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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I’m hopefully a long way off from it, but I tell my wife pretty regularly that if I ever fall and can’t get up to just leave me on the floor. Gravity will have made it’s decision, I’m to be a floor-person, no sense in trying to fight it. Let me crawl.

    I work in 911 dispatch, I get calls all night, every night for lift-assists, sometimes we’re sending help out to the same place every night or even multiple times a night.

    I don’t want that for myself.


  • I don’t think I get recognized, but I’ve had a handful of people say that they like the way I write, so maybe I have a group of dedicated followers somewhere.

    Funnily enough, I just earlier messaged some random lemming that I had tagged for a while as “this guy seems cool” to let him know that. I figure everyone likes to get a little compliment like that from a stranger now and then. Just some random dude whose username kind of stood out to me and I noticed every time it popped up he seemed like a nice guy. So some of you are probably out there like him being recognized for just being a decent person.


  • Just gonna chime in to say check with your local libraries to see what they do have available, and also check with surrounding libraries,

    My local library is a small branch of a countywide network of libraries, so I can go check things out from any library in the county.

    I was a little surprised to learn that my local branch has mobile wifi hotspots available. They’re nice for families that are struggling to pay for Internet service so their kids can do schoolwork, I’m also thinking about checking one out for road trips and such.

    A bigger branch has a pretty impressive library of things available- tools, cookware, board games, small appliances, AV equipment, etc.

    One thing I’d really like is vehicles, although I’m sure it would be an absolute liability/insurance nightmare, not to mention the upfront and ongoing costs and such, so I totally I totally understand why it’s not a thing.

    I’m lucky that I’ve always been able to borrow a car from my parents when I needed one because mine was in the shop or whatever. Not everyone is so fortunate though, and unless we step up our public transit game, a lot of people need cars to get into work and run errands and such. A small fleet of basic sedans or something that you could check out for a day or two when needed without paying out the ass for a rental would be amazing.

    And almost everyone needs to move something big or transport a few people once in a while, so a pickup truck or passenger van in the fleet might be kind of nice.

    Even if it’s not totally free, they could be rented out at-cost and not have to turn a profit like regular car rentals.



  • American/meat-eater

    Bread stays out but is wrapped

    Butter stays out in a butter bell (that’s not a common thing in America BTW but they should be)

    Some sauces and condiments and such that are packed full of salt and vinegar and such stay out

    Leftovers and such go into the fridge after a few minutes to a few hours, there’s not exactly a hard rule here, just kind of based on what feels right and whenever we get around to it. Overnight is too long, with few exceptions if it’s been out that long we’d probably throw it out.

    One exception to that is if I make stock, there’s a good chance that’s going to sit out for a good while to cool down. It takes a while to get a big pot of liquid down to a reasonable temperature to put in the fridge. I also figure it’s been simmering for several hours, so odds are there’s no bacteria alive in it, so I throw a lid on it to try to keep it that way, especially when I do it in the pressure cooker because it’s basically been autoclaved at that point and it’s staying in a pretty damn close to totally airtight vessel.

    Most vegetables and fruits are fine out on the counter for at least a day or two, and some will last weeks or months depending on temperature, humidity, how much light they get, etc. but most of them last a lot longer in the fridge so that’s where they go. Onions, garlic, potatoes, pineapples, and bananas always live outside of the fridge. Other things like apples, citrus, tomatoes, peppers may go either way depending on how fast I’m planning to use them and how much fridge space I have. Cut-up produce always goes in the fridge.


  • If you’re dining out getting it hot and fresh from the oven, I’d tend to agree with you

    But if you’re getting delivery or takeout, which at least in the US, probably accounts for most pizza consumption, odds are that when you eat your pizza it’s probably been sitting in a box for at least a few minutes, maybe up to an hour or so, soaking up its own steam and juices, and maybe going cold

    Which, of course, would change the texture and probably not for the better.




  • I’m no expert on animal color vision, but different animals absolutely see color differently, some have markedly worse color vision than humans, others are even better

    And of course we can’t really know for certain how different animals perceive color since we can’t actually see the world through their eyes as it gets processed through their brain, though we can make some pretty educated guesses.

    AFAIK, most mammals except for some primates (like humans) and a few other exceptions, have dichromatic vision (have only 2 kinds of cone cells in their eyes instead of 3 like we do) so there’s gonna be some “gaps” in their color vision, and one of the common configurations is similar to red-green colorblindness in humans and would make orange look very similar or indistinguishable from green but the specifics do vary from one species to another.

