evasive_chimpanzee @ evasive_chimpanzee @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Yeah, it's really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.

Technique can't overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.

To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.

There's no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can "use your core" or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.

I'm going to disagree with everyone here. Loads of people throughout history have learned to swim by literally being thrown in. It's not a good way to learn, but people do it. Even babies can do it.

Given a little bit of reading first, you'd do just fine. Yeah, the motions might be a little off cause it's hard to learn a complex movement from a book, but it would be good enough.

You're getting downvoted for saying something sorta close to true, but not exactly. I agree strongly with everything you said here, though.

Generally, with any complex human-machine interface, you want to cast as wide of a net for accommodation as possible because there are so many variables that come into play.

Like if you are putting together a basketball team, you probably want a bunch of tall dudes, but you never know how many Muggsy Bogues's are out there unless you let everyone play.

For a fighter pilot, would you rather have a female with greater ability to distinguish color, or a male that can pull higher g's? It's impossible to say what specific traits would lead to the best outcome in all possible engagements.

Even things like colorblindness can be a positive in situations because camouflage can stick out to colorblind people. Some types of deafness comes with immunity to motion sickness.

I'm not sure. I know in a lot of those places, the rationale is that the terrain is too flat, so rifle bullets can travel too far.

The problem is that I don't know if that actually corresponds to increased risk of death. It sounds plausible, but idk if there are real stats to back it up.

A quick search for some plausible data turned up California's official stats, and going back a few years, I never saw more than 5 deaths in a year. Extrapolating the rate to the whole US, that's like 50 per year. Other sources just say "less than 100 per year for the whole US".

Without a specific study, it's just as plausible to attribute the fatalities to sheer proximity of the shooter to the victim rather than bullets traveling far. Bigger targets are easier to hit. Just looking at the California data, which includes injuries, this seems to bear out, and most injuries and fatalities are due to close range shotgun bird hunting (i.e. the Dick Cheney).

And really, if you wanted to completely eliminate the risk of rifle bullets traveling further than intended, you could mandate the use of any elevated shooting position (which some places do for archery).

Here's an example: Delaware only allows shotgun, pistol/pistol caliber long guns, and muzzleloader, no true rifle.

https://www.eregulations.com/delaware/hunting/deer-seasons

Connecticut only allows rifle on private land.

https://portal.ct.gov/deep/hunting/2025-connecticut-hunting-and-trapping-guide/deer-hunting#PVSHOT

Iowa has no rifle allowed.

https://www.iowadnr.gov/things-do/hunting-trapping/iowa-hunting-seasons

Lots of states have restrictions against modern (and by modern, i mean bottlenecked) rifle rounds, and if you want to use a rifle, you have to either find a 150 year old cowboy gun, or buy a really expensive new gun using one of several specialized cartridges that cost like $2 a round.

And then when it comes down to it, if you live in a state where it is legal to hunt with a regular rifle, you end up finding that half the time any public land that you can hunt on is restricted to archery only, so unless you happen to be a large landowner, you can't hunt with a rifle.

That's not true. With no controls, there is no significant difference in tolerance by sex. When controlled for height, females have lower tolerance than males. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3753357/

There are a lot of differences between how the US and how Australia do hunting. For one, there is no commercial deer/elk harvest in the US. Commercially sold venison can only be from farmed deer/elk. I think deer leather can be sold, but there are a lot of hoops to go through.

Also, in the US, most hunting regulations exist not for ethical or conservation purposes but to prevent people from being able to subsistence hunt. They wanted hunting to be a rich man's game like in the UK. The existence of hunting seasons is a good example. Another is regulations on method of take; for example, you often must use outdated equipment like bows and muzzleloaders, and the use of modern, effective rifles is severely curtailed. Compare that to Australia where you can use night vision/thermal scopes and rifles with supressors, and i believe there is no "hunting season".

The reality is that both countries have an overpopulation of large herbivores in areas, and the answer anti-hunting people give is the reintroduction of large carnivores. While we should do that in more rural areas, it's not feasible in urban/suburban areas where deer proliferate.

Many municipalities actually have to pay to have deer culled, and they do that rather than making it easier for people to hunt.

Tl;dr, i think there are some things I like better about how Australia handles hunting, but theres also things about the US's method i like.

You can save a lot of money by buying a used baratza. They sell literally every part for replacement, so you can just buy a used one and swap in whatever parts

This sort of thing happens all the time, and it's usually subject to some level of debate. Just look at the ponderosa pine (pinus ponderosa. Some say there is one species with multiple subspecies, some say they are just different varieties, some say that they are different species, or some are and some arent, etc.

Most people in America have health insurance through their employer. This was originally designed to be a perk of jobs back in the day, but now it unfortunately links healthcare to employment. If you are retirement age, you can get Medicare, which is government sponsored healthcare that still works through the private system, so there are no "government doctors" or anything like that for that population. Similarly, for disabled folks, or those poor enough (which can be hard to prove), they can get Medicaid.

