Fondots

@Fondots@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why have we as a society just accepted the increasingly blinding bright lights of cars?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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 ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is time ~25% faster now?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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 ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ 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?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sunglasses suggestions⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  So no more fancy sunglasses for me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I got in a collision with a car from the 70s with a car today, would not the 70s car win out since it would primarily be metal? If so why don't people buy more 70's cars?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do office going men still wear suits in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I had a math professor from Nigeria

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do they still offer shadows to shadow their work and learn a trade you want to try? Or is that the old days? I thought it would be neat to be an Electrician.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone explain the Birds and the Bees to me? I get its related to sex somehow but was never told the story or where it got started or how come a plant and insect?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can someone explain the Birds and the Bees to me? I get its related to sex somehow but was never told the story or where it got started or how come a plant and insect?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

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

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

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

  Not-so-subtly threatening the boyfriend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the "Gen z stare" a real thing?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve encountered what I think of as the Gen z stare once or twice.

  It skews more towards the younger end of Gen z, and honestly might even be more of an older gen alpha thing.

  What I’m talking about isn’t the blank look given after being asked a stupid question, although they are absolutely masters of that as well (and I love that look and use it as myself)

  It feels like more of a lack of understanding that someone is asking you a question and expecting an answer, or perhaps an inability to process that question and come up with an appropriate answer.

  My friend who works at a bank has what I think is kind of the quintessential story that shows this version of the stare looks like, a younger person walked up to the counter, he asked some variation of “How can help you today?” And just got a stare back, like it never crossed their mind that they’d have to answer a question and say “I need to make a deposit/withdrawal,/etc.”

  And I don’t think it’s necessarily a feature of the generation as a whole, not that gens z and alpha don’t have their quirks, but I have plenty of Gen z friends and coworkers and I don’t think they’re much worse off in any particular way than my fellow millennials. I have somewhat less exposure to get

  I think it’s a very specific subset of the generation with a perfect storm of social isolation/anxiety issues, maybe some neurodivergence, probably some overbearing helicopter parents, and COVID kind of hitting at exactly the wrong point in their lives so that they missed out on some kind of social development milestones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If I decided to convert from [insert lack of religion] to Amish, would they allow me to bring my Casio graphing calculator to continue my math studies?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Like others have said, the degree of technology permitted and a lot of other things vary a lot from one amish community to another.

  But in general, most Amish aren’t going to school beyond about 8th grade. Some of them might be getting some sort of vocational training in addition to that but you’re probably going to have a hard time finding any kind of opportunities for Amish higher education.

  In general, they tend to get more leeway for using technology as part of their business than for personal use, they might have a computer to help track business expenses, maybe even a business email or have a website for selling their goods online. It’s possible they might even be allowed to have a car or use a tractor for certain purposes.

  But as far as just pursuing a math education, that’s probably gonna be a no-go. And if they somehow do permit it, you’re probably gonna need to get by with a pencil, paper, slide rules, etc.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hypothetically, if a Black Millionaire had their home broken into by a poor White person, how much danger is there of the Black Millionaire getting shot by cops "by mistake"?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I work in 911 dispatch, and we have some really rich towns in the county I work for

  And I have one story that makes me think it’s at least something that’s on their minds

  I got a call from one of those neighborhoods for a breaking and entering. The caller had been out of the house and came home to find that someone had broken in while they were gone.

  I’m gathering all of the information, and without me prompting he starts giving me his description - 6ft-whatever black man, wearing blah blah blah, and that he’ll be waiting by the front door etc.

  And it just felt very clear to me that he knows unless he is very upfront about that, that when the cops get there, there’s a really damn good chance that they’re immediately going to assume he’s a suspect and not the homeowner.

  Googled him later, former NBA player, I don’t follow sports but apparently he was kind of a big deal when he was playing. Not sure what his net worth is, but houses in that neighborhood tend to sell for several million.

  Probably the nicest caller I’ve ever gotten from that neighborhood, and with the best reason to call. Another guy nearby once got into a fight with an Amazon driver because he had the audacity to pull into his driveway.

  As an aside, that is how B&Es happen. Unless it’s your crazy ex or something looking to start shit with you, they’re not breaking into your home while you’re home, they want to take your shit and get the fuck out they don’t want a confrontation with you. I admittedly work in an overall pretty safe area, but we do have some pretty shitty towns as well as the mega rich, but after 7 years on the job I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a call for an in-progress B&E while someone was home where they didn’t know the person trying to break in (and usually there was a very specific, though usually not particularly good, reason they were trying to break in- they wanted to take back something they gave the person, were trying to retrieve their own belongings, they just wanted to fight or trash the place because they were mad at them, etc.)

  And it’s almost always in the super rich neighborhoods where houses are spaced far apart, the residents can afford to take long vacations far from home, and there’s lots of valuable stuff to steal left unattended while they’re gone. To a lesser extent it happens in the really shitty neighborhoods. It’s almost unheard of in the rest of suburbia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Native English

  A tiny bit of French. My public school French education was a bit of a mess, lots of long-term substitutes and then substitutes for those substitutes, so none of it really stuck. If someone talks slowly I can usually catch the gist of what they’re saying, but probably wouldn’t be able to string the words together to respond.

  And I’ve gotten myself to be somewhat passable at Esperanto using Duolingo.

  I may make another run at learning French at some point.

  Wouldn’t mind learning Polish, Italian, Gaelic, and/or Albanian, since that’s where my ancestors came from. Never been particularly great at language-learning though so that’s a huge stretch.

  Also always thought it would be cool to learn Unami (the language spoken by the Lenape people who originally lived in the area I do)

  And I’ve spent enough time in tiki bars that I occasionally think about learning Hawaiian or some other Polynesian language

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨🍌 GET YER NFTS HERE 🍎⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not affiliated with them, but if anyone has money to throw at interesting fruit, I got a box of assorted fruit from the Miami Fruit Company for Christmas and it was pretty cool to have weird fruits to munch on for a few days.

  There may be other companies doing the same thing maybe with a better assortment or cheaper, but that’s the one I know off the top of my head.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How many times a year do you wash your jeans?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Given that I do laundry roughly once a week, often pushing it past that a bit to maybe a week and a half or so

  And I don’t wear jeans much during the summer, and generally prefer other styles of pants

  Probably around 30 times a year.

  I normally only wear them once before washing. Sometimes twice if the weather’s cool and I haven’t done much to get sweaty/dirty or if they were only worn for part of the day. There’s some extenuating circumstances where I might push it beyond that, like if I’m camping it’s possible that I might wear the same jeans for a long weekend (but with fresh undies every day)

  I don’t buy nice jeans, pretty much just whatever Walmart or target has in stock in my size. I get a few years out of a pair as day-to-day jeans, once they start showing too much wear they might get downgraded to work pants for when I’m doing yard work, painting, etc. at which point they get washed when that job at hand is done, usually one day but for a particularly big job I may wear them for a few days.