Slight counterpoint

I have 2 TVs in my house. A 70" Vizio as my main TV and a 40-ish inch Samsung fame in the bedroom

Haven’t used the TVs smart features in years, everything I watch is run through a game console or dedicated streaming device (currently a 4k Chromecast)

Their software is kind of dogshit, but I never interact with it except once in a blue moon after a power outage or something when it defaults back to that. I otherwise find it to be a perfectly fine TV for the price I paid for it.

However, as bad as the software is on the Vizio, the Samsung is 10x worse. And unfortunately as bad as it is, that’s what we use because it was hard enough trying to hide the box the TV came with (the way they get the frame TV’s so light and thin is by moving all of the electronics into a separate box, I installed a cabinet in the wall behind the TV to hide it) let alone trying to hide a separate streaming stick/box along with it. I also feel like using one of those may not play as well with the art mode as the built-in software, which is kind of the whole point.

Totally anecdotal, but I work in 911 dispatch, so I have a bit of insight on people involving themselves in emergencies

It’s really hit or miss.

Fires, gunshots, medical emergencies, fights, things blowing up, car accidents, noise complaints, aircraft crashes, I’ve probably taken a call about it, and those calls have come in from the person involved, a neighbor , a random passerby, their grandmother who lives in another state, or some random follower on tiktok.

And sometimes we get a hundred calls about the same thing. There are times I can just about answer the phone with “911, if you’re calling about the [thing] in [place] we’re already aware, help is on the way.” And be right about 90% of the time while that thing is going on. (To be clear I don’t do that, because almost every time I crack a joke about my job or vent about stupid shit our callers do, some self-righteous dipshit comes at me with a whole “if that’s how you talk to your callers maybe you’re not cut out for this job” spiel as if no one ever vents about the idiots they have to deal with at work.)

And there are other times where we get exactly one call about something serious happening in a very public place and we’re left wondering if it was a prank call until our police/fire/EMS get out there and confirm that yes, everything is exactly as described or even worse, it’s a total shit-show and all hell’s breaking loose.

Sometimes it seems like a whole town is turning out to help people with a minor fender-bender, and sometimes hundreds of people are driving right by an overturned vehicle.

Usually, of course, it’s somewhere in-between. We got a handful of calls about something but our phones aren’t ringing off the hook about it.

Moral of my rant is, a lot of times people will step in to help or at least call 911 in an emergency, but you can’t always count on that. The idea of the bystander effect is exaggerated and misinterpreted, but the core takeaway about it is solid. You can’t always take it for granted that someone else is going to do something to help, so if you find yourself in a position where you can be the one who helps, you should do so.

Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.

Most bullet casings are brass, which is a fairly soft metal, you could probably scratch some words into it with a pocket knife, sewing needle, pretty much any pointy steel object

Just kind of thinking out loud

All of those people who were brought into ERs from ground zero and the people, vehicles, etc. that brought them there would have been covered in that same dust that’s causing health issues for first responders, that means doctors and nurses probably also received some level of exposure to that dust because I doubt all of those people showered on the way.

I don’t know how their exposure level stacks up against the people who were on-scene, I’m sure it’s an order of magnitude less, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was still significant enough to cause some health problems. IBM pretty sure I’ve seen some evidence of people who live with firefighters developing health issues from secondhand exposure like that.

On top of that, there’s also the psychological burden that always gets overlooked. I’m sure that took a hell of a toll on healthcare workers.

And there’s a recognition aspect, because for all of the people who died, there were also many more who were injured, and more than a few of them owe their lives to the doctors and nurses who treated them just as much as to the first responders who got them to the hospital.

Well at the end of it, you can see he actually starts leaning pretty far to the left

Not a Doctor, take this for what it’s worth

But my understanding is that, depending on the type of seizure disorder and a whole host of other factors, there’s a lot of things that can potentially trigger seizures

Flashing lights are a classic example, but also smells, temperature, stress, diet, hormones, drug/alcohol use or withdrawal, fever, lack of sleep, etc.

Also you said that you gradually halved your dose since then, that might also be a factor. Lets say you were on 100mg before and 50 now. When your body was acclimated to 100mg, it was probably a bigger shock to your system to go without than it is now that your body is only used to 50, obviously 0 to 100 is a bigger difference than 0 to 50.

Coming up on 7 years married, probably about another 2 maybe 3 years together (she seems to think we were dating for a while before I realized it, I’m kind of dense)

We were friends for probably about another 2 or 3 years before that, and for probably about that long again before that we kind of recognized each other as friends-of-friends but only ever bumped into each other in-passing and didn’t hang out.

The type of ice cream definitely makes a difference, more premium brands tend to be a lot stiffer than cheaper brands. And I admittedly tend to buy just some basic vanilla ice cream because I like to go crazy with toppings.

