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Fondots

@ Fondots @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
657
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • TIL that for the average price of a car in the US, you could buy 5 cars in China

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  • The problem with EV battery disposal is mostly that there isn't enough used batteries for companies to want to be involved in recycling them.

    Part of that is because, unlike your claim, in a lot of cases they're having perfectly long long service lives, even exceeding what we thought their lifespans might be (there are exceptions of course, like the early Nissan leafs)

    And then other sources of used batteries, like from crashed vehicles, are being being reused more-or-less as-is for things like storage for solar power and home backups, which is preferable to recycling when possible

    Eventually we'll probably hit a critical mass of used batteries full of valuable lithium and such that companies will be clamoring over themselves to start recycling them, and maybe at some point we'll even reach a point where no more lithium needs to be mined and we'll be recovering all we need from dead batteries. Basically the whole battery can be recycled these days, its just a matter of building out the infrastructure to do it, and once there are enough batteries waiting to be recycled, someone will see dollar signs and step up to that plate.

  • TIL that for the average price of a car in the US, you could buy 5 cars in China

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  • And if the prices go up, I end up right back buying 10 year old used cars, so long term nothing really changes for me, personally, except I get to enjoy a couple years of driving a newer car than I'm used to.

    And it generally helps increase EV adoption which is an overall good thing.

    Not really seeing any downsides here.

  • TIL that for the average price of a car in the US, you could buy 5 cars in China

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  • Even if that's true, it would still make sense for a ton of people to get these.

    Personally I've always had used cars that were already around 10+ years old when I bought them and so they cost about 1/5 of a new car. So far I've averaged about 5 years out of them because at that point pretty much any minor fender bender is enough to total them or my car just up and dies.

    So for me, buying a cheap EV that only has a 5 year lifespan wouldn't really change much, and I'd be happy to have a car, if only for a couple years, where random shit is just acting up just because of the age of the car (on my current car, some of the speakers have been going in and out since I got it, I think the front passenger side has finally settled on "out" I could fix it, but don't feel like throwing money at it)

    And at the end of those 5 years, I'd probably have saved enough in gas to afford a new chinese EV, or at least a really solid down payment on one.

  • What was your "we have to leave now" moment?

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  • You're quoting from somewhere, but not citing your sources, which doesn't really add to the conversation either, for all we know you're just copy and pasting some AI-hallucinated bullshit, and it kind of reads like it might be because that last sentence is a bit of a mess.

    Now, sure, you technically can cook crack in a spoon, and I'm also absolutely certain that some people have, maybe even on a regular basis.

    But at least around me, most crackheads aren't usually out cooking their own crack in the field, they're buying rocks from their dealer. That's one of the reasons crack got big- higher profit margins for the dealer. Maybe the situation is different in Vienna, I honestly can't can't say I've ever talked to any Austrian crackheads about their local drug culture. And on the user's end the draw is that it has a faster, more intense high, and having to make your own crack before you can smoke it kind of takes away from that a bit.

    And it can be prepared in a spoon for injection like heroin, but like your quote said, most of the time people prefer to smoke it.

    It can also be smoked from a spoon in a pinch if they can't get their hands on a more suitable crack pipe, and giving you the benefit of the doubt that it was in fact crack, I'd bet that's what you saw, but that's a different process than what's described in whatever you quoted.

  • What tv show has the best theme song?

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  • It may not have been the catchiest song that you'd catch yourself humming

    But I really dug the opening for American Gods

    The song is sort of reminiscent of Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin, which is of course very fitting

    And all the imagery is also very spot-on

    The first season, IMO, was probably one of the all-time best seasons of a show I've ever seen

    But man did it take a hard nose-dive after that for a few different reasons.

  • JetBlue told a grieving customer to clear his cookies after a $230 price hike—then deleted the evidence

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  • I once bought a couple copies of a book as an inside joke for a couple friends.

    It was not at all a popular book, I can pretty much guarantee that you've never heard of it or it's writer, and odds are you'd probably hate it if you did ever read it.

    I think when I bought them they were going for about $5 a pop.

    And immediately after I ordered them the price shot up to like $15

    I can only assume that the algorithm assumed that something happened that made that book popular all of a sudden, instead of just one asshole buying a couple copies to give to his asshole friends as a joke.

    Took a few months before the price dropped down again.

