No idea what brought this post onto my feed, Lemmy’s algorithms get a bit fucky sometimes and I wasn’t exactly looking at the age of the post or expecting it to be 7 months old.

But you’re welcome. Thank you for being a sarcastic asshole to someone trying to answer your question. Hope you have the day you deserve, bud.

Also a new term to me as an American (at least in that sort of usage, I’ve heard the word when used to talk about art and literature and such)

So I googled it.

It’s sort of an alternative to toll roads. Basically instead of paying a toll to use a highway every time you get on it, you just pay once, get a sticker to put on your car to show you paid it, and it’s good for X amount of time, and you can use that highway as much as you want until it expires.

Different countries of course have different rules on which roads and types of vehicles require a vignette.

I suppose you can kind of think of it as being similar to vehicle registration but only for specific roads. Or if you’ve ever needed some kind of parking permit to park in certain areas or lots, it’s like that except for driving.

OPs gripe, I suppose, is that if you drive around different countries in Europe, you might need to pay for multiple different vignettes, and probably have a few different stickers on your car, and it would be nice to just have one that covers all of Europe instead.

It also seems like that is sort of a thing for large trucks in a handful of countries that have agreed to use a common vignette (Eurovignette) but it’s only for those big commercial vehicles, not regular passenger cars, and not all countries have adopted it.

There is a small chance that this is actually a true fact, but I’ve never been able to find any source that backs it up. I haven’t looked hard, but I have looked, and my google-fu is usually pretty good

I remember hearing once that “blue raspberry” flavor exists because when food scientists were trying to come up with a formula for artificial raspberry flavoring they just couldn’t get it quite right, they got pretty close, but not quite close enough for people to buy that it tastes like raspberries. But some marketing guru decided it was good enough and they’d just color it blue and people would accept it “of course it doesn’t taste like regular raspberries, this is blue raspberry, it’s different, it’s supposed to taste like that”

And yes, blue raspberries kind of actually exist. They probably used that as justification banking on the fact that most people don’t actually know what they taste like.

There’s also some stuff about a certain red dye being banned at one point, and marketing also wanting to differentiate raspberry because people already associated red with flavors like cherry, strawberry, watermelon, etc. and those are probably true as well, but I don’t think those reasons are incompatible with this explanation.

I’m not going to get too into the politics of the troubles, but I think it’s kind of worth remembering that this did happen in the context of an armed conflict, morality gets fuzzy.

Thinking about it in the context of modern conflicts, let’s say a Palestinian or Lebanese group assassinated an influential Israeli businessman who was vocally advocating for Israel continuing their operations, or perhaps a Ukrainian group assassinated a Russian oligarch.

Or hell, the guys who shot the United healthcare CEO or Charlie Kirk.

In some theoretical future where there’s some kind of peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine/Lebanon, or the US has gone through some kind of civil war to overthrow MAGA types, would it seem so unreasonable to want those people to be freed as part of the negotiations?

Or looking further back, let’s say members of the French or Polish or whatever resistance in WWII had assassinated a German businessman who helped fund the Nazi war machine, wouldn’t we have expected them to be freed after the war?

And I think likely that’s a similar kind of light at that least some Irish people would view these guys in.

And of course, depending on what side of the conflict you were on, you may not see things that way. If you were a Nazi, or if you support Israel or Russia or Trump, you’d probably think of those assassins as nothing but criminals or terrorists, but as the saying goes, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom-fighter

“You don’t.”

My area isn’t the hottest, but it does usually get up to about 100F for a day or two most years, and in the summer temps are in the 80s or 90s during the day pretty consistently, and it can be humid.

I have a mostly finished basement, I’ll spend a lot of time down there over the summer, it stays pretty consistently cool.

I’m lucky that I work night shift, so it’s easier for me to do stuff in the evenings or early morning before it gets too hot.

There’s a saying that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate gear. I usually joke that in the summer that means air conditioning.

But if you don’t have a/c, opening your windows and getting some fans going can really go a long way to keeping your house cool.

Limit your time outside, find somewhere to sit down in the shade and take a break if you need to.

Dress appropriately for the weather, lightweight, light colored, breathable clothing, linen is great if you can find it. Maybe consider wearing a wide-brimmed hat to keep the sun off your face and neck when you go outside.

