Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Years ago, I was in boy scouts (in the US)

For those not familiar with the scouting program, one of the main philosophies is "boys teaching boys" so in a well-run troop, the older, more experienced, and higher-ranking scouts are responsible for actually running the troop. The adult leaders hand down some general guidelines- we need to be ready to do X at Y time, but actually getting the scouts to do that falls to those older scouts.

At the top of the youth hierarchy, is the "staff" patrol, the most senior members of the troop. At its head is the Senior Patrol Leader, and under him there would be various other positions- quartermaster, scribe, one or more Assistant Senior Patrol leaders, etc.

In this story, I was a member of the staff patrol, I believe at the time I was quartermaster, or maybe one of the ASPLs, so I wasn't normally the one running the show, and truth be told I tended to avoid the leadership responsibilities when possible, and I wasn't exactly the most by-the-book, type-a, over-achieving model scout, but I was generally well-liked and respected by the younger members of the troop, I knew my stuff, and I was happy to share my knowledge.

On this particular camping trip, most of the staff patrol were unable to attend. I believe it was just my friend Dan and myself. Dan is very much the type-a, overachieving type, and, on paper, much more of a model scout, he may even have already earned his eagle by that point, while I was still chilling at star or life rank. So nominally he was the one in-charge for this trip.

And I was happy to leave him to it. I took my back seat and let him run the show, and I just helped facilitate in the background. And he did a fine job of it, his organizational skills were put to good use throughout the day.

Dan is exactly the type of person you want schmoozing with businessmen and politicians and such, I won't say that he lacks people skills. But he's not necessarily the kind of guy you want to hang around a campfire with and drink a couple beers. There's a time and place for both skill sets, and sometimes when the task at hand is wrangling a bunch of 11-17 year olds who have been let loose in the woods with pocket knives and taught how to build a fire, it's the second kind of skill you need.

So towards the end of the day, when the task at hand was basically "get all of these asshole kids to settle down and start getting ready for bed" Dan was kind of at a loss. He enjoyed being the one in charge and didn't particularly want my help, so I sat my ass down and started reading my book, while he tried to herd cats.

And slowly the younger kids began to gravitate towards me. They asked what I was reading, what it was about, and I told them. They hung around, some read their own books, others busied themselves with other quiet tasks, I think a game of magic or two sprung up around me. More kids drifted over, and they'd ask what I was reading, lather, rinse, repeat.

It frankly made it pretty hard for me to read my book, I could only get a couple paragraphs in at a time before someone interrupted me.

So at some point, I decided what I'd do was I'd start reading aloud to them and have a little story time. I wasn't very far into the book, so I started over from the beginning. I gave them a quick run-down of some of the important things from the first book in the series, and I began reading.

And before too long, all of the younger scouts were gathered around me, listening to me read.

Mission accomplished. I got them all settled down, and I got to read my book.

Dan was kind of amazed at how he had spent about 20 minutes trying to get them all to calm the fuck down, and I did it in like 5 minutes by just reading to them.

That book was The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the 2nd book of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy 5-part "Trilogy"

So that's my recommendation. I figure if it works on a bunch of teens and tweens, it will probably work on a dog as well.

I guess you could start with the first book, but there's something that feels appropriately Douglas-Adamsian to me about starting from the middle and reading to your dog.

"Stop trying to make fetch happen"

Everyone has their own verbal idiosyncrasies- local dialects, accents, words and phrases you picked up somewhere that have a nice ring to them, in-jokes with your friends and family, etc.

You'll come by them organically, no need to force it.

Inevitably, when you try to force them, at best people just won't notice, or more likely they will notice and think you're a weirdo, or a pretentious asshole, and at worse they might actually have a hard time understanding you which kind of defeats the purpose of speaking in the first place.

Seek out new experiences, acquire knowledge at every opportunity, meet people, go places, do things. Without even trying your speech will acquire plenty of interesting character and you won't have to expend any effort to do so.

Birkeland–Eyde, yes, but that's even more inefficient than the Haber process.

Ostwald is something else though, that's basically the next step after the Haber process to turn the ammonia into nitric acid.

