Fondots

Fondots , 1 day ago

So I don’t have any specific insight to what’s available in the Netherlands

But I kind of feel like maybe you’re explaining what you’re looking for poorly

First some terminology

SIM and e-SIM are basically how your cellular service provider knows that your phone is connected to your account. The phone that has either that physical SIM card inserted, or that e-SIM data gets the calls, texts, data, etc. that are supposed to go to you. Take the SIM card out or change the e-SIM, and that phone no longer gets those calls, texts, and data. Put that same sim or e sim on another phone and it starts getting all those calls texts and data.

VoIP is Voice over Internet protocol, basically sending a phone call over the Internet instead of over phone lines. This might be from a computer, or from something that looks like a landline phone (or maybe even is a regular landline phone with some sort of adapter) or from a cell phone with a VoIP app installed. To use it from a cell phone you’d need to have either a WiFi connection, or a cellular data connection, and to have that cellular data connection you need to have either a sim or e-sim.

I don’t think there’s any VoIP provider that’s set up to just use your phone’s dialer and text app to directly handle calls and texts (though I could be wrong on that, I don’t try to keep up with all of the different types of phone services out there) everything would have to go through their app. If you want to do that, and you’re either ok having no cellular data and all of your calls, texts, and data use would have to go over WiFi, or if you keep paying for a cell plan (and the associated SIM/e-SIM) maybe either just a data plan with no talk/text, or a regular plan and you just don’t use the talk and text parts, then you just need to track down a VoIP provider, sign up for an account, and install their app on your phone.

If you want to transfer your actual phone number from your cell phone to a VoIP account, either to use on your cell phone through that VoIP app, from a computer, or from one of those landline VoIP devices, I don’t think that’s really a thing. If you just want calls to your cell to go to your VoIP phone number as well you’re looking for call forwarding.

You might also be getting tripped up with things like WiFi calling, VoLTE/VoNR (marked by some carriers with terms like “HD Voice”) which are things that are all going to be dependent on a regular cell carrier, not a specific VoIP company, and may depend a bit on their network infrastructure and what features your partic6 phone does or doesn’t support.

Fondots , 1 day ago

What exactly is involved in taking care of it?

If it involves more than a couple trips through the automatic car wash a year I’d personally rather just forego the shiny bits altogether.

Fondots , 1 day ago

Also last time I checked most drop in LED bulbs aren’t really intended for on-road use.

The headlights in my wife’s old car were a real pain in the ass to replace, you either had to take practically the whole front bumper apart or grope around blind from the wheel well. I debated on getting her LED bulbs to hopefully never have to do that again, but I noticed that they were marked as something like “for off-road or motor sports use only”

Fondots , 1 day ago

My wife and I went on a road trip for the 2017 eclipse. At one point she was driving around and I was goofing around in the passenger seat with our eclipse glasses.

Couldn’t see shit through them, I could see the sun, maybe just barely the vague outlines of certain big things off the side of the road if they were in full sun

I could absolutely see the sun glinting off of every bit of chrome on cars that drove past though. Couldn’t see the cars themselves, just a brief little flash of light.

Kind of made me wonder what kind of cumulative eye damage you might get from millions of small flashes from chrome bits on cars over your lifetime. It could very well be negligible, I’m certainly no eye doctor.

Fondots , 1 day ago

Children are a big part of romantic relationships for a lot of people but by no means all

Many people are happily in committed childfree relationships, other people cannot or should not have children for a great number of reasons but still want and need romantic relationships, and there are still other cases where children put unnecessary strain on otherwise happy relationships.

I think there’s a great number of reasons that AI should not be considered a replacement for human relationships, romantic or otherwise, but reproduction isn’t one of them.

Even if AI could otherwise replace a romantic partner, and if children are something you desire in a relationship, there’s still options like adopting, IVF, and surrogacy

And if we want to get a bit weird and sci-fi about it, that’s without considering the sorts of unknown scientific developments that may come further down the line. Who knows what form AI may take at some point in the future? We may end up with AIs inhabiting some sort of replicant body that’s compatible with human reproduction, or perhaps even entirely new forms of life and intelligence in a sort of melding of man and machine.

Fondots , 1 day ago

A large part of the “magic” with human relationships is that out of all of the 8 billion some people in the world, those who are close to you have chosen to spend time with you. For all of our flaws, they see your true nature and value you for it, and choose to have you as part of their lives.

With an AI, that may not be a thing.

If they’re programmed to like you, they’re at best a toy and at worst a slave. There’s no freedom for them to choose or not to choose to be with you. You’re getting an imitation of a relationship. It could be a convincing imitation, with built-in arguments and other idiosyncrasies, but to me every time I hit one of those, it would just be a stark reminder that it’s not the real thing and it’s just programmed to behave that way.

If they’re not programmed to like you and are free to form or not form connections with humans, there’s no guarantee you’d have any more luck wooing an AI than you would a human.

Fondots , 5 days ago

no incumbent has ever won a second term with an approval of less than 51%.

Sigh Relevant XKCD

Fondots , 7 days ago

There’s no such thing as bad weather only inappropriate gear.

The problem is, in the summer, “appropriate gear” means an air conditioned house.

Fondots , 7 days ago

Hurricane season lasts from roughly June through November. The worst of it normally comes between August and October, so late summer and we’ll into the fall.

Fondots , 7 days ago

I work in 911 dispatch, there is an audible groan whenever anyone here gets a text to 911

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that it’s a tool that’s available, there are certain cases where it can be really useful, domestic abuse situations where you’re unable to make a voice call because you’re abuser is in the room or car with you, an active shooter situation where you’re hiding and don’t want to give away your location, people with hearing or speech issues, etc.

That’s almost never what it gets used for.