My brain defaults to fahrenheit, and that probably shapes how I look at temperatures a bit, but those temperature differences between our different freezers feels pretty significant to me. In warmer temperatures, for example, that amount of temperature difference could be the difference between shorts & t shirt weather and needing a jacket.

Also, for what it’s worth, my family once acquired a full container of Ben & Jerry’s that would have been served at one of their stores. The instructions on the box were to store it at or below -20f/-29c, and bring it up to 10f/-12c in the serving cabinet.

My fridge freezer is currently set to -2f (about -19c)

My basement freezer doesn’t have a convenient temperature display, and I don’t have a thermometer in it, I’d guess I’m probably at around -10 to -20f (about -23 to -29c) some people go as low as -40f (which is also -40c)

It of course varies a lot depending on where you are but I live in the suburbs, and they’re pretty common around me. Not necessarily an “everyone has one” kind of thing, but definitely something that you know a good handful of people who have them.

https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/data/2020/state/pdf/State Appliances.pdf

According to the EIA, about 33% of households overall, state by state it’s as low as 19% in California, and as high as 65% in south dakota. So even in states like California, Nevada, or New Jersey where 94+% of people live in an area that’s considered urban, if you assume 100% of the rural residents have freezers, that’s still about 13% of those city dwellers with a dedicated freezer.

I feel like the biggest deciding factor is probably whether or not you own a house, which is going to have a lot of correlation to being urban/rural. They take up space, so not conducive to apartment living, and they’re kind of a bitch to move so you probably want to make sure you’re going to be able to stay in a house for a while before buying a freezer so that you don’t have to deal with moving it every few years if your landlord jacks up the rent and forces you out.

Do most refrigerators in the world not have a freezer?

Because I’m pretty sure that’s what they mean by “fridge freezer” as opposed to a separate “deep freezer” like a chest or an upright freezer with no refrigerator.

Not sure how common having a separate freezer is in other parts of the world, but it’s fairly common in the US.

I know my basement freezer is really fucking cold, it’s actually kind of painful to handle things I pull out of it sometimes because they’re so cold. The freezer on my fridge upstairs is a bit warmer (still well below freezing of course) I can usually manage to scoop ice cream out of my upstairs freezer without too much trouble, but out of my downstairs freezer it would be kind of like chiseling at a rock with a spoon.

The in-universe science behind Cyclops’ optic blasts have been very inconsistent over the years.

The explanation that I’m personally familiar with is that his eyes themselves are portals to a dimension of pure concussive energy that doesn’t produce heat, and that energy is also conveniently blocked by ruby lenses in his glasses and visor, and also his own body is immune to it.

Which doesn’t really make any sense from a real world physics perspective, but that’s comic books for you.

And of course depending on what timeline/reboot/alternate universe you’re dealing with, who’s writing it, and what’s convenient for the plot, any of that can go right out the window, I’ve definitely seen him melt things and start fires with his blasts in some versions.

I think another explanation that gets used sometimes is that his body absorbs sunlight to power them.

The us has always been anti illegal immigration

The US actually made it almost the first hundred years of its history without many meaningful immigration laws

I’m sure someone will argue otherwise, but one thing commonly cited as the first US immigration law was the steerage act of 1819, which was pretty much just “you can’t overcrowd your ships, you have to have enough food and water for everyone, you have to have a list of your passengers and account for anyone who died on the way”

So not really limiting immigration, more making sure that the ships bringing immigrants here were providing at least basic livable conditions for the trip.

Immigration overland was totally unregulated.

And with some minor alterations here and there, that was pretty much the state of things until the 1870s and 80s with the Page Act and Chinese Exclusion Act. Until then there really wasn’t such a thing as “illegal immigration” and borders were pretty much wide-open.

To be thorough, between 1776 and the Page Act, we did have the Alien Friends and Alien Enemies acts to allow the US to deport non-citizen immigrants under certain circumstances, and we took a few steps forwards and backwards at times regarding the naturalization process, but we also had the 14th amendment and “An Act to Encourage Immigration” in there as well.

And of course after that, shit went downhill pretty damn quickly.

So it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but again for almost half of US history there really wasn’t any such thing as “illegal” immigration for anyone to be against (general anti-immigrant sentiments are another story)

US

It varies from district to district of course

My school offered Spanish, French, and Latin

They used to offer German, but ended that a few years before I got there.

In 7th grade, unless you’re in remedial English, they have you do ¼ of the year taking each as an “exploratory” language (the last quarter they had something else, I want to say they called it “study skills” or something, just a very general class on how to do school stuff)

Then in 8th grade you took that class, it’s been a long time but I think you had it for half the year, but it possibly might have been for just a quarter or maybe for the whole year.