  • xkcd #3235: Types of Board Game

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  • I remember one time being over a friend's house, he had some board game they just dug out of the back of a closet somewhere and we were thinking about playing it. Can't remember which game it was, I want to say it may have been Diplomacy, but I'm not 100% on that.

    We open it up, looked like all the pieces were there, and we started reading through what we thought was the rulebook, it was a fairly beefy book.

    Then we realized that what we had wasn't in fact the rulebook, but some sort of secondary book that referenced the full rulebook, which it called "intimidating"

    On reading that, we decided that this game was just too much trouble for how much effort we were willing to put in that day.

  • Do you feel a kinship with people who drive the same make/model car as you?

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  • I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper, at the time I got it they already hadn't been made for about a decade, they weren't super common to begin with, and I think a lot of them got cash-for-clunkered, so they were a pretty rare sight

    Always got a wave when I passed someone else driving one.

    And not for nothing, I really liked that car.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • I have a lot of outdoorsy hobbies, most people who are serious about camping and hiking and such are also pretty good about leaving no trace.

    But there's also a lot of people out there who aren't serious about it, they just think it would be fun to go out in the woods and have a party or whatever and they leave a lot of litter, start fires in inappropriate places, etc.

    And at least around me, that's generally a pretty safe thing for them to do. Theres no really no large predators left for them to be concerned about.

    And I sometimes think "maybe if we just reintroduced wolves, that might be enough to dissuade some of these assholes from making a mess in the great outdoors"

    Those of us who spend a lot of time outside know there's usually not too much to worry about as long as you're taking some basic precautions, but almost every time I talk to a non-outdoorsy person, it seems like they're always afraid of getting attacked by wolves or bears.

  • What do you think of homeschooling?

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  • I think there's a time and a place for home schooling, and a lot of it depends on the parents actually putting the effort into it.

    I used to work with a guy who homeschooled his kids. For them, it was probably the best option for them. He wasnt the brightest bulb out there, but he did have pretty decent common sense, and was self-aware enough to know that he wasn't up to doing their lessons himself.

    He also had some physical and mental health issues, and his wife was basically in the same boat and was pretty much totally unable to work. Their housing situation wasn't exactly secure, he made shit money, he often found himself out of work, and they had to move a few times over the 5 years I worked with him, usually couldn't afford to have a car etc.

    So he had his kids enrolled in some sort of online homeschool/cyber charter school thing. And that probably gave them a bit of stability they wouldn't have had otherwise if they were constantly moving and needing to change schools. Probably also spared them from some bullying and such they would have gotten at schools for being poor.

    And he did his best to make sure they were out socializing with other kids and experiencing the world to the best of his abilities. He wasn't keeping them isolated. If he could have afforded to live in a better neighborhood I suspect he would have been the type to let them run loose around the neighborhood as long as their school work and chores and such were done. And he certainly wasn't controlling them or telling them what to think outside of basic morality, he definitely was no saint in his youth and was a proud weirdo.

    I'm not much of a kid-person, so I'm probably not the best one to make this judgement, but the couple of times I met them they seemed about as bright, happy, and well-adjusted as any kid out there.

    On the flip side, my high school actually had a kid who was homeschooled who was caught planning a school shooting (on us.) His parents had pulled him out of our district to be home schooled because of "bullying," I never met the guy myself, he was a couple years younger than me, but from my friends who did know him, I get the impression that he was basically Cartman. He was severely overweight, but this is America, we had plenty of fat kids and overall didn't have a significant bullying problem, the reason people didn't like him was because he was a totally-unlikeable, racist, misogynistic asshole, and really if any kid ever deserved bullying it was probably him.

    And I don't think we can exactly place the blame on home schooling, since the root problem with him started before that, and it's probably his parents to blame (some wild stuff came out about what his parents would do for him/let him do, it was a really weird case of somehow being both totally interested in supervising their child while also being major helicopter parents,) but i think that sort of isolation certainly didn't help.

  • What's the most moving experience you've ever had?

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  • This isn't moving in a happy way at all, I'm gonna gloss over a lot of the details, but still, trigger warning

    I'm a 911 dispatcher. This was pretty early on in my career, but I'd already handled a lot of crazy calls, and I was sort of nearing the point where I felt like I'd heard a little bit of everything, and this was the call that took me back down a peg to realize that there is always something new waiting around the corner for you to figure out how to deal with.

