Fondots @ Fondots @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I think there's a few factors at play here

Yes, depression is a big one

There's also a lack of places to go and things to do for young people. Some parents are weird about their kids going anywhere these days, and no one really wants to bring their boyfriend/girlfriend over to hang out with their parents.

And even if you don't have obnoxious helicopter parents, where do you go? Malls are dying, restaurants and movies are expensive, and if you go hang out in a park some Karen will call the police on you.

Neighborhoods aren't walkable, public transit is broken, and cars are unaffordable so even if you find somewhere to go on a date, how do you get there?

And at least in heterosexual dating, we've also had a bit of a cultural shift that might throw things off. A lot of things that used to be accepted we now rightly understand are problematic, I think a lot of men and boys are hesitant to make the first move now because we don't want to be seen as creeps, but at the same time I think most girls still kind of expect the guys to make the first move, and while a lot of us are a bit more enlightened and could be cool with that (my wife of 5 years made the first move, she'd probably still be waiting if she left it to me) there's still plenty of guys with toxic fragile masculinity out there who could react poorly to a girl making the first move and I don't blame girls for not wanting to take on that risk (for the record, I also choose the bear)

So the dynamics have shifted a bit, and I don't think we've really figured out how things are supposed to work yet, and honestly things probably need to shift a whole hell of a lot more before things can normalize there and people can just feel comfortable asking other people out on dates without worrying about it being weird.

And in a similar vein, it's also I think become a lot more normal to just have platonic friends of the opposite gender. Personally some of my best friends are women who have no desire to date or fuck.

And people are also a lot more willing to have some sort of casual sex, friends with benefits, hookup culture, etc.

So there's probably a lot of physical and emotional needs that are now being met outside of the context of a romantic relationship when in the past that was pretty much the only way to meet them.

Longer leg moisture wicking boxer briefs, I particularly like Duluth trading co's armachillo bullpen boxer brief.

I'm admittedly biased being a US American, but the only time I ever see anyone refer to any part of the Americas except the US as "America" is when they're trying to make this point. It never comes up in conversation otherwise.

I'm not saying that some people/places don't use it that way, but those people have never made it to the same parts of the internet that I inhabit.

Personally, I'm happy to just chill where I am for a couple decades until I can retire. If I have to work, this honestly feels about as good as it gets for me. I don't have any desire to climb the ladder or go hunting for a new job.

I like the hours/schedule, we do 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation, which is pretty common in this field, so it's a long shift but it's a long shift sitting in an air conditioned bunker, and unless you come in for overtime you never have to work more than 3 days in a row without a 2 day break. Now those 3 days are weekends, which sucks, but the flip side is every other weekend you have a 3 day weekend. And if you plan your vacations and such right you only need to take 2 days to get a whole week off, so my PTO can go a long way. Here we start off with about 2 weeks of vacation time ("about" because it's based on 8 hour days and we work 12, it more or less works out the same but you're always kind of left with some fraction of a day carrying over) then after 5 years you get another week, and again at a couple other milestones years. I actually really struggle to use up all of my PTO personally because nearly everything I do fits into a 3 day weekend.

Benefits are solid, pension, decent medical plan, sometimes you can qualify for first responder discounts, etc.

Different places have different policies on this, but where I am what you do between calls is pretty much up to you, as long as you're not bothering anyone or making a mess, you can bring in a laptop and play video games or watch movies, read, work on some crafts, whatever as long as you can put it down when the phone rings.

I work night shift, so things can get pretty dead and you get a lot of downtime between calls. Most people work 7-7, but I managed to snag myself a 3pm-3am shift, which I think is great- I get to sleep in until noon every day, but I don't have to turn my schedule totally upside down if I need to do something in the morning.