Drink lots of water, find some cool foods to eat, watermelon, cold soba, ice cream etc.

Also not a biologist and I’m similarly out of my depth, but I’m pretty sure this part of the quoted text is kind of explaining that, but from the perspective of laypeople like us, is kind of glossing over it.

Based on the body surface area of humans and animals, and considering the metabolism and absorption of fluoride in rats

Surface area and mass/volume don’t scale the same way (for example the square-cube law- a 1inch cube has a volume of 1 cubic inch, and a surface area of 6 square inches, so a 1:1 ratio of volume to surface area,a 10inch cube has a volume of 1000 cubic inches, and a surface area of only 600 square inches, so a 5:3 ratio of volume to surface area )

I don’t know where/how in the body fluoride gets absorbed, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it gets absorbed through your stomach lining, so a big limiting factor in how much and how fast you absorb it is how much surface area the inside of your stomach has. More surface area means absorb fluoride more quickly.

So if rats were just scaled-down humans, you’d expect them to need a lower concentration to absorb the same kind of dose as a human.

But rats aren’t just scaled down humans. They’re rats.

And again, not a biologist, I have basically no idea what the inside of a rat looks like. Maybe their stomachs are roughly the same size proportionally to us, or maybe they’re significantly bigger or smaller, which would throw off how much stomach surface area they have available to they absorb fluoride.

And of course their metabolism and body chemistry is going to be different than a human. I’m pretty sure their metabolic rate is way higher than ours so basically everything inside the rat is happening faster, stuff is getting absorbed faster, but also excreted faster, and food/water is spending less time in the stomach leaving less time for that fluoride to get absorbed.

And maybe rats are just fundamentally better or worse at absorbing and metabolizing fluoride than we are, maybe their stomach lining is just more or less capable of absorbing fluoride, maybe they have more or less of some protein or enzyme or something that does something with that fluoride so it gets used more or less efficiently by their body, etc.

So all of that would need to be taken into account. Whole lot of math involved figuring that out that I don’t even want to think about.

And, of course, experimentally, we want to be able to see and measure the effects. The study is looking for its effects on the brain, not, for example, liver and kidney function (or whatever organs would be damaged by too much fluoride.) Trying to measure the IQ of a rat I’m sure is already hard enough in general, let alone trying to measure potentially very minute changes in it. It may be they’re trying to push the dose as high as they can to try to create any measurable cognitive symptoms, if we’re giving the rats 6x the normal dose, maybe to a level where it might damage their kidneys or something, and still not seeing any cognitive issues, it’s probably pretty safe to say that a normal, safe, dose isn’t going to cause issues either.

My first job was pizza delivery for a local shop. My mom knew someone who worked there, and I got the job through her. They weren’t exactly hiring for the position yet, but they knew they were going to need someone seen because their current delivery guy was going back to college in a couple months. She knew I was looking for a job, floated my name to the owner, and he called me.

Second job was a warehouse shipping/receiving position. Again, got it through a family friend who was their accountant or something. He mentioned they were looking for someone, I said I might be interested, and he basically set everything up for me to come in and interview and I was basically hired on the spot.

Now I work in 911 dispatch. This is basically the only job I actually found and applied for myself, I saw they were doing some sort of hiring event and I thought it was something I could do. Still though, I worked my connections, my brother in law is a firefighter, and knows a lot of people in local public safety/first responder circles, so I got him to ask someone he knows who works here to put in a good word for me. It could be that I just really impressed them, but I only had one interview and a lot of people who got hired at the same time as me, some arguably with more impressive resumes, had to go through an additional round or two of interviews.

So as the old saying goes, it’s not so much what you know as who you know.

When I was applying for jobs on my own back at 16-18 years old, even shitty retail gigs, I never seemed to get anywhere, online, paper applications, etc. never seemed to go anywhere, occasionally I got an interview but they never panned out. But when I know someone, or know someone who knows someone, I have a 100% success rate of getting hired and I’ve gotten to skip some of the bureaucracy to boot, and they’ve turned out to be pretty stable, reasonably well-paying jobs given my level of experience and such.

