My dad retired a few years ago, he spent basically his whole life driving to work and anywhere else he needed to go himself.

Where we live, senior citizens can get a pass so they don’t have to pay bus or train fare.

So now he takes the bus everywhere, sometimes he basically just goes and rides it for fun, doesn’t really even go anywhere in particular, just gets on a bus and rides around for a bit, gets off at some random stop, and waits around for a bus going back the way he came from.

Weird hobby, but I guess it beats collecting stamps.

So I think that makes a pretty compelling case. If you make it free, people will use it

And if you’re blindly trusting that AI overview instead of looking for a reliable source on the search results, then yes, you’re lazy and stupid.

How picky are you about graphics quality and what games do you intend to run?

I have a bit of a franken-PC I’ve cobbled together mostly from spare parts from my wife’s upgrades to her own rig and some other bits I’ve gotten good deals on here and there. It’s got an old AMD FX-6300 CPU, and a 2060 I snagged from a friend for cheap. And as of a few months ago I hopped from windows to mint.

And I’m happily running most of what’s out there. It definitely struggles with newer AAA games, I’m not a graphics snob but I do sometimes need to turn down the graphics settings lower than I’d like, some games have atrociously long loading times, etc. and I’m sure there’s a couple resource-hungry games I just straight-up wouldn’t be able to run

But for my standards and the games I play, I find it to be a totally acceptable gaming rig.

So if I were in your shoes I’d totally go for it. It’s not always about having the most optimized powerhouse rig, it’s about playing games.

No, but it is important if you’re trying to record video of police brutality and such which is where my concerns lie about how these laws could be twisted

I think the same concerns still apply, if you can’t post that video anywhere it doesn’t do much good for you to record it.

I don’t know what the existing laws in the UK look like,

In general though, in the US, it’s usually legal to film things that are happening in public places, that’s part of what’s (supposed) to protect us from stuff like filming ICE agents.

Now of course, I’m not saying that it’s not important to do something to protect people from creeps recording them and posting them online without their consent

But I also feel like this is the kind of law that needs to be crafted very carefully to make sure that it’s not going to infringe on legitimate reasons people may have to record people in public. I could absolutely see Republicans here twisting a law like this that was made with good intentions to go after people for posting videos of ice arrests online.

By most measures, I’m a pretty stereotypically “manly” guy, and you can say pretty much the same thing about most of my male friends.

I’ve never really felt as though a woman being present in any way impeded anything we were doing. If anything it improved things in a “the more the merrier” kind of way. As long as they’re ok with the cigar smoke, fart jokes, having to pee outside, etc. anyone is welcome to participate in our bullshit.

But I do feel like we can get in the way of women bonding and venting it the ways they need and want to. The old “it’s not about the nail” kind of thing.

And of course, there’s a whole lot of guys who are just dangerous toxic assholes who probably shouldn’t be allowed to be around women in general, but trying to figure out which ones can and can’t be trusted is a tall order and it’s a lot easier to just say “women only.”

So I don’t really see much point in men-only spaces, but I do see it for women-only spaces.

There’s some exceptions, sure, like men who have certain kinds of trauma that involve women may need some safe places to work that out. And it’s not that women can’t also be dangerous, toxic assholes, but in terms of numbers, severity, and actual risk, things are kind of on a different level than with men, so it’s easier to deal with that on a case-by-case basis.

I mean they’re cool, but they’re not that cool.

They’re only rad-ish.

I’m also dipping my toes into 40k lore

It kind of depends on what factions you care about, and what kinds of stories you like to read, this is pretty much where I’m at.

The horus heresy - I’m still working my way through this, there’s a ton of books and stories, not all of them are necessarily worth it and some of them kind of rehash some of the same events from different perspectives. Read the first 3 or 4, then you can kind of skip around until the end, there’s a few suggested reading lists floating around online to help you decide what you want to read. The heresy takes place 10k years before the main 40k universe, so it gets you a solid primer on why the universe ended up the way it is.

Pretty much all of the eisenhorn stories are pretty good, and get you a bit away from the giant battles with space Marines and such so you can get more of a feel for what else is going on around the imperium.

Pretty much anything written by Dan Abnett is pretty good, he’s pretty widely accepted to be one of the better and more consistent 40k writers. There’s some valid criticism of him, I won’t pretend he’s the world’s best writer, but pretty much everything he’s done is readable and enjoyable.