I'm sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds

These days we do have the means to do it, though I don't know how achievable they are to the home-gamer

But historically this was actually a huge chemistry problem

I'm not a chemist, so I gotta gloss over some stuff I don't fully understand

But nitrogen tends to form bonds with itself and makes an N₂ molecule. That's what the nitrogen in the air is, that's what liquid nitrogen is.

And unfortunately for us (for chemistry purposes) that molecule is very stable, it doesn't like to react with much, for most practical purposes it can basically be considered inert.

However, nitrogen is of course part of a whole lot of other chemicals as well, very important chemicals that plants and animals need. You probably heard about the nitrogen cycle in middle or high school science class at one point, and how nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil can convert atmospheric nitrogen into stuff that plants can use, and then animals eat the plants, and their waste also contains nitrogen compounds that can feed plants, etc.

But for us to do that through chemical processes isn't easy. We can't just pour some liquid nitrogen into a beaker and mix in some other stuff and it reacts to make ammonia or whatever other nitrogen compound you desire.

Until around 100 years ago, we basically couldn't turn atmospheric nitrogen into anything else, at least not at any kind of scale and not in any commercially viable way. Which was a huge problem as the world's population was growing and growing enough food to feed everyone was hard without being able to make synthetic fertilizers. The US actually has a law saying that they're allowed to just claim uninhabited islands that are covered in bird shit because that guano was rich in ammonia and other nitrogen compounds and so immensely valuable as a fertilizer.

Then along comes Fritz Haber, who comes up with the Haber process to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. This was a huge deal and he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for it. I don't think it's a stretch to say that if you've eaten pretty much anything grown on a farm you owe it to the Haber process.

And it's still a huge deal to this day, the haber process is responsible for around 2% of the world's energy consumption, and about the same amount of our greenhouse gas emissions.

If you've got a quick and easy way to turn pure nitrogen into something else, there's probably another Nobel Prize waiting for you.

I very rarely have trouble sleeping, but when I do, this is what I've always done since childhood and it hasn't failed me yet.

I lay there, with my eyes closed, resist any temptation to look at my phone or do anything else, make myself as comfortable as possible wrapped up in blankets and pillows and whatever

And I just kind of direct my mind towards something pointless and let it wander down that rabbit hole

Maybe I'll imagine sort of a bunch of swirling lights and colors and just kind of watch them, look for patterns, etc.

Or I'll make up stories. I'm no author, but I'll imagine myself as maybe a super hero, or an astronaut, or a wizard, or any of those sort of stock characters, and I imagine myself saving the world, or fighting a dragon, or boldly going where no man has gone before. These stories I'm making up aren't deep, they're a crappy universe full of plot holes and the kinds of characters an elementary schooler playing make-believe would come up with, because of course the superhero I'm imagining myself as can fly and has heat vision and wolverine claws and can turn invisible and has super strength and...

Or I just kind of think about simple things I enjoy. Places I could go hiking with my dog, date nights with my wife, meals I'd like to cook for friends, etc.

Whatever it is, I just kind of let my mind wander down that road, it takes my mind off of whatever was keeping me awake, and after I while my focus begins to falter and I just sort of slip into sleep from there.

I'm pretty sure this kind of falls under the category of some kind of meditation. My work once did a mandatory "wellness retreat" as a "training" thing I had to go to. One of the things we did was a guided meditation session, and that felt like the same sort of thing (but for people who are boring and lack the imagination to think of a scenario to meditate on by themselves, imagining myself flying an x-wing through an asteroid field beats the pants off of imagining I'm walking through a meadow to the beach or whatever that lady was having us imagine)

Sometimes a little background noise is helpful. I'm not personally too picky about what it is, I like trip hop music for this purpose, or forest sounds, or just random YouTube videos (not even necessarily anything relaxing, I've fallen asleep to some machinist YouTubers plenty of times and the sound of a mill, lathe, band saw, grinder, etc. isn't exactly what I'd call soothing.

