Fondots

Fondots, 1 day ago

Probably the biggest thing is to try out a few different brands of blades to find what works for you, that’s probably going to be the biggest variable. There at least used to be some variety packs you could order on Amazon and such

Personally I like feather blades, they do have a reputation for being ridiculously sharp even by razor standards, which can make them a little unforgiving, there’s a good chance you’re doing to slice yourself up a little when you’re first using them, but find what works for you. About the only thing I purposely avoid is store brand blades, they’re pretty much all garbage, try to track down pretty much any name brand.

Other than that, pick a handle that seems sturdy, and comfortable in your hand. Honestly I think most options out there, even a lot of the cheapest ones are just fine, there’s really not that much to them. Be prepared for a bit of a learning curve as you figure out the technique.

Some people get way into it, and will give you a whole lot of recommendations about soaps, creams, lotions, etc. and by all means experiment with them, but don’t feel like you absolutely need to get too into it. Personally I lather up with whatever soap I have on hand and splash on some old spice afterwards and like my results just fine (disclaimer - my skin isn’t picky, I could probably just about wash my face with acetone and dry shave with a piece of broken glass, some people have more sensitive skin, so find what works with you)

Fondots, 1 day ago

Just to kind of give you a sense on my personal thought on the handles, I have 3 razors, an old one that’s either a Gillette or a Merkur (I honestly can’t remember which one) that I scrounged from my dad’s junk drawer, one I picked up from a grocery store or target or something that I believe is a van Der Hagen, and one my wife got from somewhere on Etsy, so I feel like that’s a pretty decent cross section of what’s out there.

All 3 shave just fine. They all shave a tiny bit differenly, but that really kind of comes down to personal preference and that technique/learning curve I mentioned. I wouldn’t really say any of them are significantly better or worse than the others.

The Etsy one is my usual razor, probably feels the nicest in my hand, the handle is a little longer which I like, but the real reason it’s my main razor is because it looks the nicest hanging on my razor stand and because my wife got it for me. I’m not crazy about how you change the blade because you basically unscrew the whole top and I don’t love needing to fiddle around with it that close to the blade.

The junk drawer razor is my traveling razor because its handle is kind of short and it fits better in my toiletry bag. It probably has my favorite blade changing method, there’s a little knob at the base of the handle you turn to unscrew the head and the top half of the head comes off. You can also halfway undo it which leave the blade a little loose without the whole thing coming apart which I find makes it easier to rinse hair out. If I had to pick one that shaves the best it’s probably this one, but it’s also the one I’ve had the longest so I’ve had more practice with it and I’m pretty sure that’s like 90% of the difference. It’s probably my best quality razor, even though it’s probably a few decades older than me everything about it still feels rock solid, but it also had probably a half century worth of tarnish, scratches, etc. that I’m too lazy to really clean up, so it’s also probably my ugliest.

The van der Hagan razor has sort of a butterfly opening thing for the blade. I feel like on a nicer razor that would be kind of nice, but with the fit/finish/tolerances it was made to, it feels a little cheap to me, like it wants to break (although it’s been years and it hasn’t broken on me yet, so my fears may be unwarranted) it has a slightly longer handle which I like, but it’s also skinnier, which I dont like. It probably gives me the worst shave, but it’s also my least used and again I feel like practice and technique probably play a bigger part in that than there being any significant shortcomings in the design. This one lives in my guest bathroom for when I shower and shave in there if my wife is hogging the master bath.

And when I say one shaves better than the other, the difference is pretty miniscule once you get used to the razor. When I first got it, I thought the Etsy razor shaved terribly, now that it’s been my main razor for years I’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between it and the junk drawer razor. And since it doesn’t get used as much anymore, I feel like I get worse shaves from the junk drawer razor than I did when it was my main razor. I also noticed my shaves get better with the VdH razor when I tried to use it more, but honestly I never put much time into getting used to it because I always felt like the handle was too skinny. But that’s personal preference, I like thick-handled heavy tools in general, some people like thinner handles and lighter weight.

