I remember maybe a year or so ago, overhearing some of my coworkers who seemed to genuinely believe that schools were installing litter boxes for alleged students that identify as cats.

These idiots will believe absolutely anything, and it doesn't need to be even remotely anchored to reality.

I find this kind of interesting after Naomi Wu (also known as SexyCyborg) recently had a run-in with the CCP and has largely gone silent online.

For anyone not familiar with her/her situation, she's a tech/maker YouTuber. She has a pretty radical look with enormous fake boobs and skimpy outfits, but she does have some genuinely interesting content. She had been calling out some security vulnerabilities that recently got some attention so that's likely why the Chinese government, in her words, clipped her wings, but she had a bit of a target painted on her back regardless because of her appearance, being a lesbian, and because her girlfriend is a Uyghur.

The actual sprayer nozzle sits towards the back of the bowl and sprays up at an angle so any dripping is going straight down into the bowl not landing on the sprayer nozzle.

It's getting fresh water, not recycling bowl water, I suppose there could be some small risk if Larry has explosive diarrhea all over the nozzle, but its probably no worse than if you have any splashback after using a regular toilet after him. Most of the models I have used also have a self-cleaning feature that will have the nozzle rinse itself (they still do need to be actually cleaned periodically of course)

There is a little bit of splashing, unless you're abnormally small and skinny though most of it is probably just going to get your butt and staying in the toilet, once in a while I'll get a couple drops on the front of the toilet seat and I'm pretty sure that's just over-spray shooting directly between my legs, not poop water splashing off of my ass

Call 911, tell them where it is, explain that you found a trash bag somewhere and you're concerned it has a dead body in it, don't disturb it any more than you already have

I work in 911 dispatch, from my end of things this is a very straightforward call. Verify your location, one or two short lines of notes, send a cop out to check it out.

I've taken a few calls like this, luckily it's always just been trash or at worst a dead animal.

One time the responding officer found some bones in the bag and was pretty sure they weren't human, but called out our on-call coroner to be sure who confirmed that it was just a deer or something.

Similarly I once had a call from an off-duty coroner reporting a "strong smell of decomp" from the woods near a gas station or something. I guess if anyone would know it would be them. Sent a cop out, sure enough, it was a dead deer.

It's very rare that anything like this is ever as exciting as your imagination makes you think it might be. Still, always better to call if you're unsure.

ThatsTheJoke.gif

The Roman Historian Sallust once said "Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master"

I remember posting that quote on Facebook once probably about 12 years ago. An older guy I worked with at the time chimed in that he was one of the few and how important liberty was to him.

Few years later he was spewing Trump bullshit.

People always chime in with stories about how chiropractors helped them with XY and Z problem they were having.

And overall I don't doubt them. There's a lot of things that can go wrong with your spine or other joints, and I'm certain that some of them can be addressed by physically manipulating and adjusting it.

But the basic premise of chiropractic treatments is that basically all human ailments can be fixed in that way, which should sound like total bullshit to anyone with half a brain. And that's before you get into all spiritual nonsense that pervades a lot of the field.

Now some of them understand that that's a load of bullshit and may even be realistic about the things they can treat, but it can be pretty damn hard to sort them out from the ones who think that your pancreatic cancer is caused by ghosts in your spine and they know how to get them out or some bullshit like that.

Now if you have a good idea what your issue is and what needs to be done to fix it, take the time to carefully vet your chiropractor to make sure they're not going to try some crazy bullshit on you, you very well may be able to get a decent treatment from them. Maybe you'll even be able to save some money going with that.

But for most of us who aren't doctors and so only have kind of vague ideas what exactly the issue is and that the treatments we're doing actually make any sense, and don't necessarily have time to do all of that research and carefully vet that the person treating them isn't secretly a quack, you could just get the same sort of treatments from actually physical therapists, orthopedists, physiatrists, etc. with the added benefit of them actually understanding the issues and how to fix them properly.

Chiropractors are kind of like the rednecks of the medicine world. Some of them know exactly what they're doing with that harbor freight welder, they may not do things by the book but they know for certain what works and what doesn't and more importantly know when something is beyond what them and their buddies can accomplish on a free Saturday with a case of beer and when they need to suck it up and limp their truck to the shop and let a professional deal with it. Others know just enough to be dangerous and while they can get the job done 90% of the time or at least not make things worse, that 10% of the time something is literally going to blow up in someone's face. And still others are just meth heads looking to make a quick buck and it's a miracle they're not behind bars. And when you see them hanging around the local watering hole, it may not be totally clear which is which until it's too late.

Teeth have always kind of struck me as something we could eventually not just replace or regrow and make as good as new, but actually replace with something better.

Teeth are, by their nature, subject to a lot of wear and tear, corrosive environments, have a lot of nooks and crannies that need to be cleaned regularly, etc.

How fucking cool would it be to have some sort of cyborg teeth made of some material that won't wear down, is more corrosion resistant, stronger than your natural teeth, etc? You could use your teeth as a bottle opener with impunity, or do everything else your parents always warned you not to do with your teeth.

I'm certainly no doctor or material scientist to suggest what the ideal tooth replacement material would be, but imagine having some kind of titanium alloy super teeth that would never wear down, corrode, or get cavities no matter what kind of neglect or abuse you subject them to, and are purposely engineered for easier flossing, may e even more efficient biting and chewing. Sure, the Jaws look isn't everyone's aesthetic, but some of us might consider it a worthwhile trade-off.

In the meantime though, this is damn cool if it pans out.

Gator- tastes like chicken, kind of tough and chewy, but come on, have you ever seen an alligator? Of course it was going to be chewy.

Frog legs- pretty much a dead ringer for chicken wings if you didn't know what a wing was supposed to look like. Maybe just the tiniest hint of something fishy going on there.

