rocket_surgeron

There are some people for who this is the opportunity of a lifetime.

PSAR volunteers are also called Trailhead Stewards and people who care a lot about the environment and the health and safety of people flock to these positions. You get training, accommodation that is impossible to obtain otherwise, and experience. There is almost always a waiting list for trailhead stewards.

I’m a watershed steward so I spend a ludicrous number of hours poking around storm drains, parking lots, and streams, writing and giving presentations, compiling reports, and wrangling volunteers for cleanup and drainage projects all in exchange for $0.00.

I like sailing and swimming and fishing and I want my local rivers and bays to be clean. If I liked hiking in the mountains I’d probably be a trailhead steward.

Here’s a video with some psar volunteers: https://www.flickr.com/photos/grand_canyon_nps/51252679717/i...

Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups

LOL

Get fucked.

I'm not a libertarian so I live in the real world, in what world are you not allowed to fly without an ID?

I've flown, yes, post-9/11, yes, post-shoe-bomber, yes, post-RealID, without an ID on multiple occasions.

You walk up to the counter and say "I've forgotten my ID and need to make this flight" and they type on their computer, hand you a slip of paper, and then you show that slip of paper to the TSA staffer at the podium checking IDs and they ask you some questions, and you're waved through.

Is this just another CATO fundraising grift?

edit: It's even on the TSA website https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification

In the event you arrive at the airport without valid identification, because it is lost or at home, you may still be allowed to fly. The TSA officer may ask you to complete an identity verification process which includes collecting information such as your name, current address, and other personal information to confirm your identity. If your identity is confirmed, you will be allowed to enter the screening checkpoint. You will be subject to additional screening, to include a patdown and screening of carry-on property.

It is a common misconception that all poppies produce opium.

They do not.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of poppy varieties that produce no morphinan alkaloids.

Morphinan alkaloids become "opium".

https://www.poison.org/articles/what-to-know-california-popp...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10017456/

In the real world with thriving economies, there will be smaller, underdog players already operating. Maybe they are regional, or maybe they have a slower/smaller fleet.

Yes. I use them every day. I send million of dollars of aerospace equipment to and fro every year using 3PL, none of which are UPS or FedEx or the USPS.

There are thousands of 3PL firms, each competing with each other.

If you search "full truck" and/or "intermodal" and "logistics" I guarangoddamntee there are a dozen within 50 miles of your zip code.

They just need to raise capital to expand rapidly.

LOL

If my preferred smaller logistics firm (Polaris) was given eleventy-billion hexaseptillion dollars it would take two years at a minimum just to lease the aircraft, airport slots, and facilities needed to compete with a single-digit percentage of UPS's network.

Again, the fact that people think that smaller underdog competitors to UPS don't exist is a glaring, supermassive-black-hole-sized blind spot that pseudo-capitalists have.

In a REAL capitalistic economy, a small shipping provider would have raised the capital immediately to capitalize on the strikes, advertised their services to UPSs customers and eaten the company away.

In the real world it takes weeks if not months to purchase a delivery vehicle. There are no delivery van lots that you go to in order to browse a wide variety of Morgan Olson and Utilimaster vans and then plop down a million dollars for 20 of them, not that 20 of them would allow you to run a parcel shipping service. You need thousands. Which means a production run at a manufacturer who is already booked through next year.

Hell, it would take weeks just to figure out WHERE to advertise much less actually inking deals, unless you like throwing money away.

It doesn't matter if you apparate a trillion dollars, time is immovable. It took a decade of conceptualizing and two years of actualizing to start FedEx.

If a rationally-acting rational actor rationalizes ten quadrillion dollars of gold into his pocket, it doesn't matter one fucking bit.

They can't buy the facilities, systems, equipment, and experience needed to do shit. They can't use their iron capitalist will to pour concrete faster.

This is one, of many, fundamental blind spot concerning reality that capitalists or pseudo-capitalists used to working in the fake online venture capitalist world have.

The state flower of California is the California Poppy Eschscholzia californica.

The poppy that produces opium is the Breadseed Poppy Papaver somniferum.

You can buy ten thousand California Poppy seeds at any Home Depot for $3.97.

https://www.homedepot.com/p/Stover-California-Poppy-Seed-790...

My gut tells me that the number of fatal incidents that would be prevented by complete "takeoff to landing" automation vastly exceeds the number of incidents prevented by a human correcting a computer or recovering from a failed instrument or system.

I'm willing to bet that for every "miracle on the Hudson" there are ten or more "the pilots should have just let go of the controls and let the computer handle things, or trusted their artificial horizon after getting disoriented".

The number of FAA accident investigations that mention spatial disorientation is too great to be otherwise.

Is there some good explanation, show a sinking titanic was heard both in london and new york, but a modern(...ish) MH-370 can just dissapear?

