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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)FO
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1,099
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I'm not looking for troubleshooting

    WTH is going on with my phone? Anybody else having new problems?

    That sounds a hell of a lot like a troubleshooting question. Otherwise you're just screaming into the void and I'm not sure what kind of interaction you were looking for by posting here. I suppose we could just say "that's rough buddy" and "yes/no, I am/am not having that problem" and move on.

    His tone could use some work, but so could yours. Those are very relevant pieces of information to ask for when trying to figure out what's wrong with your phone.

  • When you say it won't loosen when turned, do you mean it's totally seized up or it spins but the part doesn't come off?

    If it's totally seized up, have you tried dousing it with some sort of penetrating oil? WD40 might do it a pinch, but a specialized penetrant like PB blaster or liquid wrench would probably be better.

    Soaking it with some CLR or something might also help to break up and rust, lime, or other crud that might be in there.

    Still won't come loose? Get the beefiest screwdriver you can find that will fit the slot. Maybe give it a couple good love taps with a hammer and see if that helps bust it loose.

    If you can find a suitable bit, an impact driver/wrench may do the trick too.

    Get a big ol' set of channel locks, vise grips, a pipe wrench, etc. that you can grab onto the screwdriver with to give you some extra leverage, and go to town.

    Sometimes a little heat will do the trick, you can try hot tap water, boiling water, heat gun, and blowtorch if you're willing to accept a bit of a risk.

    If it's spinning but you don't seem to be making any progress

    Do you have access to the back of the tub? Often there's an access panel so you can get at the plumbing. If all else fails you can try to take the drain apart from the back/underneath

    EDIT: I suspect this is part of a pop up stopper something like this- https://youtu.be/c5_o166BCDQ (not my video) just so you have some idea how this thing goes together

    Edit 2: sorry I fired off a couple quick thought and this is still rolling around in the back of my head because I'm havi a slow night at work. These pop up drain stoppers are like $15. Don't worry about breaking them too much, the whole assembly pretty much unscrews. Bust off the plastic parts and if you need to cut off the screw head, get a tub drain removal tool (also about $10 -15) try to find one that's hollow if there's still some screw sticking up, unscrew the whole drain and replace it.

  • It's definitely the wrong vibe a lot of times, but it's also a weird balancing act.

    I like to think my county has our shit together about as well as anywhere in the country (which is admittedly a fairly low bar) We do have some other resources available to us that we try to make use of, like a mobile crisis team (which is technically some sort of private non profit entity that receives county funding and works with us and our police departmens very closely, but it's not something that we can directly dispatch in the same way we can send police/fire/EMS)

    And they do a lot of good, they go out and respond to calls from people who need their assistance, and often handle things just fine on their own.

    But a lot of times we find ourselves getting calls from those teams because they went out to make contact with someone, who they spoke with and who requested their assistance, but started getting aggressive so they need police to assist them.

    And I've been on the phone with a lot of situations that have taken some crazy turns, where it starts out sounding like a totally boring, routine call for an officer to come out and take a report or address some minor issue, and suddenly everyone is yelling, punches are being thrown, something is on fire, etc.

    So in the interest of safety, a lot of non-police calls probably should still have police respond as well, they just need to strike a happy balance where they're waiting outside or something, ready to bust in if needed, but otherwise they're not directly involving themselves in the situation.

    But overall, a whole lot of my calls would probably be best resolved if we could force people to sit down with a middle school guidance counselor and learn how to take a deep breath, count to 10, use their inside voices, and listen to each other.

  • I am fairly certain I fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Somewhere at the top end on the mild/high-functioning/low-support-needs/however-you-want-to-describe-it.

    I've never felt a need to pursue a diagnosis, I don't think putting it on paper and making it official has anything to offer me that's worth the aggravation of dealing with extra doctors appointments and such to get diagnosed.

    But I've occasionally considered doing it so that I could potentially participate in any sort of research being done that might possibly help autistic people with higher support needs. That would be worth the aggravation.

    But holy fuck does this administration make me glad I never did.

    I always had a little paranoia that a diagnosis would be more trouble than it's worth beyond just the annoyance of getting diagnosed. That somewhere I'd encounter some bullshit regulation where I'd be considered mentally unfit for something, or be disqualified from a job, or just have people treating me different if they found out.

