• 4 Posts
  • 488 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • It’s really all over the place depending on the student, the parents, the homeschooling program they’re using, etc.

    I once worked with a guy who homeschooled his kids because their housing situation was a little unstable. It probably provided them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise since they probably would have had to change schools a lot with all of the moving around.

    Other kids may benefit from it if they’re not doing well in a regular school environment, have disabilities, are gifted, etc.

    In other cases it can be very isolating and they miss out on a lot of socialization with other kids their age

    And some parents use it to control what their kids are learning to force political or religious agendas on them.



  • I understand that oil isn’t just sitting around in big empty voids in the rock, and that those voids are full of gravel and such, and that we’re also injecting water and such into the wells to maintain pressure, etc.

    But I’d be willing to bet (a small amount, maybe like $50 tops) that out of the thousands of oil wells we’ve drilled over the years, that through some quirk of geology, some void has opened up somewhere down there with just enough liquid oil and open space that you could probably get a kayak on it and paddle around in a small circle.

    I’m thinking probably more like the size of a smallish above ground swimming pool, not a decent sized lake that would actually be worth paddling around on.

    Of course there’s also the issue of the pressure at that depth, and the fact that any atmosphere down there is probably gonna be natural gas and not breathable air, so you’d probably have to do it in a hard diving suit


  • I’m all for splitting hairs over semantics, and I’ll agree with you that “fascist” probably isn’t the best label for Iran

    But if you take a step back and look at the big picture, it does look a hell of a lot like fascism.

    Extreme right wing, militaristic government, social and economic regimentation, charismatic, authoritarian dictators, focusing a whole lot of hatred and blame on people in the nation who don’t conform and towards external enemies, etc.

    I don’t know that they’re exactly nationalistic, but they do have religion filling pretty much that same role, and let’s be real, the line’s pretty damn blurry between religion and government there.

    And they don’t exactly make racial/ethnic superiority a centerpiece of their identity, but they’re certainly not exactly sitting around singing “Kumbaya” with their minorities either, and again we have religion filling a pretty similar role in other ways.

    You can get into the weeds about the specific philosophies at play here and about the history that led them to their current situation, and there’s certainly merit in doing that, but as far as the casual observer is concerned, they do look and quack a hell of a lot like fascists, and while it’s not the best label for what they have going on it’s certainly not the worst either. I’d maybe prefer to slap a qualifier on it- something like pseudo-fascist, islamo-fascist, maybe something like “Farscism” if we want to get a little cutesy with the wordplay to separate it from “classic” fascism.

    And similarly I’d probably want to slap a few qualifiers onto the term “theocracy” as well before applying it to Iran, I don’t think that just that one word really points the whole picture.

    And now that I’m looking at it, “fascist theocracy” might be a contender for how I’d label them.



  • If we want to get a little nitpicky, the Moroccans kind of have it right

    Sure there’s advent leading up to Christmas

    But “christmastide” really begins on Christmas day and continues on into January (January 5th for Epiphany, or slightly longer if your Catholic because they technically count the feast of the baptism of the lord as part of christmastime.) When you talk about the “twelve days of Christmas” the first day is Christmas.

    The lyrics to “Good King Wenceslas” (otherwise known as “that Christmas carol whose tune you recognize, but have no idea what the lyrics are if you even know that it has lyrics”) starts with the titular king looking out his window “on the feast of Stephen” which is the day after Christmas.

    Different branches of Christianity, countries, cultures, etc. of course do things in all kinds of different ways, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know much about Moroccan Christians, nor much about Islamic attitudes towards Christmas there (though since they were doing Christmas events, I think it’s fair to assume that these weren’t exactly hard-liners who believe that no Muslim should ever have anything to do with Christmas) so I can’t really say why they do their Christmas stuff the way they do there, but it could be they just never got the memo that how we celebrate Christmas has changed a bit over the last few centuries.



  • “locker room talk”

    Most of my friends and I are pretty traditionally “manly” men. The kinds of guys you turn to if you need to build something, fix something, need to cut down a tree, want to drink beer and smoke cigars, shoot guns (not after drinking the beer,) go fishing (beer is ok for that,) etc.

    I have basically no clue what’s going on in any of their sex lives. We never really comment on women’s appearances, and when we do it’s kept to just a very quick observation, “man, she’s hot” kind of thing.

