Anyone ever have a baked potato explode?
ArtieShaw@kbin.social to 
ArtieShaw@kbin.social to ArtieShaw
1 Post – 155 Comments
Joined 1 years ago
ArtieShaw@kbin.social to The companion story: Hospital bosses ignored months of doctors' warnings about Lucy Letby suggests that not only did hospital management ignore the problem for almost 9 months, they had no interest in involving the police or outside investigators. They even required two of the doctors to apologize to her for their accusations.
So I guess she was getting away with it just fine.
I've seen this happen so many times and it's always so embarrassing. There's a lovely template that you can slap onto an article that says something along the lines of "this article appears to have been edited by someone with a close association with the subject." It's truly a marvel in how close it skates towards saying, "the subject of this bio didn't like parts of what people were saying, so they edited it to suit themselves" without saying exactly that. It's subtly brutal.
Fortunately for the feelings of people who edit their own wiki bios, I suspect that they probably don't feel the sense of shame that I would if I were in that position.
There's a wiki article on the subject of nurses who kill their patients. It contains some general speculation on motivations.
The motivation for this type of criminal behaviour is variable, but generally falls into one or more types or patterns:[4]
Mercy killer: Believe the victims are suffering or beyond help, though this belief may be delusional.
Sadistic: Use their position as a way of exerting power and control over helpless victims.
Malignant hero: A pattern wherein the subject endangers the victim's life in some way and then proceeds to "save" them. Some feign attempting resuscitation, all the while knowing their victim is already dead and beyond help, but hope to be seen as selflessly making an effort.
Fun fact. My workplace added recycle bins to the breakroom a few years ago. The day after, HR had to call a facility-wide emergency meeting to explain that their use was voluntary only and that no workers would be required to use them.
Grown ass adults lost their shit because they saw a recycle bin.
Off the top of my head:
- That little triangle embossed on your plastic container says it has been / can be recycled.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
https://www.earthday.org/plastic-recycling-is-a-lie/
-Anything involving babies and incubators is immediately suspect. (Or babies and bayonets, for that matter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah\_testimony
-And this one is pure conspiracy, and I know it's not what you asked for... but it's ridiculous and 'tis the season. My mother in law is convinced that the lyrics to "Oh Christmas Tree" (O Tannenbaum) were changed by people who wanted to erase the true and original lyrics. By who? Big Tree financiers? Communists who are stealing Christmas and replacing it with trees?
Anyway...
The original lyrics, according to this conspiracy, praise God and never mention trees at all. It's completely ridiculous and always ends with the whole family singing along with the "true lyrics" from a badly photocopied paper that she hands out. I hope this doesn't come up again this year because it really makes me want to fight. Which would make me the bad person, because who initiates fights on Christmas? The next couple of days are going to be tough.
This happened during street festivities for lunar new year, so a lot of people are connecting the dots. They don't mention that the car was aggressively trying to drive through a crowd, but it seems like it was trying to make its way through a crowd.
Multiple witnesses said Waymo’s navigation technology became confused by festivities and fireworks that were lit to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Witness Anirudh Koul said the driverless car “got stuck immediately in front.”
Another witness said the car’s presence in the middle of Chinatown’s celebrations triggered frustrations in the crowd. “You could feel the frustration when people were just trying to celebrate,” she told KRON4.
Under cabinet manual jar opener. It's flat and mounts under your cabinet of choice. Easy to use, but also easy to forget it's there! I sometime find myself jar in hand and half-way to wherever my husband is before I remember that I no longer need his skills.
Electric candle lighter. Rechargeable lighter with long neck. Eliminates the need for matches or standard lighters. The noise it makes does scare one of the cats, though. I haven't tried it on campfires yet, but I think that was something the ad said it could do.
At some point, the question becomes: was the candidate too unqualified to understand what they were applying for?
I don't mind training someone if they're not 100% up to speed but they also need to be capable of learning and retaining things. A lot of that means that you need a foundation based on education and on the job learning. In other words, I'm not going to teach foundational shit that you should have picked up in high school.
One memorable example: we had one applicant who claimed a high degree of competence and related experience - and although I had some doubts during the interview I was realistic about the job market and our chances of finding someone who was a perfect match. She was personable, seemed smart, and had worked in the industry. How hard would it be to train her? If she could manage to pick up even the most basic parts of the workload it would be win to hire her.