And when all else fails, I rub one out

I do a movie night once a year and every year we do a different theme. Sometimes it's a pretty normal and straightforward theme, the first year or two I did it was Robert Rodriguez movies (this party is nominally a Cinco de Mayo part) but we quickly ran out of those, so we pick a random theme every year

One year the theme ended up being "movies that got a better "remake'" (we watched the worse versions)

I believe that theme was 2023, it's been a wild fucking 2 years so I can't remember all of the movies we watched, we usually manage to squeeze in about 3

But I remember David Lynch's dune was on the list, as was the Super Mario Bros movie. None of us had actually seen the new Mario movie, so we just kind of took it on faith that it had to be better.

If I had a point to this story, I've long since forgotten what it was, but I've typed it out and I'm gonna post it.

I kind of think of the 50s as kind of a major turning point for the US. There were a lot of seeds of greatness then that weren't properly nurtured in the following decades so that they could grow.

While just about every other country in the world was trying to put themselves back together from WWII, we had emerged not only unscathed, but in almost every measure better than we were before. We had military might, we had a booming economy, manufacturing, science, technology, arts, entertainment, cars, appliances, TV, electricity all on a scale previous generations could only dream about.

Even if you were part of a marginalized group- black, LGBTQ, female, etc. there were some glimmers of hope that looked like things might get better soon- the civil rights movement was picking up steam, there were some early LGBTQ rights movements and demonstrations taking shape, women entered the workforce in a big way during the war, and after the war mostly returned to the home afterwards but those seeds were planted, I don't think it's a coincidence that little girls growing up in the 40s watching the women in their lives being the Rosie the Riveter would become the ones who embraced 2nd wave feminism 20 or so years later.

And of course we had high corporate taxes helping to fund it all.

It wasn't all sunshine and roses of course, and you will certainly find no shortage of people here on Lemmy who will happily spell out all of the many reasons the 1950s sucked, and I don't disagree with them, but that's not what you asked, so I'm not going to go into that.

The 50s were a major leap forward in the quality of life for many people in america, and while far from perfect, there is definitely an angle you can look at it from where things looked like they were more-or-less on the right track.

Doubt anyone's going to see it at this point but figured I'd write out some of my other thoughts now

When I talk about going back to square one and defining what a firearm even is, I mean that quite literally. Muzzleloaders aren't considered firearms, and no they're not likely to be used in a mass shooting, but they'll still kill someone just as dead as a modern firearm. There's stupid loopholes about antique guns that may function in much the same way as a modern firearm.

They're fucking guns.

And with an eye to the future, it may be worth building in a little future with other weapons technologies that may come into play that should be regulated similarly. There are high powered air rifles today that are comparable in stopping power to some firearms, shouldn't they be regulated in a similar manner? Or what if advances in battery technology and such make coil/rail guns viable as man-portable or even concealable weapons?

We also classify things in really stupid ways. Take a look at some of the weird shit around short barrel shotguns/rifles and "any other weapons" where you can have 2 basically identical weapons that are classified differently just due to a quirk of how they were manufactured. An AR-15 with a short barrel is a no-no unless you're willing to jump through some extra hoops, but you can build an AR-15 "pistol" and slap a -not-a-stock "wrist brace" on it.

And machine guns are a no-no, but bump stocks, binary triggers, forced-reset triggers, etc. that get you basically the same effect are a-ok. Not to mention that absurdity we had for a few years where shoelaces of a certain length were technically classified as a machine gun.

I basically want to create 4 categories

Hunting arms- single shot or manually operated rifles and shotguns with barrel length 16" and greater, rimfire rifles, muzzleloaders, and certain larger handguns. Low rate of fire, not easily concealable.

Concealed carry weapons- handguns.

Other firearms- short barrels rifles/shotguns, semi-auto shotguns and centerfire rifles

Machine guns, destructive devices, etc. we're moving bump stocks, binary triggers, forced reset triggers, etc. into this category.

For the first 3 categories, the main difference is going to be in the types of training required, as well as the required insurance rates. I think it's also fair to be allowed to purchase hunting arms at 18, and bump the other categories up to 21.