Fondots, 2 days ago

The issue people are worried about is that no one is making the decision to kill kids, it’s the AI making the call. It’s being given another objective and in the process of carrying that out makes the call to kill kids as part of that objective.

For example, you give an AI drone instructions to fly over an area to identify and drop bombs on military installations, and the AI misidentifies a school as a military base and bombs it. Or you send a dog bot in to patrol an area for intruders, and it misidentifies kids playing out in the streets as armed insurgents.

In a situation where it’s human pilots, soldiers, and analysts and such making the call, we would (or at least should) expect the people involved to face some sort of repercussions- jail time, fines, demotions, etc.

None of which you can really do for a drone.

And that’s of course before you get into the really crazy sci Fi dystopia stuff, where you send a team of robots into a city with general instructions to clear it of insurgents, and the AI comes to the conclusion somehow that the fastest and most efficient way to accomplish that is to just kill every person in the city since it can’t be absolutely sure who is and isn’t a terrorist

Fondots, 3 days ago

So your current voting options are

1. The guy who is currently allowing a genocide to occur or even helping to perpetuate it, but could potentially be persuaded to take steps against it
2. Vote for 3rd party candidates or abstain from voting so that you can pat yourself on the back and say “I didn’t vote for genocide” even though that option doesn’t have a snowballs chance in hell of winning (no matter how much we wish that were the case)
3. The guy who is fully in support of the genocide and would very much like to support more genocides given the chance

And that’s not even touching on basically every other issue where candidate 1 is also far better (or at least much less bad) than candidate 3.

Voting for 2 takes votes primarily from candidate 1, candidate 3’s supporters by and large have no intention of jumping ship no matter what. So you’re effectively taking votes away from the one candidate who has any chance of winning that we might be able to talk out of genocide, and allowing candidate 3 to win so he can do even more genocide.

I’ve voted 3rd party nearly every opportunity I’ve had for most of my adult life, and I hope at some point we return to some level of sanity and I can feel safe resuming that. Right now, we are faced with 2 possible outcomes, bad and cartoonishly evil, whatever thoughts you have about this being the year of the 3rd party candidate are delusional, the movement just isn’t there right now, and while normally I’d be all about the idea of a protest vote, you only get the one vote, and would you rather use it to send a message, or to actually avoid the worst outcome?

Perfect, as they say, is the enemy of good.

Fondots, 4 days ago

I’m an eagle scout from the days before they started accepting girls, I remember always hearing about how much cooler the BSA program was than girl scouts

Part of the problem is with how things are structured. BSA troops tend to stick around for a a while (the troop I was part of well over a decade ago is still going strong and just a couple years off from its 100 year anniversary,) so you end up with a lot of accumulated knowledge and resources over the years, people stick around after they age out of the program to stay on as leaders, they bring their own kids into the program years later, we had some 2nd or 3rd generation eagle scouts who had all earned it from the same troop their fathers and grandfathers did, we had a garage full of troop gear, a pretty decent troop library fell of merit badge books, old handbooks, various first aid and camping manuals, etc. some troops have their own cabins or campsites or other such properties, and the organization makes it very easy for new scouts to find an existing troop, pack, crew, ship, etc. to join.

Girl scouts often don’t have that. Sometimes they do, and when they do they can actually do a pretty amazing program, I’ve heard of some girl scout troops who’ve done some pretty cool stuff that honestly puts my own troop to shame, but more often they kind of tend to get formed with a group of girls around the same age and their mothers, never really do much recruitment, and when the girls either age out or lose interest and drop out the troop just kind of folds. They have to put a lot into the cookie sales and fundraising because they’re usually starting with no troop gear or other resources, there’s not much generational knowledge about how to run a scouting program, so they tend to just kind of have to figure things out on the fly. And a key part of the boy scout program was “boys teaching boys” the older kids in the troop take on leadership roles and help run the program teaching the younger kids, if you’re starting with a group all about the same age, you lose out on a lot of that dynamic.

