Fondots

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Fondots ,

If you haven't noticed there's a lot of people out there are incredibly dumb, and don't understand basic math, let alone how a company like EA works.

I can guarantee you that there are more dipshits out there than you'd think who would look at that number and say "well it's less than 100 percent, so they don't have total control, so what's the big deal?"

Now as for whether any amount of clarification is enough to convince those idiots that that's not how things work, that's a fair question.

Fondots , (edited )

I don’t know what to buy anymore.

I have a problem where because I'm so hard to advertise to between adblock and premium subscriptions, that I am usually very out of the loop on what movies and TV shows are coming out

The biggest ones usually make their way into the news or Lemmy somehow, but there's definitely a lot I'm clueless about until I see them pop up streaming somewhere a couple years later

Fondots ,

Honestly, it may still be worth it even if you don't have the space to buy much in bulk, I've gotten some pretty good deals from Costco on things like clothing and electronics

And you don't have to, and probably shouldn't, buy everything in bulk, just some things that you use a lot of.

Fondots ,

I tend to think of and describe myself as a conservative, but don't align myself with the Republican party at all (I am registered to vote Republican to try to weed out the worst of their lunatics in the primaries, but it's gonna be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election with the way things are going)

In my view, which absolutely isn't the view of the Republicans or conservatives as a whole, the point of conservatism is to just pump the breaks and slow things down to make sure all the "I"s are dotted and "t"s crossed to make sure things are actually going to work as intended.

Liberals/leftists/progressives should basically be the "idea guys" coming up with big general plans for what they want to happen

Then the conservatives would be sort of the bean-counters/logistics/nuts-and-bolts sort of guys. They shouldn't be there to outright oppose the liberal ideas, they're there to point out the problems with their plans and make sure they're addressed before we commit to some half-assed plan.

Fondots ,

Yeah I'm pretty sure I said as much dude.

Fondots ,

Could also just be the rim being kind of dirty and corroded and needs to be cleaned up a bit of bead sealant.

I've had it happen to me a couple times, tires just always lost air sort slowly, I never cared enough to bring it in just for that, not a big deal to stop by the air pump once a week or so when I was getting gas anyway.

I'm sure if you brought your car in just for that they'd probably slap some token $10-50 price on it.

But if you bring it in for another service I feel like a lot of places will just do it. I know I brought my car in to pep boys one time for an oil change or something and asked them to look at it and they just did it, no extra charge.

I feel like it's one of those little things that no one is quite sure how to write it up in the system, and figuring it out is more of a pain in the ass than just not mentioning it to the boss, not like he's gonna notice they used an extra scrap of sandpaper and blob of sealant anyway.

Fondots ,

I'm certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

But a couple things jumping out at me

The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn't exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there's a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don't quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it's not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don't get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn't fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a "haha, how do you like your leader's name when it's on a black kid? Suck it Nazis."

Or maybe it was something else. That's just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

*fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.

Fondots ,

Went after a worm on a hook, easily the biggest mistake of many fishes lives.

Fondots ,

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/3e117172-8ad2-4ca3-a29f-b17e3600e07b.jpeg

Google photos has a date tag attached to this of 9/10/2008

A whole lot of stuff has traveled with me through the years swapping SD cards from one phone to another, and eventually things getting backed up to the cloud, etc. this is probably the oldest thing I have saved that can count as a meme. I don't know if that date is when I actually first found it, when it first somehow got backed up, if maybe that's just from some metadata left over from whoever made the meme originally, or something else entirely

But that date does generally feel about right, and the humor feels about right for high school-aged me.

Fondots ,

Same boat, my computer is basically the computer my wife built probably about 12 years ago before we got together, it was pretty beefy for its time. I basically stuck her old components in a new box (and also stuck a newer graphics card in it because I got a really good deal on a used 2060)

Still manages to run most games out there on acceptable (to me) settings.

Made the switch to Linux about a week ago, no major issues, some things are arguably running better now. It's not without its hiccups but so far things have gone pretty smoothly.