Assuming you’re getting regular dried pasta, there is no cooking happening to it at the factory, it’s all happening in your pot. It’s extruded or rolled out and cut and then just dried still raw. There may be some products out there that are precooked in some way, but that’s not your standard dry pasta noodle.

There’s two aspects to cooking dried pasta that usually happens roughly simultaneously when you boil it- rehydrating the noodles and cooking them. Rehydrating is mostly a matter of time- making sure they spend enough time in enough liquid for the pasta to soak it up, although higher temperatures do speed that up a bit. And cooking is mostly a matter of temperature- making sure it gets up to a temperature where the necessary chemical changes happen. There’s some recipes where that gets mixed up a bit, I’ve seen a couple that call for soaking the pasta before cooking, or there’s things like spaghetti all’assassina where it’s cooked before rehydrating.

So what’s going on here?

I suppose it’s possible that there was some kind of manufacturing issue, like the pasta wasn’t mixed or dried right so it’s not cooking or rehydrating properly. There’s really not much to most pasta dough, some nicer brands literally just list flour of some kind as an ingredient and nothing else, most grocery store brands probably have some of the other usual food additives you’d find in enriched flour, but really there’s not too much to mess up there, and if they messed up the mixing bad enough, odds are in probably wouldn’t have extruded or rolled out right either.

And I have a hard time imagining them screwing up the drying process bad enough in a way that could result in this that wouldn’t have just resulted in the pasta cracking apart before you got it.

So I think it’s more likely that something went screwy with the cooking.

I know you said you didn’t, but honestly the safe money is probably on that you just didn’t cook it long enough. Maybe it’s a different brand than you usually get, or you mistakenly used the cooking instructions from a different shape of pasta, or there was a misprint on the box.

Maybe you’re at a higher elevation where water boils at a lower temperature so the cooking and rehydration didn’t go quite right.

Maybe you over or under salted the cooking water, or added something else which affected it

Or maybe there’s some other water quality issue where your water that didn’t allow it to rehydrate as well as it should have.

Maybe it’s something else I’m not thinking of, but I can say with confidence that it wasn’t an issue with the cooking process at the factory because pasta does not get cooked and the factory.

Yeah, there’s plenty of VESA mounts that will allow you to rotate the monitor, move it up/down, side-to-side, and tilt it forwards and backwards as needed

As for ones that will automatically change the orientation that things are being displayed when you turn the monitor from portrait to landscape, if that’s what you’re looking for, that’s a tougher nut to crack, I’m sure they’re out there but they’re not common, or (last I checked) cheap. But changing the orientation is as simple as Ctrl+Alt+arrow key (I think some newer Intel display drivers have changed that, but I haven’t looked too far into that)

Honestly, your required specs are basically any monitor on the market at this point, you can rotate the display orientation of any monitor with settings baked into any OS you’re likely to be using

You probably won’t even need to spend $100 for a 60hz 1080p monitor

If you can’t find one with an adjustable stand that’s to your liking, just look for one that can use a VESA mount and get another stand for it, probably less than $50

You can probably get 3 monitors and stands for your budget and still have enough left over to grab lunch.

Unless you have some gaming, graphic design, etc. needs you haven’t disclosed, I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung up on this, even cheap monitors tend to last a pretty long time

My wife worked at a higher end kitchen store for a long time, and got to test out a whole lot of different brands of kitchen gadgets and such, and made really good use of her employee discount

In the end, her recommendation is to basically go with Breville for everything but stand mixers (go with KitchenAid) and blenders (go Vitamix)

So we have a Breville hand mixer. This was actually one of the last things she picked up before leaving that job, and it was at my request, she kind of didn’t see the point of it since we already had the stand mixer, and an immersion blender, and honestly just about everything else you could want, but now that we’ve had it I’ve made a convert of her. It gets regular use and abuse and it’s still going strong probably almost a decade later

It’s got a light that shines into the bowl, which doesn’t seem like it should be a big deal but it’s actually really nice to have, it’s got plenty of power but is also probably the quietest mixer I’ve ever used, it comes with the usual beaters, whisks, and dough hooks, and its got a little storage container in clips onto so that the attachments are always there with it and you don’t have to go looking through your drawers for them when you need them.

The silicone on my beaters is starting to look a little worse for wear, but I don’t think that’s unreasonable given how long we’ve had it, and I’m pretty sure I can order new ones from Breville still if I wanted to.