Also as far as recruitment goes, at least back when I was in scouts, even if you waned to join an existing girl scout troop, it could actually be pretty hard to find them. BSA had their BeAScout website, you could find all the local groups, meeting schedules, and contact info pretty easily, girl scouts, at least at the time, didn’t have anything like that. I remember there was one time my troop wanted to reach out to some of the local girl scout troops to see if they wanted to participate in some kind of event we were having, and they had a hell of a time finding any contact info for them.

Also, some of the girl scout leader training requirements seemed a little excessive, maybe the situation has changed, but I remember hearing that they had to have leaders with specific training for pretty much any little part of their planned activity, like there was a specific training to go on camping trips, a separate training if you wanted to have a campfire on the camping trip, etc. and a lot of them were paid courses and I don’t think they were cheap. I don’t have anything against training in general, I had to do a few when I was a boy scout leader, but some of what I heard from the girl scout side of things sounded pretty excessive to me.

Fondots, 5 days ago

English

A very tiny bit of French, I can understand more than I can speak if they talk slowly, my French education was kind of shitty and it’s been well over a decade since high school since I’ve really used it so

I’ve been learning Esperanto on Duolingo, it’s been going pretty well, I’m just about at the point where I can confidently read a book without having too look up too many words. I’m far from fluent, but I getting there.

Fondots, 5 days ago

I rarely drink coffee on my days off, when I work I bring a 20oz mug of drip coffee with me. At my old job, I’d probably polish of a pot or two to myself most days, mostly because walking back to the break room and brewing a pot when it was empty was a good way to avoid actually working that no one ever batted an eye at.

Fondots, 10 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

My preference is sort of a modified & extended machete order, though be warned that this is probably going to be a months-long undertaking so you have to be in for the long haul, and may involve searching out some fan edits

For the OT, there are some fan edits that use ports of the special editions and such where they’re appropriate for better effects and such, but use the original versions where the changes made are stupid (so han shoots first) I’d use those if possible.

IV
V

You get the “I am your father” reveal then it’s flashback time

I, some say it’s optional, but the duel of the fates is badass, and you need to introduce Maul somehow
II

Squeeze in at least a “best of” selection of The Clone wars here, I won’t blame you for not doing the whole series.

III (there’s a fan edit that mixes in the parts of the last season of clone wars and Bad Batch that happen concurrently with the movie, use that if possible, if not, save the last season for after this)

Bad Batch
Solo (optional, I enjoyed it for what it was, but it’s optional)
Kenobi
Andor
Rebels (probably do another “best of”) Rogue one (I suppose you could also do rogue one first, but I’d let episode IV stand on its own, so maybe immediately after IV)

VI

Mando
Boba Fett (very optional)
Ahsoka

Then I guess the sequel trilogy if you really want to

If they’re not in it for the long haul, and just want to do the movies

If you just want to do the main series movies

IV
(After considering my above advice, I’d probably slot R1 in here if you want to include it even though it’s not main series)
V
I (more optional here, I’d still do it for completions sake and to lay the groundwork if you think they may want to do TCW and/or Rebels later)
II
III
VI
Sequels if you want to

Fondots, 10 days ago

Not exactly sending them to coworkers, but I did kind of refer a coworker to one once.

I work in 911 dispatch, it’s kind of hard not to end up a little desensitized to some crazy shit. We once had a call about some kind of industrial accident, someone’s arm caught in a machine or something along those lines. Obviously not going to share too many specific details about the incident, but we did have a teams on location ready to do a field amputation if needed, but luckily they were able to get the person out without any major injuries.

