If you didn’t think people can change, you probably wouldn’t spend as much time arguing with people on the internet as you do. Not really much point in doing that since you’re not going to change their minds after all.
But even if you genuinely don’t think people are capable of improvement, I think it would still be worthwhile in a “know your enemy” sort of way.
I have a friend who worked at a convenience store in an area where the KKK still has a decent presence. The local grand wizard or dragon or whatever ridiculous rank he had took a liking to my friend (it should maybe be noted that my friend is practically a caricature of blond, blue-eyed whiteness.) I wouldn’t say they were friends, it was more than he was on the clock and couldn’t really afford to lose his job by telling some racist fuck to pound sand, they didn’t keep in contact outside of work, neither of them changed each other’s minds about anything (my friend is now engaged to a black woman) but they did have some fairly in depth and civil conversations about race and society and such.
I can’t say for what Mr Pointy Hat’s takeaway was from their talks, but my friend’s overall impression is that the klan guy was kind of stuck. He kind of seemed to know that the world had changed around him, and that maybe he was in the wrong and there was no place for someone like him anymore, but he was unable and/or unwilling to change himself to adapt to the new world and to different ways of thinking than he’d been brought up with, so the kkk was kind of his way of carving a safe space for himself out of the world where he knew how things worked and where he had some sort of value. And his hatred towards black people and other people different from himself wasn’t really that they should be killed or enslaved or treated poorly, but that he didn’t get why they needed to be part of the same society as him, sort of like if they could just all go off and live in their own countries he’d wish them the best in their endeavors.
I’m not saying that’s at all a good philosophy, I find it absolutely abhorrent, but it’s also more nuanced than I would have otherwise thought a klansman would be capable of.
I also won’t say that my friend necessarily had a perfect read on this guy, it could very well be that he totally took the wrong things away from what the guy said. And even if he did hit the nail on the head, with a sample size of 1, you can’t exactly extrapolate that to say that the rest of the klan or other racist shitbags feel the same way.
But I do think there can be some value in talking to some of these types of people, maybe not befriending them exactly, but building some sort of mutual understanding might help get some of them onto the right path before they end up too old and stuck in their ways like that guy.
First of all, I find your phrasing that he “is/was” a cop kind of interesting. Is he a cop or is he not? If he was but is no longer a cop, it could very well be that he left that career because he shares some of your same thoughts and feelings and you’re getting yourself worked up over nothing.
Anyway
To me, ACAB means that all cops are bastards collectively
It does not mean that each individual cop is a bastard.
There are undoubtedly some cops that are good people, doing their damnedest to do the right thing, standing up for the little guy against the bastards, who are trying to make the system better from the inside, who understand the role that policing should be, etc.
And there are of course some who are bastards, who abuse their power and do all of the things that make policing shitty.
And there are cops who aren’t actively bastards themselves, but also aren’t doing anything to make waves and stand up against the bastards.
It’s a case of a few rotten apples spoiling the bunch. The apple barrel has a couple absolutely amazing apples in there that are everything you could ever want from an apple, a whole bunch of meh run-of-the-mill grocery store apples, that do the job of being an apple well enough, but aren’t going to make you stand up and say “holy shit, that’s a good fucking apple,” and then there’s a handful of rotten apples that will make you puke your guts up, and unfortunately you don’t get to pick and choose which apple you’re eating, you just have to reach in blind and take a bite, and since those rotten apples are in there, it’s a pretty big gamble to make, you have to really need that apple for it to be worth it.
However, entering into a friendship is different than other interactions you’d have with the police. You get a chance to inspect the apple before you eat it, to see if it’s good, ok, or rotten to the core.
I’d say don’t dismiss him outright because he’s a cop, but try to feel him out, see what his attitude and philosophy is like, don’t grill him on it, but take note of how he reacts when different subjects are brought up, and if you find something problematic with what he says, try to explain how your views are different in a non-confrontational way, don’t make it a fight or an argument or a debate, just try to explain your thoughts and feelings and try to understand why he thinks the way he does as well. With the right people around him, it’s possible that you could help make him or keep him a good cop when otherwise he might go bad, it’s up to you if you want to take on that task.
I feel like that leaves a little weird wiggle room though.
Let’s say you’re born in a Spanish speaking country, maybe Mexico, for the first few years of life you grow up surrounded by Spanish speakers, your first words are in Spanish, you only know Spanish, everyone you know only speaks Spanish.