We're not union in my county, and while normally I'm all for unions, it's worked out well for us so far, because one of the first concessions that tends to get made in contract negotiations is mandatory overtime in some form because like I said everywhere struggles with staffing issues, and so far they've done a decent job of keeping our pay competitive without it (probably because I think the dispatchers in most if not all of our surroundings counties are unionized, so they know we might jump ship to them if they don't pay us competitively)

And for all of those practical reasons, it also feels good to know I'm helping people. I have absolutely saved lives in my time here, I've delivered babies, I've helped people through disasters and all manner of scary situations.

And it's always interesting. When the phone rings I never know what's going to be on the other end, which of course has its ups and downs, but it's always interesting. Some of the people and the things they call about are absolutely infuriating of course, but no matter what it is I always get a great story. I never come home to my wife asking me "how was your day" and have to answer with some boring "same shit, different day" kind of answer, there's always something interesting. Sometimes it's something I'm proud of, sometimes it's something I'm pissed off about, sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's sad, and sometimes it's "can you believe somebody actually called about this?"

I'm a 911 dispatcher, basically every dispatch center in the country is always hiring. There's a lot of turnover, obviously it's not a job everyone is cut out for and people get burned out, but also people use it as a stepping stone or career builder to move onto other things, a couple of my coworkers want to be cops and this looks good on that application, one went to work for FEMA, a couple have gone to be the dispatchers at local stations, people get promoted or transfer to other county positions (my agency is part of our county department of public safety, in some areas it might be part of your sheriff's department, local PD, etc) or just go chasing higher paychecks or dream jobs (pay varies a lot around the country, we make decent enough money where I am, but some places really pay peanuts)

I saw an ad on social media somewhere that they had a hiring event going on, so I went. I was working in a warehouse at the time, and a job where I could sit down in the air conditioning sounded really attractive.

Civil service type jobs were already on my radar, I looked into becoming a park ranger for a while, and I'm an eagle scout, so I had a solid grounding on first aid and such.

I showed up, filled out an application, took their aptitude test (we, and a lot of other agencies use something called criticall if you want to get an idea what that test was like. Some typing, reading comprehension, map reading, listening to some sample calls and answering questions about them, etc.)

I passed the test, so as part of the hiring event I got an interview on the spot. If I applied outside of that, I probably would have had to schedule separate times for the test and interview.

I did alright in the interview so they scheduled me for a job shadow to come in and sit in the room to listen to calls and radio dispatch for a couple hours.

Then a while later I got my conditional offer. I had to get a hearing, vision, and drug test, and schedule a psych eval with the county psychologist.

You all know what hearing and vision tests are like I hope, for the drug test they did a hair test. I shave my head, so I was expecting them to take some beard hair, but apparently their policy is to do underarms if that's the case.

The psych eval wasn't anything too in depth, sat down with him for a few minutes, chatted about my mental health (no real issues there) then I got handed a very long test booklet to go fill out, lots of multiple choice questions that seemed to basically be gauging if I can play well with others.

And I assume at some point in there they ran background checks and such. Some places get really in depth with that, interviews with the sheriff, polygraph tests, etc. but mine was all pretty out of sight and out of mind.

Then class started. About a week into it we had to go to the county detectives office to be fingerprinted. But otherwise after that it was just all training.

Requirements here are pretty minimal, clean background check, high school diploma/GED, ability to pass all the pre employment screening, etc. At my agency past drug use isn't necessarily a disqualifier, as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired and don't get caught lying about anything you have done. Some other places are of course more strict about that.

If anyone thinks they may want to pursue a dispatch job, your local agency may list the job under a couple different names, dispatcher, calltaker, telecommunicator, etc.

My mom's side of the family is polish, back in the 80s they visited some relatives there so my mom could be the godmother to one of their daughters.

Shit was rough there then, the family they stayed with had an actual outhouse. No one could ever say that my family is rich, but American money went a long way there back then, basically anything they wanted could be had for what was practically pocket change but the local polish people could barely afford any of it. One of them managed to visit the US back then, and literally cried when he went into an American supermarket and saw the variety and amount of food that just anyone could buy without needing to save up their ration cards (and not a big or fancy one, I'm pretty sure the one they went to is now a normal sized CVS)

So some really rough times are still in living memory for a lot of poles.