    Other types of animals like many fish, birds, and reptiles actually have 4 types of cones and so can see parts of the spectrum we can’t (though it doesn’t necessarily mean they can or can’t see the same colors we do and then some, where we have receptors for red, blue, and green light, they might have for example, red, blue, blue-green, and green, giving them essentially the same range of color vision we do but with extra sensitivity to the blue/green part of the spectrum)

    And then of course you have animals like mantis shrimp with 12 or 16 types of receptors.


  • When I took my state’s required hunter safety course, one of the instructors was an older dude with grey hair and a ponytail who wouldn’t look out of place at a Dead & Company concert.

    To point out the importance of wearing an orange hat during small game seasons, and also to “be sure of your target and what lies beyond it” he pointed out how much that grey hair and ponytail would look a lot like a squirrel if you only caught a glimpse of it through some brush.

    Not saying that’s exactly what happened here, the kid doesn’t look like he was the grey ponytail type, but the article shook loose that memory in my head.

    EDIT: not that I’m ungrateful, but somehow this is now my highest rated comment on Lemmy, and I’m just curious why this one in particular resonated to well.


  • Kind of, but not much, certainly not anything like a steady income.

    I gave one of those apps a try that give you rewards for installing and playing games. After a couple of years I earned up enough points to get about a $50 gift card. None of the games on it are amazing, but some of them are passably entertaining when you just need to kill some time. They’re all, of course, loaded with ads.

    This is more of theoretical money at this point, but years ago I bought a small quantity of Bitcoin (like less than 0.1 BTC) and I’ve just kind of been sitting on that. It was about $20 when I bought it, it’s worth quite a bit more than that now. If I were to cash out now, it wouldn’t exactly be life-changing money by any stretch of the imagination, but it might get me a crappy used car, or maybe offset the cost of a nice vacation for me and my wife.

    I do the Google opinion reward surveys, which basically pays out as credit for the android app store. Every so often it adds up to enough for me to spring for some paid app I wouldn’t have bought otherwise, or maybe a book or movie or something.

    If you want to count it as online, for a while I did taskrabbit, basically an app to get hired doing odd jobs for people, putting IKEA furniture together, yard work, hanging shelves, etc. That wasn’t a bad side gig if you’re handy, but I don’t have the free time for it these days and it was kind of a pain figuring it out on my taxes at the end of the year.

    Not me, but I have a friend who was a stripper for a while, when she got out of it, she actually made a decent little chunk of money selling her used stripper heels because some foot fetish people are all about that. She figured out that it could be feasible to just buy some heels, wear them around for a few weeks, and sell them for a profit. She decided it was more trouble than it was worth for her but something like that is potentially an option as well, pretty sure used shoes aren’t the only thing with a weird fetish secondary market you could take advantage of if you know where to look to sell them.


  • First name is ultimately derived from Hebrew, it’s one of the most common names in the English-speaking world, and variations of it are similarly popular in basically every place where Abrahamic religious have a foothold.

    It’s fine. I’ve met plenty of people with my name, I don’t particularly like or dislike it, it is just my name.

    My last name is kind of interesting. It’s ultimately of Italian origin, but sometime after arriving in America someone basically decided that it sounded too Italian, dropped the vowel at the end, swapped out about half of the remaining letters, and created a new name that kind of sounds similar to the original.

    Looking at it, you’d probably never peg it as an Italian name. Sometimes people look at it and try to pronounce it as if it were French, but that’s not how we pronounce it.

    I rather like my last name. I probably use it more than my first. It’s got a nice ring to it, it’s unique, there’s rarely going to be anyone else around with the same name to avoid confusion, it’s got some fun family history to it, and as far as I can tell, it doesn’t exist anywhere in the world outside of my family.

    Unfortunately, my family is pretty uncreative with male names, if you look at the top 100 names in the US from the last 100 years, my entire family tree can basically be found in the top 10 or 20. I’m aware of at least one other person with the same first and last name as me and there’s probably a good handful more, and there’s a solid chance they have the same middle name as me too.

    I rarely see the extended family so not a huge deal.


  • I don’t normally recognize specific users online except for a handful of novelty accounts. For all I know, I’ve only ever talked to 3 people on Lemmy. I don’t generally look at usernames, and certainly don’t remember them.