Then when you’re about 3 years old, before you’re even forming really solid, permanent memories, you go to live in the US, you’re surrounded by English speakers, almost everyone around you stops speaking Spanish regularly and switches to English, your English vocabulary quickly catches up to or maybe even surpasses your Spanish ability. Your first real memories are of people speaking English, and you spend the rest of your life primarily speaking English. You still speak Spanish though, you keep up with your education in that language and can speak both fluently.
I think there’s a valid argument that both could be considered your native language, even if Spanish was your first language, you’ve still grown up speaking both.
It depends, some things, like freeze dried fruit may not necessarily need to be rehydrated.
For things that need to be rehydrated, you may not need as much water to rehydrate it to be edible as would be in the regular ingredients. Hypothetically if you were to make soup from scratch, you’d lose some of the water to evaporation as you cook it. If you were to premake and dehydrate soup, it wouldn’t need to be cooked as long or to as high of a temperature - everything is already cooked you just need to rehydrate it and warm it up to your liking, no need to get it up to a boil and simmer it for however many minutes or hours so less is lost to evaporation.
And depending on the area you’re backpacking in, you’re probably going to be refilling you water from streams and such several times along the way so you can plan around that. In the areas I normally backpack, you’re probably going to cross over or hike along a few different streams every day, running out of water isn’t a major concern.
One time in particular comes to mind, where I did have to plan around having enough water to cook my meal. Normally we plan on our lunch being cold- jerky, trail mix, etc. and we do a freeze dried meal or something similar for dinner that requires water. Around lunch time we were by a stream, and looking at our map the area we were planning to camp for the night wouldn’t be near a water source (pretty much at the very top of a mountain) so we decided we’d have our hot meal for lunch so we could refill our water to make sure we’d have enough to last us until we were able to refill later the next day.
It kind of sucked though, as we were getting closer to our campsite, the temperature started dropping, and a thick fog rolled in. By the time we made camp, we were all kind of cold, everything was damp, and we were generally pretty miserable, and we didn’t even have a hot meal to look forward to. So we pretty much just scarfed down whatever jerky or crackers or whatever we had and went right to bed. The next day though, everything had cleared up, and when we made our way to the summit to enjoy the view. We looked down into the valley below us and we saw a cloud, and we realized that the fog from the night before wasn’t just fog, it was a cloud passing over the mountain, and we hiked through it, so that was pretty cool.
But the next time you go mattress shopping and the salesperson is telling you “it’s like sleeping on a cloud” run away, clouds suck and don’t make for good sleep.
Probably to account for people who won’t store it properly, degradation of the packaging material, etc.
For example, if you store your blister pack of KI on a sunny shelf in your bathroom, UV rays eventually weaken the plastic packaging, cracks develop in the plastic letting in water vapor from your shower, and a stray mold space makes its way in as well and eventually you end up with mold growing on your pills. The KI itself may still be perfectly fine and able to do its job, but that mold might make you sick.
FYI, duck hunt was an NES game, which was an 8 bit console, the SNES was Nintendo’s 16 bit generation
Like others are saying, crypto laws are a bit murky
In general though, it’s pretty well in agreement that you’re supposed to pay capital gains tax when you sell, I imagine that’s something they may try to do away with.
I bought a tiny amount of Bitcoin probably a decade ago, and have basically been sitting on it ever since. It’s of course grown in value significantly since then (though we’re still only talking enough for maybe a couple nice dinners or a modest vacation, not life-changing wealth)
Capital gains tax takes a pretty good chunk out of what I’d earn from it, don’t get me wrong, I’d still make money off of it no matter where I tried to cash out, but currently it’s hovering right around the point where I’m not sure if it’s worth the hassle of having one more thing to keep track of and figure out on my taxes for a relatively small payoff.
If they did away with the capital gains tax on crypto, I’d probably cash out right now (and never look back, I don’t feel I need to repeat this experiment)
I’m not saying that they should do away with capital gains on crypto, just kind of pointing out one way they could get it and how it might affect me personally.
I work in 911 dispatch
The location we get from your phone isn’t exactly a magic “here’s exactly where this person is” button.
For the most part, we rely on triangulation from the cell towers, which means the quality of that location is highly dependent on how many towers are around, how close you are to them, signal strength, the surrounding geography, whether you’re inside a building, in a basement, outside, etc. and the location isn’t constantly updating.