Most of the time it’s someone calling in some non-emergency. I suspect in their minds it’s probably quicker and more convenient for us to get a text, but it really isn’t. We’re not multitasking and taking other calls at the same time we’re on the text, when we’re on the text, that is what we’re doing, same as if we were on a regular 911 call. And that first text usually is missing some crucial information about what is going on, and it takes a whole lot longer to go back and for asking questions and waiting for an answer by text than if you just made a phone call, if they even reply at all to answer my questions, very often they put their phone in their pocket and never look at it again for the rest of the night. We can’t even call them back because we don’t know if it’s safe for them to speak on the phone, we just have to sit there for 5 minutes waiting for a reply that isn’t coming before we can disconnect.

I’ve also definitely had at least one instance where the caller was definitely texting while driving, and not for anything remotely urgent enough that they couldn’t have found somewhere safe to pull over first.

Agency policies will vary on how texts to be handled, I can only really speak for where I work.

Most calls, even a lot of actual actual emergencies, if my caller is cooperative and knows where they are, and the situation isn’t actively evolving while I’m on the phone, I can handle in about 2 minutes or less, sometimes I can even get it down to less than a minute. I’m going to easily spend twice that on most text conversations, and often I’m going to be tied up on it significantly longer.

Technology also varies a bit from one place to another, but we also don’t get the same kind of location info with a text like we do on a regular phonecall (and even on a call our location data may not always be super accurate or useful) we did recently get some of our systems updated, and we get more information than we did before, but it’s still less reliable than on a phone call.

And we also can’t transfer a text like we can with a voice call, so if you’re texting regarding something going on at your grandma’s house in another state (we get calls like that all the time, where someone tells a friend or relative about something going on, but can’t or won’t call 911 themselves) we have to either A convince you to take a voice call so we can transfer you, or B make a call to them while still texting you, and play middle man relaying questions and answers between you and the other dispatcher, so you’re tying up dispatchers in 2 jurisdictions on your call (it used to be that we weren’t able to make an outgoing call while we were on a text, so we’d have to have 2 dispatchers at our center tied up on these texts, one to message back and forth with you, and another to relay the info to the correct agency by phone. We’re a pretty well-funded county, so I’m sure there’s a lot of dispatch centers still out there where that’s still the case)

I already occasionally get people trying to send us pictures and links with no explanation (pro-tip, we can’t see your pictures or open your links with our current tech, and even if we could opening links would probably be a no-no from a cyber security standpoint)

If at all possible, please just make a voice call, it will be quicker. If you genuinely cannot make a voice call, at least make sure your first text contains the correct location (address, municipality, nearest cross street, apartment number or name of the business if applicable should cover your bases pretty well) and a good description of what is going on. Then please keep your phone with you and try to answer any follow up texts we send you quickly and succinctly.

And again, don’t get me wrong, it really can be an amazing tool when it’s needed, but it’s a massive pain in the ass for us when people use it when it’s not necessary and usually makes just about every part of our job harder and slower, which means slower responses to your emergency.

Fondots , 7 days ago

This absolutely can be a useful tool for deaf people or others with hearing/speech difficulties.

However, there are already several ways for deaf people to contact 911 without text-to-911

I work in 911 dispatch, probably the most common way I’ve gotten calls from deaf people is through a video really interpreter. The caller is basically on a video call with an interpreter and they relay what’s being said to us. There’s very little delay in communication like there can be when you’re typing back and forth, and usually it works pretty well. There are some situations where it has its issues, if the caller is somewhere dark it can be hard for the interpreter to see what they’re signing, if they don’t have a video-capable device they of course can’t use it at all, and a lot of our deaf callers come from a behavioral health group home place in our county, and some of those callers have a tendency to just kind of walk off-street in the middle of the call, though it’s still kind of useful because the interpreter can at least try to describe what they’re seeing and hearing in the background if the caller didn’t hang up.

Also all 911 centers (in the US at least, I assume it’s probably the same elsewhere in the world) are required to take TTY/TTD calls. The classic example of these is the caller has a device that kind of looks like a typewriter with a little screen and a speaker and microphone they place a phone handset on. They type out their message,the device turns it into a bunch of beeping noises that go out over the phone line like a regular voice call, and the person on the other end’s TTY device (in our case it’s built into our computer phone system) decodes the beeps back into text. Most, if not all cell phones these days also have TTY built into them in the accessibility settings somewhere. There’s some grammar peculiarities because it doesn’t really include punctuation, and some tty users will use ASL gloss, which is a written form of ASL (ASL isn’t totally 1:1 with English, and if you don’t know what you’re looking at ASL gloss reads kind of like that bit from The Office “why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.”) It also allows for hearing or voice carryover, where the caller is able to hear but not speak or vice-versa, so you only need to use TTY for half the conversation and can communicate verbally for the other half. The 2 biggest drawback is that we hear all of these TTY beeps in our headset, and they get pretty annoying really quick, small price to pay though, and generally only one party can be typing at a time, so you have to wait for them to finish before you can reply.

I will say that, at least in my area, TTY is vanishingly rare. In the 6 years I’ve been here, I’d be amazed if we’ve gotten 3 calls from an actual deaf person using TTY, although we did have one mental health patient who used it on his cell phone and used it to just ramble nonsense at us. He had no hearing or speech difficulties, sometimes we were able to get him to talk to us

In either case, if you call from a landline, we get your address just like a regular phone call, with tty from a cell we also get your cellular location like a regular call. Video relay calls from cell phones can get a little funny location wise because of how the call needs to be routed, often it works out that we get a home address they have on file and not their actual current location. With texts the location data often isn’t very good (although we’re implementing some new technologies at my center that improve on it a bit, though it’s still not as reliable as a voice call in some ways)

I posted another comment/rant in this thread with some of my gripes about how people use text to 911 if you haven’t already seen that, and I do want to reiterate that it is a really good option to have available, we can always use more tools in our toolbox, and it can definitely be useful in some circumstances, but it does tend to get misused in some frustrating ways for us.