So our conversations tended to be about a lot of the crazy gory fucked up things we’d taken calls about or otherwise seen or heard about, and I mentioned the Russian lathe accident video to one of my coworkers (don’t look that up if you’re not the kind of fucked up who can deal with that sort of thing, it’s a guy getting caught in a heavy duty lathe and spun around and mashed against the machine until someone comes and hits the emergency stop, at which point there’s nothing much left of him)

That piqued her interest, and she went and watched it on her phone at her next break.

I wouldn’t send the video to anyone, especially not out of the blue, and when it comes up I warn people not to look it up if they’re the type of person who would be significantly disturbed by it. In general I won’t even mention it to people who don’t work either in some sort of emergency services or medical sort of field where we have to occasionally deal with that kind of thing, or in a machine shop where they’re working around those kinds of machines, and even then it’s something that only gets brought up to certain people in certain contexts.

Fondots, 11 days ago

If I go out and kill a newborn fawn in the woods for shits and giggles without the appropriate tags, out of season, etc. it’s still poaching, just the same as if I went out and killed an 8 point trophy buck I didn’t have a tag for, took it home, ate it, mounted it’s head on my wall, etc. That fawn may not have survived, it may not have grown into anything impressive, but at the end of the day I killed a deer I was not legally allowed to kill. The guy writing the law probably didn’t have killing fawns for fun in mind, they probably pictured something more like the second example I gave, but I think most of us would agree that the fawn-killer should be punished just as or maybe even more harshly that the buck-killer.

I can’t think of any good reason it shouldn’t be the same for fish.

EDIT: also, usually with fishing regulations, there’s also size limits, you can’t keep a fish under a certain size, it has to be thrown back. These fish were almost certainly under the legal size. Not to mention creel limits, even if they were somehow all of a legal size, and even if he somehow did everything else legally (which he didn’t,) I suspect the creel limit on salmon is significantly lower than 18,000

Fondots, 11 days ago

If you don’t want to let the system handle it, what actions are you personally taking to bring about the change you want to see?

Because the options are to try to handle this relatively peacefully through the system, or to bypass the system with violent action. The other side has been champing at the bit for decades for an excuse to turn to mass violence, so you might have some catching up to do in terms of organizing support and stockpiling supplies for the coming conflict you seem to want. If that’s the case, probably best to get yourself off Lemmy, don’t want to leave a paper trail, then go out and start hoarding guns and ammo, maybe dig a bunker somewhere.

Fondots, 13 days ago

It’s pretty damn hard to pick just one thing, so my best-of list

There’s really basic foundational things like the wheel, cutting tools, fire (if we want to count it as an invention,) string/rope/cordage, writing, clothing, cooking, agriculture, metalworking, etc. the sort of things that are absolutely basic building blocks of civilization.

Moving a few milenia up, and in no particular order,

the Haber Process to synthesize ammonia, which allowed for the creation of synthetic fertilizers. If you’ve eaten any commercially grown food in the last century, you probably owe it to the Haber Process.

Antibiotics are another big one, as are vaccines.

Vaucason’s lathe arguably laid the foundation for a whole lot of fabrication techniques that led to the industrial revolution

Refrigeration

Steam engines and later internal combustion engines

Clocks

Compasses

Printing press

The telephone

Airplanes

Computers and the internet

Cameras

Fondots, 13 days ago

Like others have said, I’d give scraping it off with a razor blade a try, glass is actually significantly harder than the steel of the razor so it’s difficult or impossible to scratch your glass with the blade. Razors are cheap and readily available (if you don’t already have some kicking around) so you have basically nothing to loose by trying it. Also mentioned we’re magic erasers/melamine sponges, also a pretty solid bet, they basically work like micro sandpaper.

Failing that, I’m no chemist, but from googling around a bit for siloxane and solvents, I think your best bet for solvents youre likely to find at most hardware stores are mineral spirits, turpentine, and xylene, which should all be readily available in most hardware stores in the paint section with other paint thinners. From what I could find, it kind of looks like you’re going to want a non-polar solvent, not a polar solvent like acetone. They may dissolve it outright, or may at least soften it up enough for you to scrub or scrape it off easier.