Escargot - an excellent excuse to eat a bunch of butter and garlic and for some reason it's fancy even though you're eating a garden pest

Squirrel - kind of greasy, but not bad, darker meat than I expected. Not really enough meat on them to be worth it though, at least not the squirrels we have in my neck of the woods, I've seen some pretty big squirrels in other parts of the country though, so maybe they're a little more worthwhile. If you had a handful of squirrels I suspect they could make a pretty good soup or stew though.

Rabbit- tastes like chicken, I've had it a few different ways, I don't know that I would know the difference if you swapped rabbit for chicken in any of them, but I had a rabbit pot pie at a restaurant a few years ago that has been my happy thought ever since, probably the tastiest thing I have ever eaten.

Deer venison - very similar to beef, a bit gamey but I dig that.

Quail - tiny chicken, that's pretty much all there is to it.

Pigeon- much darker than chicken, a bit greasy, overall pretty tasty (these were country pigeons, I don't recommend eating city pigeons) a single pigeon breast is pretty much exactly the right size to make a pigeon nugget.

Bison- lean beef, maybe a bit stronger tasting but overall pretty well within the beef spectrum. If you didn't tell me it was bison, I'd probably assume it was either really cheap or moderately expensive beef.

Wild boar- pork but not, kind of hard to explain this one, and the way I had it prepared had a lot of spices and seasoning so I can't really give a straight appraisal of the meat itself.

Kangaroo- it tastes like it evolved on a different continent than any other mammal you've ever eaten. It's still very much in the red meat family but there's something else going on there that's kind of hard to place, sort of gamey and stronger tasting.

Goose- kind of like a mix of duck and turkey, leaning more duck-like, and yeah, that tracks, you could probably just about assume that from looking at a goose.

I wouldn't really consider these to be exotic, but a surprising amount of people don't seem to have tried them, and they're some of my all-time favorite meats.

Duck- its more like a red meat than chicken, can be kind of greasy/fatty but in a good way

Lamb- red meat, kind of a strong gamey taste (that again, I personally really like) oddly somehow gamier than venison despite venison actually being a game meat and lamb being domesticated. You could probably serve me deer and tell me it was beef and slip it by me, but I don't think you could pull it off with lamb.

Goat- lamb, but moreso.

Liver- it's kind of hard to describe liver in any way but livery, but iron-y and minneral-y are probably the best adjectives I can come up with. I've had beef liver and chicken liver, beef is definitely a stronger flavor but both are recognizably livery. Chicken liver is probably mild enough that as long as it's prepared well most people could enjoy it, beef liver is definitely more of an acquired taste.

Chicken hearts- stronger flavored and tougher than regular chicken, but still recognizably chicken, imagine dark meat but lean. Little bit of a irony/mineraly taste, but not in a livery way, can be a little tough/chewy, and if you're inclined to batter and fry them, they are the perfect size to make sort of a popcorn chicken thing with, or if you want to have little bits of meat for a stir fry or something and don't feel like chopping up the meat yourself. They are also dirt cheap, at least around me.

Tripe- a bit chewy, honestly not too much going on flavor-wise, there's something going on that tastes/smells of a barnyard but in a very pleasant way, but it's almost more of a suggestion of a taste than an actual flavor.

Beef tongue- recognizably beefy, but definitely has something going else on, not quite livery but leaning that direction. Definitely something you need to braise or sous vide or something for a long time because it will be damn near impossible to chew otherwise, and it has its own unique texture, it will probably make you think a lot about your own tongue while eating it.

Chicken feet- look, there's really no meat worth speaking of on a chicken foot, it's basically all skin and connective tissue which is tasty and an interesting texture, but not worth it to me to eat themselves, some people do, but it's not for me. ut if you want to take you chicken stock to the next level, use some chicken feet.

And these are probably the opposite of exotic, just weird or have bad press

Pickled pigs feet- salty vinegary vaguely porky jello with bones in it. I like salty vinegary things, so that's not a bad thing in my book.

Scrapple- local delicacy for those of us in the Delaware valley, if you've ever heard spam described as everything but the oink, well scrapple has some oink in it too. It's soft and mushy and fries up to a real nice crisp on the outside. Taste is sort of in a similar vein as a breakfast sausage, really nothing too wild about it.

Pork roll (you north jersey folk calling it Taylor Ham are crazy, it says pork roll right on the package, you're wrong) is basically just spam with a better PR department, less salty, slightly different spices, doesn't come in a can.

And on that note- spam, it's delicious but very salty. If you like ham you'll probably like spam.

For what it's worth, I work in 911 dispatch, so I've heard pretty much every reason someone could call the police, some good, some not so good, and there's always weird exceptions or edge cases where a situation that I normally wouldn't personally think warrants police involvement can get tipped over the edge (regardless of whether I think they're needed or not, if someone calls asking for police, I'm dispatching them, if the cops want to ignore the call, that can be on them)

My general rule for fights/domestics, is I'll call for situations that are or look/sound like they're about to become physically violent, neighbors yelling at each other next door-not my problem. If I start hearing them throwing things around, I start hearing mention of weapons, they're suddenly out in the street, etc. then I'll call.

I'll also call when it's just a verbal argument in a situation where that sort of behavior is totally uncalled for, like an irate customer yelling and screaming in a store, manager is asking them to leave and they're refusing.

Or if I witness a crime where the victim is a person, small business, or public property.

Situations where a person is or might be in significant danger or distress.

Reckless drivers if they're really excessive, not your run of the mill bad driver or asshole speeding and running shop signs, you need to be a couple notches worse than that- swerving all over the road, or speeding to a ridiculous degree.

Certain road obstructions and other traffic hazards.

When in doubt, I say err on the side of calling. Take a deep breath, keep a level head, stick to the facts, and answer the dispatcher's questions, and please, for the love of God don't start your call off with anything like "well I guess it's not really an emergency but..." that's basically our "it didn't scan, so it must be free" and don't apologize repeatedly for calling, if you feel bad about tying up an emergency line, all of that apologizing just makes the call longer which means you're just tying up the line even more.