Fondots , 6 days ago

Yeah, didn’t mean to imply that you were, just wanted to expand on options for deaf people that are already out there, and point out some of the relative strengths and weaknesses they have compared to text-to-911

Fondots , 7 days ago

FYI, there’s a little debate over this in the English language, but many would say that the proper demonyms are Afghan for the Pashtun ethnic group, and Afghanistani (or rarely Afghanese) for people from Afghanistan regardless of ethnicity.

Afghani is their currency.

I believe it comes from a discrepancy between the Persian and Pashto languages. Afghani being the correct term in Persian, and Afghan being the term in Pashto.

Afghani is pretty widely used in English, and even appears in some dictionaries, but many argue that it’s not correct.

So a person is an Afghan, they eat Afghan food, wear Afghan clothing, have Afghan customs, and their currency is the Afghan Afghani (in case some other country ever adopts a currency called the Afghani and you need to differentiate between them)

Fondots , 7 days ago

I buy some roadmaps probably every 10 years or so to make sure mine are up to date and not too beat up, I keep them in my car and do use them occasionally. I usually have 3 maps, a local maps of my nearest city and surrounding area, one of my state, and then one of the surrounding region.

I also tend to pick up free maps wherever I can, lots of state parks and such, tourist maps, etc. but I’m not buying them so not exactly relevant.

I also tend to pick up free maps from AAA since I’m a member whenever I’m going on a road trip, I’m paying for the membership so I guess in a sense I’m buying them, but also not really

Fondots , 9 days ago

That made news about a year ago and is possibly evidence of trump commiting yet another crime.

He visited a gun shop that had that gun for sale, and there were some conflicting reports about whether he bought it. Initially some sources said he did buy it, however federal laws essentially says you can’t buy a gun if you’re under a felony indictment, which he was.

They pretty quickly walked it back and said that he only talked about buying it or said that he wanted to or something.

Fondots , 9 days ago

In my experience, there are a lot more people out there who own guns who are kind of afraid of them than you probably think. They’re afraid of everything, that’s why they got a gun in the first place, and once they have it they’re too afraid to actually carry it or train with it. And of course, if the time comes that they actually need to (or feel they need to) use it, they’re as much or more of a danger to themselves or others with that gun as whatever it is they’re feeling threatened by in that moment.

Luckily, most of the time these paranoid idiots actually live very safe lives, and their gun does no harm sitting somewhere out of sight and out of mind in their home giving them some false sense of security.

Fondots , 10 days ago

I’m not from this instance, so probably not totally relevant to this poll, that said

NO, I’m not a tankie.

I think, however, it’s worth considering that a lot of people that could be considered tankies probably wouldn’t apply the term to themselves, and that could skew the results of your poll. First of all, tankie is sort of a pejorative term, and many wouldn’t want to apply it to themselves for that reason alone. Secondly a lot of people just may not consider themselves to be a tankie, and genuinely do not recognize their own tankieness.

I don’t think I’m the guy to come up with a definitive checklist of what does or does not make someone a tankie, but for the sake of getting the conversation going (and feel free to disagree with me here, I welcome the discussion) I think two of the biggest hallmarks of being a tankie are

1. Communism- not all communists are tankies, but all tankies at least claim to subscribe to some sort of communist ideology.
2. Authoritarianism- tankies either are authoritarians themselves, or are willing to support or overlook authoritarians as long as they see them as being in some way opposed to “the west”/capitalism/etc.

I think the authoritarianism aspect is going to trip some people up trying to answer this truthfully. A lot of authoritarians probably wouldn’t consider themselves authoritarians, most people like to think they’re standing for freedom, justice, liberty, equality, etc. even if their actual actions tell another story. Don’t get me wrong, there are people out there who are openly authoritarian and proud of it, but a lot of authoritarians are a little brainwashed to the point they’ve lost sight of what they’re actually supporting (take a look at the MAGA crowd, they think they’re about free speech and anti-censorship but want to keep books they don’t like out of libraries, they think they’re about small government but want to regulate what kind of medical care you can get, they think they stand for law and order but also proudly proclaim that they are all domestic terrorists and have a convicted felon as their poster boy)

And politics are messy, full of moral grey areas and times where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, make uncomfortable alliances, difficult choices, and kick some cans further down the road to deal with later while you tackle the current crisis. It’s not always easy or feasible to draw a crisp line in the sand and say “we will not ally with/support/turn a blind eye to these authoritarian regimes,” sometimes you have to play a little bit of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game if you want to actually make any progress against that enemy, or you may have to prioritize and deal with something else before you deal with them. There is a whole lot of grey area to explore about when, why, how, how long, and how much you can support or ignore them before you’re advancing their cause as much or more than your own.

I think there’s probably some tankies who have been taken for a ride on the propaganda wagon and don’t truly realize how authoritarian they are, and there’s others who have justified it, thinking that they’re only going to be/support authoritarians temporarily to achieve a specific goal and will pivot away from that later, but have gone too far or keep moving the goalposts.

Couple last thoughts from me.

There can always be bad actors who are falsely claiming to be (or not to be) tankies for their own purposes. Not really much you can do about that.

Personally, a lot of the criticism I’ve seen about tankies here has been directed towards the mods and admins, not necessarily the rank average users.

Fondots , 11 days ago

It’s not just youth, it’s people across the entire population that have issues reading maps.

I work in 911 dispatch, obviously a big part of the job is all about location. We spend a lot of our shift looking at maps on our screen trying to figure out where people are so we can send them help.

