How much do you think the average American flies?

Less than half of us get on a plane in any given year, so most of us aren’t impacted one bit by long lines at airports because we just weren’t going to go to the airport anyway.

And if we do, most of us are only flying a couple of times a year. A couple extra hours at the airport a couple times a year isn’t that big of a deal.

Especially since odds are that you already planned to arrive early because there’s always the potential for all kinds of hold-ups and delays at the airport anyway.

It’s something like 10-15% of the population who account for something like 2/3 of all airline passengers. They’re the only ones this is really “hurting” (and even then I’d still say it’s more of an inconvenience than causing any actual hurt)

And conveniently, it’s also about 15% of the population who are immigrants, and every last one of them should consider themselves to be in real danger of having their lives uprooted or even ended by ice. They are actually being hurt.

So no, fuck that.

I really only need 1 HDMI port on my TV- to connect my AV receiver to, everything else gets plugged into that receiver, it’s got about 8 HDMI ports.

Right now there’s 3 consoles, a pc, and a Chromecast hooked up to it, so I have ports to spare, and I haven’t had to use anything on my tv since I initially set it up and set the input to HDMI 1

It’s not necessarily feasible for everyone, it does take up a little more space in your entertainment center that not everyone has, but I also think it’s 100% worth it to at least have a decent set of speakers hooked up to your TV if you can find the space and budget to do so.

Probably the coolest thing since I started learning it is some of the weird places it turns up

If you read the comic series Saga, the “blue” language is Esperanto

It shows up in the background of some movies and such as a generic “foreign” language

The watch brand Movado is an Esperanto word (movement)

I’ve never dived too deep into in, but I know there has been some research into native Esperanto speakers (denaskuloj) because that’s a thing that exists

Basically none. A couple friends have learned a little bit with me, and I’ve sought out a couple Esperanto books, podcasts, etc.

But otherwise I can’t say that I’ve ever randomly run into another esperantist I could talk to, and I’m not the type of person who seeks out clubs and conventions or making friends with strangers online.

But it’s an easy language to learn, and I feel like it’s taught me how to learn a language, and I think that I’ll be better prepared if I ever decide to try picking up another language somewhere down the line.

And while I’m not holding my breath, I like the idea of an international auxiliary language, and while there’s some valid criticism of Esperanto for that purpose (like that it’s too eurocentric) it’s probably about the best option that we have right now since it already exists, there’s people who actually speak it and it doesn’t have all of the weird grammar rules and such that natural languages all tend to have.

I believe in esperanto it should be

bonvolu stakigi la seĝojn ĉe la fino de la tago

Literally translates to something like

“Please make stacked the chairs at the end of the day”

The measure of a good story isn’t in a brief description of the premise, but in the actual telling of that story. A good writer could take something mundane like putting on your socks and make a funny, interesting, or thought-provoking read out of it, and a poor writer could make the most absolutely amazing thing imaginable a slog to get through.

I see nothing glaringly wrong with the premise of your story, but it’s all of the other details you don’t want to give away and how you tell the storf that would determine whether it’s a good story or not.

So the question really is how are you as a writer?

I’m pretty sure this is at least the second time I’ve seen you asking this question somewhere on Lemmy, so at the very least you don’t seem to have a lot of confidence in your own writing abilities.

And maybe that’s warranted, maybe it’s not. I haven’t read any of your writing to be able to say, and even if I had, just because I do or do not personally like it doesn’t mean that it’s objectively bad or good, it’s a matter of taste.

Start writing. Share some of what you’ve written with others and solicit criticism. Take that criticism into consideration and write some more. Lather, rinse, and repeat until the people you’re writing for (maybe it’s others, maybe it’s just yourself) are happy with what you’ve made.

The first things you write, in all honesty, probably won’t be good. As a talking dog on a children’s cartoon once told me “sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something” you gotta start somewhere, and unless you’re a rare generational talent who’s naturally gifted at writing, you’re not gonna be starting from the top.

Scrolling through your history I see a lot of “do rich people do X” kind of questions. And I feel like that’s sort of your way of doing research into this project.

And that’s good, the best stories have some aspect to them that’s grounded, that feels familiar to them in some way, that things actually could play out in real life the way it does the pages.