For the 4th category, we're keeping things largely the same as the current NFA regulations, but we're fixing some of the wonky definitions, and increasing the cost of the tax stamp, because the $200 it was set at in the '30s really hasn't kept up with inflation.

We're also going to make most gun accessories subject to the same sorts of background checks and such. And we're moving silencers into this category.

We're unifying gun laws across the country. No more wonky patchwork of different states having their own laws. If it's legal, it's legal across the whole country, if it's illegal, it's illegal everywhere.

I hate the term, but we're closing the "gun show loophole" (which really has nothing to do with gun shows) all transfers must go through the process. We're also expanding the locations you can do them at, not just FFL dealers anymore, police stations, and some details would need to be figured out for security reasons, but maybe some places like DMVs, post offices, courthouses, etc. and we're getting rid of any fees. No excuses to not do things properly.

We're beefing up the background checks, getting all states on the same page with what does and does not disqualify someone from owning a gun, red flag laws, probably disqualifying people with DUIs (if I don't trust you with a car I certainly don't trust you with a gun)

And we're delisting marijuana so that if you like to smoke up once in a while you're able to keep your guns.

Along with the changes in ages, we're also making some changes to police and military. If you can't legally purchase and carry a handgun or rifle as a civilian, you don't get to carry them in your line of work either. You're exempt from the draft until 21, you can enlist at 18 but only serve in non-combat roles until 21, and if you do enlist before age 21, you will receive education and training equivalent to that many years of college or vocational training. Police academy will become a 4 year program equivalent to a bachelors degree. Also off-duty officers do not get any special exemptions in their eligibility to carry firearms, and their duty weapon stays locked up at the station when off the clock. There's a whole lot more I have to say about police reform too, but that's an entirely different rant.

Firearms must be stored in a properly-rated safe that is either firmly attached to the structure of your home - studs, floor joist, concrete, brick, or other masonry walls, etc. or that is heavy enough that it can't be easily moved by 2 guys with a hand truck. No leaving them in your car, unsecured in your garage,in the night stand, etc. when you're not able to directly oversee them. We're not going to be doing in-home inspections on this, but if it's somehow found that you're storing them improperly, like if someone is able to steal them because they weren't properly secured, then you lose your right to own guns.

If you lose your firearm (I work in 911 dispatch, the amount of calls I've had for guns found in bathrooms, movie theaters, etc. that someone left behind is pretty worrying) or have a negligent discharge (that isn't the result of a manufacturing defect,) you lose your right to own guns.

We're making some major changes to stand your ground laws and castle doctrine, I don't have a problem with castle doctrine as a general concept, but a lot of states' implementations leave a lot to be desired. When your outside of your home, I think the focus should be more on duty-to-retreat (again, I work in 911 dispatch, I don't think a night goes by that I don't have a dozen calls that could have been solved without police intervention if my caller just fucking walked away but instead escalated into some sort of fight)

No, we are not arming teachers. Full stop.

I'm probably missing some things here, and there's a lot of details I'm glossing over a bit because this comment is already too long, but hopefully this kind of paints a general picture of where my head is at.

It's not, and that would be addressed in the stuff I didn't feel like writing last night (and still don't)

And I don't feel like writing it because there's a lot to it, to just barely scratch the surface, my ideal gun control reform would be part of major overhauls to basically all aspects of government and we'd have things like universal healthcare (which would cover the psych eval,) government funded childcare (so that you can do something with your kids while you jump through the hoops,) free and expanded public transportation (so that you can get to the courthouse or wherever you need to,) expanded workers rights (so that you would have PTO to use to go do all of that,) expanded hours for government offices (so that people hopefully don't even need to use that PTO, I know it my county to get a concealed carry permit you have to be able to get to those courthouse during certain hours on certain days, the courthouse isn't conveniently located and the hours suck, most people probably have to take a day off of work and get up early to do it, that's bullshit) and we'd be getting rid of most fees for government services or at least making them scale to income.

And of course, were funding this by massive taxes on the wealthy.

Basically we're putting a hell of a lot of hoops in the way, but we're paving the way to those hoops so that anyone who wants to has a fair shot at being allowed to attempt to jump through them.