A short list of what we learned
- no bachelor's degree (our manager was livid when she found out about that one)
- no understanding of basic science (like, "temperature is not measured as a percentage" basic science)
- a week into the job, asked when she was going to "start doing X," even though the job description was "you're going to be doing Y and Z." To be fair (?), the words describing X and Y were fairly similar and you might mistake one for the other if you had a poor grasp on either of them.
I'm going to gloss over a lot of irrelevant (but horrifying) detail here. We did have one memorable conversation where she said, "I'm so glad I applied for this job even though I wasn't qualified. You never know where you can get by trying!"
Where she eventually got was fired, but that took some time and the damage she did is still legendary. Part of that legacy of raging incompetence is that we fact-check resumes in ways that we previously did not. But the great irony is that she probably had no idea of just how unqualified she actually was. Again, the question becomes: is the candidate too unqualified to understand what they were applying for?
The other hobbyists on this thread made some good points about what's being shown in the photos, but I'm a mushroom nerd and wanted to point out a few things just for fun. I've only grown the tasty kind, but since we're looking at cubes I'm going to talk about cubes.
The first item on the mushroom grower's quest is usually spores. This may seem like a large hurtle, but with the exception of three state it's actually not illegal to buy, sell, or ship spores in the US. There's an understanding that the buyer will not be growing anything with them because that would be illegal. A syringe with spores can be found for under $20.
You can see this person's spore germination lab in the second photo.
The bottles with brown liquid are liquid culture media. That's basically a nutritious, sterile broth. A few drops of the liquid from the spore syringe is added to the bottle and the grower lets it incubate until it starts to form mycelium (the main part of the fungus). Behind the jars you can see agar plates. Some people start with the agar and then move to liquid culture. Some use the agar just to isolate strong organisms and remove contaminants. With one big exception, there's no one correct way to do this.
The exception explains the equipment in the back of the photo: sterile work environments and growth media. The bench is a laminar flow hood that pushes sterile air forward across the work bench. The big pots are (I'm making an educated guess here) steam sterilization chambers. The bags contain sterile substrate. Usually grain like oats, rye, or millet. Even brown rice. The grain is cooked in water, drained, then bagged up (as in this case) or placed into modified jars. The containers and contents are sterilized prior to adding the mycelia.
There are a couple of ways to do this, but lets say they're adding if from the liquid culture. Working under sterile conditions, they fill a sterile syringe with liquid, then proceed to inject a few millilitres into every bag. The injection holes are sealed with tape and they're ready to incubate for a few weeks while the mycelia consumes the grain.
Remember: fungi are not plants. They don't grow in dirt. They consume organic matter and eventually form fruit in order to reproduce.
After a month or two the bags should be filled with pure white mycelial growth. It's now mushroom time. They need a drop in temperature and the introduction of fresh air . I would imagine that this grower moves them to that second room and simply opens the bags to admit fresh air. (I use a slightly different method with my tasty mushers, and it's my understanding that this would also work with cubes. I transfer the grain to tubs filled with a damp substrate, wait for it to colonize completely, then adjust the environmental conditions).
In a couple of weeks the fruits (mushrooms!) start to form. After harvest, you can usually rehydrate the block, wait a week, and get a second crop. And also - now that you have mushrooms, you can collect their spores and begin again!
As a hobbyist it was very interesting to see the photos of a small but still commercial scale grow.
I just wanted to comment that Bob Ross's name and image is controlled not by his estate, but by his former business partners. There are a couple of good articles out there, but the tl/dr is that they stole the business from him as he was dying.
It sounds like the painting being offered for sale was in private hands, but I hate to see a price point like that being set while the vast majority of his work is owned by the people who screwed him and his family.
I was on two flights earlier this year where the attendants weren't given seats for takeoff and landing. In the first case the attendant squatted and braced himself in the aisle next to the last row (where I was seated). I wasn't quite sure what was happening, but it was weird.
The next flight where this happened, the older attendant straight up told two passengers ticketed to seats in the last row to get the fuck off the plane and back into the terminal. She was pissed. I felt for the guys because they had boarding passes with seat assignments. Not their fault. (They were eventually seated elsewhere).
I was also assigned to that row so I asked her what was going on. She said that where an attendant seat isn't available they're supposed to reserve seats in the last row for staff. But they're overbooking all flights so aggressively that they're assigning those seats to customers.
I hope they get what they need. I'm a frequent traveler so I selfishly hope it doesn't come to disruptions, but I'm willing to live with sending angry emails to airlines.
