AFKBRBChocolate

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Yet another refugee who washed up on the shore after the great Reddit disaster of 2023

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AFKBRBChocolate ,

I didn't know what they were and had to look it up

The Bell Riots were an event that took place in San Francisco on Earth in September 2024. They led to the end of the Sanctuary Districts and marked the real beginning of Humans working to find a lasting solution that would resolve social problems. This would set humanity on the path to founding the United Federation of Planets.

Hey, the date is coming up.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I'm old - there's just so much that has and hasn't happened...

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I'm not an expert, but it's a very complex global system with moisture in the atmosphere sometimes falling as rain/snow, collecting in rivers and lakes, going into ground water/aquifers, flowing into the oceans, and sometimes just staying as moist air. If one area isn't getting it's usual rainfall, quite often another area is getting more, but it can also be that the moisture is just in other parts of that complex system. A lot is driven by high- and low-pressure systems, air temperature, water temperature, etc.

In my area of southern California, we've had some major, extended droughts. But the rising temperature of the Pacific has caused the air to hold more moisture, and we've also had some "atmospheric river" storms that drop insane amounts of rain. So even though we get an average of 13 inches of rain a year, we got more than 13 inches in just February, and we're up to almost 31 inches for the season. It wouldn't be surprising if we didn't get anymore until late in the year though.

Some of that rain went into snowpack, some into reservoirs, some into ground water, but we're close to the coast and all of it will go back to the ocean. Did we get rain that would normally have gone elsewhere, or was it rain that wouldn't normally have formed? I think it's likely hard to say, but maybe there are meteorologists or others who know more reading this.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Seems like New Mexico has a lot of that and is close. Probably lacks your family though.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

No, doesn't seem worse than Texas. Their police (at least in Albuquerque) seem terrible, but the people are nice and it's reasonably liberal. Our kid is non-binary and there getting their PhD. They've have a pretty good experience.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I never like this particular comparison because there are so many people in the world who have nothing, or nothing but debt. Is hard to tell from it how much is the wealth of the top or the poverty of the bottom. It would almost be better to compare to the next group down, or to an average or something.

Maybe a graph with one block being the richest person, and then groups of the next n richest people, however many it takes to equal the richest. And then keep doing that, so there's more and more blocks to equal the richest. I bet it ramps up really fast.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

At my work, we meet astronauts fairly often (I met Jonny Kim last year), and it's amazing how many of them are like this. They'll usually pass out their headshots that have their bio on the back, and the number of advanced degrees and impressive accomplishments is jaw dropping. Like I feel like I'd think my life was worthwhile if I did one of those things by the end of it, and a lot of the astronauts are hardly more than half my age. And to really rub it in, they all seem incredibly genuine, personable, and well adjusted.

There are a giant number of people who want to be astronauts, and NASA only needs a small number in a given year, so they can pick the very cream of the crop.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Okay, but now I want to chase an ice cream truck with a convoy of vehicles...

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Years ago I was walking through a park area of UC Berkeley while on vacation and this squirrel walked right in front of me and stood there, so I stopped and watched it. I realized I had some food in my backpack and there might be something squirrel-appropriate, so I very slowly took it off and opened it up, hoping the squirrel wouldn't get scared and run away. I found something - like a grape or something, don't remember what - and got it out to toss to the squirrel, but when he saw it he ran up my pants leg and stopped at about my waist. Scared the crap out of me. I held out the food and he took it with one hand, stuck it in his mouth, and ran away.

That's when I learned that there are apparently tame squirrels all around Berkeley.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

No, this is not the place for that. People come here to see cute things, not to see a wounded animal. I feel badly for you and your boy, but this is the wrong community.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

It seems strange to us, but vacation time isn’t something required by law. In fact, there are no federal requirements for companies to cover paid sick leave, either (some states have them).

Those things mostly came about as a way for companies to attract and retain employees, and because of union negotiations.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Yep, hence “federal,” but I should have been specific.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Right, this is the correct answer. Even with a very tall ladder, the force is relatively small. If the ladder is well anchored, you can demonstrate this by standing at the top, holding on tightly, and pushing on the wall to see how hard you have to push to move the top of the ladder away from the wall a little.

Also worth mentioning that they sell covers/pads for the top of the ladders to prevent denting the drywall, but you can also make them from a piece of foam pool noodle.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Heh, fair enough, though if that’s enough to make you feel backwards, you don’t have enough angle on your ladder.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Maybe this is timely. We’re having all our bathrooms gutted and redone. Just today our contractor asked what colors we wanted them painted, so I asked which company’s color samples we did get. He said if I’m going to a place like home Depot, Behr or Dunn Edwards.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Thank you! I get a good number of the obscure ones, but this one had me scratching my head.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

That’s bullshit, he knows exactly what he’s doing and he milks that “I’m just a curious dummy” thing for all it’s worth. It’s his excuse for subtly promoting garbage that he believes in.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

“Sacks”

Baby Boomers Are Overestimating Future Social Security Income ( www.bloomberg.com )

Baby boomers anticipate that 47% of pre-retirement earnings will be replaced by Social Security, according to results of an annual survey from the Nationwide Retirement Institute. But the reality for someone making what the Social Security Administration considers the average wage in recent years, about $60,000, is more like...

