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Cake day: August 23rd, 2023

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  • At least from my personal experience, they’re all too believable, and I’m sure plenty of others here have similar stories.

    A couple of nights after the election I spoke to my father, and he could tell I was quite upset. He told me how I shouldn’t worry because Trump was going to make everything better since “Joe and the Ho” hadn’t done anything. Not even one or two sentences later he was telling me about how he needed to get all of this medical work done by the end of the year (he is on Medicare), because his Medicare agent told him they expected a good majority of those benefits to be cut next year by the upcoming administration…

    Between the many similar stories from other family members and friends, the increased searches for “Project 2025” and “change vote”, I really don’t think it’s a stretch at all for most to accept these as true, because many people are experiencing it firsthand.


  • Oh, I can totally believe it. Ethiopian food is so damn filling, while not being insanely calorie dense like a lot of what we’re used to in the US. Beans and veggies are filling but not calorie dense, so just adding more of those, even cheap canned ones to your diet can make it much easier to lose weight. I had a buddy that lost almost 30lbs in college literally just by replacing a meal with a can or two of green beans and hot sauce every day for a couple of months. He’s managed to keep it off too, as it helped him realize just how much more his hunger was sated by a couple 60cal cans of beans vs some huge 800 calorie meal from Taco Bell, which was his preferred junk food of choice at the time. Fun fact, it also works extremely well on overweight dogs, minus the hot sauce.



  • I’m 29 and this is already the case. A lot of the early 2000s internet is already getting hard to find, and even a lot of early YouTube feels like it’s been scrubbed clean, or had stuff auto-muted/removed due to copyright that drastically affects the content. Not to mention all the flash animations and whatnot that might not have made it to somewhere as big as Newgrounds. There’s a lot of stuff I remember watching that seems to be utterly lost



  • From scratch it’s obviously not feasible, but having been a former Soviet state I’d imagine a good majority of the resources needed are floating around.

    The main challenges with nuclear weapons are 1. procurement of the fissile material, 2. yield efficiency, and 3. miniaturization. Once you have the first part done, as Ukraine very likely has the nuclear fuel processing facilities to do so, the second part is less important if you just want a bomb. Just look at the fact that they were so confident the Little Boy would work they didn’t even bother with a prototype, even if its yield ratio was quite low. It needed about 60kg of uranium for its 15kT yield, while Fat Man managed 21kT with only about 5kg of plutonium.

    So, it’s a tradeoff where if nuclear material is hard to come by and you need to get the bomb somewhere far away, making something really efficient is pretty important. However, if you have sufficient material and just want a decently big boom in the middle of a field, it’s quite literally something you could feasibly manage in a home workshop.

    The one other note on the importance of efficiency is in regards to fallout. Anything that isn’t used in the detonation is blasted every which-way, and isn’t really something you want as a normal military, since a nuclear wasteland isn’t strategically very useful. But, if you’re just trying to fuck up someone else’s day, then its less important and you can get into really “fun” stuff like dirty and cobalt bombs.


  • Very, very broadly, I’d say a lot of my concerns boil down to them convincing the broader industry as a whole that cutting costs and delivering a shit product is okay, so long as you’re doing it as a “technology company”

    • Pushing out buggy, half-baked SW because “we’ll fix it with an OTA” and a recall has little to no direct financial impact, allowing for you to gamble lives on hopefully getting a SW update out before the bugs cause accidents or deaths, rather than spending the time/money to get it right from the start.

    • Removing stuff like important, standard hard controls (buttons/stalks/etc) to make everything a touch control, purely for cost cutting, but acting like it’s because buttons are “old tech”

    • Pushing that 100% BEV is the only current solution, rather than pushing for a far cheaper mass improvement of fuel economy and scaling BEVs as HEVs grow too, especially in developing markets.

    • Using a proprietary charging standard for nearly a decade, solely as a sales tactic, and only cooperating with other OEMs once it allowed them to collect government subsidies

    Those are just a few I can think of off the very top of my head, and the ones I’ve seen have the most impact on the broader industry. I can go into more detail on any of them as well.






  • Absolutely! It’s something people really don’t like thinking about, but end-of-life planning is super duper important. Create and regularly update your will, ensure you have beneficiaries listed for stuff like stock accounts, and leave very clear instructions (and ideally money) aside for how to act on them. Have a lawyer look over them as well to prevent any family bullshit from going on as well.


  • It was something like $9k to have my grandfather cremated and a small service for him. The funeral industry is even worse than the wedding industry at taking advantage of your time of emotional turmoil, and because even legally you’re kinda limited at what you can do with the body and you’re on a time crunch, shopping around isn’t exactly easy.

    Given that servicemember funerals can be quite elaborate, and I’m sure that number also likely includes a number of other things like death benefits paid to the families, I can totally believe that cost.



  • This is legitimately one of the real reasons Musk is pushing for Trump so hard. NHTSA (and all the other regulatory agencies) were effectively gutted completely by the Trump admin and it’s basically the entire reason Elon could grift his way to where he is today. The moment Biden got into office, basically every single agency in existence began investigating him and pushing blocks out of the proverbial Jenga tower of the various Musk companies. He’s praying that Trump will get elected and allow him to keep grifting, because otherwise he’s almost definitely going to jail, or at a minimum losing the vast majority of his empire.


  • There was a show I remember way back called “Testees” where it followed a couple of guys who were human Guinea pigs for some pharma company. Each episode was generally about some new drug and the horrible/hilarious side effects and shenanigans that would ensue. There was also a 3rd guy who was basically Frank from It’s Always Sunny, and the B plot would flow him sometimes. In one episode, the company actually makes a penis enlargement pill that works, however a little too well. It’s so big that every time he gets an erection, he blacks out from the drop in blood pressure. Been a while since I’ve thought of that show lol.




  • skyspydude1@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    2 months ago

    You don’t know why someone is speeding, and it’s not your job to enforce traffic laws. There was a story I remember reading a while back of someone’s friend having a chainsaw accident, and them watching their friend bleed out in their car because some dumb piece of shit figured they’d play traffic cop and blocked them in traffic. If you see someone driving aggressively, just assume they’re driving that way because they’re about to shit their pants, and let them go on their merry way. Report them if you want, but don’t endanger yourself and others trying to be a “hero”