If you like orks (I like orks) Brutal Kunnin’ and Da Big Dakka are both fun reads, and Mike Brooks seems to get orks and other xenos pretty well.

That’s about where I’m at personally. Not too sure where I’ll go from here, I got a ton of the heresy left to get through still, and besides that I’ll honestly probably just grab whatever happens to catch my eye at a book store or library

Yeah, and I also think that the sort of temporary nature of most girl scout troops also hampers, what I think, was one of the most key parts of the boy scout program- the idea of “boys teaching boys” (I suppose they may phrase it more like “kids teaching kids” now)

The older kids in the troop took a really active role in running the program. Often we’d pretty much just get sort of a list of bullet points from the adult leaders for what we needed to accomplish and it was up to us to figure out how to make it happen, put together a plan, delegate responsibilities, and get the younger kids up to speed, while the adults stood by off to the side somewhere pretty much just making sure we didn’t do anything too stupid.

Not all of us were exactly natural-born leaders, but because of that sort of organizational structure we all kind of learned some passable leadership skills.

But without that ongoing recruitment and the kids of different ages being active in the troop together, that kind of youth leadership can’t really happen to the same extent

I’ve also heard some things, and I have no clue how true they are, about their adult leader training being a little excessive, like there’s separate classes you’re supposed to take before you do pretty much anything, like you need to take the training before you can go on a camping trip, and then there’s a second training for if you want to have a campfire, and another if you want to go on a hike, etc. and I believe those are all trainings you would need to pay for

So if that’s true (and it may not be, this is half-rememered info from probably about 2 decades ago) that does put a pretty high barrier of entry for a lot of people.

I’m wondering what exactly counts as a site for these purposes

I’ve been out of scouting for a long time now so I really don’t know how they’re working it

But I feel like different patrol areas at a lot of BSA summer camp sites probably offer more privacy and separation than there is at 2 adjacent sites at some non-bsa campgrounds.

I know at the summer camp my troop usually went to, you usually couldn’t really see or necessarily even hear what was going on in another patrol’s area, even though they were technically all part of the same site.

But at one state park we camped at a few times, we could pretty much see and hear everything that was going on in the adjacent group sites.

A big part of the problem with girl scouts, in my opinion, is that a lot of the time the troops are kind of temporary.

Usually group of girls and their parents (usually moms, who may or may not have any scouting experience of their own) start up a troop, more-or-less from scratch when the girls are brownie or daisy-aged, and then that’s pretty much it, they don’t really do any ongoing recruitment, it stays just those same girls until they all either quit or age out of the program and then the troop dissolves.

Meanwhile, the (boy scout) troop I came up through is going to be celebrating its 100 year anniversary in a year or two. They have a garage full of troop gear, money in the bank, and decades of institutional knowledge of how to be a scout and how to run a scout program. We had one or two kids whose or father and I think even grandfather had earned their eagle from the same troop, the current scoutmaster was in the troop a couple years before me and his kids are in it now, the one before him was already scoutmaster when I started before his kid was old enough to join and stayed on for a few years after his son aged out, and every year we got a new batch of kids joining, some years more than others sure, but there was always new blood coming in

So there’s a lot more continuity and something like generational wealth going on with the BSA. Girl scouts generally need to hit the cookies and fundraising hard because they’re often kind of starting from 0 (not that there isn’t some valid criticism about how the cookie sales work and how the money is distributed and used, but I don’t know enough about that to really go into it)

And as far as recruitment, boy scouts made it really easy to find a troop, there’s a website you can go on and find all of the ones near you, so if your kid just suddenly wanted to join, or if you moved and needed to find a new one it was dead simple to look that up. At least at the time when I was in, girl scouts didn’t really have anything similar, unless you were already in the know about when and where the existing troops met you were kind of SOL if you wanted to join one. I remember one of our leaders talking about some sort of community event they were trying to put together, they had some representatives from a couple other local organizations and other scout troops and such coming, and they wanted to see if any of the local girl scout troops would want to take part, but he just couldn’t get in touch with any of them, couldn’t find contact info, when he reached out to their local council they basically stonewalled him

And unfortunately just by the nature of it usually being the moms who are the involved parents with girl scouts as opposed to usually the dads with boy scouts, there’s often a bit less outdoorsy knowledge to build on (some of my best hiking/camping/fishing buddies are women, but until I was the one who started inviting them out, a lot of them had never done much that kind of thing, and unfortunately that’s not a terribly uncommon situation, whereas guys tend to be more likely to grow up doing that sort of thing with their dads)

All that said, I’ve known a decent amount of girl scouts, and while a lot of them got stuck with shitty programs, there were a handful that actually probably went harder than we did in boy scouts. The odds aren’t exactly in your favor of ending up in one of those girl scout troops, but with the right parents, kids, and resources they actually can put on a really good outdoor program (and their campgrounds are usually really nice as well) they just don’t have the systems in place to make sure that all of their troops are able to do that to the same extent boy scouts can.