The situation is different from one area to another, but overall a lot of places have moved to a sort of central dispatch model, more or less everything is going to go through the 911 center and very little gets dispatched from your local police station. In a lot of places, even if you call the non emergency number there's a good chance it's coming to us, and if it does go to someone at the station there's a good chance they're going to transfer you to us, or just take the information and call us after you hang up. In most cases I'd prefer you just called 911 and cut out the middle man, especially if you don't know exactly where you are so I at least have a landline address or cellular location to work with. The station can handle administrative things, getting a copy of a report you already filed, answering general questions, lost & found, etc. but if you need a cop to do something, even if it's just give you a phone call, that's probably going to come through us.

In your situation, I probably would have called when someone was banging on your door. That kind of tells me that the situation was out of hand and was potentially even presenting a threat to yourself. You seem to understand that as well since you went for your gun. If there's a situation where you think you may need to defend yourself and you have the time to do so, you should probably be calling 911.

I probably also would have called the front desk about the yelling. Cops may not care about your noise complaints, but the hotel probably has their own noise rules, and if the guests are breaking them, management can have them trespassed, and the cops will care a bit more about that.

Final thoughts, since I'm somewhat on the inside, I have a pretty good handle on the overall attitude of the cops in my county. Overall, I trust them not to show up and shoot someone having a psych episode, or be too unreasonably racist, or otherwise do something that's going to end up on the news in a bad way. Certain officers/departments I trust more than others, and I'd be more or less willing to call about minor issues based on that. In a situation where I don't know the local cops I'd err more on the side of not calling. My overall guidance of "if your not sure, call" still applies through.

My workplace has a no s'mores rule.

Shortly before I started, they had a small fad of people making s'mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the trainees was a younger dude who had never lived on his own, and apparently had no idea what an appropriate amount of time was to microwave it, and put it in for 5 minutes or something, filling pretty much the building up with smoke.

We're a 911 dispatch center, so evacuating the building to go to our backup center is a whole thing, they were able to avoid having to do that but just barely.

So no s'mores.

We have 2 major incidents

First one:

Dude A lends Dude B some money, relatively small amount, pretty sure it was less than $50. Dude B decides he's not going to pay it back, so like mature, reasonable teenagers they decide they're going to go to the park after school to fight about it.

Dude A is not a big guy, he asks Dude C who is a giant of a human being to come along just to make sure he doesn't get killed, sort of a referee to pull dude B off of him if things get out of hand, not expecting him to step in or lend a hand or anything.

Dude B apparently has a different idea about how this is going to go down, and has a few friends come along with him with screwdrivers and baseball bats and other such improvised weapons.

Dude C sees this as they're about to walk off the school property to fight, and does his job, takes these weapons, throws them in his bag, throws his jacket over the protruding bat, and they're about to continue on their way.

The school, however, got word of this fight about to go down, and a bunch of cops show up.

Dude A lucks the fuck out and a passing senior he kind of knew pulls him into her car and assures the police that he wasn't involved in this clusterfuck. None of the other kids give him up and he gets off scott-free and cops never figured out who the last unnamed party to this was.

The rest of them are all taken in, questioned, and receive their various punishments. Dude C gets the worst of it since he's the guy who's now holding all the weapons. He goes and spends a year or so at an alternative school, and is allowed to come back partially on the condition that he joins the football team. Our senior year we proceeded to win 0 football games, so fat lot of good having a giant on the team did.

Apparently dude C had misled his friends about how much money this was over, when informed by the cops that it was over like $40 he flew into a small rage, threw some things around, then calmly sat down and said "I have been misinformed"

Rumors of course start swirling and the truth gets very lost to the point I heard a version of the story where Dude C attacked the cops with a samurai sword and tried to flee on a motorcycle.

I'm pretty confident that this is a pretty accurate version of events though, a couple of the involved parties have all told me pretty much the exact same story, and it's relatively unspectacular compared to some of the embellished versions I've heard. It's also pretty much in line with what I know of their personalities.

For the most part, these kids weren't dangerous, I don't think any of them really had any other significant problems for the rest of their school career, and I'd describe most of them as nerds and generally decent people, some of them have some mental/emotional baggage, and couple that with some hormones and being stupid teenagers the stars just kind of aligned in the wrong way, and for the most part none of them held any significant grudges against each other and could probably have been considered friends to some extent afterwards.

Second incident:

I'm home sick one day, my mom worked at a school in our district, my sister was in school this day.

The phone rings, it's an automated message from the district. Something about the district being made aware of a threat to the high school, but that everything is under control, there's no danger, etc. not a lot of details.

Call my mom, she doesn't have much more info than I do, she's, not particularly worried, but of course a lot of parents panic and go to pick up their kids. She texts my sister to see if she wants to be picked up, she declines, she's having a good time, it's her and like 3 other people left in her class, they're chilling and watching movies and such, there's a news crew and some cop cars outside of the school.

Having nothing better to do, I'm going through all the news I can to figure out what's up.

Eventually, it took a few days for all of the details to emerge, what we managed to piece together was

There was a kid who was planning a shooting, tried to recruit another kid who turned him in. Cops raided his house, found a bunch of airsoft guns, flea market swords, a half-built pipe bomb, and one gun (that his parents bought him) with no ammo.

This kid had been pulled out of school and was being homeschooled because of bullying. I didn't know him, he was a few years younger than me, but from what I understand from people who knew him he was mostly bullied because he was an unlikeable racist asshole. The short bit of attention the media gave it tried to make it out like he was bullied for being fat (and let's make no mistake, this dude was fat he may have been almost as wide as he was tall) but from the stories I've heard of him from before this happened, if any kid ever deserved bullying it was him for being such a major asshole.

I wouldn't really mention his fatness, except that at some point during the trial and such, his mom (herself a very large lady) got in trouble for trying to smuggle him food, which was just icing on the proverbial cake.