If you lose your job, there's a system to pay to extend your employer's insurance policy until your next job's plan kicks in, but it's expensive cause your old job is no longer paying a big percentage of it, so a lot of people gamble on not needing insurance if for example, they end one job in May and know they have a new job starting in September.

With insurance, there are some government mandated policies. For example (and don't quote me on this cause I don't know the exact policies), things determined to be "preventative" have no out of pocket cost, so you won't generally pay for a regular yearly checkup, vaccines, etc. There are often options for insurance types to pick from depending on if you anticipate needing lots of care (e.g., a healthy young person probably won't, but if you are trying to have a baby, you know there are a lot of costs associated).

My employer pays for my insurance. If I were to get cancer, I would probably end up paying for a couple thousand dollars of appointments, scans, etc (called the deductible). Then I'd reach a point where my insurance covers most of the cost, and I kick in 20% (called the coinsurance level). Eventually, if my costs hit a certain limit (the out of pocket limit), insurance covers everything. I think it's like $8k or something like that for me. That's the most I could ever have to pay in a year.

People get screwed over by a few things. First is that while I could put together $8k if I had to, many people still have trouble with that. The second is people falling through the cracks of the labyrinthine system, and they end up without insurance while in between jobs or whatever. The third thing is that insurance decides what is necessary, so if you live in the middle of nowhere, and your child gets a specific type of cancer, you might not want to settle for whatever the "standard of care" is at your local hospital, you might want to fly across the country to go to the best hospital for that cancer, and your insurance isn't going to cover that cost.

And it is incredibly important to note that the insurance companies don't play fair. When your doctor tells the insurance company that you need a certain procedure, they have an automated system send out a "no". Your doctor then has to spend time to appeal the decision. Eventually, you might get the care you need paid for, but by engaging in these practices, they are hoping you will either 1: pay yourself, or 2: die.

Also, a final note that I think is important is that cancer, and many chronic illnesses, makes people desperate, and willing to try anything. There is a huge ecosystem (and it probably exists in your country, too), of people selling alternative (i.e., fake) medicine to cure them. Yeah, it's possible to wind up with a $50k bill for real medicine, but you also have people paying large sums to feed bleach to their autistic kids and then trying to pay for it with go fund me.

pH doesn't necessarily tell the right story if you are concerned about acidity for your teeth, GI tract, or taste. Something like distilled water will turn acidic with a pH of 5.8 due to co2 absorption. There's barely any "acid" there, though, it just doesn't have any buffering capability compared to water with some dissolved solids in it (like tap water). What really matters is what they call "titratable acidity".

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-45776-5_22

Southern baptists were pro-choice until the rise of the "moral majority" required southern baptists to fall in line with the catholic church on abortion to create the supply side Jesus we know today.

But you don't call it "point four five caliber" you call it "forty five caliber". Similar is 7.62 mm AKA "thirty caliber". It's reasonable that someone wouldn't know that it's literally just hundredths of inches.

Shotgun gauge is wonky, so it's not a given that the number would just be a diameter in units they are familiar with. "Grains" are also a meaningless unit to most people.

Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.

The last paragraph is a good catch. Someone from outside the US is not going to catch the difference between "a Wisconsin state senator" and "a senator from Wisconsin".

Agreed. Jobs don't go to the applicant with the highest GPA (or the most "skilled"), they go to whoever had an internship at their dad's friend's company (or friend's dad's company, etc.) each summer and got grades that were "good enough". If you can get something like that, even if it's not exactly in your area of interest, you don't need to be too concerned about grades.

On the other hand, if you don't have those connections, you need to be smart.

There are people who are able to get decent enough grades and get jobs on charisma alone, but they are a nightmare to work with cause you'll always be picking up their slack (even if they are perfectly nice people that you enjoy being around).

I tend to disagree with people on the "numbers game" thing. The barriers to submitting a million resumes to a million jobs have never been lower, so people in charge of hiring are inundated with applications from people who's skillsets and stated interests make it clear that they have not even read the job posting. It makes it so that people who are fitting for the job are like a needle in a haystack. It also doesn't help that the people reviewing applications are not often the people who you'd be working with, and they don't necessarily know all the right things to be looking for; they just have a list of magic words that they are filtering for. You might have a synonym of the right word on your resume, and they'd never notice it.

These days, knowing someone is especially the key in my experience. It doesn't even have to be someone you know well enough that they'd give you an actual "recommendation". You are probably better off sending your resume to 10 people who already have the job you want than submitting 100 actual applications.

It's not the best resume in the giant stack who gets interviewed, it's someone's niece's college roommate's former coworker's step-cousin.

I feel like it's only a matter of time before those get banned, so i kinda want to get one, even though I dont really need one.

It's such an easy thing to predict happening, too. If you did it perfectly, it would, at best, maintain an unstable equilibrium and just keep the same output quality.

Total War: Empire. I've previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who's played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.

There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It's cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren't located in the capital because it's meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.