There was a televised special about this guy, and it's wild from start to finish. He comes across as a weird mix of clever and dumb, charming and disgusting. Mostly the latter and the latter, but I have the benefit of knowing about him beforehand. His victims didn't.
If I remember correctly, it was his absurdist need to fake (and publicize!) his own death that led people in the US to him. He literally reached out to multiple news orgs in his home state to say that he was 100% dead, even though no one had asked. I guess the moral is that if you're going to dangle something that weird in front of reporters, expect them to follow up.
Rose Acre Farms! There's some super weird stories linked to the founder, David Rust. Three of his employees were murdered/died under unusual circumstances in the 1970s and 80s. Theresa Osborne, Mike Reese, and Carrie Croucher. All unsolved. All involve small town weirdness and rumors.
Aside from the deaths, there was the scandal in the 80s where he left his wife because he "wanted more children and more chickens." He already had seven kids with his first wife, Lois. He found a much younger woman and had five or six more. Lois eventually divorced him and, along with her seven kids, took majority control over Rose Acre.
All Googleable, but here's a set of newspaper clippings.
https://imgur.com/a/BJuhyB9
That's a hard agree. I work in a highly regulated industry and literally every new dude who joins the company says some version of "I don't see why we can't just..." and proceeds to describe some moderately to highly illegal shit. Every single one.
It's wild. I think they honestly believe they're the first person to think up these completely obvious and simple "solutions" to problems that require some degree of control and complexity.
Short and simplified version:
Virginia had a lot of land and it was a slave-holding state. But the western part was in the mountains, where it wasn't really feasible to have a plantation or conduct large scale trade. Waterways were the most efficient way to trade. By the time the Civil War rolled around, Virginia wanted to continue slavery, but the people in the mountains didn't really give a fuck. They were poor and didn't want to fight for the plantation owners.
Post war, WV continued their status quo as a poor mountain state with mineral resources but not much else. Virginia continued to flourish with its arable land, cities, military facilities, and ports.
Two cats at once. I get the part of the bed not taken by the cats. I'm motivated to lie very still by the cats and the obvious repercussions for moving.
If that fails, the podcast Casefile - gruesome true crime stories recited by a very slow talking Australian fellow. It almost always puts me out. In bed or on planes.
On the other hand, it's a really bad idea to be locked into a single source for your raw materials. It sounds like Tran was trying to mitigate that risk in a fairly reasonable way. If he can buy and sell from other farmers, there's a buffer if the OG farm can't deliver. And he could also continue to use the OG farm as primary supplier, while selling off excess chilis to other producers.
All of this is why supply contracts and backup supply chain plans exist. Risk mitigation is normal. Like they said near the end of the article, businesses sometimes need to have an adult in the room.
Hi u/spez! This is exciting news. I'm looking forward to your valuable insight into the question of how to go several days without pooping. Three day's worth would be optimal, but I'm sure everyone would be interested in your vision for a future without enshittification
Having guys make me mix tapes.
Anyway, this one really cute guy at college had an epic cassette collection and he was also artistically talented so he made custom covers/inserts for each one. The original tape is long gone, but somewhere I still have my favorite cassette cover that also includes the hand-printed play list.
He had other excellent skills, so I eventually married him.
Same, but I'd probably go with Bree. I'm a bit tall for the Shire. Also, Bree seems a little more lively and they have a thing called 'pints.'
No, they don't cause damage on their own. Birds get a windfall of big nutritious bugs. Humans might be a little creeped out.
I don't think that means what you think it means.
That's a nice and succinct summary.
I've been following this story pretty closely. I'm nowhere near to being part of the press, but I do enjoy seeing clumsy attempts at suppression blowing up in spectacular fashion. As this one has done.
I have a brother who is younger than me by 6 years. Our upbringing was a bit weird. Our parents basically forbid anything that might cause them inconvenience, irritation, or expense - which was most things that might interest a kid. (No, they're not religious, which is the first question that everyone asks. They're just raging assholes who are also a bit stupid. I can't really explain it much beyond that.)
In addition to the manipulation and emotional abuse, they rewarded us if we informed on each other. I seldom did. Not through any great virtue or integrity of my own, but because I routinely got punished for the stupid shit he did. For instance, I didn't tell them when our adult neighbor shot little bro with an air rifle because I knew he would catch absolute hell for being in the position of getting shot with an air rifle. Even if I didn't catch hell about it, it was miserable to watch him get screamed at. For context on this story - we had been told to stay away from Steve's yard because Steve was a known psycho with a hatred for neighbor kids. On that glorious summer day, Steve had dropped a $5 bill on his driveway just inside the property line... and was waiting for a kid to come by and be dumb enough to try to pick it up.