Also, when they’re recording the audio, they’re usually not just reading through the whole script in one go

They’re probably doing multiple takes of most of the lines, changing little things until they get the take that feels right

So you’d end up with a bunch of choppy little cuts instead of a nice long continuous shot of the VA doing their thing in a recording booth like OP is probably imagining

That same week

I happened to be out in the middle of nowhere on a backpacking trip when both of them died, and along the way we ran into a couple other groups who had started their treks more recently, and they dropped the news of those two deaths on us, so I think that was the first thing each of of us asked our families about when we got back to civilization and got a cell signal

We were also a little relieved that the H1N1 swine flu hadn’t killed everyone while we were gone.

It probably depends on the music festival you’re going to but there was one I used to go to every year

It was 3 or 4 days of day-drinking, eating like crap, staying up late, being outside in the sun on probably one of the hottest weeks of the year while probably not drinking enough water, and sleeping in tents on the ground.

And depending on how the festival is laid out, walking around the grounds from one stage to another, to different vendors and food stands, to your campsite and back, etc. can add up pretty quickly. The one I went to was pretty small and compact, but I still probably managed around 5-10 miles a day walking around, and you may be hauling around camp chairs, blankets, and coolers with you for a lot of that. And I’m not saying that that’s a lot of walking, personally I can do that pretty easily, but it’s more than a lot of people normally do.

I think @southsamurai@sh.itjust.works pretty much hit the nail on the head, but just to sort of reiterate

Wearing “women’s” clothes (I always liked the Suzy/Eddie Izzard quote “They’re not women’s clothes, they’re my clothes. I bought them”) doesn’t necessarily make you gay or trans or anything, it just means you’re wearing women’s clothes.

If you’re comfortable identifying as a man, and you’re attracted to women, all that means is you’re a straight male cross-dresser or “transvestite” (I believe some people find the term transvestite offensive, others have no problem at all with it. I’m not a cross-dresser myself so I won’t weigh in on that debate) or perhaps a femboy. It could be that you just like wearing women’s clothing and there’s not much more to it than that. It could be some sort of kink/fetish thing, it could just be that you find it comfortable or feel cute, or maybe you just think it’s fun and silly.

And you could probably go down some pretty deep rabbit holes trying to unpack why you like it. There’s probably as many reasons for it as there are people who enjoy cross-dressing. But unless it’s really causing you severe emotional distress not knowing, you can always just take a page from Popeye the Sailor and say “I yam what I yam an’ that’s all that I yam”

Or it could be that you have some sort of gender dysphoria, and this is your way of working it out and coming to terms with that. In which case you might figure out at some point that you identify as a woman or some flavor of non-binary.

But at the end of the day, clothes are just clothes, and the person wearing them is just a person. I don’t think it’s worth getting too hung-up about putting labels on things, go ahead and try some different labels out for yourself, maybe you’ll find something that sticks, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Policies and what resources are available are going to vary a bit from one agency to another, but assuming it came in to us on a 911 line

From landlines, we get an address for the phone number. There’s a couple exceptions to that with certain kinds of business and VoIP lines where the address we get may not actually be the actual address where the person is, or there’s always the chance that the phone company has wrong info, but generally speaking if you call from a landline we know where you are.

From cell phones, things get a bit fuzzier. For the most part we’re relying on triangulation from cell towers to locate you (we call it “Phase II”) which means the quality of that location can vary from pretty good to basically useless based on how many towers your phone can reach, signal strength, geography, etc.

What that location looks like is we get a set of coordinates

An “uncertainty radius” or “confidence factor” which is a distance in meters from that point that the caller is probably within

A “confidence percentage” which is how confident the system is in that location (I’ve literally never seen this be anything other than 90%)

So what it ends up looking like is something like “90% confident that the caller is with 200m of 40.12345°N,-90.12345°W” (random-ish coordinates, not sure where that location actually is, but it’s definitely not where I work)

I’ve seen the confidence factor be in the single digits, and I’ve seen it in the thousands. Sometimes it takes a minute before we get a good fix, sometimes it comes in right away, sometimes we never get a good location from it.

