even until the next day, and it will keep providing that energy for a longer period of time.

  Fiber is, for the most part, indigestible, your body can’t really break it down into simpler sugars that it can make use of. It goes in your mouth, through your digestive tract, and out the other end relatively unchanged. That doesn’t mean it’s useless though, it still plays an important role in digestion. It takes up space in your stomach helping you feel more full. It absorbs water and helps keep your stool soft and helps waste move through your intestines, and it minds to things like bile acids and cholesterol so that they can be passed as waste.

  Again, this is meant to be a very general answer, there’s a lot of details I’m glossing over both just to keep things simple, and because I’m not a doctor or anything of the sort and I’m not 100% sure myself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should naming your children stupid names be illegal?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe in Iceland’s case it has to do with how the Icelandic language works and certain names just kind of don’t work with the rest of the language. I’m far from an expert on the Icelandic language, but my understanding is that nouns, names included, sort of get “conjugated” (I’m not sure if “conjugation” is the correct term, I think that’s specifically a vowel thing, but it’s similar in that the word changes depending on how it’s used in a sentence and most of us are familiar with the concept of conjugation.)

  There’s a few random things in English that do it, like depending on the sentence, you might use I/me/my/mine/etc. when you refer to yourself refer to yourself, but in icelandic all nouns do that in a regular predictable way, so they have to be pronounceable with certain suffixes tacked onto them.

  I think they also do the old school patronymic/matronymic name thing instead of family names. So if you meet someone in Iceland whose name is something like “Steve Robertson” then “Robertson” isn’t his family name, his dad is literally named “Robert” and so he is “Steve, Robert’s Son” so names kind of have to work with that kind of naming convention as well.

  So it’s less of a “this name is stupid” and more of a “this name breaks our language”

  It also seems like they’ve eased up on some of the rules in recent years, first names are no longer gender restricted, and they’ve added a nonbinary suffix for the patronyms/matronyms so now you can be a -bur instead of just -son or -dóttir

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What would the world look like if every worker got together and Unionized for a universale wage that helps everyone? Instead of one country trying to screw over another?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In a sort of abstract sense, there are some parallels.

  In a system like the US, corporations and those with a lot of money hold a lot of power, and unionization is a way for everyone else to take some power for themselves to make sure that their voices are heard.

  In a system like China however, most of that power is instead concentrated with the government and upper echelons of party, so attempts at democratizing fill a similar role of giving regular people a voice.

  There’s a lot of nitty gritty details, cultural differences, etc. and I don’t really want to gloss over those, but the root in either case is common people trying to make sure their voices heard.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pens in Space⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Finer bits of wood, like sawdust, or pencil shavings from sharpening, catch fire much more readily than a solid chunk of wood like a whole pencil.

  Given the right environment, finer sawdust can even be explosive.

  A lot of campers and other outdoorsy types are probably familiar with using “feather sticks” to start a fire, where you take a stick and cut a bunch of fine curls into it, almost like you’re whittling down the stick but leaving the shavings attached.

  The whole stick wouldn’t readily catch fire, but those finer curls attached to it will light pretty easily and spread to the rest of the stick.

  And while I’ve seen some pretty impressive feather sticks made by people with a steady hand and sharp knife, most of the time those feathers aren’t quite as fine as most pencil shavings.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I pronounce "slava Ukraini"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I believe it should be something along the lines of “slah-vah oo-kra-ee-nee”

  The “oo” part almost wants to be a “yoo” but doesn’t quite get there

  the “kra-ee” almost slurs together into a single “kri” sound

  And the “nee” almost drops off into “neh”

  Disclaimer- I don’t really speak a word of Ukrainian, there’s a pretty big Ukrainian immigrant community in my area so I’ve been around Ukrainian speakers and heard it spoken probably slightly more than the average American, but I’m probably missing the mark on that a little bit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What actually came first? The chicken or the egg?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In one sense, the egg. Animals had been laying eggs for millions of years before anything like a chicken evolved.

  If we’re limiting our scope to just chicken eggs though, things get a little murkier.

  When we talk about chicken eggs, are we talking about eggs laid by a chicken, or are we talking about eggs from which a chicken can hatch? Or do both need to be true for it to truly be a chicken egg?

  In the first and last case, the chicken obviously needs to come first, a non-chicken can’t lay a chicken egg if that’s the criteria you’re going by.

  That middle ground though is interesting.

