I don’t let anyone in my house but I would gladly setup a few chairs, picnic umbrella, folding table and a tray if frosty beverages on the front lawn. Why the front? Maybe some neighbors will join in and we can have a science block party with music, balloons, and Mr. Wizard/Bill Nye style physics demonstrations.
I have this notion that one day it would be nice to be neighborly enough to just put out a sign that says “fresh coffee”, “brunch”, “Beer on tap” or whatever as a signal that people should drop by for a chat.
But I’m not really in my neighborhood’s demographic. It’s an older neighborhood, and the only folks close to my age seem like extreme introverts.
You know how some people are really into.putting up flags? Some hang pride flags, others political flags or country flags, etc. I say you should hang a flag of your favorite hobby (assuming PG rated). Into D&D? Hang a D&D flag. Maybe one of those introverts will be curious enough to say “nice flag”, and you take it from there.
As many have already told you, people need more than just physical companionship.
I’d add that some people cannot be happy even with a healthful environment because of internal or personal issues. For example, certain cluster B personality disorders or traits cause that people feel empty deep down. They will enjoy things for a while, but often return to feeling incomplete, disconnected, etc.
Thanks again! I just moved a publicly shared photo album from Google Drive to Ente and it’s great. Just the fact that you can sort images properly is a relief. I can’t believe how horrible photos sites are in the 2020s. Ente certainly has a lot of missing features but I’ll be using it for stuff like sharing (less than 5GB) photo albums with friends and family.
Do not blame immich for running on shitty hardware. Just alone latency of the hard drives makes it slow as hell not even talking about a completely under powered CPU that is already at its limit to run a NAS and additional heavy services like Plex.
A SSD cache is a must for loading small files which is a must for a Photo cloud cause of thumbnails, previews etc.
Talking about features, maybe you should specify what you actually want and need instead of speaking only generally.
I genuinely can not find a single thing to like about it. It feels like development was stopped shortly after they finished the wire framing. Plex and QuMagie are significantly better (and they suck).
Mattresses. Some of the major brands offer a trial period but they also cost a ton of money and are still a hassle dealing with. Memory foam mattresses in a box can be great quality but if you dont like it, no chance youre getting it back in the box. If you brought it home in a car you now have to rent a truck, get some help and its just a bad experience if you want to return the bed.
The 2 companies I’m aware if that do returns (endy and purple) both pick it up from your house for you as part of the return. You are right in that companies with that deal tend to be overpriced, but it’s not like they can resell those used mattresses for the same price they got them.
Personally I prefer spring mattresses and ice never seen that sort of deal with them.
The TSA is something that shouldn’t exist in its current form. They very often fail their audit checks and normalize invading your privacy to an extreme degree like body scanners and pat downs. If water bottles are considered potentially explosive then why dump them on a bin next to a line of people where they can go off? This is low grade security theater that inconveniences passengers at best.
It’s basically the only type of jobs program that both sides of our broken government can agree on: petty nonsense that looks like it might do something useful, but really doesn’t, and only inconveniences the poors.
The main reason why it exists is to provide jobs. The number of people who work at the TSA at every airport in every state…no representative wants to cut those jobs.
I fucking hate that this is a thing. “We can’t stop doing this useless and/or detrimental thing, look at all the work it makes for other people to do!!!” Absolutely bonkers that it’s just a standard political argument.
“the idea of having more than those who have nothing is the very only reason shareholders can ever imagine someone would work for at all, thus they also falsely believe they would do something good when enforcing this by removing everything from those who already are vulnerable and thus create a living example of how you would end when you don’t help them rob even more.”
Here in the states when we say “medical insurance shouldn’t exist” what we mean is “the medical insurance industry shouldn’t exist”
Basically the cluster fuck of insurance companies we have now shouldn’t exist, we should just have a single payer type system where medical expenses are paid for through our tax dollars. In its current state it’s a nightmare to deal with.
A lot of private insurance in the US amounts to paying a couple hundred monthly to have the insurance and then they deny payment for basically anything and everything. So you pay them to pay out of pocket anyway.
Just got state insurance which covers everything, but very few offices accept it.