My agency’s policy is that if we have a confidence factor of 300 or less, we can enter the call as normal with just that phase II if we’re unable to verify that location any further

And if they’re in somewhere like a wide open field or parking lot or something, 300m is pretty good, they’ll probably see you when they get out there. If you’re in a denser neighborhood with apartment complexes and a bunch of houses, wooded areas, etc. that’s really not much to go on. Usually we can get at least that 300m, but again not always.

That phase II location also takes a while to update, if we’re lucky we can only get an updated location every 20 seconds or so, so if, hypothetically, you’re in a car flying along the highway at 70mph, you could be about a half mile away from where you were by the time we got a new ping.

So we always try to verify the location, and we can’t, as my callers like to put it “just GPS your phone”

New technology is rolling out, we can sometimes get actual GPS locations from your phone which is usually more accurate and updates faster, but it depends on what settings you have enabled, what your carrier supports, etc. I think my center currently can only get it from iPhones. Same for your emergency information like contacts, medical info, etc if you’ve filled that out.

Once you hang up with us, that’s usually pretty much it, we’re not getting any further updates on your location even if we call you back and you answer.

We also don’t get any of that if you call on a 10-digit non-emergency line, usually we get your phone number and maybe a name on the caller ID, but depending on how the call got routed to us, like if you were forwarded from a station, we may not even get that much.

If we get a call with no other usable location info, if it came from a landline we can look up the phone number to get the address.

We can also look up the phone number to see if we had any prior calls from that number that we might be able to get an address from. We only store those records for about a year, sometimes our police departments have records that go further back they can look up, but we need something to go on to pass it along to the correct department that would have those records.

Pretty much anything beyond that is usually something that needs to be initiated from the police. There are only very narrow circumstances where we’re able to request for a phone company to try to ping your phone, and even if we can do it, the location may not be any better. They can also try to get subscriber info from the company to get your home address (although that’s not always super useful, people move and don’t update their address, are on someone else’s plan, etc) if they get a name and date of birth they can try to look up your info from your drivers license info (again assuming it’s up to date) property records, etc.

So if we get a call that’s just an open line with heavy breathing or something else suspicious, we’re using those tools to try to get someone out to at least the general area to try to locate the, and police are hopefully using whatever other resources they have on top of what we do to try to narrow it down if needed.

We’re probably going to enter it as a hang-up call or a suspicious activity which just gets a police response unless we heard something that makes us specifically think fire or EMS are needed.

If we heard yelling, gunshots, alarms going off, etc. then we might enter it as something else as appropriate to make sure we’re sending the right resources.

If they stop talking to us while we’re on the call, hopefully the first thing we got from them was a location, it’s the first thing we ask, otherwise all the same thing applies.

If it’s just an open line, we’ll stay on for about 30 seconds or so to see if we hear anything. If we don’t we enter it as a hang up, try to call it back, and if they don’t pick up we just kind of move on and it’s in the hands of the police to do something about it.

I’ve always been a cheap sunglasses guy, I buy whatever brand they’re selling at whatever store I happen to be at when I need sunglasses. I usually go through a couple pairs of them a year, they get lost or broken, or the lenses get all scratched up.

Arguably I could be more careful with them, but $20 a couple times a year for something I use almost every single day seems more than worth it to me.

One time I came across a good deal on a pair of Oakley’s, and I figured I’d treat myself. IIRC they were a return at an REI garage sale, they looked brand new and the tag said they were just returned because the original customer did like them or they fit poorly or something.

It was a relatively cheap model of Oakleys to begin with, and with the discount I think they came out to like $60, which still made them the most expensive pair of sunglasses I’ve ever owned.

I liked them, I don’t think they were in any particular way better than my usual cheap sunglasses.

And about 3 days later I found out that if you drop them and someone accidentally steps on them before you pick them up, they absolutely break the same way a cheap pair of sunglasses would.

So no more fancy sunglasses for me.

If I have to pick only one, I’m going to go with modern crumple zones

But man, I do wish we had some kind of magical smart metal that could be as rigid as an old car for low speed collisions, but still crumple for more serious impacts.

Because when you drive an old shitbox like I do, pretty much any damage is enough to total it, and having to get a new car really sucks when the accident was minor enough that no one was going to get hurt anyway.

Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn’t actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it’s difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go

But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go