US

Our gun laws are a patchwork of really dumb state and federal laws and regulations that often don't make much sense and there is little consistency. I think we pretty much need to go back to square one with basic shit like defining what constitutes a "firearm" and go from there.

I have a lot of thoughts on this and I'm not going to write them all out here right now, because it would get really lengthy and I just don't feel like it right now (if there's interest in hearing what this random internet stranger has to say I may write it up later)

But in general I think that people should be able to own guns, but I also think that there should be a lot of hoops to jump through to get them, background checks, proficiency tests, education , training, insurance, psychological evaluations, storage requirements, etc.

I've actually been pretty impressed with the plastic screw-in type

I haven't had one fail on me yet and they've been plenty stable for my uses. I have some pretty heavy wall shelves hung in my kitchen with them (though to be fair, each shelf is probably held up with about 4-8 of them, not like I'm actually hanging 50-100lbs or whatever they claim to be rated for off of just 1 or 2 of them.

It's been a few years since I hung them, but I think I also got a couple lags into studs as well, but the majority of it is screw-in wall anchors because no one who designs shelves ever seems to make them with standard stud spacing in mind.

Quick and easy to go in, and easier to remove. Sure they leave a bigger hole, but it's not like it's significantly harder to patch a ½inch hole than a smaller hole, it's still in the realm of what I can pretty much just spackle over. And if/when I take them down, I'll probably be doing plenty of painting, spackling, sanding, etc. anyway

Lag bolts are more like a big wood screw, what you call coach bolts seem to be what we call carriage bolts

I'm not sure if the wire gauge thing is right, unless you're talking about a different system than I'm familiar with, because with wire gauge smaller number=bigger wire, and with screw sizes smaller number=smaller screw

Also just my 2¢ on "machine screw" vs "bolt" as a casual tinkerer with various things held together by different types of threaded fasteners.

Generally speaking if it's got a hex head or nut that I'm using a wrench to tighten, it's a bolt

If it's got some sort of hole (or God forbid a slot) that I'm going to use some sort of a driver (for the purposes of this, an Allen "wrench" is a driver) to tighten, it's a screw.

And of course everything gets really murky when we start talking about things like sheet metal screws, lag bolts/screws, masonry screws, etc.

Just an FYI if you're not familiar with American screw sizes, calling this a 10-32 equivalent is probably going to confuse come people.

The naming convention used for screws in America includes the shank diameter and the pitch of the thread in threads per inch (TPI)

So a 10-32 in a #10 diameter screw with 32 threads per inch

Below about ¼ inch diameter, the American system usually uses that numbered system, a #10 screw is .190 inches or roughly 3/16

For larger diameter screws they usually just use the nearest fractional equivalent instead of the screw number, so a ¼-20 is roughly ¼ inch (actually .242in/ or #14) diameter and has 20 TPI

Most sizes have a standard coarse and fine thread, for #10 32TPI is the fine thread, and 20TPI is the coarse thread

Little back-of-the-envelope math that I'm not super confident in, this would be something like a 10-16 screw. You might want to rename it or add a note to that effect, or maybe call it something like a #10 extra coarse thread.

Sounds like you did pretty much the same bit of googling I did, because I also ended up there and ctrl-f'd "Taliban" and only found the one result

For anyone who doesn't go down the rabbit hole themselves, that result is "Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP)" or the "Pakistani Taliban"

Which is a group that mostly seems to be active in Pakistan (duh) and in Afghanistan near the border. TTP pledges allegiance to the Afghan Taliban, but the Afghan Taliban, at least publicly rejects that allegiance (though you can certainly make some arguments that they're probably in cahoots, just keeping things off-the-books)

My thoughts on kangaroo are, kind of unsurprisingly, that it tastes exactly like it evolved on a different continent than any other meat you've ever eaten.

It's still definitely in the red meat family, but it's different and it's hard to explain how. I'd say it's maybe more like venison or maybe lamb than beef, but it's definitely its own thing.