And they've really come a long way since then, my mom's goddaughter is now traveling the world doing something in the hospitality industry, last I heard I think she was in Thailand (the relative who visited back in the 80s was amazed to see black people.)

So I don't think most poles are in any hurry to end up under Russians thumb again.

I work in 911 dispatch, and I don't have hard stats to back it up, I'm not even really sure how it could be objectively measured, and I'm sure I have a whole lot of bias and such, but I'm pretty sure everyone I work with agrees that we just get weirder calls on full moons.

Not necessarily busier, or more severe, there's just a certain something that's hard to explain about a lot of our callers that seems to get a little strange on a full moon.

It's not something we're actively keeping track of, it's not like we have a reminder set on our phones for the full moon, but when we have one of those nights where everything just seems to be a little off and we check the moon phase, it seems like it's full or nearly full more often than not.

Although personally I think we see a bigger difference for a couple days after the clocks change for daylight savings time. My pet theory on that is it throws people's medication schedules off by an hour and it takes them a few days to readjust. Plus throwing off sleep schedules, and dementia patients who sundown may be up and acting up at a time they would otherwise be asleep.

I have a really complicated relationship with coconut, because I really like the flavor, but hate the texture. The flavor wins out for me but not by much.

And come to think of it, I think a lot of the commercially made ones use some sort of coconut creme filling instead of cream cheese so it's more shelf stable and doesn't require refrigeration. I like the cream cheese ones slightly more.

I don't really lack for motivation, I'll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can't logistically make happen.

For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I've checked,) and I just don't have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.

I've made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I've helped butcher chickens, I've made beef Wellington, sushi, I've baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I've made ice cream, homemade pierogies.

Camden I think is the original location, but they have a couple other places now, Mt Holly and Medford I think?

I generally don't let many people from Jersey know this, but you guys may have the best cheesesteaks with Donkeys Place. They're a little heretical with the seeded Kaiser roll, but they're damn good.

Ah fuck, can't believe I forgot birch beer.

Any time I manage to get someone with any influence at a local brewery's attention I try to put the idea for a hard birch beer into their mind. I don't think it's taken root anywhere yet, but hopefully someday.

Applejack to an extent, I don't think it has quite as much cultural significance to Philly, but maybe to NJ with Lairds.

While I'm on NJ, the Taylor ham/pork roll debate is weird to me, it says pork roll on the package.

And while we're talking drinks, I suppose honorable mention goes to Yuengling. Pottsville is a bit outside of the Philly area, but it's ubiquitous in and around the city, if you order a "lager" you get a Yuengling. Its a solid alternative to the Bud/Miller/Coors big brand beers, but really nothing too special. I avoid buying it myself anymore because Dick Yuengling is kind of a dick, and there's plenty of other great beers being made in and around the city, but I've probably drank more lagers in my life than any other single beer.

EDIT: On birch beer, if you ever find yourself up to Ulysses PA in, I think, Potter County, they have the Pennsylvania lumber museum, they have a birch still there, and at least the one time I was there they had a guy talking about it with a little vial of birch oil from the still you could smell. He had a lot of cool information about birch trees/oil, turns out birch trees contain a compound that's similar to aspirin. And the birch oil does smell very much like birch beer.

Philly area

Yes cheesesteak, hoagie, soft pretzels.

But I believe strongly that a roast pork Italiano sandwich loaded up with sharp provolone, roasted long hots, and broccoli rabe is the best Philly sandwich.

Go a little out into the suburbs around Norristown, and you'll also find the "Zep" a sort of pared-down hoagie, one kind of meat, cheese, oil and spices, tomatoes, and plenty of onions.

I'm not going to wade into the minefield of which sandwich shops are best except to say Pat's and Geno's are garbage, but maybe worth it for the experience if you're a tourist. Avoid anywhere that advertises as a "Philly Cheesesteak" look for cheesesteak, steak sandwiches, or even just steaks. For a Zep I don't think it's controversial to say Lou's ro Eve's are the places to go.

