ChickenLadyLovesLife
@ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
- Comment on A simpler time 1 day ago:
I was working in a cubicle farm at the time, and everybody was on the phone all fucking day for weeks trying to pass the call-in test for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Absolutely no work got done by the entire IT department of a major corporation for that whole time. I’m surprised that show didn’t have a worse effect on the economy than 9/11 or COVID.
- Comment on Kirkland strong 2 days ago:
I’ve never seen a worse example of this than people who put the Monster logo on their cars. How is it even possible to feel that level of pride in your energy drink of choice?
- Comment on do what you love 2 days ago:
I dunno, I used to have seriously monster calves until I started heavy cycling and running. They’re still OK but they definitely shrunk after I lost 30-40 pounds.
- Comment on do what you love 4 days ago:
job, education, grammar, race, sex, take your pick.
I’m gonna go with “calf muscles”.
- Comment on do what you love 4 days ago:
Most of my programming career was spent working for small consulting firms that created custom software for (relatively) small clients. The most important skill by far was the ability to talk to customers (and listen to them as well) in order to understand what they needed the custom software to actually do. Not only is this skill not taught in the Computer Science curriculum, it’s not even conceived of as a thing. My bosses were constantly hiring freshly-minted CS grads and could not understand why I rejected having them placed on my team. I instead always looked for people that had experience not just with programming but with things outside of the programming world entirely.
That being said, I sure would not have wanted a freshly-minted philosophy grad either, for the same reason.
- Comment on do what you love 4 days ago:
convince investment bankers not to kill themselves?
Sometimes there is great value in a job done poorly.
- Comment on nooo my genderinos 4 days ago:
“Noooooooooo!” -Albert Einstein
- Comment on i just think they're neat 5 days ago:
Why would ancient humans have bothered growing bong gourds when they could have just punched holes in empty beer cans instead?
- Comment on i just think they're neat 5 days ago:
Some fun facts: Grover Krantz, the originator of the concept of human persistence hunting (which Wikipedia labels “conjecture”), was better-known as a staunch advocate for the existence of Bigfoot (there is of course no such thing as Bigfoot - it’s obviously a Yeti in a gorilla suit). Interestingly, he didn’t propose it as an explanation for bipedality, one of the unique characteristics of the human lineage, but rather as an explanation for our big brains, speculating that bigger brains would allow persistence hunters to survive a large fraction of their brain neurons dying from the heat stress that would result from long-distance running during the day.
For apparently no reason, Krantz’ skeleton and that of his favorite dog are on display at the Smithsonian.
- Comment on "I know the lyrics I promise" 6 days ago:
Did you know: Deee-Lite used a sample from the Green Acres theme song in their eponymous 1990 club hit “Groove Is In the Heart”?
- Comment on sorry lenin, the look has been gentrified 6 days ago:
Fun fact: After Lenin died in 1924, he was mummified because of the worldwide popularity of Howard Carter’s discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in Egypt - not because of any tradition in Russia of preserving the bodies of Tsars or other leaders. The “preservation” job was utterly and completely amateurish, because nobody involved had any idea how to do anything like that.
- Comment on Anon thinks there is a bicurious double standard 1 week ago:
gay men are much more poly-curious than straight women
I used to have a gay man cut my hair (back when I used to have hair lol). Casey would talk very loudly about his sexual activities and it was always amusing to see the looks the other (female) hairdressers in the shop gave him. One time he was telling me about fucking an old woman, saying “sure, I’ll stick my dick in whatever, why not?” This was especially amusing because it was right before prom night and the place was filled with high school girls getting their hair elaborately coiffed while their fading-flower mothers hovered nearby with shocked looks on their faces. This was in Louisiana, which is surprisingly a lot more tolerant of homosexuality than you might think (at least in some parts) - he was fired that day, which was a common occurrence for him. I think he worked out of five different salons during the time he cut my hair.
- Comment on Well that didn't work out as planned 1 week ago:
School bus driver here. Depending on the district you drive for, it can be stable. At mine, we make over $30/hr and get benefits like health insurance and a small pension (after ten years on the job). However, you don’t get a lot of hours (typically 4-5 a day, although the most senior drivers can get 8+ hours a day) and generally no (or very little) work in the summers - for me, this is part of the job’s appeal. We are a union shop, which is pretty important to the situation.
The lack of stability comes from the fact that there’s a strong tendency for school districts to privatize and hand over transportation responsibilities to private bus companies, which generally use older poorly-maintained buses, and hire any creatures that seem to be alive and have CDLs to drive while not doing criminal background checks on them or testing for drugs and alcohol and paying them a lot less with no benefits. The advantage of privatization is that it ends up costing school districts more because of the much higher accident rates.
- Comment on Truly a 1984 moment 1 week ago:
It’s kind of funny how all the British Pythons have stories about Graham Chapman claiming that none of them even knew what gay was before they met him. They were all like “uh, we went to public school in England - how would we not have known anything about that?”
- Comment on this is exactly what copper would say 1 week ago:
Copper-nabbers are opportunistic, and won’t take the time to forge an original invoice.