But remember, this is your world, your character, your story, you make the rules and while it’s good to keep things grounded in reality, it’s also good to ask “what if?” Even if there had never been a biracial drug-addicted rich-kid street-racer (based on some of the things you’ve asked) in all of recorded history, it’s your prerogative to write a book based on the concept of “but what if there was?”

A lot of your questions also make me think that you’re pretty young, or at least just don’t have a whole lot of worldly experience for one reason or another. That’s not a knock against you, that just means that you’re at a great point in your life to start building knowledge and experience about the things you want to write about. Don’t rely on Lemmy to spoon-feed you those answers go out and find them for yourself.

Read. Read absolutely everything you can stomach. Reading is probably the most absolutely important thing to learn how to write, how can you hope to write well if you don’t know what good writing looks like? Read fiction, read nonfiction, read news articles, stories, biographies, memoirs, comics, short stories, epic novels and multi-part series, read analysis and criticisms of other writing, read theory on how to write, read new works and the classics, read about philosophy, psychology, sociology, science, art, math, etc.

And think about what you want your own writing to be like, and what worked and didn’t work and why in all those things you read.

And don’t limit yourself to reading. There are stories all around us- on tv, movies, all over the internet in various forms, and most importantly real life, go do things and talk to people as much as you are able. Experience as much as you can, and think about how it all makes you feel and how you’d write about it. Talk to people who have used drugs, maybe see if there’s some kind of volunteer opportunity at a rehab clinic near you. Go to a racetrack, maybe work on your own car. Good luck finding an in to get direct access to the mega-rich, but there’s no reason you can’t try, sometimes you might be amazed at what’s possible if you just ask- there’s only about 6 or 7 degrees of separation between you and almost anyone else in the world, the odds are pretty good that you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows exactly the kind of person you want to talk to if you just care enough to chase down those connections.

Learn about black culture. Learn about Japanese culture. Learn about the experiences of biracial people. Learn about the lives of people around those people. Learn from their own perspectives and from the perspectives of outsiders looking in. Learn about the rich, learn about the poor, and all of the complex interactions between all of these different groups of people and when, where, and how they all intersect.

And again, just write. The only way to learn if a story is any good is to actually tell it.

I work in 911 dispatch, understandably once in a while I get a caller who is just absolutely losing their mind over whatever is going on that they’re calling about

And sometimes pretty much the only thing I can do to grab my callers attention and bring them back around to listening to me is to just kind of repeat sir/ma’am until I get their attention they come back around to realizing I’m trying to talk to them.

If I can get their name, I use that instead and it’s more effective, but that’s not always a given.

Just sitting there in silence until they get their shit together on their own doesn’t work, and more likely they’re going to just hang up on me.

And repeating whatever question I need answered really just kind of goes in one ear and out the other while they continue going off.

Their name or sir/ma’am is punchier, it has a way of cutting through their panic and grabbing their attention saying “you are being addressed right now and the person addressing you needs your attention”

And I really wish we had a good, gender-neutral equivalent of that. It needs to be polite and professional, and maybe a bit authoritative-sounding, so something like “dude” obviously won’t cut it.

And I need it both for trans/non-binary people, and people whose gender just isn’t clear on the phone because they’re in a panic, calling from a potato, and/or just have a somewhat ambiguous voice.

Normally I just have to pick one and go with it, and they’ll either correct me (in some cases, choosing the wrong one might actually be more effective at grabbing their attention because astonishingly (/s) people don’t enjoy being misgendered and they jump at the opportunity to correct that) or they also just roll with it.

But I’d really like to avoid that if I can, and I haven’t really found a good option for it yet.

Like others have said, the degree of technology permitted and a lot of other things vary a lot from one amish community to another.

But in general, most Amish aren’t going to school beyond about 8th grade. Some of them might be getting some sort of vocational training in addition to that but you’re probably going to have a hard time finding any kind of opportunities for Amish higher education.

In general, they tend to get more leeway for using technology as part of their business than for personal use, they might have a computer to help track business expenses, maybe even a business email or have a website for selling their goods online. It’s possible they might even be allowed to have a car or use a tractor for certain purposes.

But as far as just pursuing a math education, that’s probably gonna be a no-go. And if they somehow do permit it, you’re probably gonna need to get by with a pencil, paper, slide rules, etc.