    So, my dude, I think it says something that I recognize you. I hit about the 1st sentence of your second paragraph and went “is this that guy again?” And sure enough, you were.

    I’m not saying this to belittle you in any way, please go on being your sensitive, submissive, gender-nonconforming self. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

    But you’re on here every couple of weeks posting along these same lines, so I can tell that this is really eating at you at a pretty deep level, and while I don’t know what the best solution for you is, it might be professional help, it might be as simple as getting out more, it might be anything in-between, I’m pretty confident that just posting about it on here is probably not going to find you the solutions your seeking.



  • I think you’re thinking of paywithfour.com

    Which seems to be a standard by-now-pay-later company, which isn’t necessarily a scam, but those companies are very predatory with excessive fees and interest rates and such so they certainly feel scammy. I didn’t do a deep dive on them so I can’t say if they’re necessarily any worse or less legit than any other company (or maybe even better)

    But four.com seems to be some sort of enterprise authenticator/SSO company . The website is weird because it doesn’t really tell you much about them, it just kind of has a link to request an invite to sign up

    I figure there’s two main options with that. Either they’re sort of a fly by night company just sort of squatting on the domain hoping to profit off of selling it and just have the shell of a website up to give an air of legitimacy

    Or they’re just really focused on their enterprise customers and see no reason to really have a public-facing webpage, either your company uses them and you need to log in to manage your account, or you have no real business with them. Maybe they’re sort of a legacy system that a parent company is keeping around to fulfill a contract, maybe they’re getting enough business from in-person sales and word-of-mouth and don’t feel the need to risk overextending themselves by marketing more aggressively

    Or of course it could be something nefarious, but without looking into them too much nothing on the face of the website gives me any particular reason to think that.



  • Fondots@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSteady
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    23 days ago

    Again, it varies, but a lot of places have moved to a central dispatch model where basically everything, emergency and non-emergency, is going through the same dispatch center in one way or another.

    In the area I work in, especially after hours and over the weekend, a lot of stations aren’t staffed and everything redirects to us anyway, and even if you do reach someone at the station, often they’re either going to transfer you to us at central dispatch, or take down the information and call us themselves after they hang up with you. They’re not able or not supposed to dispatch much of anything from the station directly.

    Technically those calls go behind 911 calls in our queue than calls on actual 911 lines, but luckily in my area our staffing and call volume are at a level where that’s almost never a factor and pretty much all calls are answered immediately.

    So most of us here are of the opinion that people are better off just calling 911 for anything except for basic administrative things that need to be handled by the office at the local station, basically everything else needs to go through us so you might as well cut out the middle-man and go to us directly. And worst-case scenario we can’t help you and we’ll tell you who to call instead (you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even begins to think about trying to get you in trouble for misusing 911 for a non-emergency, none of us want the paperwork or to have to go to court or anything else that would have to go with that.

    Again, the situation varies a lot from place-to-place, non-emergency lines may be more useful in other areas, call volumes and staffing levels may be worse and you may not want to tie up the 911 lines, etc. so it pays to be aware of the situation in your local area.

    Again, this all varies, but that’s pretty much how things seem to work everywhere within a couple hours of where I work.


  • Fondots@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSteady
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    23 days ago

    It’s going to vary a bit by jurisdiction, everywhere handles things a little differently

    The coroner’s office should have an office number and you can certainly try calling that. It may or may not be staffed overnight or over the weekend and they’ll have some sort of on-call procedures in place (in my county, when they don’t have anyone in the office, their phones actually come through to us at the dispatch center to have the on-call coroner paged. Generally speaking we don’t do that for the general public, just for police, hospitals, etc.)

    Whatever funeral home you intend to use may also be able to handle it.

    But in general, just call 911. I won’t lie, a lot of what happens after that kind of happens in a black box from my perspective, I take the call, hang up and police/fire/EMS go out and do their thing and I get very little follow-up from there. But they have the experience with this kind of thing, they know what steps to take from there.

    I also get a decent amount of calls where my callers are kind of clueless about what’s going on, it’s happened that they tell me the patient is conscious and alert only for the field units to report that they are in fact stiff and cold to the touch and an obvious class 5, and the opposite way around where they’re sure someone is dead and when they get out there the person is in fact up and talking and seems to be in perfect health, and of course everything and anything in-between. So it never hurts to have someone go out there to make sure things are actually as they seem. And of course we want to double check to make sure there wasn’t anything suspicious about the death as well.

