The really fun bit: in order to smell anything, you necessarily have to snort in molecules of that substance. It's a happy little thought whenever passing a sewage treatment plant.
I travel a lot for work. US Customs and the TSA are absolutely a sick joke. I could easily write a novella on the extremely poor training of TSA employees. I have a small permanent retainer (read: braces); about 25% of the time, that is considered suspicious, and I get an enhanced inspection. "Ya know, I could just open my mouth and show you what's in there."
The TSA always determines that my juggling balls are suspicious, so I never pack them in carry-on anymore. I have NEXUS, yet I always get an enhanced inspection on return to the US. Literally every other country to which I have flown just waves me through, even before I got Pre-Check/NEXUS/Global Entry.
My partner had her rigging knife in her backpack on a flight out and back. She was unpacking and found it in her backpack after the trip. Good catch, TSA.
And the absolute frosting on the TSA shit sandwich: one of my close friends owns a private security firm. His company was approached by the TSA to assist in security audits at a major international airport. He and his team were contracted to "smuggle" fake firearms through TSA checkpoints, any way they could. The TSA repeatedly failed to detect the firearms for each of five audits. The TSA division (district? regional?) manager, frustrated at his group's 100% failure rate, determined that my friend's company must have specialized criminal training, and everyone who worked that contract were put on the no-fly list. It took him about 18 months to unfuck that mess for him and his employees.
I had written a few more paragraphs about TSA hassles, but I think y'all get the picture.
whose asshole vance is now slurping with the gusto of a dog in a steak factory
😆 It's only 0600 here. I'm gonna call it a day after reading that so that I can end on a high note.
Oh, throughout the whole thing, he and his employees were treated like garbage. He would get through security, go directly to the person's office, and reassemble the pistol in front of the manager. And then my friend (or one of his employees) would get interrogated for hours on unrelated questions, like it was somehow my friend's fault that the TSA failed their audits.
I can corroborate this. Source: am man.
I had a partner for eight years. We met when we were both 31. She was my first monogamous relationship theretofore because I decided to give monogamy a try. She was utterly, screamingly boring in bed. There was nothing else notably wrong with the relationship, except for her unwillingness to communicate on anything beyond household, workaday topics. No oral (give or receive), no anal, not into foreplay, and she would just lay there. But no conflicts either. There was the advantage of she was always willing and ready to go without any foreplay or lube. She got off and claimed she was absolutely sexually satisfied. Sex wasn't even fun in the context of Free Use, which is a kink I enjoy. I tried to engage her in all kinds of Gottman Method relationship work, but she bluntly and explicitly refused.
At one point early in our relationship, she moved and clamped her vagina in a way that was quite enjoyable. "Honey, that was great! Please do that more." And for the rest of our relationship, any such complement was a sure-fire way to make sure it would never happen again. After eight years of nearly daily, invariably terrible sex, I stopped approaching her sex for three weeks. She never said a thing. On day 22, I broke up with her, and she was absolutely gobsmacked, claimed that I was throwing away eight years of great history. She hadn't even noticed that there had been no sex for three weeks.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." - Jonathon Swift
So now you're investing time and effort to publicize why this bill was broken. Your political opposition successfully got you on the defensive. These strategies play a part of why fascism and authoritarianism are succeeding in the USA.
"I got mine, fuck you." With a little dash of "Nothing like the afternoon delight of some bootlicking."
I know plenty of staunchly feminist women whose entire personae (or life goal) is the 50s US housewife fantasy. But, that's still a matter of self-determination. Nothing about the GOP's actions indicate self-determination is part of their platform, except for oligarchs. This is yet another play in their ongoing Big Lie Tactic: tell a big enough lie enough times, and people will start to believe it.
These nudis are very common on the docks where I moor my boat. This picture has the saturation punched up, but still fails to convey just how trippy they, and most other nudibranchs, look in person. The iridescence in the rhinophores and cerata is something that can be tricky to capture with imaging. Here is a different angle of the same species.
Sous vide cooking. It's easy to buy a bulk quantity of food, vac-pack and cook it, then freeze it. This saves time and money both on purchase, initial prep, and mealtime prep.