Tomato pie- close relative of pizza, thick sort of focaccia-like crust, square, thick tomato sauce, dusting of Parmesan cheese, served cold. Staple of many parties here.

Also in the suburbs - Franzones pizza, Bridgeport is the original location, but the original owner sold it to a relative and opened the one in Plymouth/Conshy location and another in Manayunk. You're going to either love or hate the pizza, thin crust, very sweet sauce in a spiral on top of the cheese. There's a few imitators out there but Franzones is the original.

This is the right time of year for them so "Irish Potato" candies. Sweet cream cheese and shredded coconut, rolled in cinnamon. Nothing Irish about them but they kind of look like potatoes.

Zitners Easter eggs- chocolate candies with various fillings.

Goldenbergs Peanut Chews- chewy molasses candy with peanuts covered in chocolate

Mallow Cups- like a Reese's cup but full of marshmallow and coconut instead of peanut butter

Scrapple - don't ask what's in it, just eat it.

Pork roll (kind of a jersey thing, but ubiquitous in Philly too) it's basically round spam

Pepperpot soup- this is old Philly food, like revolutionary war Philly, it's damn hard to find these days but every few years some local restaurant gets the idea to recreate it. It's a hearty, slightly spicy beef and trip soup. There's some Caribbean pepper pot soups that are kind of similar.

That article pretty much just rehashes what I said, and doesn't touch on what you said about "being made with a starter" so I'm not really clear on why you linked it.

The legal requirements for Tennessee Whiskey are the same as for bourbon + it must be made in Tennessee + charcoal filtering

And since bourbon can be made anywhere in the US, and at least until the next civil war kicks off, Tennessee is still in the US

And since the legal definition for bourbon doesn't say that you can't charcoal filter it, and since it's purpose is to "remove impurities" I think it's safe to say it's not adding any color or flavor which would disqualify it. (And one of the big producers doesn't even need to do it)

I think it's safe to say that Tennessee Whiskey is bourbon. It just checks a couple extra boxes so it can be marketed as "Tennessee Whiskey" because it makes it sound a little extra special.

Careful, when the couple bottles I already have kicking around run out I might try to take you up on that offer.

Assuming you're Canadian, I've had the pleasure of visiting a few different parts of your country a handful of times, and each one was of the most memorable trips of my life, so I'm always happy for an excuse to return.

Depending on where you are, it may not even be the longest drive I've taken to get some whiskey (current record is about 12 hours)

Jack isn't really a bourbon

It checks all of the legal boxes to be a bourbon, at least 51% corn, aged in new charred oak barrels, the aging and proof requirements, made in the US, etc.

Being "made with a starter" isn't a requirement for bourbon, and I'm honestly not even too sure what you mean by that. I assume it's probably some reference to it being a sour mash whiskey, but that's not something that factors into the legal definition of bourbon.

The only thing that arguably makes it not a bourbon is the "Lincoln County Process" of charcoal filtering it before aging in the casks, which is a requirement to be called a "Tennessee Whiskey," all the other requirements are pretty much the same as bourbon (and it's worth noting that the 2nd biggest Tennessee Whiskey brand is Prichards, which is actually located in Lincoln County, and doesn't use that process and has a grandfathered exception to that requirement)

The main nitpick is whether that Lincoln county process can be considered to add color or flavoring, because if it does that would disqualify it from being a bourbon. I'm personally of the opinion that if it's a filtering process, it's probably removing flavor and color if anything so not a disqualifier, and even if it did, in the relatively short time it's in contact with the whiskey it's probably pretty insignificant and not gonna be all that distinguishable from what the charred oak barrels are going to impact to it over the next 2+ years.