I work in an area with pretty solid service, and at my cunter our policy is that if our ping is accurate to within about 300 meters we can use that if we can’t get any other location information from the caller, and most of the time we’re well within that, but not always. And a 300 meter radius is still a pretty big area, if that drops within a crowded downtown area, or if they’re in a high rise apartment or office building, that could be pretty much useless. And it takes us about 20 seconds to refresh the location and the new location may not be accurate when it does come in, so they’re in a moving vehicle they might well be a half mile away from where they were by the time the next ping comes in. And once you hang up we stop getting that location info and if we want to ping your phone again it’s a bit of a process that requires our officers or our dispatch supervisor calling the phone company, faxing or emailing them paperwork, etc. so not something we can just do totally on the fly, and for whatever reason the pings we get when we do that never seem to be very accurate, and it takes some time and we only get one ping at a time, and if we’re lucky we get one maybe every 10 minutes. We can also only request those pings when we have reason to believe that someone is in danger.
I suspect that there’s a whole mess of local/state/federal laws and regulations, and department/agency/corporate policies that come into play with all of this with a million different exceptions, but overall that’s going to be broadly true in most places around the IS at least.
We are starting to get more gps-based cellular location, this kind of depends on your phone’s capabilities and settings, what network you’re on, and your local 911 center’s capabilities. We’re generally a bit ahead of the curve on our technology and capabilities, so that’s not something everywhere can do yet. We’ve actually had it for a while but the implementation was pretty janky and not very useful, but we got some upgrades within the last year or so. It’s usually, but not always, more accurate than triangulation, the location updates faster, and we do continue to get location updates after you hang up but only for about a minute or so.
Generally speaking, we also have no quick way of knowing who’s calling from a cell phone. Your name won’t usually come up on our caller ID, just your carrier. If you have your emergency info filled out on your smartphone and made it available we can access that, but frankly most people haven’t. If you’ve called before and given your name, we can search for prior calls (in our jurisdiction) from your phone number. Otherwise we can try our luck with some free phone number lookup websites, or try to get the subscriber information from your provider, and if you’re on some kind of a family plan that may mean we’d get maybe your parents information from the phone company not yours, and some prepaid plans don’t really seem to have much if any information on their subscribers on file so it ends up being a dead end.
And that’s pretty much the extent of what we can do from 911. There may be other resources cops can use or other options for exceptional circumstances, but that’s outside the scope of 911 tracking your phone.
Also if you call a non-emergency line, even if it’s one that redirects into a 911 center (we answer a lot of the departments when they’re out of the office, some of them just always come into us, and even if you reach someone at the station there’s a good chance they’ll transfer you to our central dispatch) we won’t get any location info and we need to go through the phone company to get a ping.
And calls from TextNow numbers and other similar apps can be really hard to track down.
On further research, you are correct. I’ve heard the thing about it being deductible for the business repeated enough that I thought it was true. Guess that’s just a reminder to always be fact-checking. I will be editing my comment accordingly. I do feel like the rest of my comment still has some value on how to determine whether it’s worth it or not.
Thank you for pointing out my wrongness.
How are we defining “worth it?”
EDIT: THIS IS INCORRECT, the business cannot deduct your donations.Yes, the business can claim it as a deduction on their taxes. If it’s a business you like, maybe that’s a good thing, if it’s not then that may be a bad thing. Does the money that goes to charity outweigh whatever harm may come from that company paying less in taxes? I don’t know if there’s any good way to objectively say that.
You don’t really get much say in which charity that money goes to, it’s just going to whatever charity that company has chosen to partner with. Some charities can be kind of sketchy, not all of them are on the up-and-up. If it’s a cause you care about, you may be better off just donating directly yourself to a charity you trust.
Now your individual contributions doing this are really a drop in the bucket, let’s say you go to a store and donate at checkout 3 times a week, and since you’re rounding up to the nearest dollar, you’re donating a max of $1 × 3x a week × 52 weeks a year = a maximum donation of $156 dollars a year donated by rounding, probably going to several different charities, and realistically you’re probably donating about half of that unless you have some real OCD about your purchases being even dollar amounts, so probably about $78/year divided up among however many different charities the various places you shop at are involved with.
Now of course you’re not the only person making those donations at any given store, each store is probably making hundreds or thousands of dollars in donations between all of their customers rounding up their checks.
Unless you’re really struggling, you’re probably not going to miss the maybe $100 or so that get siphoned off from you making these donations spread out over a whole year.