There's a lot of cases where depending on how you prepared and seasoned it, I don't know if I could necessarily tell you with 100% confidence if I was eating venison or beef, and maybe even a couple things you could probably pull that with lamb or goat vs beef. I'm pretty sure I could reliably pick out a kangaroo dish from a lineup 100% of the time.

It was good though, I would absolutely eat kangaroo again if it was more readily available around me. It's kind of a stronger flavor that some people might have an issue with.

Tasted like fishy dirt meat

I'm not a fish-eater in general, but I am an avid fisherman (I just catch them, the wife eats them,) so I've heard a lot of stories from my fellow anglers (which should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt, there's a reason they're called "fish stories")

There is a persistent rumor I've heard that some people will take catfish and other bottom-feeders like carp home alive to let them swim around in a bathtub of clean water for a day or two to sort of flush all of the mud and everything out of their system before cleaning and cooking them

Allegedly it's more of a southern thing.

I have yet to find seafood that I like.

Irony of ironies is that I love fishing. Luckily anything I catch worth keeping my wife is more than happy to eat.

People always tell me that good fish shouldn't taste/smell fishy. I retort that I suppose good beef shouldn't be beefy either.

I'm willing to hear people out, try different fish prepared in different ways, still haven't found one that I liked, at best they're mostly tolerable.

I've figured out that I generally tend to enjoy freshwater fish over saltwater. If I catch a couple nice trout I'll eat that for dinner with my wife instead of having to make a separate dish for myself, I won't hate it, but I won't like it either and I'd probably rather have a hot dog.

And I like raw fish better than cooked.

I might actually kind of like raw oysters, but they are in no way worth the cost.

Lox isn't bad, but I'd prefer just about anything else over it.

There are a couple fish-based products out there that are so far removed from fish that they're hardly worth mentioning for the purposes of this comment that I do enjoy, like Worcestershire sauce and Asian fish sauces, katsuobushi, Caesar dressing, Crab Rangoon (let's be real, you could probably leave the crab or "krab" out of most takeout rangoons and it wouldn't change much) some Japanese fish cakes, etc.

The absolute worst is shrimp though. Nothing about shrimp is appealing to me, the taste, smell and especially the texture are all pretty repulsive.

I'm not otherwise a guy with a lot of food hangups and consider myself a pretty adventurous eater. Weird tastes, textures, bizarre fermented stuff, strange meats, etc. are all generally OK in my book, there's not many other foods out there that I don't enjoy. In my house right now I have some double salt salmiak licorice, a bottle of Malört, a wide selection of hot sauces going up to around 1 million scoville, I'm pretty sure I have both Vegemite and marmite somewhere in my fridge, some very peaty scotches, and plenty of other very divisive foodstuffs that I enjoy.

I have tentative plans to visit Iceland next year, so I'll probably end up torturing myself with some hákarl at some point. And I don't intend to seek it out, but if it happens to be offered to me for free somewhere I may consider trying whale, which I suppose is technically seafood.

Interestingly enough, the US doesn't seem to regard the Taliban (at least not the main branch that's currently running Afghanistan) as a terrorist organization.

When you said that I thought they might, I was actually pretty sure it was the case, but on looking into it that doesn't seem like they do, at least not officially.

Some other countries do, and there are a couple other Taliban splinter groups and such that do make the cut.

And of course, the entire history of Afghanistan since the Cold war can probably be of best summed up as "an absolute fucking mess" full of different factions, shifting allegiances, and all of that geopolitical nonsense, but you can make a pretty compelling argument that the US sort of put the Taliban in charge there in the first place. The us backed the Mujahideen against Russia back in the day, and while they're not exactly the same organization, there was a whole lot of overlap between former members of the Mujahideen and the people who formed the Taliban. So from one angle slapping the terrorist label on them would be kind of like admitting "we backed the terrorists"

You know, I've read your comment a couple times, and I can't quite wrap my head around what you're trying to say, I can kind of parse it in a few different ways, and none of them quite seem like they're really a direct response to what I said either agreeing with me or disagreeing.

It's certainly possible that I've got a case of the dumb tonight, but would you mind rephrasing and expanding on your thoughts a little bit?