If Titanic had sunk in the Indian Ocean, it would probably still be lost.

By sinking in the North Atlantic it was within radio range of dozens of other ships and ground stations. Carpathia got to it in 3 hours.

The part of the Indian Ocean that MH370 is thought to have gone down in is second only to the South Pacific in emptiness.

The problem is suffering real world consequences for certain types of medical treatment, such as problems getting work, renting housing, etc.

Fix that, then? I keep hearing about all of these nightmare scenarios, dreamed up by paranoiacs.

I submit. You are right. Fix THOSE problems instead of killing people.

I'm agreeing with you. What you said happens. We must fix that.

If things are that bad, the entities inflicting these consequences don't care about medical privacy anyways, right?

You are probably like me. To me there is no medical information of any kind that could embarrass or "stigmatize" me or anyone else.

But the vast majority of people are paralyzed by fear that someone might find out they have hemorrhoids.

Others live in a delusional state of paranoia where "duh gubmint" will use the info against them not realizing that any entity, governmental or otherwise, willing to do so will just ignore privacy laws anyways.

Libertarian morons probably think McDonalds telling an employee they can't wear a Burger King shirt to work is censorship...

Luckily for me, education is a thing.

I work at a big "tech" company.

But it's not a sexy tech company. We build actual physical products that do things-- we're not a Matryoshka doll of web services hiding an advertising service in the middle whose only purpose is to trick users into giving up private information so that dick pill ads can be served more efficiently to them.

Nor are we trying to figure out how to use AI to serve you ads better.

It's slow, boring, work that pays well and is easy (mandatory) to leave behind after you clock out at 5pm every day. PTO flows like water, and the benefits are platinum-plated.

Of course, since we don't sell dick pill ads like Google, Meta, and the others there's no chance that our stock will erupt and leave us all multi-millionaires, so it's not "sexy".

I started out as a tech writer, part time while going to school, in 2007 and am now a Senior Principal Engineer.

Because we work on slow, actually real, physical, projects there is a lot of stability-- schedules are made in five year increments.

That, to me, is a "tech" company.

Internet firms whose only purpose is the sale of ads are just ad companies masquerading as a tech companies and I imagine such an environment might be somewhat volatile.

The site is only good for finding reviews on products but companies figured that out and game it now as well.

You're using it wrong. Reddit is the only place, in the history of the entire internet, that has successfully collected all of my interests into one location.

Astrophotography, Astronomy, Art Deco, Scuba, Amateur Radio, Radio Astronomy, Motorcycling (specifically Moto Guzzi bikes), EMS/Firefighting, Vintage Computing, Maps, Woodworking, and most importantly of all, Yoga-- all in one place.

There were fora for all of these "back in the good old days" but the user base is 100x more active and knowledgable, they're all in one place, and there are super-niches.

If you go to reddit and only see companies hawking a product, you're the problem.

Like the people who go on TikTok and only see chicks. What the fuck are you doing? I go on TikTok and only see astronomy and scuba diving videos. It's great!

My fetish is listening to and reading complaints about how Apple prices their unnecessary luxury goods.

The next year is going to be glorious.

Did you really create a new account just to post this comment?

Sad.

If an extraterrestrial intelligence has reached the level of ability needed to transport large masses over vast interstellar distances, they are not lazily buzzing F/A-18s off the coast of California.

They're not coyly darting to and fro in a game with, almost exclusively American, pilots.

They're not hiding themselves from humanity, for whatever reason.

Their immense power would be like the Sun shining next to humanity's candle. They would not care, or even know to care, about how we would react to their presence.

Their interaction with Earth would be like Earth's with Mars. Sure we take steps to sterilize Mars rovers to prevent contamination but only because when we drill the hell out of that rock in broad daylight for all the Martians to see we want to make sure we only get Mars stuff.

I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.

which is damaging the reputation of the hobby.

Literally, actually, irrefutably, and unquestionably, it is impossible to attract an enforcement action accidentally. The FCC bends over backwards to accommodate mistakes, if they even deign to notice them.

This was his third strike.

Your comment is inverted.

It isn't fines that are damaging the reputation of the hobby, it is the almost rampant abuse of the rules by actors like Beaudet.

Literally, actually, irrefutably, and unquestionably, a grand total of zero people have ever thought "oh man I want to get into amateur radio but I'm not going to because the jack booted thugs at the FCC will fine me if I play music over nets in order to piss people off."

The vast, overwhelming, majority of people don't even think like that.

For the remaining microscopically-miniscule minority, the thought excites them.

Usenet didn't fail, you failed it.

There are servers up right now. People using it at this very moment.

Why did you leave? Digg? Slashdot?

The dirty secret about "metabolism" is that, except for an EXTRAORDINARILY SMALL part of the population, the range of metabolic differences between individuals is approximately equivalent to a single candy bar's worth of calories.