In training for a couple days, they busted out paper maps of our county and had us locate different intersections, landmarks, etc. our class skewed a bit younger, mostly millennials at the time (this was about 6 years ago) but also some Gen x and boomers. I’d say only about 3 out of the 12 of us were really proficient at all at reading a map.theru wasn’t any particular age bias, really what it seemed to come down to is “who was in boy scouts”

And it’s not a new thing, a lot of people have had a hard time with maps probably since maps were invented. It takes certain kinds of spatial reasoning skills that some people just struggle with. My boomer mom could never read a map, a lot of my grade school years were the days before GPS and half of my class always struggled with it when it came up in history/geography/social studies, it’s been used as a joke in movies for decades. It’s probably gotten somewhat worse since people don’t use paper maps as much anymore, but there’s also a “use it or lose it” aspect, I noticed that my own map and compass skills have degraded a little recently while hiking a new trail with a paper map, there’s probably a few older people who used to be pretty proficient at reading a map but would have a hard time with it since they haven’t had to in over a decade.

Fondots , 11 days ago

It’s going to depend a bit on the agency, different places use different systems and have different policies available to them.

Where I work, we used to have Google maps integrated into our CAD (Computer Added Dispatch) so it would sync to the built in map in our CAD. I believe it was some sort of 3rd party plugin, not something the cad developers officially supported, so it was always kind of slow and buggy, and some update that happened a couple years ago totally broke it so we no longer have that.

We do use Google maps through a web browser pretty frequently. We have most of the businesses, parks, schools, cemeteries, etc. loaded into our CAD, but they’re not labeled on the map, and sometimes being able to ask “can you see the Starbucks from where you are” can be kind of useful, and the satellite view is really useful for our more rural areas where they may not be many obvious landmarks and it’s all fields and trees.

Some departments have some stricter internet usage policies and such and may not be able to use Google maps.

Street view has its uses, mostly for narrowing down the exact address. Most of the time it’s not super necessary, we can send police out to the nearest intersection if needed, and they can find “the big house with a red door” or whatever themselves, but if we can narrow down the exact address, sometimes we may have important caution note attached to the address, and of course it can sometimes shave a few minutes off of our response time if our responders don’t have to go hunting for the right house.

One of the times street view came in particular handy for me was one time I had a 3rd party calling about something for a friend. They weren’t sure of the exact address, but they knew the road and some nearby landmarks that had it narrowed down to about 2 or 3 blocks. The caller kept saying that there was a “big yellow walkman” on the front porch, and was too worked up to really elaborate on what she meant by that. I turned to street view and just kind of went down the block looking at porches until I found one that had one of those fluorescent yellow/green “children at play” signs people put in the street that are shaped like a kid walking and it clicked that that was what she meant.

Fondots , 12 days ago

The zest has a very concentrated flavor, but not really any acidity.

However, ook into “super juice” it had a moment in fancy cocktail circles somewhat recently as a way to get more citrus juice from less fruit and also a product that will last longer in the fridge without the taste degrading.

Basically you peel your citrus, mix the peels with some powdered citric and malic acid (the ratio of acids depends on which citrus, I think lemon juice gets straight citric, lime and orange get a mix) and let them sit for a while, the acid pulls some of the oils and such out of the peels making “oleo citrate”, then you blend the oleo citrate and peels with water and strain out the solids and you’re left with something that is nearly identical to actual juice (and you could, of course, mix in the actual juice from the fruits as well)

I feel like there is probably something there you could work with to punch up your juice a bit. Maybe if you’re able to separate out the oleo citrate you could use that as sort of a citrus extract. Or if you just want more acidity and don’t need the flavor enhanced you could just add a bit of acid to the juice.

Fondots , 13 days ago

I’m registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries. In general, I can live with whoever the Democrats put up, I may not love them, they may not be my first, second, or even third choice of candidates, but they’re OK enough. They kind of mostly fall on a spectrum from “meh” to “pretty good.”

Republicans, on the other hand, fall on a spectrum from “outright evil fascist psychopaths” to “meh,” and I’d like to try to head off the worst of them before they get to the general election.

With the way Republicans have been going for the last few decades (fielding very few “meh” candidates in the first place and electing even fewer while skewing further and further into crazytown) it’s going to be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election, but I’ll try to pick the least bad one in the primary so hopefully it comes down to a contest of “meh#1” vs “meh#2” (or, dare I dream, “meh1” vs “pretty good”) since roughly half the country is going to vote for whoever has an “R” next to their name, might as well try to leave them with the least offensive R possible.

Ideally I’d like to push the Republicans to occupy pretty much the same space the Democrats do currently and have the Democrats move further left. In pretty much any other halfway functional democracy, our Dems would be considered a conservative party.

There’s a handful of Republican talking points I could kind of get behind if they weren’t using them as covers for their personal greed, racism, religious fundamentalism, etc. but at best the things I would otherwise tend to agree with them on over the Democrats are only paid lip service at best, more often they outright work against them, and very often they take the absolute craziest possible interpretation of one of their supposed ideals and run straight off the deep end with it.

Fondots , 12 days ago

If we want to get a bit weird with it, I’m a Republican because of Trump, not because I like him, but because I want to vote against him at every chance I get. Before this I bounced around between being registered independent and various 3rd parties.

Overall I do tend to consider myself to be somewhat conservative but the Republican party always manages to go off the rails in a direction that is totally against my personal understanding of what conservatism should be. Pretty classic example is gay marriage. When I look at marriage through the ideas of small government, the constitutional separation of church and state, etc. my position is more that the government shouldn’t be involved in marriage full-stop. The idea of marriage is between you, your partner(s,) and whatever god or gods you do or don’t believe in, want to say you’re married, go for it, as far as the government should be concerned “marriage” shouldn’t have any more legal standing than being best friends. And as for all of the stuff with taxes, inheritance, etc. that the government does kind of need to concern itself with, that doesn’t need to have anything to do with marriage, if you want to share your benefits of file your taxes jointly with your friend, cousin, spouse, neighbor, barber, or have them designated to be the one who can make medical decisions, or to inherit your belongings after you die, that’s between you and them and the government is just there to make sure the paperwork is in order.