I work in 911 dispatch, and we have some really rich towns in the county I work for

And I have one story that makes me think it’s at least something that’s on their minds

I got a call from one of those neighborhoods for a breaking and entering. The caller had been out of the house and came home to find that someone had broken in while they were gone.

I’m gathering all of the information, and without me prompting he starts giving me his description - 6ft-whatever black man, wearing blah blah blah, and that he’ll be waiting by the front door etc.

And it just felt very clear to me that he knows unless he is very upfront about that, that when the cops get there, there’s a really damn good chance that they’re immediately going to assume he’s a suspect and not the homeowner.

Googled him later, former NBA player, I don’t follow sports but apparently he was kind of a big deal when he was playing. Not sure what his net worth is, but houses in that neighborhood tend to sell for several million.

Probably the nicest caller I’ve ever gotten from that neighborhood, and with the best reason to call. Another guy nearby once got into a fight with an Amazon driver because he had the audacity to pull into his driveway.

As an aside, that is how B&Es happen. Unless it’s your crazy ex or something looking to start shit with you, they’re not breaking into your home while you’re home, they want to take your shit and get the fuck out they don’t want a confrontation with you. I admittedly work in an overall pretty safe area, but we do have some pretty shitty towns as well as the mega rich, but after 7 years on the job I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a call for an in-progress B&E while someone was home where they didn’t know the person trying to break in (and usually there was a very specific, though usually not particularly good, reason they were trying to break in- they wanted to take back something they gave the person, were trying to retrieve their own belongings, they just wanted to fight or trash the place because they were mad at them, etc.)

And it’s almost always in the super rich neighborhoods where houses are spaced far apart, the residents can afford to take long vacations far from home, and there’s lots of valuable stuff to steal left unattended while they’re gone. To a lesser extent it happens in the really shitty neighborhoods. It’s almost unheard of in the rest of suburbia.

My wife likes to listen to podcasts.

And often I find that the podcasts she listens to are about things that I’d followed closely in the news weeks, months, sometimes years before (we just have some different interests, she’s actually probably the bigger news junkie than I am)

But so I’ve taken to calling her podcasts “late news” because she’s getting that news later than I did.

Arguably that would fall under the banner of “emotional intelligence”

Native English

A tiny bit of French. My public school French education was a bit of a mess, lots of long-term substitutes and then substitutes for those substitutes, so none of it really stuck. If someone talks slowly I can usually catch the gist of what they’re saying, but probably wouldn’t be able to string the words together to respond.

And I’ve gotten myself to be somewhat passable at Esperanto using Duolingo.

I may make another run at learning French at some point.

Wouldn’t mind learning Polish, Italian, Gaelic, and/or Albanian, since that’s where my ancestors came from. Never been particularly great at language-learning though so that’s a huge stretch.

Also always thought it would be cool to learn Unami (the language spoken by the Lenape people who originally lived in the area I do)

And I’ve spent enough time in tiki bars that I occasionally think about learning Hawaiian or some other Polynesian language

Feeling’s mutual.

If you need someone to teach you how to ride a bike, hit me up.

Alright. If that’s what you want to nitpick here

The average adult (in the US) can ride a bike, whether or not they ever actually do is a different matter, but the majority of us learned how to at some point, and there’s a reason “it’s like riding a bike” is a saying.

From being able to ride a bike to being able to ride it a reasonably long distance just takes time and work to build up to it, which is what he said.

Now a lot of people won’t put in that kind of work, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t.

I’m fat, I won’t sugar-coat that. In a couple weeks when it warms up a bit I’ll hop on my bike, and I’ll probably manage around 5 miles, and by the end of the summer I’ll probably work my way up to around 15 miles, and I’ll still be fat. I do this pretty much every year (and worth noting, I didn’t even learn to ride a bike until I was in my 30s)

There are parts of the world where damn-near everyone gets around on bikes, they don’t have some sort of unattainable genetic advantage because they grew up in Amsterdam or whatever that gives them some “dormant athleticism” that Americans don’t have, they just ride bikes.

The average adult can ride a bike. They just don’t or won’t.

