Our roads are designed around cars, it’s very often extremely frustrating and unsafe to have to share the road with bikes.

As an example, most of my commute is along a 2 lane road (1 lane each direction) that’s winding, poorly lit, and has almost no shoulder. The speed limit is 35mph, which isn’t a speed most cyclists can keep up for very long if they can reach it at all.

If there’s traffic coming the opposite direction, it’s often difficult or impossible to pass that cyclist safely so very often I’ve been stuck driving 10 under the speed limit around a cyclist I can’t get around.

And again, it’s a windy, poorly lit road, coming around a corner it would be very easy to hit a cyclist if I wasn’t being careful (which I am, but many are not)

To add insult to injury in my particular case, there’s actually a very nice bike path that runs directly parallel to the road, you can actually see it from the road for much of its length, and there’s lots of places to get on and off of it, it’s paved, it’s actually almost as wide as the road itself.

There’s also the issue that a lot of them don’t always follow the rules of the road, you see a lot of the lane-splitting, running red lights, etc.

And there’s good reasons for some of that behavior, I’ve heard them, I don’t disagree with them, but the fact of the matter is that it makes them unpredictable, which is the last thing you want to be on the road.

Some also ride at night without proper lights and reflectors, which is really a problem with some idiots and shouldn’t be generalized to bikes in general, but some people are going to do that

There’s also Americans’ love of big SUVs with big blindspots that makes bikes harder to see when they’re around you in traffic.

As for ebikes, I have a love-hate relationship with them.

They can keep up with traffic a lot better, which helps my first point a lot.

They’ve also gotten a lot of people out on bikes who wouldn’t have otherwise, which is great, but it also means that a lot of those people are going from not having ridden a bike since they were like 10 years old to feeling bold enough to be out in traffic because their bike can keep up but never really learned how to coexist with traffic on a bike, so we’re doubling down on the unpredictability.

There’s also the issue that out of traffic, in spaces where e bikes coexist with pedestrians and regular bikes on trails and such they’re often zooming around at unsafe speeds.

And there’s the usual patchwork of laws and regulations from one state to another, and a lot of shady imported brands selling bikes that don’t meet those regulations. A lot of the e bikes on the road around me are overpowered and too fast for what the laws allow. And people also let their kids ride them which also isn’t allowed.

I’m all for more people riding bikes in general , but the current situation with infrastructure, regulations, enforcement, and education here make it a really unsafe and frustrating to share the road with bikes.

One of my friends lived in a really old house that had been converted into apartments. Everything was of course laid out really weirdly because they crammed a bedroom, living room, and kitchen into what I’m pretty sure was originally 2 bedrooms and part of a stairway

One of the only built-in light fixtures in that house I’m pretty sure was an old gas light that someone screwed a lightbulb holder onto about 100 years ago and has been there ever since.

I’m from PA, lyme is pretty common here.

One of my friends moved to Seattle, and one when he came back to visit family he managed to catch it.

Apparently he got a call from the state health department in Washington after he got his test results back basically asking “where the hell did you get Lyme disease”

He told them he’d been in PA, and they were basically like “ok yeah that checks out”

Other comment hit the nail on the head with their link

But for those who won’t click the link, its basically just that once upon a time that’s what the price of a package of nails that size was, bigger nails cost more pennies than smaller nails.

While we’re on weird hardware measurement, I might as well talk about wire gauge

Basically it’s an arbitrary standard because it’s what someone somewhere set up their wire making equipment to do and other people just followed the same standard (though of course different parts of the world use different standards for different things, so there’s diff6 “gauge” measurements in use in various places for different things)

But the general idea is you would start with a thick wire/rod, and pull it through a die to stretch it out into progressively thinner wire

The original rod would be 1 gauge, one pass through the die and its 2 gauge, one more pass and it’s 3 gauge, etc. which is why the diameter gets smaller as the numbers get bigger

Then there’s shotgun gauge, and I have no idea why this is the standard they decided to measure this by, but it’s what it is. It’s the number of lead balls that size it would take to make a pound.

So a 12 gauge shotgun has a bore of .725 inches. It would take 12 .725 inch lead balls to make a pound.

For a 20 gauge shotgun, the bore is .615, and you’d need 20 balls that size to make a pound.

And then they throw that system out the window with .410 shotguns and just call it by the fucking bore diameter.

And I’m not gonna even touch on railroad gauges, American screw sizes, etc. not because it’s not interesting (to me at least) but because I’ve run out of fucks.

The abbreviations come from Roman times, popular currency in Rome were librae, solidi, and denarii.