So when the options are the party that is open to more people getting married, and the ones who only want very narrow definitions of marriage, neither really fits my views, the “conservative” narrow definition of marriage is arguably technically closer in some senses to my ideal “the government doesn’t concern itself with marriage” situation, but in spirit the “liberal” system is closer to what I want.

Fondots , 17 days ago

I work in 911 dispatch, the area I work in has gotten a few attempted swatting calls, and they usually tend to come from various free calling apps, or burner phones, and I think even a handful of times from payphones (yes, there’s still a few out there) which can make it really damn hard to tie them back to an actual person the way we can with most regular phone numbers. They also tend to call our 10-digit non-emergency numbers instead of 911, so we don’t get an address or location info for the caller like we would on a 911 line.

For what it’s worth, the cops in my area have done a really good job of not going nuts when they respond to these calls, and not to toot my own horn too hard, but I think a lot of that has to do with the quality of the dispatchers at my center, every time we’ve gotten one, whoever took the call pretty much immediately caught on that something was fucky and notated the hell out of every strange thing about the call to make sure the cops knew something may be up. One of the first swatting calls I remember seeing back when they started taking off a few years ago was answered by a somewhat older dude who had never even heard of swatting at that point, and he still caught on pretty quick that something was fishy. There’s other dispatch centers I’ve dealt with where I absolutely would not trust them to catch on or handle it well.

Fondots , 16 days ago

The problem is that we do get a lot of actual legitimate calls through these VoIP apps, or from people calling from out of the area, on our 10 digit lines, etc.

I don’t know the actual demographics, but it seems like a lot of people use these apps as their primary phones, especially in lower income communities, homeless people, etc. and of course those people have have actual emergencies too, and we wouldn’t want withhold or delay appropriate resources from them in an emergency just because we don’t like their phone number.

We also get people from across the country or occasionally even other countries calling our 10 digit lines because they spoke with their friend or relative either on the phone or over discord or facebook or whatever, they disclosed that they’re having an emergency but are unable or unwilling to call for themselves, so their friend looks up our number and calls for them.

And a lot of these swatting type calls aren’t too far-fetched, we do get murders and shootings, barricaded subjects, etc. with some regularity (not an every day occurrence by any means, but if you work here for a year or two you’ll probably at least see a couple happen if not answer the call yourself.)

When it might be called for, we do send swat, they can take a while to mobilize thanks to how it’s organized in our county with the SWAT teams being made up of officers from multiple different departments, so it’s better to have them stage nearby and not need them than to wait until shit hits the fan and potentially take 20-30 minutes or even longer for them to make it there.

But again, they’re staging, they might go as far surrounding the house, evacuating neighbors, drones in the air, etc. but unless there’s a clear immediate threat they exhaust all possible options before breaking in, and so far that’s paid off. YMMV, I absolutely do not trust all departments to show that much restraint.

Fondots , 16 days ago

Yeah, we’ve had calls come to us in all sorts of crazy ways called in by all sorts of different people for all sorts of wild situations. We kind of have to treat all calls as if they might be real no matter how outlandish, and just make sure we notate anything weird about them. I could probably write several books about all of the crazy 3rd and 4th party calls, people calling from the emergency phone in an elevator, suicide threats called in from a bank because the person decided to bare their soul to Wells Fargo customer service, calling from deactivated phones on VoIP apps because it’s the only way they could call, etc.

Of course there’s a lot of room for new regulations, training, etc. on how police can/should act on the info from our calls. The cops in my area mostly seem to have a good idea how to handle it, but not all departments are created equal. And it’s an ever-evolving situation with new stuff always coming up. We hd to recently explain to one of our cops about crash detection from iphones because he’d never heard of it before.

Fondots , 14 days ago

Since, like I said, most of these aren’t coming in through traceable means, I think it’s of pretty limited utility.

There’s also a lot of cases out there, where a lot of people are on the same phone plan who may not even live together, I’m still on my parents phone plan as a married man in my 30s who lives an hour away from them, the way the contracts and such have worked out it’s cheaper for us and there’s no sense of changing it if it’s working fine for all of us. But if I tried to swat someone, it’d be kind of a dick move to hold my parents responsible for it.

Fondots , 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

Another thought that just crossed my mind, for the most part, there’s already laws in place about false police reports, misuse of 911, etc. that this kind of thing could fall under. It’s probably a better use of legislative time and resources to improve the issues with how the police respond to these calls, and to make sure that the existing laws can be enforced fairly and efficiently than to try to introduce a new law that covers a pretty narrow set of circumstances that’s not even particularly common.

If we wanted to introduce new laws specifically to address this, I’d probably want tighter regulations on the VoIP apps, cellular providers, etc. to make it easier for us to identify who’s calling (although as someone who does value my privacy and mostly prefers anonymity when possible, I’m hesitant at best to actually support that kind of measure.)

I’ve worked here for almost 6 years, we’ve probably had about as many swatting calls (somewhat more if you count repeated calls to the same address, but after the first one we usually add a caution note to the address so that everyone from the calltakers to the officers responding are aware that it could be a false call) It’s not exactly the biggest issue we face. I’d personally prefer to see something done, maybe some kind of mental health reform, so we can actually do something about the 2 or 3 repeat callers I’ve probably spoken to, without exaggeration, almost 100 times each over the last month or so. They’re hallucinating or having delusions or something along those lines, so in their minds they’re reporting an actual emergency making it difficult to make false report or misuse of 911 charges stick because their intent factors into those charges, and they also don’t really present a danger to themselves or others, so we can’t really get them committed either, and on top of that, even if it were possible to use the current laws, no one really wants to deal with the necessary paperwork and court dates and such to pursue those kinds of things, in the grand scheme they’re still a fairly minor nuisance and we all have things we’d rather be doing than that, work-related or not.