The kid who turned him then went and broke into his house a little while later and tried to steal his Xbox or something.

To expand on the abusive relationship aspect, say your partner, parents, etc. want to keep you from contacting people, maybe your family/friends, maybe the police, maybe your doctor (for example to seek abortion services, or maybe treatment for a health issue they've been trying to withhold medication from you for) they may check your phone to see who you've been contacting or even take your phone from you to prevent you from using it.

There's also of course less savory reasons, cheating, dealing drugs, or other illegal activities.

And somewhat less likely, undercover officers, FBI agents, investigative journalists, etc. whose cover could potentially be compromised if the wrong people are around and that second phone goes off.

If I go out and kill a newborn fawn in the woods for shits and giggles without the appropriate tags, out of season, etc. it's still poaching, just the same as if I went out and killed an 8 point trophy buck I didn't have a tag for, took it home, ate it, mounted it's head on my wall, etc. That fawn may not have survived, it may not have grown into anything impressive, but at the end of the day I killed a deer I was not legally allowed to kill. The guy writing the law probably didn't have killing fawns for fun in mind, they probably pictured something more like the second example I gave, but I think most of us would agree that the fawn-killer should be punished just as or maybe even more harshly that the buck-killer.

I can't think of any good reason it shouldn't be the same for fish.

EDIT: also, usually with fishing regulations, there's also size limits, you can't keep a fish under a certain size, it has to be thrown back. These fish were almost certainly under the legal size. Not to mention creel limits, even if they were somehow all of a legal size, and even if he somehow did everything else legally (which he didn't,) I suspect the creel limit on salmon is significantly lower than 18,000

I used to be a delivery guy at a local pizzeria. One of the other delivery guys was the laziest piece of shit I could imagine.

There was one time they couldn't find him, his car was there, the delivery car was there, and he wasn't exactly the type of guy to go take a walk, so they figured he had to be in the store somewhere. Eventually they found him taking a nap in the walk-in, he brought a chair down with him and hid behind a wall of our buckets of cheese and sauce.

Another time they found him taking a nap in the delivery car, engine running, music blasting, seat reclined parked right in front of the store.

We were one of the rare places that had their own delivery cars, and he constantly left trash in them. I was about the only guy who ever bothered to clean them out (to be fair we only ever had about 3-4 delivery guys) There was one night I cleaned it out, he worked the day shift the next day, and I worked the next night, and when I came in the car was filled with trash again. He worked nights at a gas station in the area, so when I stopped that night to get gas, I brought in the bag of trash that I again had cleaned out and called him out for trashing the car again in such a short amount of time. I then took the bag out with me because I'm not an asshole, and threw it away properly. The next time he worked he was telling our coworkers that I dumped the trash on his counter at the gas station, which everyone knew immediately was a crock of shit (but they also all agreed that I totally should have done it.)

Yes, but 911 will provide pre-approval instructions for you and also start EMS

Source- am a 911 dispatcher

That said, a lot of our instructions fall a bit short of what you would learn from pretty much any first aid class, and we're not really allowed to deviate from our approved instructions for liability reasons. So if you're able to, everyone take some first aid classes. At the very least, you don't want the first time you're learning something to be in an actual emergency situation

Probably 90% of their food is the same stuff wrapped up in a different shape, they're spooning the same meat into the tacos as the burritos as the crunch wrap etc.

So if your goal is to get a full sense of what taco bell has to offer, get a hard taco, a soft taco, a Doritos taco, and a chalupa, mix and match the meats, sauces, and other toppings, and you'll have a pretty representative sample of most of the menu.

As far as personal recommendations, I like steak chalupas, chicken crunchwraps with chipotle sauce, any variety of their grilled burrito, and their cinnamon twists. Sometimes they have a limited time specialty item that's pretty good, not sure what they're pushing now but always worth checking out what they have.

I will also say that if you don't get a Baja blast you're doing it wrong

Wood glue, no particular brand recommendations, is one of the pew products I trust to do exactly what it claims to - glue wood.

In the interest of accuracy, it was a gallows.

I think there's a little more to it than that.

Yes, there's the fact that American culture is very dominant in pop culture and we've exported our culture around the world. As the Rammstein song goes, "We're all living in America"

But there's also the fact that we're a melting pot and we've happily appropriated bits and pieces of culture from everywhere else and integrated them into our own, and the lines get murky about where those other cultures end our our own begins.

And there's not really one American culture, we're rugged cowboys, and we're Hollywood movie stars, we're fat assholes and we're health conscious hippies, we live in modern cities, suburban sprawl, rural farmland, mountains, forests, frozen hellscapes, wide open plains, deserts, we're gun nuts, and we're pacifist vegans, jocks and nerds, some of the richest people on earth, and homeless on the streets and everything in between, and every part of the country does things just a little differently, so it can be hard to pick out things that are truly emblematic of Americans as a whole.

In a saner world, I'd probably consider myself a conservative, in the world we actually live in though, I'm not touching anything the conservative parties have anything to do with.

I generally think that things should overall trend towards being more liberal, and conservatism should just kind of be a moderating factor, not really working against a liberal agenda, just kind of slowing it down, making sure everything is fully thought through before we jump into anything, that the plans and funding and contingencies and such are in place, and in some cases just slowing things down because some stubborn assholes (mostly the current "conservatives") need to be eased into certain changes because their tiny minds will explode if you go to fast

From my mom, not my grandparents, but we've gotten a lot of mileage out of this one

"If I find it, can I hit you with it?"

Used when we were bugging her about not being able to find something. Don't believe she ever made good on that threat, but it usually did it's intended purpose of getting us to quit bugging her and find it ourselves. And if it was something we really needed help finding it would have been an acceptable trade-off.

My sister got a lot of use out of it with her college roommates and my wife and I use it with each other pretty regularly.