He was replying to a comment about e bikes, and concluded his comment talking about them. The whole comment was building up to that fact. Just because every sentence didn’t explicitly mention e-bikes doesn’t mean that they weren’t the point of the entire comment.

He spent a couple paragraphs talking about his own struggles building up to riding a regular bike and then concluded by basically saying “or you can skip all of that hard work and get an e bike”

And if you finish reading, he talks about ebikes and strikes helping to fill that gap

People don’t really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.

God damn do I feel that.

I recently replaced my dryer. It suddenly started making a really alarming banging noise.

I’m a DIY-minded guy, spent maybe an hour taking the damn thing apart.

And I found the issue- a bad drum roller. Theoretically an easy enough fix once you have the whole dryer apart like I did (which wasn’t really hard, just time-consuming)

I went online and searched out the part, and it was going to cost me almost $200 (granted I was going to replace all 4 rollers, if one went there’s a good chance the others weren’t far behind)

For a bit of plastic and rubber that looks a hell of a lot like a scooter wheel.

And while I was in there, there were a couple belts and pulleys and such that I also wanted to replace. Stuff that was bound to wear out eventually, and the dryer was about 15 years old.

So all in I was looking at probably close to $4-500 in parts. Couple hundred more and I could just get a whole new dryer, which seemed like the smart choice because who knows what else might have been about to go- the motor, the heating element, any of the electronics

So that’s what I did. And I hated it. There was something I could have fixed, I wanted to fix it, but it just didn’t make financial sense to fix it.

This wasn’t a dryer from some oddball fly-by-night unheard of AliExpress brand, it’s an overall respectable company that makes a pretty reliable product. And this wasn’t a particularly specialized part, it was basically just a wheel. It should be the kind of thing that’s pretty much standardized, used by every company in countless models of different appliances, and available for cheap off the shelf at any hardware store. I should have been able to walk into Ace hardware and go buy something like a generic “3 inch roller wheel” for like $5, took it home, and slapped it onto my machine.

But instead it was some proprietary bullshit and I couldn’t find any readily available off-the-shelf part for a reasonable price that would have fit quite right.

They literally reinvented the wheel so that some years down the line I’d have to shell out money for a new dryer instead of fixing the one I had.

I’m honestly a little conflicted about how people like you who are still actively involved in scouting should react to this.

On the one hand, yeah, screw the organization, they don’t deserve support for this kind of stuff.

On the other hand, it’s about the kids, and I do overall believe that the core values of scouting and the kind of structure it can provide are great things for a lot of kids to experience. There are other ways to provide that sort of program, but scouting is already there, and it makes more sense to me to try to preserve and improve that than to try to start something else from scratch.

And good adult leaders can do a lot to insulate their units from the bullshit from higher-up. I know my troop wasn’t at all afraid to bend or even outright break the rules when it made sense to do so (I actually remember first learning the term “plausible deniability” from one of my leaders,) and being active at the district or council level can help put pressure from the inside (back in the 90s my local council actually tried to force the issue and allow gay scouts to join, they got shot down by national but imagine if more councils would have stepped up to do that.) Good leaders with their heads on straight leaving scouting will just result in the organization collapsing into exactly what we don’t want it to be.

I’m not currently active in scouting, I don’t have kids and my schedule doesn’t really work with it these days to be active as a leader, so all I can do is try to make some noise from the outside leaning on my experience as an eagle scout and former leader. I have nothing to lose but also very little leverage. People like you have more leverage, but also not much to lose- absolute worst case scenario they find an excuse to kick you out, but if you don’t succeed at making change from the inside you were probably going to leave anyway.

Maybe you’re right, and I’ll have sent my medal away for nothing, in which case I’m down a prized but essentially useless trinket.

Or maybe I’m right, in which case I’m either ridding myself of a symbol of an organization I’ll no longer wish to be associated with soon, or maybe, just maybe I’m doing something that helps to prevent that from happening.

If you’re right, I’ll feel a little silly and otherwise continue my life as normal, content that I at least stood up for something I believe in.

But what will you do if I’m right? How would you feel knowing that you brushed this off as a non-issue if girls and trans youth, and maybe eventually other “undesirables” are eventually kicked out of scouts, when their commitment to dei wavers, and maybe they’re even twisted into a militaristic, nationalist organization like some modern Hitler Youth?