    But now it's very clear that that's sort of the plan, where a diagnosis would probably be actively used against me instead of just being the result weird edge cases where I might slip through the cracks due to some outdated poorly worded policy.

  • I believe in Iceland's case it has to do with how the Icelandic language works and certain names just kind of don't work with the rest of the language. I'm far from an expert on the Icelandic language, but my understanding is that nouns, names included, sort of get "conjugated" (I'm not sure if "conjugation" is the correct term, I think that's specifically a vowel thing, but it's similar in that the word changes depending on how it's used in a sentence and most of us are familiar with the concept of conjugation.)

    There's a few random things in English that do it, like depending on the sentence, you might use I/me/my/mine/etc. when you refer to yourself refer to yourself, but in icelandic all nouns do that in a regular predictable way, so they have to be pronounceable with certain suffixes tacked onto them.

    I think they also do the old school patronymic/matronymic name thing instead of family names. So if you meet someone in Iceland whose name is something like "Steve Robertson" then "Robertson" isn't his family name, his dad is literally named "Robert" and so he is "Steve, Robert's Son" so names kind of have to work with that kind of naming convention as well.

    So it's less of a "this name is stupid" and more of a "this name breaks our language"

    It also seems like they've eased up on some of the rules in recent years, first names are no longer gender restricted, and they've added a nonbinary suffix for the patronyms/matronyms so now you can be a -bur instead of just -son or -dóttir

  • I have a friend who's grandfather was a chemist who at least claimed to his family that he mixed up small batches of DDT for mosquito control on his property.

    I have no way of verifying that, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised if some rogue chemist with a vendetta against mosquitos was out there doing it.

  • I overall agree that the concerns are overblown and sometimes outright fake, and that artificial colors aren't inherently any more dangerous than any other ingredient

    I also agree that Kennedy and his ilk are really using this as a smokescreen for all the other bullshit they're up to

    That said, I'm largely in favor of banning artificial dyes.

    Pretty much the only purpose they serve is to make unhealthy processed junk food more attractive, so I think we should be discouraging that.

    There is some evidence that some artificial dyes may be harmful in some ways. In the grand scheme of hazardous chemicals I'm expected to in my life they're near the bottom of the list of things I'm concerned about, probably falling somewhere in between alcohol and grilled meat (neither of which I'm planning to cut out of my diet anytime soon, but I also enjoy those things so I'm more willing to accept the risk, I'm pretty ambivalent about whether or not my food is exactly the right color)

  • I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of my coworkers are predictably bootlickers.

    I can't even tell you how many calls we get all day everyday where we're all just left scratching our head going "Why did you call 911,about this? This isn't a police issue." But since usually the only tool we have in our toolbox is police, that's what we end up having to send.

    But they'll balk at any suggestion that maybe our police don't need a new armored truck and a new police station, and whatever other stupid shit they're spending tax dollars on, and instead maybe we should spend that money to beef up our mental health services, public works, homeless outreach, animal control, code enforcement, and other services that we could be providing instead of just sending police out to deal with non-police issues.

    Luckily, my local police are pretty good as far as police go, not too trigger happy, generally make a decent effort to handle mental health issues carefully, they usually manage to not make things significantly worse, though they often don't do much to improve the situation either.

  • In a sort of abstract sense, there are some parallels.

    In a system like the US, corporations and those with a lot of money hold a lot of power, and unionization is a way for everyone else to take some power for themselves to make sure that their voices are heard.

    In a system like China however, most of that power is instead concentrated with the government and upper echelons of party, so attempts at democratizing fill a similar role of giving regular people a voice.

    There's a lot of nitty gritty details, cultural differences, etc. and I don't really want to gloss over those, but the root in either case is common people organizing and trying to make sure their voices are heard.

  • I work in 911 dispatch, so this is going to depend a bit on if we're counting incidents that we've handled as dispatchers, or if we're only counting incidents that physically happened at our dispatch center.

    For the former, I'm going to just leave it at- we've handled a little bit of everything. If you can imagine it we've probably had something similar happen. I'm not going to go into any detail because our craziest incidents would probably be googleable and point you to my workplace.