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Yeah, that’s the weird thing about the article: why make guesses about what you’ll get when the SSA will give you a breakdown/projection.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

To elaborate on what others have said, with a window that slides open, rain and condensation can run down the sliding part when it’s closed and pool up in the track, eventually leaking inside your house. There’s usually dinner kind of drainage at the bottom that allows the water to drain outside. Often it’s a hole like that at the end of the track, then a little slot on the outside.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

A Trump employee who monitored security cameras at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate abruptly retracted his earlier grand jury testimony and implicated Trump and others in obstruction of justice just after switching from an attorney paid for by a Trump political action committee to a lawyer from the federal defender’s office in Washington, prosecutors said in a court filing Tuesday.

The aide — described as “Trump Employee 4” in public court filings but identified elsewhere as Yuscil Taveras — held the title of director of information technology at Mar-a-Lago. He initially testified to a grand jury in Washington, D.C., that he was unaware of any effort to erase the videos, but after getting the new attorney “immediately … retracted his prior false testimony” and detailed the alleged effort to tamper with evidence related to the investigation of the handling of classified information stored at Trump’s Florida home, the new submission said.

I’m still not holding my breath until I see Trump facing actual consequences, but he sure does look to be screwed.

New Trump poll proves Obama and Clinton were right: The GOP base are deplorable, bitter clingers ( www.salon.com )

“Hurt dogs sure do holler.” That was the saying that came to mind in 2008 when then-candidate for president Barack Obama drew outrage from Republicans because he described their voters as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” The phrase came to mind again...

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I really wish the media would at least try to appear unbiased, except in clearly identified opinion pieces - I don’t think it does any of us any good to have such slanted words in reporting.

All that being said, I agree with the overall take. People lost their shit when Hilary called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” but look at how they behave and what they push for. Why would you want to vote for someone more because there’s credible evidence that he committed serious crimes? Not just that you’re looking the other way, but it’s a desirable attribute? That’s just crap.

There’s reporting that the guy who shot the shopkeeper over the pride flag was very outspoken against abortion. “Every life is sacred, but I’m going to murder this woman because she supports LGBTQ rights.” So much of their anger is against things that have zero affect on them personally. It’s crazy.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I guess it says “commentary” at the top, so maybe I should retract that part. I’m old, and I grew up in a time when opinion pieces one the news were very overtly identified as such, with disclaimers about the publication not endorsing any opinion given. The reason being that everything else was intended to be taken factually. I see so many things now where we blur the lines, with newscasters using a lot of subjective adjectives to tell us how we should feel about things they’re reporting on. It really bugs me.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

The only slight silver lining for me in this whole shit show is that it shined a light on how prevalent racism is across the country. As an older white guy on the west coast, I knew there was still a fair amount of racism, but figured it was mostly found in the rural south and scattered uneducated cretins. It turns out that a giant percentage of our population are racists who used to keep those opinions to themselves. Now they feel like it’s completely acceptable to voice those opinions, and the rest of us can see the magnitude of the problem.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

It started under Bush. We didn’t have much drone technology prior to that, so it ramped up under him, continued to ramp up under Obama, and continued to ramp up under Trump.

Whether it’s a net negative is debatable to me. It’s not like those bystander deaths didn’t happen prior to the drones - on the contrary, there were more of them because we used less discriminate bombs instead. You can make an argument that the drone strikes have saved lives, at least as compared to what was happening previously. Targeting someone in a civilian area seems pretty reprehensible regardless.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I’m sure I’ve read salon articles that people have linked, but not enough to get a feel for them as a publication in general. When I read news, I generally try to avoid sources that lean hard in either direction, except sometimes to see what their take on a subject is.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I fully agree. It’s a stronger position when we keep it fact-based.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

You say the hose doesn’t do anything, do you mean it doesn’t have much suction, or something else? Generally, with a full size vacuum, you do stairs with the hose with an attachment on the end. I ended up using the upholstery brush with mine, and that works pretty well, but usually you can get ones like the bottom right of this image that are designed for it.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

Nope, not fixed. And unlike Reddit, you can edit the title.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

This is what it looks like for me. https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d7f05194-9671-4899-834d-71884382ae82.png

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I believe you! There are lots of little issues - it’s a young platform. If it’s any consolation, “Reddit for Lemmy” makes me giggle everytime I see it.

AFKBRBChocolate ,

I left Reddit just ahead of the blackout, and I’ve only been returning for one small private sub that can’t effectively be moved. I figure, since it’s private, Reddit doesn’t get much credit for my activity there.

I’ve used Relay exclusively for many years, so I’ve been happy that it’s continued to work. It will be annoying if/when I have to use the browser to go to that sub.

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