Then in 9th-12th grade you had each class for half the year. If you really wanted to you might have been able to arrange your schedule to have, for example, French 2 1st semester and 3 2nd, but again, it’s been a while, I don’t remember exactly how the scheduling worked.

Little tangential story about my own language learning

I went with French

Initially I kind of wanted to do Latin, but the Latin teacher was a little bit insane. Not actually a bad teacher, but I just didn’t jive with her energy, she was a former gymnast from Russia, and also kind of a germophobe, and just really intense and hyper, one of those rare human beings that if you saw a character like her in a work of fiction it might break your immersion for being unrealistic, but there she was, in the flesh.

There were two Spanish teachers, one was fine, the other was arrested a few years later for being a child molester (I heard somewhere that it eventually turned out that the kids who accused him made it up, but I really can’t find anything from after his arrest to confirm that one way or another) and I didn’t get particularly good vibes from him regardless.

So I went with French. The French teacher was actually pretty great. Also, I decided that I’d rather go to France for a school trip if I stick with it over Spain or Italy (for Latin class)

Unfortunately, she also had a baby that year and was out for most of the year.

We had a long term substitute who was also pretty great, and a pretty competent French teacher.

However, that substitute had some kind of health thing come up and was also out most of the time.

So we had a string of short-term substitutes who mostly didn’t speak a word of French.

And so we all pretty much just got passed along to French 2 knowing barely any more French than we did after our one quarter of exploratory French the year before.

That year, the high school got a new French teacher. He wasn’t so much a French teacher as much as he was a teacher who happened to be from France. He didn’t seem to me to be particularly good at teaching a language. He was also kind of a sad, lonely man who was too soft to deal with American teenagers, and some of the most unruly and problematic our school had to offer were in his first semester class, and they absolutely broke this poor man’s soul, he was an empty husk of a man by the time we got him 2nd semester, and although my class was decent in comparison, teenagers can smell weakness in a teacher and he was totally unable to control the class, he ended up having to take a lot of time off, I’m pretty sure because of depression, and actually got canned a couple weeks before the end of the school year.

So again, we all kind of get shuffled along to French 3 despite having only the most basic understanding of French possible.

The higher-level French teacher had been there for a long time. She is good at her job. She’s intense, but not unlikeable. Unfortunately from French 3 onwards, the class is supposed to be mostly taught in French and most of us could barely manage to ask to go to the bathroom. So she was frustrated with us, we were confused by her, it wasn’t a great experience.

So after barely scraping by in that class I decided no more French class for me.

Which was kind of a bummer, because I was kind of looking forward to going on the class trip to France in French 4 or 5 (they did the trip every other year) but I was way out of my depth and didn’t want to put in the effort to catch up on my own.

3d printing is not the default fabrication method now that we’re getting good at it. It just shines in certain applications.

Getting a little theoretical here

With the current state of the technology, 3d printing lags behind some traditional manufacturing techniques like machining and in terms of speed, cost, quality, available materials, etc. except for some relatively niche cases.

However, that gap is closing a bit every day, it may or may not ever catch up completely or surpass the old technique in those aspects

But if it does ever get close, I could very much see 3d printing being a preferred method

Subtractive manufacturing like machining, by design, creates a lot of waste, all of the chips and off cuts that are removed from the stock are either discarded or require additional energy and/or materials to recycle.

And things like injection molding require custom molds that wear out over time, and can be expensive to design and manufacture

And in either case, you’re largely locked into making one thing on an assembly line at a time, and to switch over to a different product you’re probably going to need to switch out a lot of the molds and tooling, recalibrate everything, etc. which can be time consuming.

With 3d printing, you could theoretically use only the amount of material that’s actually in the finished product (if you design it that it doesn’t require any external supports ) you don’t need any custom tooling or mold, just generic, interchangeable nozzles (for FDM, LCD screens or lasers or whatever the equivalent is for other printing technologies) and you could switch production from one item to another by just hitting print on a different file.

Again, we’re not there, may never be there, but it’s a cool thing to think about

I’m not a doctor who fan at all, so as far as I’m concerned the show is dogshit regardless of who the doctor is, but that’s my personal taste, to each their own.

However, from a couple minutes of googling, I’m pretty sure that the most recent doctor was a dude, and the next season with a new (“gender swapped”) doctor hasn’t even aired, or even been given an official release date, so not sure how you can really judge it already. Maybe you don’t like the actress, but I know I’ve been surprised by actors I generally don’t like knocking it out of the park before.

There was another female doctor prior to this most recent one, but again, you’ve had a whole 'nother doctor since then.

So I’m really not too sure what you’re on about their “current attempt.”