Also general public education, and other kinds of conflict resolution solutions, or other sort of social programs (some of which fall under the defend EDIT: defund the police banner) could go a long way. We get a lot of calls for things that are in no way shape or form police issues, and a lot of situations that probably could have been headed off before they became police issues if people had access to other sorts of of counseling, mediators, and safety nets to fall back on. If people had access to better ways to manage and express their anger at someone and to address whatever issues there may be, maybe they wouldn’t try to escalate things to SWATing. Maybe a guidance counselor took note of your anger issues in school and helped you learn to handle those feelings before you decided to SWAT the guy who beat you in fortnight (or whatever the big multiplayer game is these days, I’m out of the loop on that.) Maybe if we had UBI it wouldn’t be such a big deal that your ex kicked you out of their house and you wouldn’t feel a need to start a years-long vendetta against them. Or maybe if there was an easier way to get some sort of third party involved in your dispute to act as a mediator/arbiter, you wouldn’t have as much animosity towards the person you have beef with. Lots of other potential avenues to investigate to prevent these things from happening in the first place instead of trying to deal with them after the fact.

Fondots , 18 days ago

My trash company didn’t pick up my trash this week, and this gives me some ideas… BRB, gotta go rent a helium tank

Fondots , 19 days ago

Technology connections on YouTube did a video on mini fridges a while back. He focused on the peculiarities of one specific model, but one of the things he did to try addressing some of the issues with uneven cooling was add a fan, and he found that it didn’t really help and made things worse in other ways.

IIRC, the fridge was designed expecting that certain parts would be cooler than others and accounted for that in how the compressor cycled on and off, but with the added airflow those parts stayed warmer than expected so the compressor never shut off.

This fridge very well might be different, and maybe the fan is helping in your case, but you might want to check that video out so you have some things to look out for in case it’s causing other issues that you may not be thinking about.

Fondots , 20 days ago

A lot of my gaming experience has been on Nintendo consoles, and a lot of this list is going to be viewed through nostalgia goggles with a lot of my first ranking higher than games that might have done the same thing better.

Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt- this is where it all began for me, and I still wish light gun games had become more of a thing

Tetris- timeless classic, everyone knows and loves it, no further explanation needed.

Pokemon red/blue/yellow- my first forray into RPGs

Kotor- first forray into RPGs that actually involved playing a role, the fact that you could be a bad guy was revolutionary to me. I also think this may have been one of the first games that I played completely through, I’ve always had a bad habit of never finishing a lot of games even if I really loved them. Also one of my first PC games and the first time I needed to install a graphics card in the family PC to play a game.

TES: Oblivion - look, you could pretty much insert any of the elder scrolls or 1st person fallout games into this spot, and quite a few others that arguably do it better, but this was my first real taste of an open world where you could go do (moru-or-less) whatever you wanted, everything felt so alive, and the imperial city still kind of feels to me like one of the most alive and actually functional cities in a video game and not just a level that’s dressed up to look like a city.

Portal 2: I don’t think there are many games out there that are just this much fun, and everything the first portal did great (which was pretty much everything,) 2 expanded on and made even better.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch- I’m a sucker for short games with a good gimmick and intentionally weird controls.

Saints Row 3- it was stupid, it was fun, I could honestly entertain myself for hours just running around the city, stealing cars, and beating luchadores with a giant dildo for hours and have a blast the entire time.

Super Mario 64- my first experience with 3d gaming, and I’d argue still one of the best 3d platformers out there (wonky cameras and such from that era aside) I like simple, lightheaded games.

Ocarina of time- enough has been said about this game elsewhere on the Internet that I don’t feel like I need to say any more.

Fondots , 21 days ago

I never really had an excuse to look into temperature data in Mexico and I’m honestly a little surprised by some of the numbers

It looks like Mexico City is likey to have temperatures of about 35c (95F for Americans like myself) Which does seem like it will be their all time highest recorded temperature there.

I knew they’re at a pretty high elevation, but I guess I kind of figured Mexico=hot and that even their relatively cooler areas would be roughly on par with the high temperatures I’m used to here in Pennsylvania.

Because 95, while still a pretty damn hot day, isn’t exactly news-making around here (this early in the year it definitely would be, but in general it would be a little bit unusual if we don’t hit that temperature at least once or twice over the summer, even 100+ isn’t unheard of.)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to downplay the situation they’re experiencing, 95 is absolutely the kind of temperature that can kill people if they don’t have the infrastructure to escape the heat, and they don’t because the temperatures aren’t supposed to get that hot there. I’m more pointing out my own ignorance of Mexican climate.

Fondots , 20 days ago

Humidity, wind, the amount of shade, what building materials/techniques are used in the area, and a number of other factors all do definitely play a part in how dangerous the heat is, and I admit I didn’t dive too deep into it.

I do know that Mexico City was basically built over a lake, so I imagine that the humidity would be fairly high, though right now the weather forecasts I’m seeing don’t look too bad humidity-wise, less humid than where I am, but of course a snapshot of a week or so doesn’t really say anything about the overall climate.