I might actually tell that one at their funeral.
By contrast, bro was younger and never got any blowback if I was doing something wrong. He actually recorded me talking on the phone with a friend when I was in middle school. He picked up the other line and held one of those shitty '70s tape recorders to the earpiece. Talking on the phone was forbidden and he was collecting proof to use against me. My friend and I weren't plotting shit, I wasn't grounded (the concept was foreign because we were never really allowed to go out or do things like talk on the phone anyway), it was just forbidden to talk on the phone.
I could excuse it when he was eight, but he passed along "dirt" on me well into his late teens and my twenties. He was under pressure from them as well, but he basically shredded any idea of trust between us for far too many times to count. I forgot what the final straw was, but I remember thinking, "I can never confide in this person and feel trust." In every meaningful way, I've ignored him for the last 20 years.
He's probably the least shitty thing about family gatherings, but that's not saying much.
I liked him in News Radio, but I would also have said the same about Andy Dick. Come to think of it, both of them played idiot savant characters so maybe it was just the genius casting in that show.
He was also perfectly cast in Fear Factor. It was like something he was born to do.
My husband (vaccinated) caught it hard in early October. Lost his voice completely for three days and could barely eat due to his sore throat. He hasn't stopped coughing since.
He's middle aged (mid-40s) and otherwise healthy.
My mom (80) caught it last week after a trip to the east coast.
I think what you're doing so far is key. And it's really the hard part. The rest is just being a friendly place.
No one wants to be one of those 5 people howling into the void when something is getting started, but it needs to be done to demonstrate that people are willing to participate. You might also consider posting easy polls or open ended questions to invite engagement. (If you haven't)
Chicago suburbs. It's sort of an interconnected area, so this takes place over two adjoining towns.
There was a very public and stupid feud that took place between two middle aged men. Some of it played out in real life and some was documented on that now defunct website, Topix. One of them had been close friends with the the police officer who was convicted of killing at least one wife. I think he was also a cop. In any case, he was very vocal in defending Drew and anything the other guy said about the murder trial really seemed to get his goat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drew\_Peterson
The other guy claimed to be connected with the Chicago outfit. Or the cop claimed he was. I don't remember.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago\_Outfit
Basically, it was two vaguely mobbed up guys in their 50s engaging in a very public and embarrassing battle of fists and wits in an otherwise unassuming suburb. They would trade insults on Topix, get into slap fights with each other at the local supermarket, and generally just behave like leaded gasoline sniffing idiots. Neither could just walk away from it. Both used their real full names.
There's an older form that goes back to at least the 1970s when fuel efficient Japanese cars started to become popular in the US: "Rice burners."
There was some made-in-America angst at the time because of the oil crisis, coupled with some quality issues that made these cars more appealing. The phrase was definitely used pejoratively. I can remember my dad muttering about it well into the '80s.
In my friend's case it was just a faulty heater in her apartment. The first cold night of the year she turned on the heat, went to bed, and never woke up. I don't know the details beyond that.
We've had detectors ever since. And I usually think about it this time of year.
Interesting! That's kind of what I was thinking as a realistic outcome.
I fly a lot for work and I also do a fair bit of failure point and risk analysis as part of my job, so this is interesting to me in a couple of ways. Airports and airlines honestly do a decent job of checking that the people on the plane are the ones who are supposed to be there. A failure like this is reasonably unusual.
- she got through physical security (baggage and carry-on checks)
- to accomplish that, all she had to do was dodge the ID and boarding pass check.
That seems pretty feasible. If she was dressed vaguely like an employee it might have helped, but that's just speculation. We've all seen the gorilla walk through the ball game - after we were told to look for him - so it's not strictly necessary.
I have a harder time understanding how she could have boarded through the passenger line where they scan the passes.
I also have a slightly harder time understanding how she could have found a plane with open seats. I can view a seat map 12 hours ahead of boarding and see a plane with 10 open seats. When it comes time to board they're completely full. But - part of this is because the airline shuttles regional pilots to their main hub via any available seat and they do it at the last minute. And here's my further speculation: a flight from Nashville to LA is a long haul so this shuttling probably wouldn't come into play. If she checked seat availability in advance, it probably would have been accurate and she could probably help herself to a seat that appeared open.