    Damn near any time some sort of sex talk comes up it’s our female friends stoking the fires.

    I’m pretty sure my wife and her friends talk more about sex in an afternoon than I have in my whole lifetime.

    Maybe it’s because we very rarely find ourselves in a locker room, most of aren’t exactly the gym or team sports type.





  • Our roads are designed around cars, it’s very often extremely frustrating and unsafe to have to share the road with bikes.

    As an example, most of my commute is along a 2 lane road (1 lane each direction) that’s winding, poorly lit, and has almost no shoulder. The speed limit is 35mph, which isn’t a speed most cyclists can keep up for very long if they can reach it at all.

    If there’s traffic coming the opposite direction, it’s often difficult or impossible to pass that cyclist safely so very often I’ve been stuck driving 10 under the speed limit around a cyclist I can’t get around.

    And again, it’s a windy, poorly lit road, coming around a corner it would be very easy to hit a cyclist if I wasn’t being careful (which I am, but many are not)

    To add insult to injury in my particular case, there’s actually a very nice bike path that runs directly parallel to the road, you can actually see it from the road for much of its length, and there’s lots of places to get on and off of it, it’s paved, it’s actually almost as wide as the road itself.

    There’s also the issue that a lot of them don’t always follow the rules of the road, you see a lot of the lane-splitting, running red lights, etc.

    And there’s good reasons for some of that behavior, I’ve heard them, I don’t disagree with them, but the fact of the matter is that it makes them unpredictable, which is the last thing you want to be on the road.

    Some also ride at night without proper lights and reflectors, which is really a problem with some idiots and shouldn’t be generalized to bikes in general, but some people are going to do that

    There’s also Americans’ love of big SUVs with big blindspots that makes bikes harder to see when they’re around you in traffic.

    As for ebikes, I have a love-hate relationship with them.

    They can keep up with traffic a lot better, which helps my first point a lot.

    They’ve also gotten a lot of people out on bikes who wouldn’t have otherwise, which is great, but it also means that a lot of those people are going from not having ridden a bike since they were like 10 years old to feeling bold enough to be out in traffic because their bike can keep up but never really learned how to coexist with traffic on a bike, so we’re doubling down on the unpredictability.

    There’s also the issue that out of traffic, in spaces where e bikes coexist with pedestrians and regular bikes on trails and such they’re often zooming around at unsafe speeds.

    And there’s the usual patchwork of laws and regulations from one state to another, and a lot of shady imported brands selling bikes that don’t meet those regulations. A lot of the e bikes on the road around me are overpowered and too fast for what the laws allow. And people also let their kids ride them which also isn’t allowed.

    I’m all for more people riding bikes in general , but the current situation with infrastructure, regulations, enforcement, and education here make it a really unsafe and frustrating to share the road with bikes.


  • Alright, I’ll bite, why shouldn’t you be able to mod guns?

    I’m not talking about something like converting a semi auto to a machine gun

    I’m talking about stuff like choosing a different stock or grip that feels more comfortable.

    Or maybe you’d prefer a lighter or heavier trigger pull, or maybe you find that your gun’s not cycling properly with a certain kind of ammo and you’d like to swap out some springs or other internal components to address that?

    Or maybe there’s a part that wasn’t deburred properly from the factory that is making your gun jam and it needs a little filing or polishing to make it move properly?

    Or maybe you have a shotgun for hunting, maybe you’d like to have just one gun and swap between a rifled barrel to fire slugs for deer and a smoothbore barrel for bird shot?

    Maybe you want to add a different optic, a scope more suited to the distances you shoot at, or iron sights with colored dots on them so they’re easier for you to see?

    Maybe you’d just like to add a sling?


  • Fondots@lemmy.worldtoDogs@lemmy.worldI'd drink there
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    6 days ago

    I went to a local dive bar one time with a friend.

    It was our first time at this particular bar, not that we were avoiding it, we just had another perfectly adequate dive a bit closer to our respective homes.

    We sit down, ordered our drinks, and as we were getting settled in a little dog comes walking down the bar.

    We just kind of gave each other a look like “are you seein’ this?”

    And watched as the dog hopped off the bar and onto a stool at the end of the bar.

    No one else seemed to acknowledge the existence of this dog.

    And it sat there for the rest of the time we were there, waiting patiently like it expected to be served a beer.