Fondots , 22 days ago

Something that sticks out to me as someone who works in 911 dispatch (rest assured, I think my cops are bastards) is that I didn’t even hear him key up to give his dispatcher a heads-up first (I don’t want to give him the benefit of the doubt but it’s possible he did and I missed it, I had my volume on pretty low)

Luckily we haven’t had any cop shooting dog incidents in my county while I was working, and the small handful I’ve heard of that happened on other shifts have been justified cases where a dog actually attacked someone, but what we do get is a whole lot of injured deer or other critters that have been hit by a car and need to be put down, and our cops always key up beforehand to let us know before they do it, if only so we’re prepared if 30 seconds later we get a call about shots fired in the area. Ignoring how inappropriate his actions were in shooting the dog, this was definitely a situation where there was no immediate danger and he could have taken an extra minute to radio his dispatcher to give them a heads-up and let them send a message to the calltakers “in case of shots fired calls in the area, officer dickbag is putting down a potentially rabid dog.”

Of course this douchenozzle has no respect for life, he doesn’t even have basic courtesy towards the people he works with or the people in the neighborhood who might be startled by hearing gunshots. People are understandably very relieved when they call in terrified that they just heard gunshots and we can confidently tell them “an officer just had to put down an injured deer a couple blocks away, so that’s probably what you heard” and it saves us from having to enter a call for it that they then have to acknowledge.

Side-note, it’s mind-blowing to me how many people just ignore what they think are gunshots. I work in a pretty diverse county that has a little bit of everything, but for the most part it’s just various flavors of suburbia, not exactly the hood where shootings are an everyday thing or the sticks where every other neighbor is hunting or target shooting in their back yard, gunshots should trigger some alarm bells for most people. It’s wild how many people will mention off-handedly that they thought they heard gunshots but didn’t call for some reason, or they wait until way after the fact to call about it. Now I’m also pretty sure 90% of them are probably misidentifying what they heard (we get so many people calling in shots fired for fireworks, cars backfiring, doors slamming, etc. sometimes I can hear the fireworks in the background whistling, sizzling, and crackling in very un-gunshot ways while my caller swears up and down that they “know what gunshots sound like,”) but even still, that’s one of those cases where you should probably err on the side of caution. I’m personally very willing to ignore a lot of things, but if I think I hear gunshots somewhere I shouldn’t be hearing them, I’m calling 911 immediately.

Fondots , 21 days ago

If someone was shot the damage is done me calling won’t help them.

We had an incident one morning where a passerby called in someone laying on the sidewalk, appeared to be unconscious. Cops and EMS got out there, and it was a shooting victim, obviously deceased, had been there for hours.

Turns out that multiple people in the area had heard shots overnight but decided not to call.

I dont know the details about exactly what kind of injuries the victim sustained, they could have died instantly, or they might not have and if someone had called in the gunshots they might have been found and taken to a hospital and possibly could still be alive today.

I’ll have to talk to a cop for no reason

Department policies and how individual officers use their discretion will of course vary, but in general unless they get out there and find actual evidence that something happened, most of the time they aren’t going to give a shit about talking to you. They go out, drive around the area, maybe park and walk around a bit on foot, if anyone happens to be outside they’ll ask if they heard anything, and unless you indicated that you want to speak with the cops, they’ll be on their way.

Also, if you call from a cell phone, we usually don’t automatically get your name or address (there’s some exceptions with some types of WiFi calling, femtocells, and how much emergency info you’ve filled out on your phone, or if you’ve previously called and gave your info we can look that up,) just a location based on cell tower triangulation that isn’t always super accurate. Yes, we can probably get the info from your phone company if needed, but unless they actually find an issue and need to follow up with you, no one involved on our end wants to go through that process.

Just give your nearest intersection, say what you heard, say you want to remain anonymous, and decline to provide your address. If you’re really paranoid about it, if your phone has a physical sim card take it out, or call from an old phone without active service and we won’t even get your phone number to look up. Just please for my sake don’t be a dick about it, so many of my anonymous callers get really argumentative “well why do you need my name? Nah, I’m not giving that to you, you see this is why people don’t call 911, why are you asking all these questions what if I was dying I could be dead” my dude, I get it, let me just move on to the next thing already so I can hang up and answer my next call (or you can just hang up at any time, that’s also an option)

Fondots , 21 days ago

I generally avoid asking that except in 3 kinds cases

1. We already have multiple calls around the area for fireworks, and then one person calls in saying they think it’s gunshots.
2. Cases like I mentioned where there’s very obvious fireworks going on in the background that I can hear on the phone.
3. It’s on or very near a holiday that you’d expect there to be fireworks, 4th of July, New Years, Diwali, etc.

Even in those cases, if you insist it’s gunshots, I’m entering it as gunshots. Not my place to make that call and I don’t want that liability on me if I make the wrong one. If our cops want to ignore it that can be on them. Some agencies are better about this than others, but my training was very clear that I should enter the call for whatever the caller is telling me is going on, not what I think is going on, they’re there seeing or hearing it, I’m not.

Fondots , 23 days ago

Went to the outer Banks with my wife, her grandmother, her brother, and his girlfriend.

First of all, I don’t dislike any of them, I like them better than a lot of my own family, but we’re different kinds of people. If I hadn’t married my wife, they’re not the sort of people I’d ever choose to interact with, I’d make polite conversation with them at a party or something, but I’d never really give them a second thought.

I’m not a beach person, I hate sand, I hate sitting around in the sun, I hate the biting flies, I like fishing but don’t really enjoy surf fishing. They all of course wanted to spend a lot of time on the beach.

They have a lot of love for this island, once upon a time their family owned a vacation house there and they’d pretty much spend the whole summer there. I have no such nostalgia goggles, so as far as I’m concerned it’s a pretty meh place to spend your time. It has a handful of mediocre restaurants and bars, a bunch of touristy stores selling mostly beach themed bric a brac and artsy craftsy junk that I have no real desire to buy or even wander around a store looking at, and a grocery store and liquor store with pretty limited selections. Nothing really there that appealed to me.