If you have a "slow metabolism" eat one candy bar's less worth of calories and you'll be fine.

Nine out of ten humans will be within 10% (less than a candy bar) of what an online BMR calculator spits out based on their sex, age, weight, and height.

The tenth out of ten humans is the person in the article you linked to, or an elite athlete.

If you are one of those one out of ten humans, you are or should be under the care of a physician.

Everyone else can count calories and adjust based on their observations.

BMR has the same factoid-spouting prigs as BMI. Yeah, we get it, you're a powerlifter so BMI doesn't work with you. Shut up and let the 99.97% of the population for who it works use it.

The average American only made 60K in 2022

So what?

but to the average voter, this salary is obscene.

The average voter is an 80-year-old pearl-clutching moron who would rather see the homeless dead.

edit: sorry, 58-year-old.

The US government had two years of POW "confessions" trickling out before the POW confession parade started in 1952.

Of course they would have prepared. They knew what was coming.

If one believes these confessions THEY MUST ALSO believe confessions obtained under police torture, right?

quelle surprise

Maryland put "War of 1812" on the plates because of the Battle of Baltimore, specifically the siege of Fort McHenry, which inspired Marylander Francis Scott Key to write the poem that would later become the national anthem.

Fort McHenry is in the lower left of the license plate.

The star spangled banner flies above it.

The "bombs bursting in air" are the fireworks.

It doesn't commemorate the war, it commemorates the anthem, it just says "War of 1812" because that's when the event occurred.

It was a terrible design but I've got amateur radio plates so I avoided it.

1. A yoga studio. I practice practically every day and have made many good friends. We started an informal "outnumbered yoga males club" that meets for tacos and ice cream every other weekend or so.

2. The local summer garden/community theater. I help build sets and paint. Occasionally, I run the spotlights.

3. Your neighborhood's local botanical club. It's just me (a middle-aged man) and a bunch of old ladies who run something called "weed warriors" where we go to local parks and beaches and eradicate invasive species with great prejudice.

"But my neighborhood doesn't have a botanica..." I'm willing to bet it does, you just don't know about it.

4. The local volunteer fire department. I am a volunteer EMT and Firefighter who got started when I fell and injured my back and my barber showed up on the ambulance. I rehabbed (hence, the yoga) and got into shape and signed up. EMT-B is easy to attain and Firefighter-I is even easier. I do one shift per week on average, usually Saturday nights and gained an instant group of people from which to make friends.

Apropos to a submission about Vitamin D that was a couple of links above this article is the fact that it ignores quality of life.

Sometimes it seems that medical researchers don't actually care about health, they only care about numbers, because numbers are easy.

During an annual checkup a couple of years back I mentioned that I had "been feeling down and sluggish quite a bit lately" and my doctor said "hmmm, might be vitamin d, we'll see with your bloodwork".

Wonder of wonders my vitamin d was low, I started supplementing it, and once my levels got back to normal I unquestionably, irrefutably, CAUSATIONALLY, felt better. My quality of life improved.

I didn't know Vitamin D was tied to energy and mental health issues. Sure there are at-home tests now, but there weren't any back then and I wouldn't have known to take one anyways.

How many people are living shitty lives because of something simple that could be caught during an annual blood test?

Researchers: "We don't care, those numbers are hard to get. Deaths are easy to count."

There are more choices from more manufacturers than there has ever been in the history of humanity.

You can buy keyboards from wish.com e-waste to standard "good" to enthusiast vessels for artistic expression to hyper-expensive ergonomic solutions that take weeks to learn how to use.

There is a near-infinite selection to choose from at near-infinite price points.

You can build custom keyboards with open source hardware AND software designs.

"Back in thuh day" you could only choose between what was in stock at CompUSA, Circuit City, and Best Buy. Now there are so many options it is overwhelming.

Are we in the golden age of consumer choice? Minus Microsoft, of course.

Being outdoors is almost always better than being indoors and people do need to get out more but that’s not the solution to a problem brought about by bodies being adapted to sub-Saharan latitudes but living north or south of the 37th parallel.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/time-for-more...

An hour a day buck-ass naked, isn’t enough if you don’t live along the equator.

For many northern and southern latitudes where many people live if you affixed yourself to a rotating pole and rotisserie’d yourself from sunrise to sunset while naked every day, then for 4-9 months out of the year you would be D deficient.

I’m outdoors more than most and if I don’t supplement my levels fall into the mid-20s ng/mL, below the standard range of 30-100.

And no matter how many millions of studies repeat verbatim the importance of vitamin d people still neglect it.

It’s down right now because the hard drive failed last December after 27 years of operation but the NTP server for my home network used to be and will be again a Digital AlphaStation 200 4/233 running Tru64 UNIX connected to a PPS serial GPS puck.

Why? Why not!