And Tennessee is really the only place that makes the Lincoln County Process a requirement for "Tennessee Whiskey" Pretty much any other government or trade organization (like NAFTA) that has a definition for it basically just leaves it at something like "a straight bourbon whiskey made in Tennessee"

I'm not much of a JD fan in general, it's an OK whiskey but it doesn't do anything that plenty of other whiskeys don't do better.

I had a personal boycott of JD going for a few years, my wife and I are both whiskey drinkers and we visited TN for the 2017 eclipse. We decided while we were there we might as well make a detour to the distillery. I'm sure with the eclipse it was probably one of the busiest tourism weeks they've had there, so we weren't surprised to find a long line waiting for us. We made the most of it, it took us about 45 minutes to get to the front of the line, it snaked through a little mini museum, and it gave us some time to decide which tour we wanted to do.

But when we got to the front of the line we were informed that all of the tours we were interested in were sold out, and the only one available was the one that didn't allow you to try any whiskey at the end.

At no point during the 45 minutes we were standing around did they make any sort of announcement or put a sign up or anything to let us know that the other tours were sold out, if they had we probably would have decided to just go on that tour, but that really pissed us off, so we left.

I decided that I wouldn't give Jack any of my money after that, not that I was buying a whole lot of it anyway.

A year or two ago they ran an ad campaign with some drag queens. I decided that my personal boycott had gone on long enough and I could reward that little bit of token wokeness, although I have to admit that I still haven't bought any JD since then.

And like too many other companies it looks like they've now rolled back their DEI initiatives, so fuck 'em, back on the boycott list they go.

Now as a whisky drinker in the US, I'm disappointed that there's going to be tariffs affecting Canadian whisky, I'm a little torn as to whether I should support my favorite Canadian brands or avoid them since the tariffs are going to be funneling money to the trump administration.

I'm certainly going to be cutting back on my American whiskeys and many other American products in protest. I encourage my fellow whiskey drinkers to the north to do the same, you guys make some fine rye, I'll gladly take some Alberta Premium over almost anything made in the States.

I suspect I'm going to find myself drinking a lot of Scotch, Irish, and Japanese whisk(e)ys for the next few years, but I look forward to the day when I can hopefully enjoy some Canadian rye again without Trump's tariffs.

don't use colloquialisms, or soft language.

Honestly, part of the problem with the current crop of right wing assholes, is that a lot of them are so fucking brainwashed that they don't even realize that what they're supporting is just outright fascist/Nazi bullshit, so if you ask them point-blank "Are you a Nazi/fascist" they're going to answer "no" and truly believe that, even as they're supporting rounding up immigrants into concentration camps and "ironically" making Nazi salutes.

They have absolutely mastered 1984-style doublethink and duckspeak. They'll prattle on about being free speech absolutists while wanting to remove books about trans people from libraries or banning people with different opinions from their social media sites. They'll talk about being fiscally conservative while absolutely fucking the economy. They'll rant about draining the swamp and eliminating the deep state while they give some unelected goon unprecedented power to do whatever the hell he wants in the government with no consequences.

And they see absolutely no contradictions there.

So you kind of have to play fucking word games with them if you want to actually sus out what their actual thoughts are.

Tangential to this, but I've always figured that if somehow the US government is in contact with extraterrestrials, this is probably a big reason why the president probably isn't in the loop

Unless FTL travel or communications are on the table, or the aliens are based in or near our solar system, it would just take too long to have a back-and forth conversation between the president and the alien home planet.

The nearest star is proxima centauri, at about 4¼ light years away. That means it would take at least 8½ years to receive a reply to a message sent to their home planet

Imagine if, on the day he took office, Bill Clinton sent a message to the Centaurians to initiate negotiations of some kind, he'd be into his second term by the time they even got his message, and he'd be out of office and we'd be about half a year into Dubya's first term, if they took a couple months to think about their reply we may have even received it on 9/11.

Bush fires off another reply, probably with a very different viewpoint from Clinton, different goals, coming from potentially a wildly different political climate.

Aliens receive it in late 2005, meanwhile we're getting a new Pope, hurricane Katrina happens, all kinds of bullshit is going on in our world.