There were 12 denarii in a solidus, and 20 solidi (or 240 denarii) in a Libra

In pre decimal British currency they kept the latin abbreviations, but denarii became pence, solidi became shillings and librae became pounds (and this is why the £ symbol for pounds looks kind of like an L)

And over the years at different times currency was issued in various fractions and combinations of those, such as quarter penny (farthings) and half pennies

Also, what a joke that the officer basically shrugged and said he couldn’t help if no crime had occurred.

So I definitely get where you get that impression but what the article says is (emphasis mine)

After the agent identified himself, the officer told him “he could not assist with someone following or recording him if no crime had occurred, and that local law enforcement was en route.”

Which to me kind of sounds like cop-ese for “She’s allowed to follow and record you if she wants, so how 'bout you fuck off before we cause an even bigger scene?”

Now would it have been nice if the cop had arrested the nazi for brandishing or something? Sure, but you’re living in a fantasy land if you think that would have gone anywhere. I’m pretty sure any half-decent lawyer in the country could have gotten those charges thrown out because a “law enforcement” officer drawing their gun when they feel threatened while on an “operation” isn’t exactly illegal. And the arresting cop probably would have just found himself in hot water for interfering with the “operation”

And it was a Fullerton officer but the incident occurred in Santa Ana, so there may have been jurisdiction issues where he legally couldn’t have done much beyond what he did since he was out of his jurisdiction. Honestly a lot of cops probably would have said “not by town, not my problem” and kept driving.

I don’t know every chain off the top of my head to double check, but I assume that those two and the 3 I mentioned are probably more-or-less the top 5

And using the locators on their websites, I can find 1 VCA-affiliated vet, and a handful of Banfield (mostly out of PetSmart) and blue Pearl locations operating under their own names. Nothing else came up around me

I suppose it’s possible some of them may be part of some smaller chains, and I’m not going to comb through every last vet in my area, but a cursory glance at a handful of them that I’ve used doesn’t look like any of them are affiliated with any kind of chain.

I very well may live in a bubble, but this is actually the first time I’ve heard of them, are they really that widespread?

I can think of about a half-dozen independent veterinarians off the top of my head within maybe about 20 minutes of me

We do have a handful of Banfield and Blue Pearl locations around, which now that I’m looking into it also seem to be owned by Mars, which is wild

But even still, they’re still dwarfed by the number of independent vets.

In the US at least it’s sort of a legal grey area

We of course have our usual patchwork of different local and state laws, and I believe it is outright banned in some parts of the country

But overall, federally, I believe it’s more of an issue that there’s so little demand for it that no slaughterhouse for horses has bothered to open and go through the necessary USDA inspections and such to process horses for human consumption.

I believe, if you really wanted to, you could go slaughter a horse yourself and feed it to your friends and family and be totally in the clear, but if you try to sell that horse meat anywhere you’d have the USDA beating down your door (not a lawyer, don’t go feeding your friends horse based on my understanding of the issue)

As for the cultural reasons that Americans don’t want to eat horses and why it is outright banned in some parts of the country, I can’t really comment on that. I’d eat a horse and wouldn’t feel the least bit bad about it.

I actually did a make your own pizza party a while back, I encouraged people to get weird with it and a lot of my my friends are kind of foodies, so here’s a couple standouts

Goat cheese, hot honey, fig preserves, and capocllo

Spicy hawaiian - grilled pineapple, bacon, ham or spam, jalapenos, drizzle of hoisin sauce

Mac & cheese

Taco- taco meat, cheddar, red onions, jalapenos, lettuce tomato

Cheeseburger - ground beef, cheddar, mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions

Desert pizza- pie filling, vanilla glaze, crumb topping

Sort of a knock-off flammkuchen- creme fraise (sour cream would probably also work fine,) gruyere, onions, bacon

Buffalo Chicken - chicken, hot sauce, blue cheese crumbles, diced celery, shredded carrots

Breakfast pizza- eggs (we used quail eggs because my pizza oven is on the small side and we could get them, just crack them right onto the top of the pizza,) bacon, sausage, hash browns

Chicken Tika masala

Greek- kalamata olives, feta, spinach tomatoes, balsamic

And of course we had all of the standard pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, olives, peppers, etc.

A couple different sauces - standard pizza sauce, pesto, vodka sauce, Alfredo, etc.

I played for a handful of years around 2009-ish

Never got very far, don’t think I hit max level, never got super into any particular aspect of it

But I had fun fucking around online with some friends

Probably the biggest source of strife in my marriage is that my wife played for the alliance and I was horde.

And well over a decade later my text message notification sound is still a murloc.