    It's not a story I tell very often, not that I'm particularly traumatized by it and don't want to talk about it, it's just that for as much as it affected me, and it certainly affected my caller, there's not actually that much of a story to tell. But it is one that has stuck with me in a way few other calls I've taken have.

    I got a call from an absolutely hysterical young woman, screaming and crying in a way I'd never heard before, and I'd heard plenty of screaming in this job by that point. It took me a minute to get her calmed down enough to get any clue about what was going on.

    She had come home and found that her partner had killed himself. It was obviously far too late to do anything to attempt to save him. Like I said, there was nothing much for me to do, basically I just had to get her address, enter a few short lines of notes, send police & EMS, tell her to wait outside, and wait on the phone with her if she wanted me to.

    And honestly, even if there had been more for me to do, I doubt I could have gotten her to listen to it. Basically every sentence from her was punctuated with that screaming.

    Screaming is really the wrong word for it, so is crying, wailing is probably the best word we have, but I'm not quite sure it does it justice. In that sound you can find just about the full spectrum of human emotion- there is grief and sadness of course, there is also anger, there's confusion, and fear, it's a cry for help, it's a warning to others, and just as much as anything else, there is love in that sound.

    It's a truly terrible sound, and in its own macabre way, it's kind of beautiful. When you hear it, it cuts right through to some really primal part of your brain. From the moment I heard it when I answered the call, I knew this was something different from anything I'd heard before even if I didn't quite know what it was yet.

    It is the sound of someone learning about the unexpected death of someone they truly loved.

    And when the pieces connected, my whole understanding of the world shifted a bit in a way that's really hard to explain.

    It's a really weird way to think of it, but I sometimes compare it to learning that Santa isn't real, you can't un-learn it, and once you have, it's sad because there's a bit less magic in the world than you thought there was before, but there's also something strangely fulfilling about knowing a bit more about how the world actually works and if you look at it the right way, you get a glimpse behind the curtain to see all of the love that made it seem like the magic really was real.

    It was the first time I heard it, it wasn't the last, and I'm sure I'll hear it again. I've heard it from women, I've heard it from men, I've heard it from lovers, parents, children, siblings, the young and the old. It doesn't always sound exactly the same, but when you hear it you immediately recognize it for what it is.

    It doesn't come with every call I've had where a loved one has died, and I won't claim that those people were loved any less, there are countless different circumstances and everyone grieves in their own ways.

  • TIL One of the two brothers who founded the Guinness Book of World Records was assassinated by the IRA

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  • I'm not going to get too into the politics of the troubles, but I think it's kind of worth remembering that this did happen in the context of an armed conflict, morality gets fuzzy.

    Thinking about it in the context of modern conflicts, let's say a Palestinian or Lebanese group assassinated an influential Israeli businessman who was vocally advocating for Israel continuing their operations, or perhaps a Ukrainian group assassinated a Russian oligarch.

    Or hell, the guys who shot the United healthcare CEO or Charlie Kirk.

    In some theoretical future where there's some kind of peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine/Lebanon, or the US has gone through some kind of civil war to overthrow MAGA types, would it seem so unreasonable to want those people to be freed as part of the negotiations?

    Or looking further back, let's say members of the French or Polish or whatever resistance in WWII had assassinated a German businessman who helped fund the Nazi war machine, wouldn't we have expected them to be freed after the war?

    And I think likely that's a similar kind of light at that least some Irish people would view these guys in.

    And of course, depending on what side of the conflict you were on, you may not see things that way. If you were a Nazi, or if you support Israel or Russia or Trump, you'd probably think of those assassins as nothing but criminals or terrorists, but as the saying goes, one man's terrorist is another's freedom-fighter

  • If you could ask one question and be guaranteed the correct answer, what would you ask?

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  • "You don't."

  • My pasta isn't cooked?

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  • Assuming you're getting regular dried pasta, there is no cooking happening to it at the factory, it's all happening in your pot. It's extruded or rolled out and cut and then just dried still raw. There may be some products out there that are precooked in some way, but that's not your standard dry pasta noodle.