Can you Deduct those donations from your own taxes? I’m genuinely not sure, my gut says no (EDIT: you can), but let’s say you can. Do you think that $100 or so + whatever other deductable expenses you have in a year are going to beat the standard deduction? If it does, then sure, feel free to save those receipts and try to add it all up, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth to me, but maybe it’s worth it for your purposes, there’s a lot of different tax situations I won’t pretend to know for certain.
Are those charitable donations going to improve your life? That’s hard to say, I don’t know your life. EDIT to expand on this a bit Are you in a position where you’re going to benefit directly from a charity? If you are you may need to reconsider making a donation because you may need that money yourself. Although there are cases where a charity may be able to make better use of money than an individual, for example being able to pool money from donations to buy things in bulk at a better price, but you’d have to know how that organization is ran and how the money is going to get used to determine whether you’ll be able to benefit from that directly. Indirectly maybe you’ll see some benefits but probably not immediately and it probably won’t be immediately obvious. Maybe donating money now to a charity that supports youth sports leads to some kid taking up baseball who wouldn’t have been able to afford to otherwise which in turn keeps him off the streets, gets him scholarships, etc. when otherwise he might have ended up in a gang or hooked on drugs or something and broken into your neighbors car 10 years down the line to steal some change which resulted in your insurance rates going up because your in a “high crime area” or something. Or maybe it will just give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
A lot of Latinos are fairly conservative people, a lot of them are strongly Catholic with all of the baggage that comes with it, etc.
Basically the only major policy reason they ever leaned towards the democrats is immigration, so with the Dems going further right on immigration it makes a lot of sense for some of them to be jumping ship
I think in many cases a bigger issue is going to be how the game is designed, whether open or closed source.
If your open source game is a mess of poorly-documented, barely-decipherable spaghetti code, held together by a bunch of tacky bullshit, that’s going to be a nightmare to mod.
On the other-hand, a closed source game may have absolutely phenomenal documentation and tools available specifically to enable the modding community.
Similarly, you can have well-written, open-sourced code with built-in mod support with proper documentation, and you can have ridiculous bullshit closed-source code that no one is quite sure how or why it even works.
My family had an interesting experience with this
My mom’s cousin was a wonderful woman, I don’t think there is anyone who would have anything bad to say about her.
Her husband was a piece of shit. I’m not going to go into all of the ways he was a shitty person, I’ll just leave it at he was an illiterate moron who wasted all of their money, never held down a job for long, weighed probably well in excess of 300lbs (my mom, who is not petite by any definition, could fit in one of his pant legs) bought stupid cars and all kinds of shit for himself, and his wife had very little despite usually being the sole breadwinner of their household.
She got sick, my mom helped make arrangements for what would happen with their dogs when she passed because fat ass definitely wasn’t going to take care of them.
The day she died my mom was over helping take care of her, I was on my way over to pick up the dogs, I’m a couple blocks away and get a frantic call from my mom telling me not to come over, because he came downstairs with a shotgun and was talking about ending it.
I pulled up outside, my mom met me at the porch. He’d calmed down a little, I made sure cops had been called.
I go inside, there’s her cousin gasping for air beating down deaths door on the couch. He’s sitting in the kitchen, fucking around on his computer, distraught but not even giving a moment’s thought to his wife dying in the other room. He’s clearly more upset that no one’s going to take care of him than anything else. The shotgun is leaning in the corner of the kitchen.
We decide it’s best if I don’t stay long and I don’t pick up the dogs at that time.
I get on my way, cops come soon after, confiscate all of his guns. She passes, my mom gets the dogs and gets them to their new homes.
Fat ass never has a funeral for her, and definitely never tried to reach out to any of us.
Some months later my mom and grandmother are going to check out a new store that recently opened. They were driving near that house, and fat ass, being who he was, had recently purchased a ridiculous new Camaro, probably with life insurance money that most people would have used for a funeral.
My mom makes a small detour to drive by and show my grandmother that car, when they see several police cars and an ambulance turn down the same road, and sure enough they stop right in front of the house.
My mom pulls up and asks what’s going on, afraid that maybe he had done something to the neighbors, they’ve had issues before.
Turns out that they’d gotten a 911 call from the house, from a woman, who I don’t believe was never identified, we suspect probably a prostitute.
Fatass had a heart attack and keeled over dead.
She called 911, grabbed his computer and maybe a few other small valuables, nothing in particular that we noticed missing, and ran off never to be heard from again.
Good for her.
My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to untangle their debts, see what could be salvaged, etc. it wasn’t much.