We receive their reply about a year into Obama's first term, again things are wildly different. They get our reply in 2014.

Donny boy receives their reply in probably mid to late 2018. The aliens receive his orange smudged, sharpie-scrawled reply in late 2022 or early 2023. Biden doesn't even get to take part in this particular conversation.

We won't get a reply to whatever trump told them until 2027. The aliens would probably also be surprised that they got two messages from the same president when he replies again if he hasn't croaked by then, and may begin to wonder if our democracy has collapsed and been replaced with a trump dictatorship (and they may be right)

So if they intend to have any sort of actually productive conversation, it probably needs to stay out of the president's hands and instead fall to maybe some unelected government officials or career military types who might hold their position for decades and have more of an opportunity to choose and groom their successors.

The first words in the body of his post are "barrel jacks" so to me it definitely reads like he knows exactly what they are and they are what inspired his post.

Since other, probably more common, names for "coaxial power connector" include things like "barrel plugs" and "barrel connectors" and such terms are used pretty frequently in the article you linked.

The rest of it feels like he's just trying to explain the concept to people who aren't as familiar with them.

But otherwise I agree with your comment, the lack of a standard is a big reason. In my various bins of wires, cables, and adapters I can find plenty of different mismatched wall warts with the same connector but otherwise wildly different specs. You don't really want to be mixing and matching those all willy-nilly.

Also they're overall a fine connector if all you need to do is deliver power to something, you only need a hot and neutral wire and the corresponding part of the inner and outer part of the plug (I feel like I've seen some that have a ground too, but don't quote me on that, I'm not going to go digging through my bins to confirm that)

But nowadays we also often need a way to carry data to/from the device in addition to charging it. So to carry those data signals in addition to power you'd need more connections in the plug. You'd need to either have a couple pins inside the barrel which would need to be lined up properly which kind of negates the convenience of it being omnidirectional like OP wants (think maybe something like a ps/2 or S-Video plug) or you'd need to have multiple concentric rings which would make the plug bulky, probably too much so to conveniently fit into something like a cell phone.

Now a lot of the devices we're charging by USB don't necessarily need or even support any sort of data through their ports, and so could be charged or powered just as well through a barrel plug. So why USB?

IMO a lot of it comes back to iPods. For a lot of us who were around in the pre-smartphone days, that was our first experience with something that charged over USB. I seem to recall that apple didn't even include a wall charger with them (pretty sure I remember a Foamy the Squirrel flash animation where he ranted about that) you just got a USB cable and either charged it off your computer or you went out and bought a wall adapter.

I'm sure that was a cost-cutting/cash-grab attempt by apple. They could sell you an iPod without a charger and save a few pennies there, and then also sell you a charger for even more money.

Around that same time, phones were also getting USB ports, or some proprietary connectors that you could buy an overpriced cable to connect it to a computer via USB so that you could pull your .5 megapixel flip phone photos off of it and post them to your Myspace. Often they came with a charger that had a mini or micro USB port or the proprietary connector on one end and was hard-wired to a wall wart on the other end.

I'm sure some bean counters at Nokia or Motorola or wherever decided "why the hell are we going to add 5¢ to the production cost of a phone to have a charging port and a USB port for data when USB already can deliver 5v of power? Just build the phone battery around that and nix the charging port"

And I'm sure that played out with plenty of other devices that needed power and data connections- GPS, PDAs, etc.

And so from there, people started having an iPod and cell phone in their pockets that both charged over USB, and before long they'd have a USB charger at home, at work, in their car, in every room in their house, so other devices kind of latched onto that as sort of a marketing thing "you don't need to keep track of a separate charger just for this thing, you can use the same one you charge your phone with"

And of course before too long TVs, game consoles, AV receivers, etc. all got USB ports too.

As I recall, it mostly started with things that made sense, things you were probably using with your phone or computer anyway- Bluetooth earpieces, mice, keyboards, etc. then sort of branched out into everything else over the years.