    There's two aspects to cooking dried pasta that usually happens roughly simultaneously when you boil it- rehydrating the noodles and cooking them. Rehydrating is mostly a matter of time- making sure they spend enough time in enough liquid for the pasta to soak it up, although higher temperatures do speed that up a bit. And cooking is mostly a matter of temperature- making sure it gets up to a temperature where the necessary chemical changes happen. There's some recipes where that gets mixed up a bit, I've seen a couple that call for soaking the pasta before cooking, or there's things like spaghetti all'assassina where it's cooked before rehydrating.

    So what's going on here?

    I suppose it's possible that there was some kind of manufacturing issue, like the pasta wasn't mixed or dried right so it's not cooking or rehydrating properly. There's really not much to most pasta dough, some nicer brands literally just list flour of some kind as an ingredient and nothing else, most grocery store brands probably have some of the other usual food additives you'd find in enriched flour, but really there's not too much to mess up there, and if they messed up the mixing bad enough, odds are in probably wouldn't have extruded or rolled out right either.

    And I have a hard time imagining them screwing up the drying process bad enough in a way that could result in this that wouldn't have just resulted in the pasta cracking apart before you got it.

    So I think it's more likely that something went screwy with the cooking.

    I know you said you didn't, but honestly the safe money is probably on that you just didn't cook it long enough. Maybe it's a different brand than you usually get, or you mistakenly used the cooking instructions from a different shape of pasta, or there was a misprint on the box.

    Maybe you're at a higher elevation where water boils at a lower temperature so the cooking and rehydration didn't go quite right.

    Maybe you over or under salted the cooking water, or added something else which affected it

    Or maybe there's some other water quality issue where your water that didn't allow it to rehydrate as well as it should have.

    Maybe it's something else I'm not thinking of, but I can say with confidence that it wasn't an issue with the cooking process at the factory because pasta does not get cooked and the factory.

  • Budget, adjustable monitor for programming?

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  • Yeah, there's plenty of VESA mounts that will allow you to rotate the monitor, move it up/down, side-to-side, and tilt it forwards and backwards as needed

    As for ones that will automatically change the orientation that things are being displayed when you turn the monitor from portrait to landscape, if that's what you're looking for, that's a tougher nut to crack, I'm sure they're out there but they're not common, or (last I checked) cheap. But changing the orientation is as simple as Ctrl+Alt+arrow key (I think some newer Intel display drivers have changed that, but I haven't looked too far into that)

  • Budget, adjustable monitor for programming?

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  • Honestly, your required specs are basically any monitor on the market at this point, you can rotate the display orientation of any monitor with settings baked into any OS you're likely to be using

    You probably won't even need to spend $100 for a 60hz 1080p monitor

    If you can't find one with an adjustable stand that's to your liking, just look for one that can use a VESA mount and get another stand for it, probably less than $50

    You can probably get 3 monitors and stands for your budget and still have enough left over to grab lunch.

    Unless you have some gaming, graphic design, etc. needs you haven't disclosed, I don't think it's worth getting too hung up on this, even cheap monitors tend to last a pretty long time

  • So...tired...

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  • It probably depends on the music festival you're going to but there was one I used to go to every year

    It was 3 or 4 days of day-drinking, eating like crap, staying up late, being outside in the sun on probably one of the hottest weeks of the year while probably not drinking enough water, and sleeping in tents on the ground.

    And depending on how the festival is laid out, walking around the grounds from one stage to another, to different vendors and food stands, to your campsite and back, etc. can add up pretty quickly. The one I went to was pretty small and compact, but I still probably managed around 5-10 miles a day walking around, and you may be hauling around camp chairs, blankets, and coolers with you for a lot of that. And I'm not saying that that's a lot of walking, personally I can do that pretty easily, but it's more than a lot of people normally do.

  • FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved in iPhone Notification Database

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  • Once in a while I get a notification that, for one reason or another, doesn't actually bring me to the content it was supposed to link to and instead brings me to the main page of an app, and sometimes it's difficult or impossible to find where the link was supposed to go

    But going in through the notification history, the second try usually takes me where it was supposed to go

  • Where can i find a good video tutorial on shaving my junk?

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  • Yeah, personally I can probably just about dry shave against the grain with a piece of broken glass and splash on some acetone as aftershave and be none the worse for it, not too much in this world irritates my skin.

    I figured it was worth mentioning it because I know it's a concern for some people, but I've never had an issue with it personally with shaving or waxing.