  The chicken is descended from the red junglefowl. Look up some pictures, they’re pretty damn chicken-y, I might even say they may look even more like a chicken than some modern chicken breeds. If I was out walking around and a junglefowl ran across the street in front of me, I’d probably chuckle to myself while I pondered the age-old question of “why did the chicken cross the road?” If one showed up in my friends’ backyard flock of assorted chicken breeds, it wouldn’t look at all out of place.

  But it is not a chicken.

  Chickens, however, are junglefowl. We consider them to be a subspecies of junglefowl- Gallus gallus domesticus

  Chickens did not emerge in a single instant. It took many years of selective breeding and evolution for the modern chicken to come into being. Countless generations of junglefowl gradually becoming more chicken-y until the modern chicken emerged.

  At one point in time, a bird was hatched that checked all of the boxes for us to call it a chicken instead of a junglefowl. The egg it hatched from was laid by a bird that was just on the other side of the arbitrary line from being a chicken. Unless you sequenced the two birds genomes you would probably be pretty hard-pressed to say which was the chicken and which was the junglefowl.

  So the first chicken hatched from an egg said by a junglefowl.

  However, that is one true chicken in a flock of not-quite-chickens. Odds are that chicken did not breed with another true chicken, but instead one of those near-chicken junglefowl. So its eggs would not hatch into a true chicken, but instead a chicken-junglefowl hybrid.

  And there was probably a long period of time where things teetered on that line, the occasional true chicken hatched, and then laid eggs that hatched into non-chickens, those non-chickens getting closer and closer to the line over many generations.

  Until finally it happened. Two true chickens bred, and lay an egg that also matches into a true chicken. The first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken.

  But again you’d be pretty hard pressed to pinpoint which bird that was in the flock. It was probably a wholly unremarkable bird that looked pretty much the same as all of the chickens and non-chicken junglefowl around it.

  The lines we draw separating different species and subspecies are pretty arbitrary. It’s more for our convenience to categorize things than it is to reflect any absolute truth about the animals around us. That line could have been drawn just about anywhere in the history of chickens and it would still be valid.

  There’s also potentially a nature vs nurture angle here. Chickens are social creatures who raise their young, they’re not running on pure instinct, to some extent they learn how to be a chicken from other chickens. A true chicken raised by junglefowl may act more like a junglefowl than a chicken in some ways, and vice versa. Is that important when determining what the bird is? When the differences between them are so small, I think it might be. As they say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.

  So there’s perhaps an argument to be made that maybe the first true chicken didn’t appear until at least a generation or two after that first chicken hatched from an egg laid by a chicken. After all, if the young aren’t being raised by and around other chickens, maybe they’re not really chickens.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Should a movie released in 1995 be considered an "old" movie?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it depends on the movie

  If, after 30 years it still has a lot of cultural relevance, I’d think of it as a “classic” movie.

  If it doesn’t, if it hasn’t aged well and/or faded into obscurity, I think it’s fair to think of it as an old movie.

  Probably around '95, I would have been watching Star Wars for the first time. It didn’t feel like an old movie to me then and it still doesn’t to this day. Other movies from that same era haven’t aged quite as well and felt “old” to me.

  Looking at some of the top movies from '95, some of them are just as enjoyable or relevant today as they were when they released, others feel dated and not relevant to me today.

  It’s going to depend on your personal tastes and experiences of course. I can also sprinkle in a lot of platitudes like “you’re only as old as you feel” and “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”

  I think there’s also room for some overlap. There’s classic movies that also feel dated. I think some movies can be both old and classics. You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find someone who wouldn’t agree that, for example, Casablanca, isn’t old, but I think that just about everyone agrees that it’s also a classic. Where the line is is pretty murky.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Unwanted gravy starter in frozen turkey breast⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For the record, the butterball boneless turkey roasts also include a gravy starter.

  I buy a fair number of them when I find a good deal, I have a meat slicer and make most of my own lunch meats and they’re really convenient for that. Even with the added weight from the gravy which I also don’t use, they’d probably still be a money saver if I could keep myself from loading the sandwich up with extra meat.

  I’ve been trying to figure out a good alternative, I may try at some point just cramming some turkey breasts into some meat netting and seeing how well it holds together.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s cockney rhyming slang, it’s best not to think too deep about it

  Americans are called yanks, yank rhymes with tank, and septic tanks are a type of tank, so Americans are septics. It’s not exactly flattering but it’s not really as much of an insult as it sounds.

  The same kind of logic has them calling “stairs” “apples and pears” because pears rhymes with stairs and apples are kind of similar to pears.

  Or “cherry” meaning “lie” because lie rhymes with pie, and cherry is a type of pie.

• ⁨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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.