For example, we buy a whole, locally-grown, grass-fed chuck flap. We trim, bag, and cook the entire flap in one day. This provides my partner and me about six weeks of meals with high quality protein. Added bonus: the juice and gelatin in the bag after cooking makes excellent soup stock or cooking liquid for beans. Double added bonus: a sous vide chuck steak is just as good as the best ribeye fillet.
Also learn to use an entire chicken. For example, spatchcock and roast the chicken for dinner. Break down the carcass to get every scrap of meat. Make chicken salad the next day. Roast the bones, make a mirepoix, and make chicken stock. Use that to make chicken and dumplings or chicken soup. The two of us eat for a week from one chicken.
Learn about food preservation and safety: reusable containers, dangerous food conditions, fermentation, canning, making stocks... A huge part of saving money on food is not wasting any of it. Being able to buy in-season food when it's cheaper and more nutritive is a big deal.
And on that note: avoid cheap, low-nutrition food. Sure, that industrial, NPK produce and ultra-processed box meal might be "affordable." But those tend to be empty calories; you have to eat more of it to feel sated and get the nutrition you need. Locally grown, in-season foods tend to be better food values since you need to eat less of them to get the same micronutrients. See: "The Doritos Effect," by Mark Schatzker.
As a very young kid, I thought there was a very hungry monster that lived inside vacuum cleaners. The switch was just a lever to open a flap and expose the monster's sucking hunger.
The UCI could fuck up a wet dream. They actively harm the advancement of bicycling. Whenever the UCI starts administering a race type, that whole industry sector is permafuct. Disc brakes (regardless of how one might feel about discs) were banned for many years, resulting in delay of that technology despite the demand being there. Recumbents are a superlative bicycle design for most humans, but thanks UCI ban.
One of the main reasons gravel bikes have innovated so quickly is because the UCI has yet to stick its stupid nose into the races. But they'll be along shortly to ruin the fun.
My BS, unprovable hypothesis: The Golden Age of Piracy was actually a successful Socialist movement, with Nassau being a disruptively successful enclave of Socialism in action. The pirates deeply threatened the budding power structures in the US (not conjecture) and the entrenched powers in Europe. While some powers, most notably royalty, were willing to use pirates as mercenaries (privateers), there was an excess of democracy and human concern (somewhat my conjecture) among the Nassau pirates. The Nassau pirates had pensions, a form of worker's comp, disability, democratic command structures at sea, and healthcare (such as it was given the era). According to the historical texts on the Nassau pirates, there were almost no written records, which strikes me as especially odd since they had so many long-running financial and governing processes.
Did anyone else click and zoom for fun moiré effect?
I see a lot of specific examples, but here is a good engineering guideline: do not skimp on physical interfaces. **Anywhere energy is changing form or if it touches your body, don't skimp on those. **
For example
Quality usually means more money, but sometimes one is able to find a high quality and low-cost version. In my experience though, trying to find the cheap version that works well means trying so many permutations; it would have been more economical to just get the more costly version in the first place.
If my juggling of balls catches your fancy, you might also be interested to know that I also smoke meat, play the flute, and churn butter. 😆
Instructions unclear. Used boulder. No more sound comes out.
If the hardware is still great, how about installing LineageOS? Here's the direct link to LineageOS for the Pixel 4a: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/. I've been using LineageOS on all the old devices which are supported, mostly OnePlus and Nexus devices. Lightweight, and does everything I need.
There is no standard definition, though the term generally applies to vessels with a cabin intended for overnight use. To be termed a yacht, as opposed to a boat, such a pleasure vessel is likely to be at least 33 feet (10 m) in length and may have been judged to have good aesthetic qualities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacht
That said, I'm all for training and arming the cetaceans.
When the bridge was designed, cargo ships were much, much smaller.
You and me both! 😆 We continued to live together and were besties for another four years, and she would never talk about anything relationship-related, even as her next three relationships imploded.
We never got rid of slavery in the US. We merely shifted cost of ownership. Quite successfully. The laws have been advanced and tweaked to make everyone a potential criminal, especially if a minority. Prison labor is absolutely legal. The prison system is mostly privatized and for-profit. Healthcare is tied to employment, with dental care (a foundational element of good health) often being an add-on to employer-provided health insurance.
Stop the country, I want to get off.