Also what I gleaned from Google, is that siloxanes are basically silicone, so you may also have luck with products to remove silicone caulk, I know goo gone makes a product for that purpose (although it looks like the main ingredients in that stuff are acetone and benzyl alcohol, which are both polar solvents, so I have no idea how that jives with what I was getting from my other Google searches that suggested non-polar solvents, so again, I’m not a chemist and I’m out of my element)

Any solvents you end up trying, just make sure you’re following proper safety precautions, and be careful about anything else you may spray, drip, splash it on, you might ruin finishes, strip paint, damage plastics, etc.

Fondots, 14 days ago

I’ve done a bit of googling around about e15 gas, and I’m not gonna lie, I really don’t know what to make of it, there seems to be a whole lot of contradictory info about it out there, some sources say it’s cleaner, others say it’s dirtier, and pretty much all of the articles I can find feel like they’ve been bought and paid for by one big megacorp or another.

When I kind of try to average together what I’ve read, and make no mistake I’m no scientist so I very well may be way off the mark on this, I think what I’ve come up with, is that it’s worse for smog and general air quality, but better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s also ever so slightly more renewable, though really that’s kind of a negligible difference, 85% of it is still basically just regular gasoline, and the regular gas you usually buy is probably 10% ethanol anyway, so it really doesn’t make a major change in terms of how much petroleum you’re burning at the end of the day.

As far as saving money goes, you may get slightly worse MPG and/or performance using it, although annecdotally when I’ve used it, any difference was completely unnoticeable to me, YMMV (literally) depending on your car, the kind of driving you do, etc.

There’s also a deep rabbit hole to go down about corn subsidies and such that I’m not going to touch with a 10 foot pole right now.

If, and that’s a big “if,” my assessment is right, which I’m by no means confident about so please don’t take this as anything other than the musings of some asshole on the internet who’s skimmed a bunch of articles and is trying to piece together the facts, I kind of feel like this may be a bit of a wash. Probably something that needs to be really considered at the local or individual level to weigh the pros and cons, taking things into account like what your local air quality is like, how efficient your vehicle is, what you’d do with the money you save, etc.

Of course, everyone should do some research about this, make some informed decisions, seek out more info, be skeptical of claims on both sides, etc. Please do not take my word for it, my words, thoughts, and opinions about this issue aren’t really worth anything.

Fondots, 13 days ago

I just tend to hedge my bets with lots of disclaimers for things I’m not totally sure of. I know I’m not an expert on these matters, and I don’t want anyone taking what I say and spreading it has hard facts when I know there’s a real possibility that I may have it completely wrong. Hopefully no one can read my comment and go “well this guy sure seems to know what he’s talking about, I’m going to take his word for it and tell all of my friends,” but maybe it’ll get them to take a second look, see what info is out there and be mindful about where that information is coming from and try to draw their own conclusions.

And really, as far as having an opinion goes, this shouldn’t really be the kind of thing we’re dealing in opinions about. This should just be a matter of hard facts and numbers, but unfortunately due to industries like agriculture and oil sticking their fingers into, those hard facts are usually too hard for most of us to come by, so we’re kind of left with nothing but opinions based on what spotty facts we have.

Fondots, 15 days ago

Not quite what you’re looking for, but I recently did NYC to Montreal on Amtrak, about a 12 hour ride (officially it’s somewhat shorter, but delays can happen at the border crossing, and as others have noted Amtrak doesn’t have right of way over freight trains so you may get delayed over that, I’d plan on about 12 hours on this particular route)

Overall I enjoyed my experience. It would have been faster to drive or fly, but that comes with its own hassles, and since it was snowing for a good part of our ride, I definitely appreciated not having to drive through that.

The seats (all coach class on this train) were pretty roomy, plenty of leg room, and comfortable enough for my tastes. There’s power outlets at every seat, the wifi is basically useless so plan on having any movies or ebooks or whatever you want to watch downloaded before you go.