I’m especially salty about the whole situation because the house originally belonged to my mom’s aunt/he cousins mother. It had been paid off years ago, and at one point the plan had been for the house to be left to me, since her daughter didn’t have any kids, and most other branches of that side of the family were also dead-ends, I sort of represented the future of the family.
But when her daughter married fatass, since he kept wasting all of their money she let them move in because they would have probably been homeless otherwise, and they got the house when she died. They took out loans against the house, he didn’t really keep up with any sort of maintenance, etc. to call it a fixer-upper would have been an understatement.
My mom’s main priority was to have a proper funeral for her cousin, and had her ashes buried.
She never bothered to claim his remains from the coroner’s office. They tried to reach out to his kids from other relationships, other relatives, etc. and none of them wanted anything to do with him either.
After a certain amount of time, the coroner’s office here cremates the remains, and if they’re still not claimed I believe they eventually have them scattered or buried somewhere.
I’m not someone who cares much about what happens with my, or anyone else’s body, once they die. Once you’re dead you’re dead, and your corpse deserves no more respect than any other slab of expiring meat. I’d just as soon throw bodies unceremoniously into an industrial composter.
Many people of course have a different idea of that, and I’m willing to respect their beliefs.
But I think fatass should be more-or-less the model we should follow for bad people. Everything is carried out respectfully, but without ceremony, no fancy headstones, no elaborate funeral ceremony, and no easy way for mourners and kooks to make a pilgrimage site from it.
In some cases where religion and culture and such dictate that a body shouldn’t be cremated, I would support burial at sea, unmarked graves, or plain graves in in an area where they can be visited by family but not the general public.
My circles tend to be full of “traditionally manly men” types
A bunch of eagle scouts, hunters, fishermen, mechanics of various types, construction workers, people who enjoy guns knives and axes, beer and whiskey drinkers, DIYers, veterans, woodworkers, blacksmiths, guys who like camping and sitting around a fire, getting together to watch the game, and damn-near every one of us sports a full beard.
None of us see ourselves reflected in Trump at all, he’s the antithesis of all of the values we take pride in. He’s the dude we only talk to at a bar because he’s either being weirdly possessive of the pool table or creeping out some girls and we’re trying to distract him while they make their exit. He’s the neighbor we hope we don’t run into because he’s going to try to talk to us and every word out of his mouth is garbage.
And of course, those of us who are going bald just suck it up and shave our heads instead of whatever the fuck is going on with his head.
nearly three years
Try 10 years
This whole shit show kicked off with Russia invading Crimea back in 2014 and it’s been going on ever since.
Yes, it escalated in a big way a couple of years ago, but if someone were to, for example, invade Florida, we’d consider that to be the unquestionable start of a war, not 8 years later when they tried to move beyond Florida and attack the rest of the country.
For the US, I’d say a pretty strong contender is Woodstock, NY, with a population of around 6,000, and of course famous for the music festival of the same name (even though the actual festival was something like 60 miles away in Bethel)
Pretty much exactly what you probably think they are, I think they’re mostly a thing for people living off grid and maybe some RVs
Sort of
For most toilets there’s universal fittings that will work just fine, you may need to adjust them a little bit, but they’re made to be adjusted, and they’ll work just fine with most toilets.
If you have the original factory parts in your toilet, they may not be adjustable, and if you tried to swap them into another toilet they may not fit/work in other brands/models, or they may kind of work, but maybe not quite right.
There are a handful of brands that don’t tend to play well with the universal fit parts, I want to say Kohler is one, and if you go to a hardware store, most likely they’re going to stock the universal parts, then a couple of the most common oddball brands.
There’s also of course some weird toilets that are just totally different- pressure assisted flush, composting or incinerator toilets, etc. that aren’t even working on the same principle as most toilets, but I think the odds are that if you have one of those, you know that already.
Also I haven’t played with any toilets that were manufactured that way, but I did retrofit one of my toilets to be a dual-flush. Those kits seem pretty universal, but probably double-check before trying to put them in an oddball toilet.
My dude, what the actual fuck are you on about?
“Know your enemy” isn’t a saying about peaceful turn-the-other-cheek, love-thy-neighbor, forgiveness bullshit
It’s about knowing how and why they fight so you know how to defeat them.
You can’t and won’t win over every individual Nazi or klansman and make them see the light, but each one you do is one less enemy on their side and one more ally on yours, and my talking to them you get a better understanding on how to beat them.