The final hurdle seems to be the one that caught her. The article doesn't say exactly, but it says that authorities were waiting on the ground. Stewards have a flight manifest that lists every passenger by name and by seat. On rare occasions I've seen them checking the manifest as passengers board - for example, on overbooked flights where they've sold steward seats for take off and landing to passengers and they expect stewards to squat in the aisle. I've also heard anecdotally that if you're acting like a weirdo they'll look up who you are.
tldr: I could (and do!) give zero fucks about who won Sunday's sports match, but can conceive of why it might be news, of of interest, to some people.
It's funny how small towns offer a sense of security, even if it isn't really warranted.
We moved to a small town about 15 years ago. It was right after a fairly brutal murder of a local teen. And it was just a few years after the murder of a local man by his roommate. That one didn't get as much coverage, but he murdered him with an ashtray in a fit of anger. Locals were still happy to tell us that no one locks their doors.
Since then, we've had two double murders, a SWAT situation where four neighboring police forces came to town to help local police kill the guy barricaded inside his home, and a sad story of a young man who went missing in December and was found murdered the next spring. There was also the time a local man randomly attacked two out-of-town women with a baseball bat and was stabbed with a screwdriver by a neighbor. And I feel like I'm forgetting one more.
Even after all of that, police had to call everyone in town and tell them to lock their damn doors after a rash of burglaries. The thieves were just walking around trying doors at random and being very successful.
Granted - my town is unlike the one in the article because it seems like the attacks in Nebraska were both random. That would be unnerving. What I do find funny (in the WTF sense) is that every time my town has another murder, double murder, or riot, the people seem to forget all the ones that came before. For a town of 3000 people our per capita murder rate must be pretty high, but everyone feels totally safe.
Egg and rice is the easy comfort food my husband learned from his grandmother. It's our too lazy to cook or shop dinner.
It's really amazing. Literally everyone in the US would have continued to not know or care about these people until this blew up - and it's all their own doing! It's like the Streisand Effect, but without the subjects already being in any way already known or noteworthy.
You know, I never even wondered that until you mentioned it. Maybe I'll check it out because now I'm irrationally curious! I bet it's pretty nice!
(/s)
I saw that comment too. It shed a lot of light on a topic that I personally don't know much about.
On the other hand, sometimes people can get weird about sticking up for their friends under any circumstances. My parents and brother are weird that way. One example - they know a rich white kid who killed an entire family by driving drunk. The kid's own family disowned him. They didn't help with his legal support, his twin brother cut ties with anyone who supported him, and he did time in the state prison. I don't know the details about the crime, but he had graduated from a flagship state university and was from a very wealthy family. Not "paid for a wing at the local hospital wealthy" but definitely, "has a regulation size basketball court in their basement" wealthy. He absolutely fit the profile of Brock Allen Turner (the rapist).
He still got 5-10 years in state. It must have been bad. My family stepped up to support this asshole.
My brother routinely visited him in prison and gave him a job when he got out. I don't really fault my brother for that. (OK - I judge him a bit. The kid was always an asshole and he killed people. But he did his time.)
On the other hand, my parents have nothing but good things to say about this guy and generally act like he was the victim of a huge conspiracy by the state. They were also offended that their own personal friend "Stanley" was sent to old people prison (nursing home) for "no reason" after he threatened to shoot his nephew. It was a credible threat, too. Stan is very well armed and had been going off his rocker for more than a few years.
tl/dr - my family are assholes but if they decide you're a ride or die friend it doesn't matter what you've done
I created an account about 24 hours ago and this is actually better than I expected. Of course, I wasn't expecting a complete and polished interface from something so new, but I had read plenty of horror stories about how lemmy/kbin signups were impossibly complex.
I like it. It's already pretty intuitive and I like that it's not a 1:1 Reddit clone. I can easily imagine this expanding and growing into something really interesting
Also, I got the username I wanted.
What made the difference for me was buying a really nice reusable bag. There's a brand called Flip and Tumble. They'll hold an absurd amount of stuff (something like 35lbs, if I remember correctly) and fold down into something smaller than a tennis ball. I keep two in the bottom of my purse and never need a bag. They are expensive (about $18 US), but I've had mine for almost 15 years.
To be fair, after the attacks on 9/11 I heard a fair number of comments from people who were convinced their local high school football stadium would be a prime target for international terror rings.
"Think about it, Becky. It's Friday night and the whole town of Left Nube, Indiana will be packed in there. We're sitting ducks."
It's silly, but people project their fear locally.