It can be used as a heat source sure

But the thing that makes steel steel is that it contains carbon

Dig iron ore up from the ground, and it’s not going to have much if any carbon in it.

And unless you have some crazy particles accelerator/fusion reactor nonsense going on, nothing you do with just hydrogen is going to get carbon into that steel, because there’s no carbon in hydrogen either.

Coal, however, is mostly carbon, so using as the heat source naturally tends to add carbon into your iron to make steel.

There’s other ways of doing it, but at the end of the day most of them kind of rely on coal in one way or another at some point in the process because it’s a really convenient source of carbon.

The next best alternative is probably cutting down a bunch of trees to process into charcoal

Would be really damn cool to be able to suck CO₂ out of the air and use that carbon somehow, but to the best of my knowledge no one has figured out any efficient way to do that at scale.

Some of it is stress, but we get it just as much on the boring stuff too (we also handle a lot of the non emergency lines in my county) for things like a parking complaint where there’s nothing urgent going on and the caller is cool as a cucumber, they’re just completely clueless about anything I’m asking.

Like the other person said I think the question was about the ICE car

But I work in 911 dispatch, so I spend a good chunk of my night getting vehicle descriptions, you would be absolutely amazed at how many have no clue what kind of car they’re driving themselves or can’t even give a basic description

Me: What kind of vehicle is it?
Caller: I don’t know, I’m not really a car-person.
Me: Can you tell if it’s a sedan, an SUV, or a pickup truck?
Caller: I don’t know, I just told you that I’m not a car-person!

Also a shocking number of people don’t know their own address, phone number, what the nearest cross-street is to their house (or even the nearest major road or big intersection,) what municipality they live in (it may be different than the “city” part of their mailing address,) what the address is of their work, whether their car has power locks and power windows (and in fact what that even means,) whether their spouse has any important medical history, where water shut-offs are in their house, the difference between a smoke detector going off and giving a low-battery chirp, etc.

I’m sure it’s more complex than I’m making it out to be, but each gas in the air has its own freezing/melting boiling/condensation/sublimation points, so I’d imagine you could just kind of take advantage of that

Basically just cool it down to x temperature at y pressure, and all of the carbon dioxide should be solid, the oxygen a liquid and the nitrogen still a gas, and they’ve all sort of separated themselves out. Fish out the dry ice, siphon off the oxygen, and you’re left with nitrogen.

Might need to do a couple more rounds of that on each of those to account for other gases in the mix depending on how pure you need it to be, but in theory I imagine it could be that simple (again in practice I’m sure there’s probably a lot of details I’m missing)

My wife and I keep our heat pretty low, usually 60°F, which is usually pretty damn chilly for indoors

But when you step in from single digits outside, 60° feels downright toasty.

We have a heated mattress pad, keeps all of the heat inside the blankets

Doesn’t even need to be single shot

I’m sure that theoretically you could be so surprised by the recoil that you’d somehow cycle the bolt and pull the trigger to fire a second shot, but trying to imagine how that could actually happen only conjures up some pretty wild Rube Goldberg scenarios for me.

So I guess if it’s your first time shooting, don’t do it with any kind of repeating firearm in a room full of mouse traps, ball bearings, umbrellas, boxing gloves, etc.

It’s an extreme outlier, but you guys did just have a very well-publicized mass shooting there barely over a month ago (fuck man, it feels so much longer than that)

And to boot, a random civilian struggled with and took a gun from one of the attackers.

You probably won’t find yourself in that kind of situation, and I certainly hope you never do. But these kinds of things can happen anywhere. I’m quite certain that Ahmed el-Ahmed didn’t have “hold a gun” on his to-do list that day, but nonetheless it happened, however briefly.

And if you ever do find yourself in that kind of situation, it’s best to know how not to hurt yourself or others with that gun you’ve unexpectedly come into possession of.