The name comes from the casaba melon, a variety of honeydew, because the lab was "on a melon kick that year," naming various projects after melons and having already used up all the good ones.

I can appreciate that sort of naming convention.

Yeah, they've been a boogaloo thing for a while.

Unfortunately for me I have always liked Hawaiian shirts

And I'm a white guy, with a shaved head, who works in 911 dispatch so I'm police-adjacent, with some outdoorsy hobbies like hunting and fishing, with a pet malinois (free dog that fell into my lap, didn't go out seeking a super police/military dog breed, but that's the card the universe dealt me)

I'm practically a walking conservative stereotype in just about every superficial appearance, except that I'm not a conservative.

Pisses me off to no end that they've co-opted things like Hawaiian shirts and tiki torches.

I work in a 911 dispatch center, were starting to do some remote trials, but I'm not part of the test group, so I'm not totally clear on all the details about how we're handling it.

But some concerns I'd have are

1. Backup power supplies, phone and Internet connections, etc. our dispatch center has massive generators, several redundant phone and Internet lines, etc. You wouldn't want to be on the phone with your call taker and have your call drop in the middle because there's a storm and they just lost power or Internet to their home.

2. Radio equipment- phones and call taking are only half the game, the other half is on the radio with our field units. If somehow everything else goes offline, the dispatchers still have walkie talkies to communicate with the units in the field.

3. Security concerns, both physical and cyber. We're handling a lot of sensitive information, have access to various local, state, and federal databases, etc. I'd be a little sketched out by some of that going over someone's home WiFi. Yes, you can do a lot with vpns and virtual machines and such, but it still introduces a whole lot of variables that need to be accounted for. Also if something really crazy happens, most dispatch centers are fairly secure places, I personally work in a underground bunker on the property of a prison, tall fences, armed security, multiple security doors, etc. You also have less control over who is in the room and what they're doing. We're not allowed to take any pictures or video in the room, some dispatch centers go so far as you can't have your cell phone out at all, no one can just walk in unless they have business in there, it's a pretty controlled environment.

4. Physical proximity to other people is useful, we're always turning around and asking other people sitting near us for help with something or another, whether it's asking them to call another agency while we're on the phone with someone, look something up for us, asking them how to do something in the computer (there's a lot going on in our system, and they're constantly adding and changing how some things work, so I'm not sure anyone really knows how to do everything off the top of their head.) If our computer freezes up while taking a call, we can still yell across the room to the dispatcher that they need to send someone to a location because something is going on there (there's a famous story in our dispatch center from a few decades ago when we were first getting computerized where someone called in that a cop was getting beaten up and couldn't get to his radio, the person taking the call couldn't find the location in the system and had to yell over to the dispatcher for that zone to get backup started for him over the radio.) Also about half of us are working night shift and our hours are long, having people around you and keeping an eye on each other is some easy insurance to make sure no one's literally falling asleep on the job.

5. Space for the computer equipment. Where I work, call takers have 5 monitors, dispatchers have 6, and we make use of all of them, we have a lot of information we're constantly shifting through, and all those screens are very useful to us, we could, in a real pinch, make do with 2 or 3 screens, but it would be a pretty big hindrance. I don't have space in my home to squeeze in a 5 or 5 screen setup, and I wouldn't really want to work without them long term (once in a while we've had to use aour backup center which has 1 fewer screen at each console, and it's a pretty big pain in the ass)

Some of these are weird edge cases, but that's also kind of exactly the sort of situations that 911 exists for. I do think if done right working from home can add extra redundancy, hypothetically if someone blows up our dispatch center or something it's better if half of us aren't even in the building and can continue working, but on the other hand if there's widespread power and Internet outages, it doesn't do us any good to have half of our staff sitting at home in the dark either. There's a balance to be struck, I'm not totally sure what it is, but it's something that needs to be approached carefully to make sure we're still able to provide an acceptable level of service.

I'm reminded of a joke I heard a long time ago (copy/pasted from elsewhere online)

The American Government funded a study to see why the head of a man's Penis was larger than the shaft. After 1 year, and $180,000, they concluded that the reason that the head was larger than the shaft was to give the man more pleasure during sex.

After the US published the study, the French decided to do their own study. After $250,000 and 3 years of research, they concluded that the reason the head was larger than the shaft was to give the woman more pleasure during sex.

The Irish, unsatisfied with those findings, conducted their own study. After 2 weeks, a cost of around $75.34, and many pints of beer, they concluded that it was to keep a man's hand from flying off and hitting himself in the face.

I understand that I come from a place of pretty significant privilege, but it is wild to me that when faced with these kinds of situations anyone is gambling on the kinds of medical care they might/might not be able to receive in these red states with restrictive abortion laws.

I know that if any of my friends, even if we're not particularly close, came to me and said they needed me to drive them halfway across the country for an abortion because they may not be able to get life-saving medical care in our state if something goes wrong, we're going, right then and there, no questions asked, I'm calling out sick from work, running up my credit cards on gas and hotel rooms and whatever else we may need and we're hitting the road, and if needed I won't ever breathe a word of it to anyone.

The fact that people are in a position where they feel like they can't do that or don't have people they think they can trust to do that for them is maddening.

In general, predators like dogs are a very inefficient way to get calories. Cattle, for example, have the benefit of turning stuff like grass that we can't eat into something that we can (meat,) dogs on the other hand, largely tend to eat the same sorts of foods we would, so often we could just eat those foods and cut out the middleman

Now dogs are not totally obligate carnivores, theoretically they can be fed on a vegetarian diet, though it requires some careful planning to ensure they're getting the right nutrients, you can't just turn them loose in a field to eat grass and expect to get much out of it, by and large they're going to need to eat the same sorts of food we'd eat- a variety of fruits and vegetables. They can also possibly fed byproducts, scraps, offal, overripe or damaged produce, etc. that is unfit or less desirable for human consumption, but that still adds a lot of complexity to managing their diet, and if animal products are part of the feed it potentially means you need to worry about spreading disease between animal populations, don't want to be feeding your meat dogs on mad cow brains or avian flu chicken bits.