EDIT: went with Mint over Zorin though.

Fondots ,

It's actually not terribly uncommon for people to take roadkill if it's fresh and in decent shape.

In my state (PA) you're supposed to report it to the game commission within 24 hours, and you're supposed to surrender the hide and antlers to them unless you pay for a separate permit.

Fondots ,

What they were actually using prior to the space pen, and what the soviets used, were grease pencils, which really basically are crayons

Fondots ,

I had a French teacher who claimed that "let them eat cake" was a bit of a mistranslation and that "cake" was just a different, maybe fancier, type of bread.

Like the situation was more like someone said "Marie, the people don't have any baguettes to eat." And she replied "Well then let them eat brioche"

Still probably apocryphal, but I think maybe a little more believable if it were true while still showing the tone-deafness.

It also just feels very French to me.

Fondots ,

I actually looked up the actual (alleged) French quote, and it's "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"

So I actually hit the nail on the head, it's literally "let them eat brioche"

Still can't really be attributed to Marie Antoinette, and it's not unlikely that the entire anecdotal was just made up entirely

Fondots ,

Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as "obvious."

I'm a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

I'm a reasonable tech-literate person, I'm no sys admin but I'm the family "guy who's good with computers" I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I'm in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I'm back to being a kid with my family's first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there's more cool stuff I can make it do but I don't know how yet.

I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don't have that for Linux yet, and it's not exactly a great feeling.

And I feel like there's sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

Like there's a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

And then a big gap

And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

And don't get me wrong, I'm glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

And I'm slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that's a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there's a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through "this is your start menu," "here's what click/double-check/right click/etc" means," "here's how you turn your computer off" kind of stuff.

And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who's going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

Also don't get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don't want it to go anywhere, when I know what I'm doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven't found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don't exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.

Fondots ,

As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I've found is LabEx, but I feel like it's lacking in a lot of ways.

First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn't too terrible, it's more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

Second I've mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it's probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it's probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it's spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.

Fondots ,

My buddy works security at a bar. Last night he sends me a picture of a guy sitting there with some SS lightning bolts on his shirt. Bar manager wouldn't let my friend kick him out because he wasn't otherwise causing a problem.

I hatch a plan, I pull up the jukebox app on my phone, turns out you don't actually have to be at the bar to queue up music there (I'm pretty sure that used to be the case, I'm pretty sure at one point a decade ago I had to spoof my location on a rooted phone to pull this kind of thing)

And I start queuing up as many anti-fascist songs as I could think of. Cost me a few bucks but I considered it money well-spent.

This and a few other woody Guthrie songs were of course some of the first things I thought of but sadly were not available on the jukebox.

But I managed to find a good handful.

According to my friend, he got visibly frustrated when the Billy Bragg & Wilco cover of All You Fascists came on and left the bar to have a cigarette.

And when he came back in he was greeted with Youth Against Fascism my Sonic Youth

Only took about an hour of that before he packed up and left.

Apparently someone also left a review online complaining about Nazi boy, and after the owner saw it my friend now has more authority to take out the trash.

Fondots ,

Married for 7 years, together for probably about 10 total

Can't really think of a time we wouldn't have had that sort of exchange.

She's also been jokingly threatening me with divorce since we got married. I'm pretty sure we left the courthouse holding the receipt for our marriage license joking that we needed to hold onto it in case we needed it for a return. Still have it around somewhere, someday we're gonna put it in a little shadowbox with "in case of irreconcilable differences break glass" stenciled on it.

Fondots ,

I understand that oil isn't just sitting around in big empty voids in the rock, and that those voids are full of gravel and such, and that we're also injecting water and such into the wells to maintain pressure, etc.

But I'd be willing to bet (a small amount, maybe like $50 tops) that out of the thousands of oil wells we've drilled over the years, that through some quirk of geology, some void has opened up somewhere down there with just enough liquid oil and open space that you could probably get a kayak on it and paddle around in a small circle.

I'm thinking probably more like the size of a smallish above ground swimming pool, not a decent sized lake that would actually be worth paddling around on.