So yeah. Insurance in the US is super fucked up and people go without healthcare, even if they have insurance because they simply can’t afford it.
I do pay for my medical expenses out of pocket, because I can’t keep insurance long enough to ensure consistent cate.
I’ll give an example. Back in 21 I signed up for medicaid because I was poor enough to qualify. I get an email from my psychiatrist’s office “We can no longer treat you at this office because of your new medicaid status. We are not allowed to treat people on medicaid.” I asked, and they’re not even allowed to treat me if I pay out of pocket.
This is a new medicaid rule. Now if you’re on medicaid you can only see medicaid-approved providers.
So I canceled my medicaid. And I continue to pay out of pocket.
I’ve tried using other government-assisted programs before, with disastrous results. I’ve been kicked off the rolls before, at random, and I’ve had to go through the crash involved in stopping my medication, because while these government programs are helpful, they’re also buggy as fuck and can’t be relied upon.
That’s why you want a national health care program funded by taxes (they call it health insurance, but it’s mandatory and based on income, so it’s a tax, really). Private insurance is still allowed, but everyone gets a baseline.
Sure, this system has got its share of problems, and they’re massive, but if you need care, you generally receive it regardless of your financial situation. Again, bureaucracy happens and there are waiting times etc. etc., but the idea that you may lose everything because you got sick is so alien to me I have no words.
Yeah I guess the kind of Single Payer model I prefer can be conceptualised as “insurance.” But it feels more like health care is taxpayer funded. The similarity to insurance is just details for the detail nerds.
What’s wild is that if you replaced them with a single payer system or whatever else, you would still have a lot of bureaucratic work that needs to get done by the new system, so most if not all of those jobs would still exist - they would just shift from trying to deny people care to trying to connect people to care.
Well, if the government is accountable to the people, then pressures from below should shape its policies. But in America as-is I suppose you’re right that there would be no reason to think that that would happen, only a proletarian democracy can truly ensure that a government is responsive to the needs and desires of the people.
I agree with you 99%, and I’m only saying this incidentally: I think the world makes a lot more sense when we realize that change as such has real, ethically-valid costs associated with it.
We do want change, but change is a source of stress for a nervous system, so it’s always worth remembering that there’s a certain maximum rate of change we can follow while keeping people sane.
This was a key recognition, for instance, in finally succeeding at fixing various addictions of mine. I just slowed down the rate of the change and stopped trying to change overnight. And I’m not referring to dangerous withdrawal here. I’m talking about managing my own anxiety during the change to trigger snap-back.
I agree TSA’s gotta change, and stop doing their super invasive checks at the airports. But I just wanted to point out at a more global level there should be a little respect for such things as “We can’t just drop this all at once because we’ve been doing it for 25 years”.
No, it’d be more useful just on account of the harm they are not doing. I don’t give a rat’s ass what they do instead, hell, do a huge UBI experiment and just let them chill. Might as well.
I mean if a state removed the TSA and spent the money on something else, surely they could use the money to create as many jobs as they removed but in an actual useful field.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but I wouldn’t vote for a republican who got me a job, and I probably wouldn’t vote for anyone who got rid of my job (unless they were otherwise really great). So at least for me, getting rid of the job means you lose my vote and replacing it doesn’t necessarily gain my vote.
And people watching this exchange from the outside might vote against because they don’t like the idea of “minus a job for Bob, plus a job for Carl” as even-steven.
If it’s just for the jobs we can put them to work doing something useful like carrying bags for old people in the airport. Literally anything would be more useful.
This happened to me after a lunch break going back into the court room for jury duty. Didn't think about my soda until I got to the checkpoint, used to the TSA's mentality so figured the rest of it was forfeit. She just tells me to take a drink to show it's valid. Respect for people doing their job correctly, and using common sense.
Apart from the obvious failings of these checks, think about what kind of damage a single backpack of explosives can do to a packed airport during holiday season. You can literally put a ton of explosives on one of those trolleys, roll it into the waiting area and kill 200 people easily. No security whatsoever involved.