The cafe car onboard doesn’t have an amazing selection, hot food is pretty much all microwave stuff, but I found it adequate to hold me over, I wasn’t looking for a gourmet meal, just some snacks and drinks, and it was pretty nice being able to enjoy a beer or two on the train ride.

On the ride back, it seemed like the train’s air conditioning wasn’t working well and it got a little warm, not ridiculously hot, but enough that you might want to take off an extra layer or roll up your sleeves. They also mentioned that since their train fleet is aging a bit, some of them can start to leak a little in the rain, we didn’t experience any of that even though it was raining a bit, but that’s something to keep in mind.

We didn’t have any issues with the bathrooms, but at least on that route they won’t get cleaned during the trip, so if they get too gross they do sometimes apparently have to put some of them out of service.

Fondots, 17 days ago

I’m not really a fan of this poll

The wording is kind of wonky, a lot/some/not much/not at all leaves a lot to be desired for me.

“Some” is kind of ambiguous. I’d like to believe that most people would read it as it’s intended from the context, but I’m certain that some idiots probably interpreted it as something like “he has respect for some women” and not as “he has some respect for women in general”

“Some” also just feels like it leaves too much open to interpretation as to “how much is some.” Personally, in a lot of other contexts I’d tend to read “some” as pretty much synonymous “not much” and while in this poll those responses are right next to each other, they are still supposed to be distinct from each other. This should probably have been a “‘On a scale of 1-4, how much do you think trump respects women?’ With 0 being ‘not at all’ and 4 being ‘a lot’” type question

There’s also the matter of what is meant by “respect.” Does he respect them as equals? Does he respect their rights? Their opinions? Does he respect them because they’re able to bear children? Does he respect their physical beauty?

It’s hard to get truly representative sample sizes of the voting population because it’s such a large and diverse group, and 875 respondents doesn’t really inspire a whole lot of confidence in me about this poll’s accuracy when there’s well over 100,000,000 registered voters, especially without any other demographic info about who responded.

Just my 2¢ on the matter anyway

Fondots, 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago)

It’s an important fact, but hardly a major or unique case. I know I’ve personally never felt like any of the candidates in any of the elections I remember were great, just “good enough” or “better than some of the alternatives,” I certainly would’ve replaced them if I could.

Looking at some recent primaries

Back in 2020, Biden only had 51.7% of the votes in the democratic primaries. That made him by far the biggest single candidate, but that also means that almost half of democrats would have probably been happy to replace them with one of the other 4 candidates if they could (though they would have disagreed on which of the 4.) Most of them would still go on to vote for biden despite him not being their first pick.

In 2016, trump won with 44.9%, again the biggest single candidate, but that means that 55.1% wanted not trump. Of course most of that majority still held their nose and voted for him in November, but the majority of them probably would have been happy to replace him at that time if they could.

2008 was really fucking close for the Democrats, Obama beat out Hillary with 48.1% of the vote to her 48%, and the remaining 3.9% voting for various other candidates, that means that the majority (51.9%) of people wanted a candidate other than Obama. Same year, McCain won his primary with 46.7%, so again the majority did not vote for him but for various other candidates.

And I think it’s pretty safe to say that in just about any election throughout history, voters would like to replace the opposing party’s candidate if they could, no surprise there.

A really big news story would be if the majority of the party not only would replace their candidate if they could, but were actually in agreement on who they would replace them with. If 6 in 10 Democrats said “We would like to replace Biden with this one specific other person that we all agreed on” then that would be big news.

Fondots, 17 days ago

I like guns, I don’t currently own any, that will probably change at some point in my life, but one of the several reasons I don’t have one is because I don’t have any space in my house that I’d want taken up by a gun safe.