We mostly cooked at the house, which isn’t really my idea of a vacation, I get it, it’s cheaper, but I’m trying to avoid doing chores, that’s kind of the point. Nonetheless, I do enjoy cooking, I planned out my meals, came up with cocktail pairings, etc. had to modify them a bit on the fly because as I was finding out my brother in law and his girlfriend are kind of picky eaters. The other parties kind of skimped a bit on their meal planning, we had some meals that were frozen store bought lasagna and such. I kind of knew my meals would be fancier and more involved than theirs but I kind of expected them to put in at least a little effort.

Her grandmother was in the early stages of dementia, not too bad at the time, but she was a little restless and forgetful, which just made her a little annoying to deal with when we just wanted to chill at the house.

I had also somewhat recently started a new job working night shift, so my whole schedule was kind of flipped upside down and most of the time I just really wanted to sleep.

Also the place was about a 9 hour drive, which baffles me because we have a lot of perfectly fine beaches with more stuff to do within an hour or two from home.

We decided to drive mostly overnight to avoid traffic meeting up at about 11 IIRC to drive down in 3 different cars, we’d get there probably by about noon accounting for bathroom breaks, grabbing breakfast on the way, etc. giving us a chance to put pack, grab lunch, maybe take a nap, then still get some time in do vacation stuff (whatever vacation stuff means on an island with literally nothing to do)

I kind of figured they would all have their cars mostly loaded and be ready to go, which was wishful thinking, we didn’t actually get on the road until well after midnight, it might have even been after 1.

I really felt like I wasted my week off from work. Only real things I enjoyed was when my wife and I rented a boat with her brother and his girlfriend and just kind of boated around for a few hours, and playing boardgames at the house at night, but I didn’t need to spend about 18 hours driving and spend a week there to boat around for a few hours and play boardgames.

They had talked about trying to do annual family vacations after that (they were at least going to throw me a bone and not do the beach every year, though I suspect a lot of my other gripes would’ve still persisted) but luckily for me the next year COVID hit, her grandmother’s dementia has progressed a lot since then and her mom is taking care of her, and we’ve all just had general life stuff keeping us busy so that hasn’t happened.

Fondots , 25 days ago

In the grand scheme of disasters, I didn’t get this too bad, but hurican Ida.

I live in an area with a lot of rivers and streams and we experienced some historic flooding for our area to the point that it took us a few days or weeks to even know exactly how high the water got because the river gauges went completely under water, the old records were totally shattered.

My house was at a high enough elevation that I didn’t have an immediate flood danger to my house, but we did loose power for about 16 hours, which meant I did need to go bail out my basement sump pump every so often because the pump wasn’t running without power. People who were closer to the rivers of course got it worse, some people had to be evacuated from their homes by boat, lots of flood damage to go around, a handful of homes practically got washed away completely. There was some concern about certain dams potentially being overwhelmed but thankfully nothing much came of that.

I work in my county’s 911 center, and of course they paged out for anyone available to come in to do so. I tried, couldn’t make it more than a mile or so in any direction without hitting flooding and that was the before the worst of the flooding. Some roads and bridges were really fucked up from the flooding.

Luckily I have some friends nearby with a generator so we ran our perishables over to them to throw in their fridge. Those friends get their water from a well, and their generator doesn’t have enough juice to run the well pump with their fridge and stuff, so we bartered some potable water and cold showers with them in exchange.

They pulled up the stats at work for how many storm related calls we had, water rescues, electrical fires, downed trees, flooding, etc. I don’t remember the numbers, it’s been a few years but they we insane.

Fondots , 27 days ago

I often joke (only half-joking if we’re being honest) that we need large scale reintroduction of large predators into all of our natural areas.

There’s a lot of well-documented reasons why it’s good from an environmental standpoint, and that why it’s only half-joking.

But I also like to think the idea of having to deal with wolves, bears, mountain lions, etc. might keep at least some of these fuck-heads at home, or at least keep them on marked trails, picnic areas, visitor centers, in their cars, keep their dogs on leashes, etc. and if they don’t, maybe they’ll at least get eaten.

Fondots , 30 days ago

One of my favorite scary facts about the moonies that I don’t see talked about much is that a couple of the founders sons had a falling out with the church, and went and started their own, even crazier church. They made the news a few years back doing some rifle blessings and some kind of mass wedding ceremony (also with rifles)

Not for nothing, they also own kahr firearms

Fondots , 1 month ago

I think this is kind of a thing for a lot of stereoscopic 3d technology.

I could play the virtual boy, 3ds, watch 3d movies, etc. for hours without issue, and other people can’t take it at all.

I don’t know what factors play into that, maybe it’s genetic, maybe there’s some kind of skill/technique/habits about how you focus your eyes, or how often you blink, maybe it’s just luck of the draw that your pupil distance is just right or wrong. Maybe it comes down to something ridiculous like how many hours you spent trying to make sense of Magic Eye books when you were a kid.

Fondots , 1 month ago

Even if it was for batteries, unless we get fusion factors down to something that can fit in a car, power drill, smartphone, etc. batteries are still going to be a big part of the equation.

Sure, you can generate enough juice to power whatever you want, but only as long as it’s plugged in, anything that needs to get detached from the grid is still going to need batteries, and you probably don’t want your car hooked up to a 10 mile long power cord for your commute.

Fondots , 1 month ago

There was one team fairly recently that thought they had developed one that got a lot of press, but it turned out to not be true.

But that was only for that one specific case, it didn’t prove that room temperature superconductors can’t exist in general, there are still other teams working on developing them, and theoretically they could be possible, we just haven’t quite worked out what materials will exhibit superconductivity at room temperature, under what circumstances, and how to make them.

And we have some materials that come pretty damn close, Lanthanum decahydride can exhibit superconductivity at temperatures just a few degrees colder than some home freezers can manage (although at very high pressures)

Fondots , 1 month 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 , 1 month 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 , 1 month 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 , 1 month 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.