Reality is, most security measures are designed to keep the illusion of control. Nothing more. Penetration testers show again and again that you can easily circumvent practically all barriers or measures.
Police officers are mentally ill? Interesting take.
Also, we’re talking about pilots that you are already trusting with you’re life and the lives of hundreds of people with you. If they were mentally ill they could just crash the plane and kill you.
These guys are genuinely invested in maintaining the safety of human lives.
Well, conceivably those in the cockpit could be manipulated through other threats. Either threats to crash the plane, or threats to hurt the people in the back.
Nah, you literally just ground the plane whenever someone does something that rises to that level. Any threat someone could bring on a plane that could take it down is easily found by a bomb dog.
Part of their training includes risk assessment that teaches them to sacrifice individuals if it is in favor of maintaining control of the plane.
They flat out train them to shoot through a hostage someone is holding. That one person’s life isn’t worth sacrificing the lives of hundreds of others on board as well is casualties on the ground.
That’s what’s changed. Before, a hijacking meant a free trip to south America or Cuba. Now it means you’re likely to die if you don’t stop the hijackers. A planeful of pissed off passengers determined to live are gonna stop a would-be hijacker.
Plus the cockpit doors lock. Which can turn out to be a double-edged sword if the pilot has a breakdown and decides he wants to take everyone else with him.
Rigidly hierarchical control structures always carry the implicit assumption that those at the top are the good guys. (That is if they’re being sold as a way to ensure good)
The common trope about “if you don’t have anything to hide why have privacy?” is overturned by challenging that assumption. Sometimes the guys doing the surveillance turn bad and then it’s a worse situation than if there wasn’t total surveillance.
To be fair a explosion in a on the side of a line not gonna kill anyone, now a explosion in the airplane windows, maybe?, i get their argument, not that’s a good argument
According to the story I heard as to the origin of the “no liquids over X amount” rule, years ago there was a terrorist that tried to smuggle hydrogen peroxide and acetone - which can be used to rather easily synthesize triacetone triperoxide (TATP, a highly sensitive explosive) - onto a plane in plastic toiletry bottles. They got caught and foiled somehow, and then the TSA started restricting liquids on planes. This was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, if I recall correctly.
And I happen to know, from a reliable source, of someone who accidentally made TATP in a rotary evaporator in an academic lab. So it seems plausible.
Not that the rule is actually effective prevention against similar attacks, nor that the TSA even knows what the reason is behind what they do at this point, haha. I just thought it was an interesting story.
No, acetone and peroxide, and generally a small amount of HCl as a catalyst. Makes triacetone triperoxide (TATP). It’s a primary explosive, but far too sensitive for real legitimate work. It’s primarily used by terrorist organizations because it’s easy to acquire the material and easy to make. The infamous shoe bomber had TATP in the soles of his shoes, fortunately the TATP wasn’t completely dry and that’s why he had trouble getting it to go off.
In flight, yeah totally impractical and not worth even trying.
Theoretically, if I were to attempt it, I’d get my liquids through the checkpoint, mix them together and then wait the few hours for the precipitate to fall out. Then go to the bathroom pour that through a handful of paper towels, or even some coffee filters I brought in my carry on. Then, put that into some type of confinement like a metal water bottle. Lined with paper towels to pull the last bit of moisture out of the crystals. A couple more hours later and there’s a pretty sensitive device that could be set off dropping, throwing, hitting, or whatever.
That’s a way. There’s many, many ways that someone could go about it. Also agree with the sentiment that the TSA is complete theater and doesn’t actually do much to keep anyone safe. But they’re working government jobs, getting paid ok-not great, with decent benefits and can get a retirement out of it.
The shoe bomber had what was probably good quality stuff, but he was missed his flight due to looking suspicious and being pulled for questioning, he stayed the night at the airport all the while walking around with these shoes that were hollowed out on the bottom. Probably nervous as hell and sweating all this time, plus walking through puddles and such. He managed to dampen the crystals so the next day when he got on his flight they were too desensitized to detonate.
Requires an acid catalyst for the reaction to actually proceed, but yeah, could definitely ruin your day - although a lungful of chlorine gas is nothing to sneeze at either.
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