Yes, it gets sent out to every phone in the target area, it also gets broadcast on radio and TV channels.

Sure, the person of interest will get the amber alert, but realistically, they probably know that someone is going to be looking for the kid sooner rather than later.

And while 400km (about 250 miles for other Americans like myself) is certainly a big area, that might be only like 3 or 4 hours of driving if they take major highways. I know people who regularly drive double that in a day and think nothing of it and they’re not even trying to flee from a kidnapping.

And of course, there’s probably going to be some time delay between when a kid goes missing to when the alert gets pushed out. The parents/guardian may not notice right away that the kid was missing- maybe the kid was playing out in the yard while they were inside cooking dinner when it happened, they may spend some time looking around the house/neighborhood and calling everyone they know before calling the police (I work in 911 dispatch, the amount of calls I get from some friend or relative in another state because the person having an emergency called them instead of calling us never ceases to amaze me,) and then it may take some time for the police to get out there and collect the necessary information and go through whatever process the area has for issuing the alert

So it very well may be a few hours since the abduction occured before the alert is issued.

And of course, like you said, they do try to determine an appropriate geographic area to issue the alerts in, if the abductor is known to live 400km away, or has made specific threats to take the kid to a certain location, or there’s other reasons to think that may be where they’re headed, it seems pretty reasonable to me to alert that area and much of the area in between the two locations.

Where did you source the replacement antennas from?

I’ve dabbled in a little bit of ham radio stuff, and in that realm making sure your antenna is properly tuned to the equipment you’re using it with is kind of a big deal, I’d imagine it also plays some part with WiFi, it’s all radio waves after all. It could maybe be that the antennas you got aren’t’t quite right for the adapter.

By 18, somewhere along the line you’ve hopefully had some kind of science/biology class where they talked about dominant and recessive genes, Punnett squares, and all of that

But in case you didn’t, or it’s slipped your mind (honestly, given your age there’s a good chance they may have covered this while you were learning from home during the pandemic, so kind of understandable if you don’t remember) here’s a quick refresher

You get one copy of each gene from both parents. Sometimes you get the same version of them from each parent, sometimes you get a different version.

Let’s imagine there’s a single gene that determines if you’re going to be tall. There’s a tall version of that gene, that we’ll call “T” and a short version that we’ll call “t”

We’ll say that “T” is the dominant version, and “t” is recessive.

What that means is that if you carry the “T” gene, it will always be expressed. You’ll be tall as long as you have at least one copy of it.

Remember, you get one copy of this gene from each parent. They each also have 2 copies of this gene.

Your dad is tall, so he must be carrying at least one copy of the T gene. He might have one, or he might have two.

Your mom is short, so she doesn’t have the T gene, she has 2 copies of the t gene.

So if your dad has 2 copies, all of his children will be tall, because they’re all going to get a T from him.

But if he only has 1, he could have short children if he passes along his t gene instead, and since your mom doesn’t have a T to pass on, she can only pass on the t gene

We can illustrate this in something called a Punnett Square, which looks something like this (apologies for the lazy ASCII layout)

_ | T | T
t | Tt | Tt
t | Tt | Tt

or

_ | T | t
t | Tt | tt
t | Tt | tt

The top rows represent your father’s genes, with 1 or 2 copies of the T gene, and the column on the left represents your mothers with only the t gene

And the rest of the squares represent the possible combination of genes you can have.

So in this hypothetical, if your dad is a “Tt” and your mom is a “tt” you have a 50/50 shot of being tall.

This is a very simplified version of it. In reality, there’s not just one gene that determines height, there’s actually about 10,000 genetic factors that have some impact on your height.

And for shits and giggles, let’s imagine that both of your parents were tall so the punnet squares look like this

_ | T | T
T | TT | TT
T | TT | TT

Or

_ | T | t
T | TT | Tt
t | Tt | tt

In the first example, both your parents are tall, and all of their children will be tall. In the second example both parents are tall, but there’s a 1 in 4 chance that their child will inherit the t gene from each of them and be short.

And not all genes are purely dominant/recessive, some are incompletely dominant, so Tt might sort of split the difference in height between a TT and a tt person. Some genes kind of play off of other genes, so maybe in order for the “T” gene to make you tall you may also need to be carrying a “U” gene, for example.

And on top of that, there’s environmental factors, nutrition, illness, injuries, etc. can have an impact on how tall you can be. People today are, on average, taller than people in the past because overall we’re better able to meet our nutritional needs and treat health issues than they were back then.

And, while it’s unlikely that you’ll grow another foot to catch up with your dad’s height, at 18 you may still have a little bit of growing to do, some men continue to grow a little into their early 20s.

So there’s a lot that goes into this.