    I remember I had a caller one time who had been transferred to us from a nearby county where she was located. She told me her father had just died and she was having trouble getting ahold of her relatives in our county to let them know so she wanted us to go try to make contact with them for her (this would be about a priority 4 BTW, emergency and non-emergency calls all get handled through our central dispatch here)

    Of course she didn’t have her relatives addresses, good phone numbers or much of anything for us to actually help us make contact with her relatives. But I was trying my best trying to help her, asking a lot of questions trying to figure things out trying to get her to describe where they live etc.

    But the more I’m talking to her, things just seem kind of off, so I ask her when exactly her dad died

    It was like literally right before the call, she was still sitting around in the home with the body and the first thing she thought to do about it was call her relatives that she apparently barely spoke to anyway.

    Which, fine, I get wanting to let your relatives know about a death in the family, and different families and cultures have their own funeral practices and such, but you probably want to do something about the corpse in your living room first.

    So I got her back over with the dispatch for her county, both so they can do whatever they need to about notifying the coroner and whatever other policies they have in place and because her local police would probably be better able to run the information through their system to find contact info for the relatives than I would be over the phone with her.


  • Fondots@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzSteady
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    24 days ago

    I work in 911 dispatch, at my agency our calls are assigned a priority from 1-5, 1 being the most severe, 5 the least

    1 and 2 are considered high priority, you’re getting all the lights and sirens and everything, 3-5 are low, on the police end of thing a priority 5 is pretty much just us giving information to them, not something they actually need to do anything about, maybe they need to drive by and check on something, and maybe make a call afterwards to to public works or something to have them deal with an exceptionally bad pothole.

    On the EMS side of things what that looks like is

    1- pretty much what you expect, cardiac arrest, shootings, choking, traumatic amputations, etc.

    2- honestly most of the EMS calls we get are a class 2. Things people need to go to the hospital with some urgency, but aren’t in immediate danger of expiring on the way there.

    3- these are sort of the “you really called 911 about this?” calls. Like, sure, you should probably get this checked out, but you probably could have driven yourself or gotten a friend to take you to an urgent care, it probably could have waited a few hours, and the doctors probably just gonna tell you to take some Tylenol and take it easy for a few days.

    4- this is basically psych patients. Physically there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just mentally unwell

    Which brings us to the point of this rant: class 5- obviously dead people. They can’t get any deader, so no real rush. They basically just need someone with some medical training to go out there and go “yep, that’s a corpse” and maybe check up on the family member who’s having a panic attack over it. Doesn’t get much more stable than that.

    As a result of this “Class 5” has also entered our jargon as shorthanded for a dead person. So much so that some of our local news stations have picked up on it, if it’s a slow news day and they’re listening to the scanner fishing for a story and they hear “class 5” they might get a little nosey about it (I have a friend who worked for one who told me that after I started working here)


  • That’s all well and good when you’re asking them for knowledge that’s outside of what’s needed for their core job functions

    However being aware of what’s going on in the world is kind of a big part of what is expected of the president. And again, this was actually a pretty big story, there was a lot of debate around if/how the US would/should be involved

    A presidential candidate at that time not knowing what Aleppo is, would be kind of like one today not knowing what Crimea is.

    When a candidate is doing an interview like this, it’s sort of like they’re doing a job interview for the role of president with the entire country, because of course they can’t go interview with every citizen one-on-one. If you were hiring, for example, a plumber, for a job, and you asked them about how they would do something with PEX pipe because that’s part of what’s going to be needed on the job, and they replied “what’s PEX pipe?” You’d probably go with a different applicant.

    Not that that necessarily means that the applicant is a bad plumber, they might be an absolute wizard who can solder copper pipe upsidedown, blindfolded, and with one hand tied behind his back but the job at-hand needs PEX and not copper. Sure, they could probably learn to work with PEX, but it would take time to get them up to speed and you need to hit the ground running with the project to get it done before the drywallers can do their job.

    And again, I don’t think that was really the case with him here, once prompted that it was about the situation in Syria he was able to rattle off a reasonably coherent plan of how it should be handled (not that I particularly agreed with how he would have handled it, but it was generally in-line with his other policies) so I think it just took him a moment to switch gears and realize they were talking about something else now.