Of course there's also the issue of the pressure at that depth, and the fact that any atmosphere down there is probably gonna be natural gas and not breathable air, so you'd probably have to do it in a hard diving suit

Fondots ,

If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take.

Any reporter, media personality, and random schmuck who has an opportunity to interact with trump had better seize this opportunity to only address him as "Piggy" from here on out.

Fondots ,

I'm all for splitting hairs over semantics, and I'll agree with you that "fascist" probably isn't the best label for Iran

But if you take a step back and look at the big picture, it does look a hell of a lot like fascism.

Extreme right wing, militaristic government, social and economic regimentation, charismatic, authoritarian dictators, focusing a whole lot of hatred and blame on people in the nation who don't conform and towards external enemies, etc.

I don't know that they're exactly nationalistic, but they do have religion filling pretty much that same role, and let's be real, the line's pretty damn blurry between religion and government there.

And they don't exactly make racial/ethnic superiority a centerpiece of their identity, but they're certainly not exactly sitting around singing "Kumbaya" with their minorities either, and again we have religion filling a pretty similar role in other ways.

You can get into the weeds about the specific philosophies at play here and about the history that led them to their current situation, and there's certainly merit in doing that, but as far as the casual observer is concerned, they do look and quack a hell of a lot like fascists, and while it's not the best label for what they have going on it's certainly not the worst either. I'd maybe prefer to slap a qualifier on it- something like pseudo-fascist, islamo-fascist, maybe something like "Farscism" if we want to get a little cutesy with the wordplay to separate it from "classic" fascism.

And similarly I'd probably want to slap a few qualifiers onto the term "theocracy" as well before applying it to Iran, I don't think that just that one word really points the whole picture.

And now that I'm looking at it, "fascist theocracy" might be a contender for how I'd label them.

Fondots ,

If we want to get a little nitpicky, the Moroccans kind of have it right

Sure there's advent leading up to Christmas

But "christmastide" really begins on Christmas day and continues on into January (January 5th for Epiphany, or slightly longer if your Catholic because they technically count the feast of the baptism of the lord as part of christmastime.) When you talk about the "twelve days of Christmas" the first day is Christmas.

The lyrics to "Good King Wenceslas" (otherwise known as "that Christmas carol whose tune you recognize, but have no idea what the lyrics are if you even know that it has lyrics") starts with the titular king looking out his window "on the feast of Stephen" which is the day after Christmas.

Different branches of Christianity, countries, cultures, etc. of course do things in all kinds of different ways, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about Moroccan Christians, nor much about Islamic attitudes towards Christmas there (though since they were doing Christmas events, I think it's fair to assume that these weren't exactly hard-liners who believe that no Muslim should ever have anything to do with Christmas) so I can't really say why they do their Christmas stuff the way they do there, but it could be they just never got the memo that how we celebrate Christmas has changed a bit over the last few centuries.

Fondots ,

"locker room talk"

Most of my friends and I are pretty traditionally "manly" men. The kinds of guys you turn to if you need to build something, fix something, need to cut down a tree, want to drink beer and smoke cigars, shoot guns (not after drinking the beer,) go fishing (beer is ok for that,) etc.

I have basically no clue what's going on in any of their sex lives. We never really comment on women's appearances, and when we do it's kept to just a very quick observation, "man, she's hot" kind of thing.

Damn near any time some sort of sex talk comes up it's our female friends stoking the fires.

I'm pretty sure my wife and her friends talk more about sex in an afternoon than I have in my whole lifetime.

Maybe it's because we very rarely find ourselves in a locker room, most of aren't exactly the gym or team sports type.

Fondots ,

Honestly, even when I was in middle and high school (so we're going back around 20 years now) I don't remember a whole lot of that

The main topics of conversation I remember were sports, video games, music, movies, TV, weed if you were a stoner, vacations, parties, and other plans you had and things you'd done recently, etc.

Pretty much the same shit I'd talk about now.