I dunno, it’s kind of hard to spell “Ea-nāṣir” correctly.
- Comment on All I Want 1 week ago:
I see ^235\ U and I relate an obscure fun fact: separating the isotopes of Uranium is an extremely difficult task because they behave identically in the chemical sense. One of the techniques developed by the Manhattan Project during WWII was electromagnetic separation. When a charged particle (or ion) moves through a magnetic field, it experiences a displacing force that is perpendicular to the direction of motion (which is pretty fucking strange in and of itself - imagine pushing an object on the floor and having the force of friction move it sideways instead of resisting your push).
This force perpendicular to the direction of motion causes the ion to travel a slightly curved path. The electromagnet separation technique involves creating a stream of ionized atoms of unrefined Uranium and firing it through a strong electromagnetic field; because the particles of U^238 and U^235 experience the same force during this, the U^235 ions, being slightly less massive, are displaced a bit more and so follow a slightly more curved path. By placing collectors at different positions, you end up with a small amount of U^235 and a large amount of U^238.
These giant electromagnets would normally have used copper wire for their windings, but copper was a strategically critical material for the war effort and was in very short supply. So the Manhattan Project basically checked out the United States’ silver reserves and used that for the windings instead (silver is not quite as good as copper for this purpose but is obviously better than nothing).
The electromagnets also used a lot of electricity, and this is why the Uranium-refining facilities were located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. FDR’s WPA had built multiple dams around there during the 1930s, and their turbines were put to work generating electricity for the magnets (it was also used for the thermal and gaseous diffusion processes).
- Comment on Helpful me mateys! 1 week ago:
It was interesting to read that Blackbeard actually spent some time hanging out in Philadelphia. It’s not recorded whether he preferred Pat’s or Geno’s.
- Comment on Nice argument. 1 week ago:
Freud did invent (or popularize) the core principle of psychotherapy: “everything is your parents’ fault”.
- Comment on Anon shares a family moment 1 week ago:
That reminds me of Richard Pryor talking about his trip to Africa. He would ask people there what tribe it looked like he was from and they would say “you look Italian”.
- Comment on Anon shares a family moment 1 week ago:
No, I just like Tarantino movies lol.
The concept of racial purity is dumb everywhere, but it’s especially dumb in the Mediterranean, where they had these things called “boats”. There is just no way that an island smack in the middle of this shit wouldn’t have DNA from all over the fucking place.
- Comment on Anon shares a family moment 1 week ago:
I find it weird that people care whether it’s a choice or not (for the record, I don’t think sexuality is a choice, at least not usually). Is it suddenly OK to discriminate against people because of choices they make? Like which kind of car they drive or which music they listen to?
- Comment on Anon shares a family moment 1 week ago:
Sicilians? lol
- Comment on Anon shares a family moment 1 week ago:
I have two half-Thai cousins (Floridians, naturally) whose mother was a Thai immigrant, and they love to bitch about immigrants (as does my white uncle, who brought this Thai immigrant to the US from Thailand). Neither looks Thai, but one looks generically Central American and the other looks Japanese and they got abused growing up for that. It’s really wild to me how this gave them no empathy at all for the shit immigrants have to endure; instead they do their best to be caricatures of white people.
- Comment on Anon shares a family moment 1 week ago:
Just to have an ackshoolly moment: humans are apes. If you mean humans are less socially intelligent than gorillas, male gorillas tend to do stuff like killing all the children fathered by the previous silverback. Human stepfathers at least sometimes don’t do that.
- Comment on THIS is true wisdom 1 week ago:
Well, it is kinda bad when we can’t get a substitute for a driver. The day after the Eagles won the super bowl last year, more than a third of our drivers called in “sick” and we had to cancel a bunch of runs.
- Comment on THIS is true wisdom 1 week ago:
I’m a school bus driver, and when a driver quits or retires they get paid for any accrued sick leave. The idea, of course, is that you don’t want people pretending to be sick for their last week or two on the job and leaving us with unexpected absences we have to find substitutes for. However, this payoff is $7 less per hour than our regular rate - so of course, everybody that leaves pretends to be sick for their last week or two on the job in order to get their full pay. It’s just such a fucking braindead policy.
- Comment on THIS is true wisdom 1 week ago:
I’m a school bus driver. Our district has a policy that for paid holidays (e.g. Labor Day) you have to show up for the work day prior and the work day following, or you don’t get paid for that holiday. This is ostensibly to prevent people from stretching a three-day weekend into four or five consecutive days off by taking pretend sick leave. I was a white-collar worker (programmer) for my whole career before this and never encountered any kind of rule like this.
- Comment on Remember to 2FA your kidneys. 1 week ago:
Lol I thought “2FA” meant “Second Fucking Amendment” and I was supposed to shoot my own kidney.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
I like saying “CHRIST-ee-en”. It really pisses them off although it obviously shouldn’t.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Every time someone tells me about the ten commandments, I ask them to name all ten. They can never name all ten. On the flip side, if somebody starts talking about UBI they can usually say what all three letters stand for.