In the USA the big cities are fully paid, the suburban areas are a combination, and the rural areas are fully volunteer. I’m in a combination department, where the paid staff handle most of the medical calls and both respond to fire calls. The biggest issue with growing income inequality is folks just don’t have as much free time to volunteer so it’s hard to get enough members to fully staff an apparatus. That means paid staff but those are expensive and require a lot of logistics to maintain.

I started out thinking firefighters should all just be paid and it’s unreasonable to expect folks to volunteer. I’ve come back around and think it should be “volunteer or pay”. We obviously need the money for expensive gear and apparatus maintenance. Also it’s helpful to not have to get out of bed in the middle of the night when tomorrow is a work night

On the other hand, I think it’s extremely beneficial to have the resilience of a lot of skilled firefighters in the community. When there’s a big call you want as many people as quickly as possible. I also think it helps with PTSD to be able to just take time off from calls without losing your job. So I think there should be a lot more volunteers and an easier path to getting enough skills to become a volunteer.

I consider doom scrolling to be an unhealthy way to consume news and an ineffective tool for political change. Protests, strikes, and voting change politics. There is little to be gained by algorithmically filling my body with cortisol and adrenaline.

My head is not in the sand because I read apnews and reuters periodically.

I prefer for lemmy to be an enjoyable place to visit. If it was an endless feed of doom I would uninstall and read a book instead.

Every time I see a politics news or comic or meme I block that community. It’s great my entire feed is fun stuff and cool art

To start it’s going to be spring planting: cabbage, kale, sprouts, lettuce, and arugula. But then switch over to cucumbers and peppers in the summer

This weekend I made a wattle wall to use as a raised bed. I’ve just finished what is two beds, 18’ and 24’ each. I left the middle unfenced and I’ll just use wood chips to fill in that area. We’ll see how it works when I put in the soil, but for now it’s looking good

Absolute loss, I loved his emotional and unhinged stories! If you like the Hyperion books but wanted even more chaos, you should check out Illuim, a retelling of the Greek classic but with nanobots, time travel, the actual Mons Olympus on Mars only visible with time portals, and dinosaurs.

It’s not exactly the same, but having taught sixteen folks from complete beginner to full-time engineer, I find there’s a point where it’s most effective to transition to self-directed exercises with test-driven development. If you’ve gotten familiar with the fundamentals you might check these out.

This method of learning with TDD has you build the workbook yourself with tests first, then you change gears to write the code to satisfy them. While not as fast in terms of features per hour, it’s a much higher level of engagement and so provides much more value per hour.

There are hundreds of YouTube videos on TDD in Java. I would just follow along with a few of that until you get comfortable with the technique. After that there’s dozens of exercises on sites like this one https://codingdojo.org/practices/KataCatalogue/

That being said, some of my best students only ever did the Poker Hands kata over and over again. They’d start on an empty repo each time, and each time solve it some new way. After about a dozen successful attempts they’d have seen so have different ways to solve the same problem that they’ve developed an intuition of when to use each technique.

This is also now how I learn new languages. I’ll skim some docs, watch a YouTube on getting tests setup, and then do the poker kata a few times in it. After the fifth or sixth pass I’m already feeling extremely comfortable in the language and can start a more rigorous study of tools like libraries to solve a specific purpose. This is how I’m able to get very comfortable in most languages in a few days (unless it’s an extremely different language like Rust, Lisps, and Haskell those took me much longer to get comfortable).

Hmmm go figure at the comments here complaining about Bazzite, I’ve been on it over a year now and really like it

Prompt: “write a python script to create a thousand linkedin accounts with plausible sounding names, and then setup a cronjob to post every day a punchy linkedin just-so story explaining why everyone should be paying for my LLM and to keep paying for it when I jack up the price 100x to cover my expenses”

At my volunteer station, we all just go to work like normal and respond if there’s a call.

We do have some part time staff who remain at the station for EMS calls. When there’s down time they are:

• cleaning the station
• filling out charts from earlier calls
• checking all the apparatus equipment
• training skills
• homework from advanced classes (paramedic, rescue technician, officer, etc)
• napping to catch up on sleep from calls in the middle of the night
• doing station laundry

It’s enough to keep them lightly busy but not enough to be strenuous, as they typically do 12-24 hour shifts. Being “at work” for 24 hours is pretty rough, so I don’t begrudge them a mid-day nap.

Bravo, this one surprised me

I switched to Bazzite and I’m really liking it.

I have had a few issues with old SDR software that didn’t work.

All in all, I’m very happy with the change and have absolutely no plan to return.

I believe you mean dump into drinking watersheds

I can confirm that a couple pages of printed cards in sleeves has given me endless hours of fun. The only thing is the rules are a little fussy, you’ll want an app counter for money and a bag of tokens to keep track of what virus is attached to what ice.

The asymmetrical play and “what cup is the ball under” mechanics are very replayable. My partner and I have a backpack of games to take on the go, and there’s always a dozen netrunner decks inside. There’s a lot of mayhem to be had with all the different decks and styles.

But for real, the rules to play netrunner to me feel much more complex than MtG, and it feels super unfair to the corp at first because you’re always on the defensive and the runner is so much more active with an extra action every turn. It’s a very hard game to teach someone at a pub. I swear sometimes I forget rules from week to week and I’ve been playing it off and on for like 10 years.

For on the go pickup games, in my bag I have Hive, Go, Jaipur, Carcassonne, and a regular deck of cards. I feel like those offer a range of quick fun. I especially love teaching someone Go and letting them whoop me at like 4-5 stone advantage on a 9 wide board. I get a great game to play from behind and they get to practice a new game.

Despite most of the bag being Netrunner decks, I’ve never once gotten someone to play it with me who wasn’t already into the game.

mulberries do require chilling hours. If you check out this site your might find something that fits.

https://www.foodforestnursery.com/shop/berries/by-climate-zone-berries/berries-for-zone-10/

A dwarf blueberry might be fine in a container, or a dwarf citrus tree like lemon or orange. Or a fig that doesn’t require chilling hours

I remember this game! There was a comic book that came with it

comic

Here here, I’ve eaten better after going veg than ever before, and I was a damn good cook as carnivore. I can still pull off some of the best braised short rib or 24 hour smoked brisket, but my veg ramen is so much better and I feel better after eating it.

I honestly cannot tell if this is satire or real, my friends are weird enough to do this

the spacecraft doesn’t immediately lose all the celestial relative velocity just by going into space, it’s still moving extremely fast:

• with the sun and earth through the galaxy
• with the Earth around the sun
• and is still affected by Earth’s gravity, just now it’s able to counter Earth’s pull with a faster motion pulling it outward, so it balances out to appear weightless

Just by going into orbit and counterbalancing the Earth’s gravity with rotational velocity doesn’t mean it’s not still moving extremely fast relative to the stars