And as you move up the food chain you can have issues with bioaccumulation of toxins like heavy metals. Say from birth to slaughter a cow absorbs 1oz (pulling that number out of my ass) of lead and mercury and such that ends up in its various tissues. Cows are big, you have to eat a lot of cow to absorb that much lead and mercury from eating them. Now let's say a dog during it's lifetime eats the equivalent of one whole cow (again, pulled out of my ass) during it's lifetime. That dog now has that same 1oz of lead and mercury, and dogs are much smaller so it's at a higher concentration in their meat, you don't have to eat nearly as much dog as you do cow to get the same amount of heavy metals.

My grandfather had dementia, for a long time it was pretty hard to tell what was dementia and what was just him not giving a fuck. He was always someone who just did whatever he wanted and wasn't afraid to go against the grain and didn't really care what anyone thought of him, and he was kind of always that way. It would be really hard to pick apart which of his quirks were dementia related and what was just him. Standing naked in the doorway of his room at the nursing home waggling his dick at the lady across the hall sure sounds a lot like a dementia patient, but it also sounds like something an immature, womanizing troublemaker would do if they knew they were pretty much immune from getting in any actual trouble.

He didn't have the most severe case of dementia, it didn't progress super fast, I'm sure if I went months or years without seeing him I could have picked out some changes, but since we saw him regularly it was really difficult to see the changes over time.

And if he had an army of lackeys getting paid to cover up his mistakes and trying to keep him in line, he probably could have passed as relatively mentally competent almost up until the very end.

I won't pretend that my grandfather's moral compass always pointed north, but he definitely had one. He could also be pretty charming and personable when he wanted to. If he threw his morals out the window and had any political ambitions, he probably could have become an even more dangerous trump if someone had given him a small loan of a million dollars. Luckily all he ever really wanted to do was drive a bus.

Funnily enough, most of his siblings ended up fairly rich thanks to a successful business venture my grandfather wasn't interested in. Those branches of the family turned out a lot of real conservative assholes, and once the money started drying up, also a lot of criminals a generation or two down the line.

Before anyone jumps on me, billionaires suck, without exception, for reasons I don't really need to go into here, you've all heard them a million times over, and whatever good they do does not offset that in the slightest. None of them probably have been or will be a net positive influence in the world.

That said, you can probably pick out a few good things that any individual billionaire has done (and you can absolutely feel free to debate their motivations for doing those things, many of them I'm sure we're done for tax reasons, vanity, etc.)

Some of the old robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie (Carnegie was not technically a billionaire, but if you adjusted his wealth for inflation he would be the richest person today by a pretty comfortable margin) funded a lot of universities, libraries, etc.

Bill Gates has done some good work with vaccines despite his shitty business practices with Microsoft.

Musk is overall a shithead, I don't like him, I don't like his companies, I don't even like his vehicles. That said, I think it's pretty fair to say that Tesla has helped (though he is not solely responsible) to kick open the door for EVs to start gaining wider acceptance and adoption. And SpaceX is doing some exciting stuff, though again I dislike a lot of their methods, disagree with a few of their goals, don't like how they're run as a company, etc. But long-term I think we need to have our eyes to the stars, whether it's for settling on other worlds, mining asteroids, asteroid defense, or if I dare dream it, building a Dyson sphere, or just for scientific advancement for it's own sake, and unfortunately SpaceX is one of the major players in that field now.

Bezos hasn't done anything too flashy that comes to my mind, and like musk he is also a shithead that I dislike for pretty much the exact same reasons, excuse me for not repeating them, but he does have and donate to quite a few charities.

Again, none of that is enough to offset the shitty things they do, but I'd be surprised if you could find any very rich people who haven't at least donated to a handful of charities.

No real advice to give her, but I thought I'd share this story.

About 6 or 7 years ago, one of my friends unfriended basically everyone we know on Facebook and stopped replying to text messages out of the blue. Some of us had been hanging out with him a few days before, and there was no sign that anything was off.

To this day we don't really know exactly what happened, but we have a pretty solid theory.

My friend was born in the Middle East, but moved here when he was pretty young. His father is from that country, his mother is a white American, and from what I understand is not Muslim. His father apparently got a lot of shit from his family for that.

His father was always very strict, he'd gotten into fights with him before, there was one occasion where his father had threatened to move the family back to his home country, my friend stood up to him about that because his younger siblings had really only ever lived here, and ended up getting thrown out of the house for a while. His father used threats like that and cutting him off from his siblings to keep him in line. There had been some other similar fights because his father didn't approve of girls he was dating and such.

Few if any of us had ever met his father, but I get the impression he probably wasn't a fan of us either.

A couple of us went to his home to make sure he was ok, he answered the door, we didn't really get any answers except that he had made the decision with some other people that he couldn't associate with us anymore.

We later found out that he had been dating a girl, probably not one his dad would have approved of, and had also ghosted her at the same time.

Pretty much everyone left on his Facebook at the time were people with Middle Eastern names.

So we're pretty sure what happened is that his father came down on him with some big ultimatum to cut ties with anyone he didn't approve of or else.

A couple of us saw him in the wild once, he wouldn't acknowledge any of them. I shoot him a text once in a while, I have no idea if he's seen any of them, but I've never gotten a direct reply. A couple years ago, another friend's father passed away, we all used to hang out at his home, so I reached out to someone I knew from high school who wasn't defriended, and asked if they could let him know, and they did, the only reply I got through that mutual friend was a quick thanks.

Sometimes there's some really heavy stuff going on under the surface, and you can't always count on getting a solid answer.

It's not necessarily the weirdest, but it has a pretty great story behind it

I have a relative, I believe he's like a second cousin or something along those lines who has an actual coffin that he uses as a Halloween decoration.