And as luck would have it, I actually was just talking to another friend about this and he turned up a gnome extension that looks like it does exactly what I need, so it may become a Linux machine yet.

I do still want to do some upgrades and I kind of got to like the server idea though so perhaps I’ll be building a new Linux PC and also recycling the old parts into a server

Anecdotally, really just shoplifting in general.

I work in 911 dispatch, been there for about 7 years, so long enough to have a decent feel for how things have changed since before COVID.

And while I’m not keeping a personal tally, it definitely seems like over the last couple of years I’ve been getting a whole lot more calls about shit like people stealing a single red bull from a convenience store. (Yes, they call 911 for that sometimes, and we also answer a lot of the 10-digit non emergency lines, it all pretty much has to go through us one way or another, it’s the same cops responding whether it’s an emergency or not so at some point it has to end up with central dispatch)

We actually have a couple convenience stores with security guards now because of this.

Most burritos I’ve had have the ends folded in which may make them a calzone

Like a lot of people I have one or two things keeping me tied to windows for now

The main one for me is a little goofy, but my computer is hooked up to my TV and it’s synced up to my Philips hue lights.

My other consoles and such work fine through the hue sync box but for some reason the PC does not, so I have to rely on the hue desktop app to get the PC synced to the lights

And of course they don’t support Linux, and from what I’ve seen online WINE and the other usual workarounds don’t do the trick either

There’s a couple of people out there who have cobbled together alternatives, but none of them are quite where I want them to be yet.

I’ve been with my wife for around 10 years now. When we started dating she had a PC that wasn’t exactly top of the line, and it was already a couple years old, but was still pretty beefy for its time. She did a couple upgrades over the years, more RAM, SSD, etc. but most of the components were the same ones she originally bought probably around 2013-ish

About a year ago she decided it was time for a major upgrade and built a whole new computer.

I took all of her old components and stuck them in a new case. I of course had to buy a hard drive, power supply, some fans, etc. and it wasn’t maxing out the graphics on the latest AAA games like her new rig can, but it still managed to run pretty much everything I threw at it.

After a couple months I did scrounge up a newer graphics card from a friend doing some upgrades of his own, which was a nice upgrade, but not totally necessary.

I am now running into an issue with some newer games not liking the old processor even though it technically has the required specs (and it’s not windows 11 compatible) so I’m likely going to be doing some major overhauls of my own soon, and I think I’ll probably recycle these components into a home server or something, so I wouldn’t really be surprised if this PC of theseus remains in service in some capacity for a full 20+ years.

nobody alive today was alive and in the military for any major conflict that we were actually victorious in

There are still a handful of WWII vets kicking around

Also depending on how you want to define “major” and “victorious” you could maybe make an argument for Dessert Storm, and possibly the 2003-2011 Iraq War. (Whether we should have been involved in those wars in the first place, and how those wars were fought are separate issues, and I certainly wouldn’t call them “unqualified” victories, but I do think there are absolutely certain angles you could look at them from and make the argument that the US was the victor in those conflicts)

I feel like that’s kind of the point they’re making

When you tie so many of those things to marriage, you’ve created an inherent inequality between married people and unmarried people.

Let the idea of “marriage” be up to you, your spouse(s) and whatever god(s) you think may exist.

And let people sort all the rest of it out for themselves.

For example

You can have your spouse and kids covered under your health insurance that you have through work. You don’t necessarily need to live together or even be on good speaking terms as long as you have that piece of paper that says you’re married.

So why shouldn’t you be able to share those benefits with someone else of your choosing? Maybe you’re single and would like to make sure that your best friend and their kids who you see all the time and think of each other as family can go see the doctor when they need to. You probably have a closer relationship with them than someone with an estranged wife and kids they never talk to, why shouldn’t you be able to add them onto your health insurance?

No, I think I got you figured exactly right. You’re a whiney loudmouthed asshole who wants to complain.

You weren’t offering any solutions, you weren’t encouraging people to do more, you were just bitching that what they are doing isn’t enough without any advice on what they can be doing better.

Now I’ve managed to tease some of that out of you over the course of this conversation, but it sure as hell wasn’t what you were doing when I started, and I doubt that you would have ever bothered to elaborate on your own. You’d just be another nuisance around Lemmy making everyone’s day a little bit worse. Hopefully you’ll keep that up in the future instead of just spouting sarcastic whining like

Forgot all about how that happened and then nothing happened… again

And

Not in the United States of Obedience.

Complaining about a problem is only useful if you’re following it up with at least an attempt to find solutions if not offering them up yourself. Otherwise you’re just a whiney, loudmouthed asshole.