My personal experiences of course may not be representative of everyone, and like I said, it's been about 20 years so it's very possible my memory is faulty.

Fondots ,

And what came of any of that?

The (wrong) lesson that much of the US took away from the cold war is that we're basically untouchable. For all the fear of nuclear war, it never happened, and we came out on top. We never had war on our country, or even on our borders, and probably the tensest moment of the whole cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, we were able to diffuse peacefully and in a way that from many angles made Khrushchev look weak and like we came out on top.

Fondots ,

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.

Fondots ,

Oh yeah, it's absolutely primarily an infrastructure issue. Some proper bike lanes would go a very long way.

There's a good smattering of the usual things- some people are dumb, some parents suck at parenting, etc. also at play, but that's not particularly unique to bikes.

Fondots ,

Alright, I'll bite, why shouldn't you be able to mod guns?

I'm not talking about something like converting a semi auto to a machine gun

I'm talking about stuff like choosing a different stock or grip that feels more comfortable.

Or maybe you'd prefer a lighter or heavier trigger pull, or maybe you find that your gun's not cycling properly with a certain kind of ammo and you'd like to swap out some springs or other internal components to address that?

Or maybe there's a part that wasn't deburred properly from the factory that is making your gun jam and it needs a little filing or polishing to make it move properly?

Or maybe you have a shotgun for hunting, maybe you'd like to have just one gun and swap between a rifled barrel to fire slugs for deer and a smoothbore barrel for bird shot?

Maybe you want to add a different optic, a scope more suited to the distances you shoot at, or iron sights with colored dots on them so they're easier for you to see?

Maybe you'd just like to add a sling?

Fondots ,

It sounds like you need to think about your word choice better then, because that's exactly the kind of thing many gun owners have in mind when they talk about modding their guns.

And a lot of our gun laws are already incredibly stupid without people trying to drum up stupid ideas like "you shouldn't be allowed to modify your guns"

Fondots ,

I went to a local dive bar one time with a friend.

It was our first time at this particular bar, not that we were avoiding it, we just had another perfectly adequate dive a bit closer to our respective homes.

We sit down, ordered our drinks, and as we were getting settled in a little dog comes walking down the bar.

We just kind of gave each other a look like "are you seein' this?"

And watched as the dog hopped off the bar and onto a stool at the end of the bar.

No one else seemed to acknowledge the existence of this dog.

And it sat there for the rest of the time we were there, waiting patiently like it expected to be served a beer.

Fondots OP ,

They're directly on the motherboard

The ones on the front of the case are working, and I'm 99% sure they're connected to a 3.0 header

I'm not currently home so not able to confirm that right now

Fondots OP ,

My google-fu definitely seems to be pointing to it being a IOMMU issue.

Not currently home with the computer, I'll play with a couple settings when I get in and if it doesn't get me anywhere I'll definitely share that output

Fondots OP ,

From the gigabyte website, so hopefully this is the info you're looking for

North Bridge: AMD 990FX
South Bridge: AMD SB950

Fondots OP ,

I put a more detailed explanation of what I did up in the original post, but I ended up needing to turn iommu on

Which sort of flipped things around so that the 3.0 ports no longer worked but the 2.0 ones did

And I had to make a small edit to get/default/grub

And everything went off without a hitch from there

Thank you for your help!

Fondots OP ,

I put a more detailed explanation of what I did up in the original post, but I ended up needing to turn iommu on

Which sort of flipped things around so that the 3.0 ports no longer worked but the 2.0 ones did

And I had to make a small edit to get/default/grub

Thank you for your help!

Fondots ,

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"

Fondots ,

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

Fondots ,

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.

Fondots ,

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.

Fondots ,

Personally, I've only ever heard "code-switching" used to refer to switching between different accents/vernacular, I suppose that switching between entirely different languages also checks the boxes to be code-switching, but I don't know, it feels kind of weird to use that term in that case to me.

I feel like the sort of classic code-switching example is a non-white person who speaks very "white" at their job but not otherwise.