He decided he wanted a coffin, so he goes to one of the local funeral homes to see what they have around that's not too expensive and looks a bit spooky.

It just so happens that he's has a pretty nice wooden coffin that's just been kicking around in storage for a couple decades.

Why has this coffin been kicking around in storage? Because some local guy died back in the late 80s while visiting family in Poland. They had to scramble a bit to figure out how to get his body back to the US and pretty much got the cheapest wooden box they could find to ship him back in, and then buried him in a different casket. And it had just been kicking around since then since he had no use for it but also didn't want to get rid of it.

And that guy that died in Poland was my grandfather.

My mom's a bit salty about the situation, she thinks it's disrespectful or something. I personally think it's a cool piece of family trivia, and although I never had the opportunity to meet him, from what I know of him I think my grandfather would have gotten a kick out of it.

A few years back on Reddit I remember stumbling my way into a comment thread discussing some camgirl or Instagram model, or "influencer" or something along those lines. The OP was a gif of her bouncing her boobs (and I'm not gonna lie, I clicked into the thread because boobs)

Overall the comments were pretty much what you'd expect, but one dude in particular stood out to me.

IIRC, someone made a comment about how her boyfriend was a lucky man or something to that effect, someone else commented that they had heard she was a lesbian, and that's where this particular weirdo came in, saying something essentially like "nuh-uh, I talked to her cam-to-cam and she's definitely straight."

Like it genuinely never occurred to this person that someone might not be exactly who they present themselves as online.

Now I cannot claim to know anything about that girl's personal life, she might be gay, she might be straight, she might be neither, but I can easily think of probably a dozen reasons off the top of my head why she might want to hide her sexuality, whatever it may be, from some stranger she was chatting with on the internet, ranging of fear of harassment to trying to get money out of him.

I tried to explain that to him, and he was like "yeah, I get it, but I talked to her and she's a really genuine person"

Everything just went in his one ear and right out the other.

I hope that dude never made his way into a strip club, he'd get talked into so paying for many champagne rooms and then probably go home and brag about his new girlfriend.

I'm not from this instance, so probably not totally relevant to this poll, that said

NO, I'm not a tankie.

I think, however, it's worth considering that a lot of people that could be considered tankies probably wouldn't apply the term to themselves, and that could skew the results of your poll. First of all, tankie is sort of a pejorative term, and many wouldn't want to apply it to themselves for that reason alone. Secondly a lot of people just may not consider themselves to be a tankie, and genuinely do not recognize their own tankieness.

I don't think I'm the guy to come up with a definitive checklist of what does or does not make someone a tankie, but for the sake of getting the conversation going (and feel free to disagree with me here, I welcome the discussion) I think two of the biggest hallmarks of being a tankie are

1. Communism- not all communists are tankies, but all tankies at least claim to subscribe to some sort of communist ideology.

2. Authoritarianism- tankies either are authoritarians themselves, or are willing to support or overlook authoritarians as long as they see them as being in some way opposed to "the west"/capitalism/etc.

I think the authoritarianism aspect is going to trip some people up trying to answer this truthfully. A lot of authoritarians probably wouldn't consider themselves authoritarians, most people like to think they're standing for freedom, justice, liberty, equality, etc. even if their actual actions tell another story. Don't get me wrong, there are people out there who are openly authoritarian and proud of it, but a lot of authoritarians are a little brainwashed to the point they've lost sight of what they're actually supporting (take a look at the MAGA crowd, they think they're about free speech and anti-censorship but want to keep books they don't like out of libraries, they think they're about small government but want to regulate what kind of medical care you can get, they think they stand for law and order but also proudly proclaim that they are all domestic terrorists and have a convicted felon as their poster boy)

And politics are messy, full of moral grey areas and times where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, make uncomfortable alliances, difficult choices, and kick some cans further down the road to deal with later while you tackle the current crisis. It's not always easy or feasible to draw a crisp line in the sand and say "we will not ally with/support/turn a blind eye to these authoritarian regimes," sometimes you have to play a little bit of the "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" game if you want to actually make any progress against that enemy, or you may have to prioritize and deal with something else before you deal with them. There is a whole lot of grey area to explore about when, why, how, how long, and how much you can support or ignore them before you're advancing their cause as much or more than your own.

I think there's probably some tankies who have been taken for a ride on the propaganda wagon and don't truly realize how authoritarian they are, and there's others who have justified it, thinking that they're only going to be/support authoritarians temporarily to achieve a specific goal and will pivot away from that later, but have gone too far or keep moving the goalposts.

Couple last thoughts from me.

There can always be bad actors who are falsely claiming to be (or not to be) tankies for their own purposes. Not really much you can do about that.

Personally, a lot of the criticism I've seen about tankies here has been directed towards the mods and admins, not necessarily the rank average users.

It sounds like it's a ban on using the phone during school, not on simply having a phone with you.

Which honestly sounds like a rule every school has pretty much had for like 20+ years.

AFAIK, the monochrome flag comes from military uniforms, a lot of them have adopted flag patches in monochrome tans and greens to better match the camo of their uniforms. Police have been adopting more "tactical" military style uniforms in black, so black monochrome flags match that color scheme.

You may also notice that some of them have the flag backwards with the stars on the right, that's another styling cue from the military. The flag patches on uniform shoulders are in that orientation, it's mean to evoke the image of the flag streaming behind them as they walk.

As far as why civilians display these symbols, there's probably a few reasons, but it's probably pretty safe to say that most of them would identify themselves as being patriotic to some extent or another and want to show support for the police and/or military or at least think that the tactical look is cool.

The black version probably caught on mostly because it looks cool and kind of works with whatever color gear or vehicle you want to slap it on, tans and greens and such don't necessarily go with everything quite so well.