I don’t even have kids and I don’t plan on having any, I can count the amount of times there has been a child in my house on one hand with fingers to spare, and if I have it my way my count will never reach my other hand, and the only time those children were out of an adult’s immediate supervision while they were here was when they were in the bathroom, but I can’t guarantee that will always be the case, I don’t know what friends or relatives may bring kids over and what may happen that will distract us from what they’re doing.

I live in a pretty safe neighborhood, but break-ins happen, and I don’t want my guns out on the streets, so not only will my safe be merely child-proof, it’s also going to be securely bolted to the wall and/or floor, and it’s going to be hard to break into, and ideally hidden from sight. No one’s getting guns out of my house against my will without at least some time and power tools.

Should my wife or I ever have a mental health crisis, I want to make sure that we have the means to secure those guns until we can get them out of the house by changing the combo or hiding the keys or whatever (and that would also be the end of guns in our house for good)

Anyone who doesn’t think of these kinds of circumstances has no business owning a gun.

Fondots, 18 days ago

I’ve seen a couple places offering what they’ll call something like “enhanced ebooks”

I admit that I haven’t given any of them a try, but the gist is that they’re an ebook with some extra multimedia content. It kind of looks like some places that do them do the absolute bare minimum to slap the “enhanced” label on them and just add some extra pictures and maps and such, and others go whole hog with added video, the full audio drama treatment with sound effects, different actors for the various characters, narration, etc. so some of them may potentially fill the role you’re looking for

Fondots, 19 days ago

I work in 911 dispatch, nursing homes are one of the banes of my existence.

Do they have any medical history we should know about?
No.
Oh, I guess they’re just putting perfectly healthy 57 year olds in nursing homes now, good to know.

Half of them can’t tell me the address of the damn place they work, which is really nice when they call from their cell phone which barely gets any signal inside the building. Sometimes it’s a crapshoot if they can even tell me the name of the facility

For whole lot of the people who work there, at least at the homes around me, English isn’t their first language, and they don’t speak or understand it very well and speak with a very heavy accent. I’m not knocking them just for that though, they speak more languages than I do, and are clearly trying to make a better life for themselves, I certainly can’t fault them for that, but it does make me a little concerned for their patients. If I, as someone with all of my mental faculties and hearing intact, can barely communicate with you, how effectively can they be treating and supporting patients who often have significant cognitive and/or hearing impairments?

Don’t get me started on the med techs. I’m not any kind of a healthcare professional, so I have only the vaguest idea what their role actually is in a nursing home, but from when they call 911 you would get the impression that they’re kept in a dark soundproof closet until they need someone to call 911, then they’re abruptly yanked out of the closet, spun around a few times, hit over the head with the phone, and told to call 911 while a strobe light flashes in their face, because they never have any idea what’s going on

Now don’t get me wrong, some nursing home staff are great, they have all of the information ready when they call, they’re polite, professional, everything I could hope for, but unfortunately they’re kind of the exception. 90% of the time when I see a call coming in from a nursing home I need to brace myself to deal with someone who is just an absolute mess, disorganized, ill-prepared, unintelligible, uncooperative, sometimes outright rude. Sometimes I consider myself lucky if they don’t just outright hang up on me halfway through the call.

Also some of them love medical jargon, and as I said I’m not a medical professional. They’ll call, rattle off a bunch of stats and vitals that mean nothing to me and aren’t going in my notes even if I could type as fast as they’re spitting them out. When I try to determine what the chief complaint is they’ll spit out something like “their potassium is low,” forcing me to ask for further clarification in plain english, so I know whether to code it as a cardiac thing, a respiratory thing, etc.

Fondots, 19 days ago

That makes me think of my own grandfather (in a good way) I will never claim that he was the most forward-thinking, tolerant, or politically correct person out there, there were a few stereotypes and bits out outdated terminology he never quite shook (for example, the term “colored” never quite left his vocabulary, and he had a tiny bit of lingering distrust of the Japanese having served in the Pacific during WWII)

But for a man who grew up in the time he did, he wasn’t half-bad.

