Fondots

@Fondots@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone explain, calories, carbs, glucose, and gluten?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You read it somewhere, so clearly someone has reported it

  The issues are how do you

  1. Get people to pay attention to those reports and care?
  2. Get those people to vote accordingly?
  3. Get those elected officials to hold the electric companies accountable?
  4. Hold those elected officials accountable when they don’t?
  5. Keep those people engaged and doing points 1-4 consistently so that it doesn’t happen again?
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Library Apps are GOATed⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  No Mans Sky comes to mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Most people do not consciously give a shit.

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

  But those opinions can also be manipulated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ada Lovelace⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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 ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨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

  Image

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What gaming console you owned disappointed you the most and why ?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What should I do after discovering a collection of baby spiders in my home?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is time ~25% faster now?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How prevalent are cash transactions in the USA?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ireland is a Catholic majority country. Yet all the Americans I know who identify as Irish are Protestant. Why is that?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Appalachia

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your Truck is Stupid Big⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Even if we found a feasible way through physics to travel through time, wouldn't it still be impossible due to the evolution of bacteria and our immune systems?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nerve-controlled prosthetics⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Think Bold⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do I actually find a job that isn't retail?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come they don't put out episodes of like Invincible, Simpsons, or whatever doing a side by side of the actor speaking into the microphone while watching what happens the cartoon?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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