    Limiting it to things that happened here, we had one of the local crazies call in a bomb threat to our dispatch center. We weren't taking it too seriously, he's a known party and mostly harmless, but out of an abundance of caution our breaks were postponed while the sheriffs swept our building.

    Our dispatch center shares a big campus with the county prison, and a few other county offices and facilities, we're at the end of a long hilly driveway/private road with a guard shack at the top and the driveway for a few neighboring businesses branching off from it. It's not totally uncommon for various people to be walking up our driveway, people from those other businesses out for a walk, people going to visit an inmate at the prison, the occasional person with business at one of those county offices, etc.

    Anyway, one day one of my coworkers is driving into work and sees an older guy walking up the driveway, the weather was pretty shitty that day, so he decides he's going to be nice and give him a lift up to the guard shack. He comes into work and by the time he's logged in there was a call for a disturbance at the guard shack, the old guy was some sovereign citizen type trying to pull some first amendment audit bullshit at the prison. So we all got a memo about not giving anyone rides.

    Shortly before I started, there was a small fad of people making s'mores in the lunch room microwave. One of the newer trainees was a younger guy, still lived at home, was a little clueless, and decided to make himself a s'more. He microwaved it way too long and smoked up the building, it was probably about as close as they've ever gotten to having to evacuate to our backup center. So we now have a "no s'mores" rule.

    There was also one new guy that honestly probably shouldn't have made it through our background checks who was a real piece of work. He is probably the only person in living memory to use the shower here, we suspect he may have been living out of his car. He had some weird shit on his record, some strange domestic bullshit, he was a volunteer firefighter and had been in trouble a few times for trying to pull people over with the lights on his personal vehicle (basically impersonating an officer) and was just generally a really strange dude. He nearly got into a fist fight with his trainer and that was the final straw. There's been a few other weird stories involving him since we got rid of him but those are pretty googleable.

  • English, French, Spanish, Esperanto

    As a bonus: binary, hexadecimal, octal (really most bases but I can only go past that up to hexatrigesimal without looking up the symbols) Roman numerals, tally marks

  • I work in 911 dispatch, a lot of the 10 digit non emergency lines also redirect to our center, we get a lot of wrong numbers calling into us

    One of those numbers is just one digit off from a pizza place, which is always fun because once in a while someone is a domestic calls in pretending to order pizza because they don't want the person they're with to know they're calling police, so we kind of have to grill those calls with are you having an emergency/do you know you're calling the police/are you safe to talk kind of questions

    Pro tip for anyone who finds themselves in a situation like that, most dispatch centers are aware of those types of calls, but some posts online will tell you that there's a code that pepperoni = they have a gun or something like that. No such code exists, at least not in any way that's universally recognized. Maybe some departments have that standardized but it certainly wasn't part of my training.

  • I work a weird sche, 2 on, 2 off, 3 on and then the next week it flips. So every other week working friday-sunday, or I'm off those days.

    An the one hand I support this because 3 day weekends are fucking great and everyone should have them

    On the other hand, I have a feeling that would change my schedule to 2-2-4, and while 4 day weekends are even better than 3 days, I'd probably be stuck working 4 days in a row on my working weekends

  • Every once in a while, as an out of shape guy in my 30s, I think about buying myself a pair of heelys.

    Was never a skater, never really had much interest in them as a kid, but something about the idea of rolling around in Costco while I do my grocery shopping appeals to me.

  • Finer bits of wood, like sawdust, or pencil shavings from sharpening, catch fire much more readily than a solid chunk of wood like a whole pencil.

    Given the right environment, finer sawdust can even be explosive.

    A lot of campers and other outdoorsy types are probably familiar with using "feather sticks" to start a fire, where you take a stick and cut a bunch of fine curls into it, almost like you're whittling down the stick but leaving the shavings attached.

    The whole stick wouldn't readily catch fire, but those finer curls attached to it will light pretty easily and spread to the rest of the stick.

    And while I've seen some pretty impressive feather sticks made by people with a steady hand and sharp knife, most of the time those feathers aren't quite as fine as most pencil shavings.