But almost everyone does it a bit, I'm a white dude whose accent falls well within the spectrum of standard American English, but I know that I talk differently on the phone at my job than I do with my coworkers sitting at the desk next to me or with my friends and family at home.

Fondots ,

I can't offer a comparison with the other options, but I have a sofa baton U2, and I'm not really a fan. I haven't spent too much time messing with it so maybe with a little extra setup it might work great, but the scroll wheel seems to skip around when trying to select different devices, a lot of buttons don't seem to do quite what I'd expect no matter how I try setting it up, the IR seems to have a really narrow beam and is really picky about being pointed right at the device you're trying to use it with, Bluetooth controls seem pretty unreliable, and I've never been able to get it to work work with my PC in a way that feels right.

Fondots ,

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.

Fondots ,

I think this is the right take. At the end of the day you just can't change some people's minds.

Arguably, you can't change anyone's minds, they have to change them themselves. You can try to lay the groundwork for them to make that change, but we all know what they say about leading a horse to water.

Like OP's example of the uncle with lung cancer. The dude already has lung cancer, and is continuing to smoke, what more could you really say or do to convince him to stop? They're already facing probably one of the biggest possible consequences of their actions and they're still not stopping.

Sure, you could focus all of your energy into trying to browbeat them into stopping, but do you really think that's going to get anywhere? Your time and energy are probably better spent convincing someone else to quit or not to start instead.

Fondots ,

Also on the methanol concern, while the headline is calling it moonshine, which for most people probably calls to mind a distilled spirit with probably 40+% abv

But really we're talking about pruno here, prison wine, so probably more like a quarter of that if they're lucky.

I doubt they fucked it up badly enough and had enough of it to really make methanol poisoning a real concern.

Fondots ,

I only judged people in a handful of cases

If you ordered fountain drinks instead of bottled sodas when we had both available, that's kind of a dick move.

One lady once ordered a few cups of milk (in her defense, she did tell me when I delivered it that she was injured or her car was in the shop or something so it was an easy way for her to get milk without needing to go to the store. This was before grocery delivery really took off)

And I judged you if you gave a shitty tip or took too long to answer your door.

Fondots ,

When I was a kid the chicken pox vaccine was still pretty new. I remember hearing parents talking about it, and remember a few of them saying that it was only X% effective (don't remember what that percentage was off the top of my head)

At the time, it seemed like every other children's show had a chicken pox episode with one or more of the characters getting chicken pox, their parents talking about having a chicken pox party to get their kids infected, etc. it kind of seemed like it was almost inevitable that either I'd get chicken pox at some point or a lot of kids I knew would.

But I, and most of the kids I went to school with, did end up getting the vaccine, and very few kids in my school ever ended up with chickenpox. I can probably just about count the number of cases on my fingers in a school with hundreds of kids.

So vaccines work.

Funny story though, at one point in my childhood I got sick and ended up getting a prescription for amoxicillin. I started breaking out in sort of a rash/hives, and for a while they thought it might be chicken pox.

Turns out I'm actually just allergic to amoxicillin.

And then to make things even weirder, my sister gets a similar reaction from the azithromycin I usually got instead.

Fondots ,

I'm also in the process of learning Esperanto (there's actually a decent amount of us on Lemmy)

I don't foresee it ever being particularly useful on its own, but it is a really easy language to learn, and I think it's a great way to learn how to learn languages. I feel like after casually teaching myself it for a few years I'm a lot better prepared to learn another language somewhere down the road

There's a few Esperanto clubs and such out there, I'm not a part of any of them so I can't really comment on the community all that much.

One thing that does kind of interest me is Pasporta Servo, which is sort of a free Airbnb/couchsurfing thing for esperantists. Seems like that could be a cool way to travel around on the cheap and probably a good way to get more involved in the Esperanto community. Unfortunately most of my traveling is done with my wife and I haven't been able to convince her to learn Esperanto with me so I doubt she's gonna want to go hang out with me chatting with someone in a made up language in a foreign land.

Mostly I talk to my dog in it. She knows most of her basic commands in both English and Esperanto.