You'll often see these black flags with a single colored stripe, this originates from the nickname for the police "the thin blue line" (blue because police in the US traditionally usually had blue uniforms) though pretty much every vaguely public-safety/military/law enforcement has their own colored line these days- red for fire, green for military, forest green for park rangers, yellow for tow truck drivers etc.

You could probably write a book about what these lines are meant to represent, how they're interpreted by different groups, etc. Often they're meant to represent something like "the line between order and chaos"

Thanks to the blue lives matter response to the black lives matter movement, this sort of imagery has also become very associated with conservative politics

You may occasionally see the flag being flown upside-down. This originated as a distress signal, and is basically people saying that they think the nation is trouble.

I've tried to keep this mostly very matter-of-fact and not go off on my personal thought on these types of symbols and the people that display them, and kept it to just where these symbols come from. I'm going to leave my personal opinions with just a simple statement that these symbols tend to be used disproportionatly by the right wing, and I do not particularly like the symbols, what they represent, and how they are used.

A lot of people are saying it's primarily a NY thing, so I'd just chime in to say we use it in PA as well, at least in the Philly area, to refer to the northern parts of the state.

Not much more to it than youre going far enough north to be out of your city's metro area, but staying in the same state. In PA I'd say upstate probably starts around the Poconos. I think new Yorkers kind of tend to use it to refer to the rest of the state, we wouldn't tend to do that here, Central and Western PA are different things than Upstate PA, although there is definitely some overlap and there's not exactly clearly defined borders.

I don't know how many other states use the same terminology, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's pretty common in other largish states with larger population densities in the southern part of the state and lower densities in the north (I don't know off the top of my head which other states that would apply to, maybe it's only PA and NY)

Probably not the case with her, but I'm registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries. The way the party has gone though it's going to be a cold day in hell before I vote for a Republican in a general election.

There's a lot I disagree with Democrats on, but in general I can usually live with whoever they end up putting up as a candidate. I may not be thrilled about some of them, but they're usually not trying to send us headfirst into a fascist hellhole.

Republicans though, while pretty much all shitty, are a bit of a mixed bag, and I'd rather try to head off the trumps, Santoses, DeSantises, etc. before they make it to the general election.

I have a couple reasons

It's a good excuse to be outside either alone with friends, get a little fresh air and sunshine, enjoy nature, etc. it often doesn't involve the same sort of investment or level of physical fitness that, say, hiking does. It can be damn close to doing nothing, but it's enough of a thing that you don't feel guilty for doing nothing all day. The initial cost investment can be pretty low, you can probably get out and go fishing with less than $50 worth of gear from Walmart, and ongoing expenses are pretty low too, a couple buck every trip or could trips for bait, and a couple more bucks here or there for some extra bits of tackle.

You can put as much or as little time, money, or effort into it as you want. A $20 Walmart rod catches fish just fine, or you can spend hundreds or probably even thousands of dollars on a rod that also catches fish just fine. You can go out once or twice a year when the weather is nice, or you can be out damn near every day, rain or shine. You can learn a lot of different techniques, use different baits, lures, rigs, etc. to catch more/bigger/different kinds of fish, or you can have a worm on a hook at the end of your line that you just throw out in the water and let whatever's gonna bite bite. There's skills to learn if you want to, or you can coast by on just luck, sometimes the fish just aren't biting, sometimes they'll bite anything you put in front of them.

And because of that, fishing is kind of a great equalizer, you will meet all kinds of people out on the water or in the fishing aisle at Walmart, people of all races and classes fish.The techniques, targeted species, equipment, locations, etc. may all vary, but at the end of the day we're all out there trying to outsmart fish and coming up empty-handed as often as not. If you meet someone else who is a fisherman, you've got common ground and something to talk about even if you have nothing else in common. We all love to talk fishing, trade fish stories, share our tips and tricks, ask people we see fishing as we walk by how they're biting, etc.

There's also a meditative aspect to it for sure, repetitive motions, silence, solitude, nature, a certain amount of mindfulness, etc.

Fish are cool, and catching them is a good way to get an up-close look at them.

There's a lot to be said about being connected to where your food comes from, the environmental impact of commercial fishing, the health benefits of eating fish, the cost of buying or catching fish, etc. that frankly could probably be the topic of several whole books, and I'm not going to go into all of that, and just kind of leave it at fish are food, and catching fish yourself is one way to get food, and it comes with its benefits and drawbacks.

As for the weather, I'm a strong believer that there's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear. With enough of the right kind of layers, you can be perfectly comfortable. Sometimes it's nice to be out experiencing that, it's a side of the world you may not often see or take the time to appreciate. For some fish, that weather may be ideal for catching them. Some people can't or won't brave the elements, so the places you go may be less crowded, which is nice if you're seeking solitude.

It's not just youth, it's people across the entire population that have issues reading maps.

I work in 911 dispatch, obviously a big part of the job is all about location. We spend a lot of our shift looking at maps on our screen trying to figure out where people are so we can send them help.

In training for a couple days, they busted out paper maps of our county and had us locate different intersections, landmarks, etc. our class skewed a bit younger, mostly millennials at the time (this was about 6 years ago) but also some Gen x and boomers. I'd say only about 3 out of the 12 of us were really proficient at all at reading a map.theru wasn't any particular age bias, really what it seemed to come down to is "who was in boy scouts"

And it's not a new thing, a lot of people have had a hard time with maps probably since maps were invented. It takes certain kinds of spatial reasoning skills that some people just struggle with. My boomer mom could never read a map, a lot of my grade school years were the days before GPS and half of my class always struggled with it when it came up in history/geography/social studies, it's been used as a joke in movies for decades. It's probably gotten somewhat worse since people don't use paper maps as much anymore, but there's also a "use it or lose it" aspect, I noticed that my own map and compass skills have degraded a little recently while hiking a new trail with a paper map, there's probably a few older people who used to be pretty proficient at reading a map but would have a hard time with it since they haven't had to in over a decade.