He was never someone who was above holding a a grudge, and he’d gladly tell anyone who would listen who he didn’t like and why. His reasons weren’t always good, he got mad at people over a lot of petty bullshit, but I never heard him disparage someone because of their race. He ended up in a nursing home where a lot of the staff was black, and we never heard a peep from him about their race, he found plenty of other things to complain about, but there was no racial bias to it, he complained about the white employees as much or more than the black ones.

Little bit of fun family history with him, for most of his life he worked as a bus driver. Buses in our part of the country were racially integrated from pretty early on so that was never something he dealt with directly, but he did drive his bus at the same time that bus boycotts and such would have been happening in other parts of the country. He never told us this story himself, we heard it from some other older locals who remembered him driving the bus. There was one particular bus stop that was near a business that employed a lot of black women, and many of them took the bus. The bus would come at around the same time the business closed for the night, so they didn’t have much time to get to the stop before the bus came. A lot of other drivers wouldn’t wait for them, but my grandfather always did, and decades later many of them still remembered him for that.

Fondots, 20 days ago

This is sort of second-hand advice, because luckily I’ve never really had any kind of skin/hair issues (except that I’m now losing the later, but I made peace with that and shaved my head)

But my wife has had some dandruff issues in the past, so I’ve learned a little from her.

Part of the issue is that there’s kind of several different issues at play that cause dandruff or dandruff-like symptoms, and common usage of the term often doesn’t really differentiate between them very well, even though the appropriate treatments for them may be very different.

For a long time, a lot of focus with dandruff was on fungal causes, and so a lot of the commonly-available anti-dandruff shampoos and treatments work, at least in part, by being antifungal.

Of course, if your dandruff isn’t actually caused by fungus, antifungal ingredients won’t do anything to help with your dandruff problem, and may even make it worse by drying out or irritating your scalp. That turned out to be my wife’s case, and her issue improved significantly by basically switching to any other shampoo besides anti-dandruff. It took a little fine-tuning and trial and error to figure out which shampoo and conditioner worked best for her, but the big first step was staying away from anti dandruff products.

There’s a lot of different combinations of hair types, skin type, and underlying conditions that could be at play, so there’s no-one-size-fits-all solution. If you haven’t already, a good first step is probably to talk to a dermatologist, or if you already are working with one, it may be time to look for a new one.

Failing that, do some research, figure out what send like is most likely to be causing your issue and the l how to treat it, try some things, if they don’t work, try some different things, repeat as necessary.

Fondots, 22 days ago (edited 21 days ago)

I think there’s room for a little bit of nuance here

It’s pretty much always going to mean you’ve been a little dumb, or naive, etc. so it’s an insult in that sense.

But I tend to hear it used by southerners in sort of a “aw, they don’t know any better/can’t help it” sort of way.

So more like when I call my dog an idiot because she got her leash tangled around a street sign again. There’s no malice in it, she’s dumb, but she can’t help it, she’s just a dog.

Not like if I call my coworker an idiot because he’s continuing to fuck up the same basic shit no matter how or how many times you explain it to him, he should know better and can help it.

Now, there’s arguably another level of insult/disrespect implied because they are talking about you in the same way they would a dog or a small child. I don’t think that’s really something they usually intend, but of course the intention isn’t really as important as how the target actually feels about it. You can also probably get really psychological about it and dig into how their word choice reflects how they view others in relation to themselves or something, but I’m neither interested in nor qualified to go down that rabbit hole right now.

Disclaimer- those are just hypothetical examples I gave, both my dog and my coworkers are actually pretty pretty smart and capable. She’s actually the first dog I’ve ever had who actually seems to understand how to not get tangled on a street sign, so I mean no disrespect to her, or to my coworkers either I guess.

Fondots, 24 days ago

It will definitely vary from place to place, but I work in 911 dispatch, and I’m pretty sure you’d have to be in a really dysfunctional hellhole for police to not show up to an OD call involving a child.