Refs:
ADHD + tinnitus here, and my tinnitus frequencies shift around too. I made white and brown noise clips in Audacity, then notched out the frequencies of my varying tinnitus. I play it on repeat and found it very helpful. Although the tinnitus always comes back, I can focus while listening.
If you want help with creating your own files or just want me to make them for you, DM me.
There's a technical phrase for that: stochastic terrorism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism
Ever see a toucan in person? I had an employee with a toucan he would sometimes bring into work. It could throw things, especially round fruit, with uncanny accuracy. Like it could easily play catch from at least 2m away.
Glaucous-winged gulls also seem to have uncanny accuracy with defecation, but that's not quite throwing.
Mashing the upvote for Shadow Tactics and Shadow Tactics:Aiko's Choice. And agreed, their controller scheme is so spot on. Aiko's Choice adds some deeply bittersweet context to the first game.
How do I subscribe to acoustic propagation facts?
Stainless steel that gets coated is no longer stainless steel. Stainless steel requires exposure to sufficient oxygen in order to maintain the protective oxide layer.
These are rudder bolts from the same gudgeon on my sailboat. The black stuff is anoxic corrosion.
Well, goddammit, I just had a huge reply typed out, and the website deleted it when the text window lost focus. Okay, super short version: /u/akrot raises a good point, and we would all do well to apply harm reduction and awareness of EDCs in our lives. They are ubiquitous and insidious. In my case, sous vide cooking is one of the very few explicit uses I concede to single-use plastic in my life. It is also one of the few points in my kitchen that food touches plastics.
We must all pick our own battles, and everyday EDCs demand some awareness-raising.
I fully agree he's a ghoul. It is important however to be intellectually honest and morally consistent, lest we sink to the level of people like Fucker Carlson and Shill O'Reilly. Okay, maybe I'll sink a little sometimes...
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
Average water consumption stats make my head spin. According to the article, Barcelona residents use an average 99 liters per person per day. 0_0 I know the residential averages in America are even more horrific, something like 50 to 150 gallons PPPD, depending on locale.
What the hell is everyone doing with all of that water?! My partner and I use 4.5 gallons PPPD. And it's that high because we hand wash our dishes (no place to put a dishwasher).
This right here. Life is way too short to have a partner with whom one must conceal themselves. That's such a waste of energy and life capacity.
And if you're interested in developing deeper, more fulfilling intimate relationships, John Gottman's (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman) research and publications are an excellent resource on honing your relationship skills.
We hoi polloi think in money numbers and what we can afford to purchase. For the Capital Class, it's all about power. Money is just how they keep score.
Can confirm: $1000USD is an ISO standard boat unit. "How much will that cost?" "Only about 20 boat units."
Source: own and live on a sailboat.
We live on an ocean-going sailboat. We make our own water and electricity. We have ~25 years of membranes, filters, and most parts. While we have the means to move around to cooler climes, going further northward means more severe storms and shorter working life of everything. So there's that consideration.
Having the escape hatch of the boat does a lot to ease the anxiety.
Other coping mechanisms:
I'm sure I'm skipping over some of my other copium prescriptions, but those are the most salient.
But are they concerned with making money? 😁
I miss lawn darts, but the ban made sense. Holy hell, people were stupid with those things.
Whole, modern, domesticated fruits do contain quite a bit of sugar, but that sugar is locked up in fiber. There are lots of anti-sugar crusaders that consider whole fruit to be a "gimme." Gary Taubes (Good Calories, Bad Calories) and Robert Lustig (Sugar: the Bitter Truth) are two that leap to mind.
Squid, my deepest empathy for your medical journey ain't worth shit, but you have my empathy regardless. Without boring anyone with unrelated detail: I've been there. Kudos for your self-advocacy.
So I wrote a very long and angry email to the patient advocate
This right here, everyone. This person's entire role is to cut through red tape. In my experience, the patient advocate is the Winston Wolf of their hospital departments.
As an aside, Flying Squid, I always appreciate your contributions to the Lemmy community, even when I disagree. Thank you for being you.
Oh, I skip FB and IG ads completely. It's crazy: I didn't even have to install anything, and the ads just disappeared one day.
But seriously, the "your attention is being monetized" model makes for such an awful experience for me. I'm envious of people who can enjoy the world and the Internet when ads are everywhere.