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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Fondots@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLymey Lizards
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    8 hours ago

    I’m from PA, lyme is pretty common here.

    One of my friends moved to Seattle, and one when he came back to visit family he managed to catch it.

    Apparently he got a call from the state health department in Washington after he got his test results back basically asking “where the hell did you get Lyme disease”

    He told them he’d been in PA, and they were basically like “ok yeah that checks out”



  • Other comment hit the nail on the head with their link

    But for those who won’t click the link, its basically just that once upon a time that’s what the price of a package of nails that size was, bigger nails cost more pennies than smaller nails.

    While we’re on weird hardware measurement, I might as well talk about wire gauge

    Basically it’s an arbitrary standard because it’s what someone somewhere set up their wire making equipment to do and other people just followed the same standard (though of course different parts of the world use different standards for different things, so there’s diff6 “gauge” measurements in use in various places for different things)

    But the general idea is you would start with a thick wire/rod, and pull it through a die to stretch it out into progressively thinner wire

    The original rod would be 1 gauge, one pass through the die and its 2 gauge, one more pass and it’s 3 gauge, etc. which is why the diameter gets smaller as the numbers get bigger

    Then there’s shotgun gauge, and I have no idea why this is the standard they decided to measure this by, but it’s what it is. It’s the number of lead balls that size it would take to make a pound.

    So a 12 gauge shotgun has a bore of .725 inches. It would take 12 .725 inch lead balls to make a pound.

    For a 20 gauge shotgun, the bore is .615, and you’d need 20 balls that size to make a pound.

    And then they throw that system out the window with .410 shotguns and just call it by the fucking bore diameter.

    And I’m not gonna even touch on railroad gauges, American screw sizes, etc. not because it’s not interesting (to me at least) but because I’ve run out of fucks.


  • Personally, I’ve only ever heard “code-switching” used to refer to switching between different accents/vernacular, I suppose that switching between entirely different languages also checks the boxes to be code-switching, but I don’t know, it feels kind of weird to use that term in that case to me.

    I feel like the sort of classic code-switching example is a non-white person who speaks very “white” at their job but not otherwise.

    But almost everyone does it a bit, I’m a white dude whose accent falls well within the spectrum of standard American English, but I know that I talk differently on the phone at my job than I do with my coworkers sitting at the desk next to me or with my friends and family at home.



  • I can’t offer a comparison with the other options, but I have a sofa baton U2, and I’m not really a fan. I haven’t spent too much time messing with it so maybe with a little extra setup it might work great, but the scroll wheel seems to skip around when trying to select different devices, a lot of buttons don’t seem to do quite what I’d expect no matter how I try setting it up, the IR seems to have a really narrow beam and is really picky about being pointed right at the device you’re trying to use it with, Bluetooth controls seem pretty unreliable, and I’ve never been able to get it to work work with my PC in a way that feels right.


  • Also, what a joke that the officer basically shrugged and said he couldn’t help if no crime had occurred.

    So I definitely get where you get that impression but what the article says is (emphasis mine)

    After the agent identified himself, the officer told him “he could not assist with someone following or recording him if no crime had occurred, and that local law enforcement was en route.”

    Which to me kind of sounds like cop-ese for “She’s allowed to follow and record you if she wants, so how 'bout you fuck off before we cause an even bigger scene?”

    Now would it have been nice if the cop had arrested the nazi for brandishing or something? Sure, but you’re living in a fantasy land if you think that would have gone anywhere. I’m pretty sure any half-decent lawyer in the country could have gotten those charges thrown out because a “law enforcement” officer drawing their gun when they feel threatened while on an “operation” isn’t exactly illegal. And the arresting cop probably would have just found himself in hot water for interfering with the “operation”

    And it was a Fullerton officer but the incident occurred in Santa Ana, so there may have been jurisdiction issues where he legally couldn’t have done much beyond what he did since he was out of his jurisdiction. Honestly a lot of cops probably would have said “not by town, not my problem” and kept driving.


  • I think this is the right take. At the end of the day you just can’t change some people’s minds.

    Arguably, you can’t change anyone’s minds, they have to change them themselves. You can try to lay the groundwork for them to make that change, but we all know what they say about leading a horse to water.

    Like OP’s example of the uncle with lung cancer. The dude already has lung cancer, and is continuing to smoke, what more could you really say or do to convince him to stop? They’re already facing probably one of the biggest possible consequences of their actions and they’re still not stopping.

    Sure, you could focus all of your energy into trying to browbeat them into stopping, but do you really think that’s going to get anywhere? Your time and energy are probably better spent convincing someone else to quit or not to start instead.



  • I only judged people in a handful of cases

    If you ordered fountain drinks instead of bottled sodas when we had both available, that’s kind of a dick move.

    One lady once ordered a few cups of milk (in her defense, she did tell me when I delivered it that she was injured or her car was in the shop or something so it was an easy way for her to get milk without needing to go to the store. This was before grocery delivery really took off)

    And I judged you if you gave a shitty tip or took too long to answer your door.


  • When I was a kid the chicken pox vaccine was still pretty new. I remember hearing parents talking about it, and remember a few of them saying that it was only X% effective (don’t remember what that percentage was off the top of my head)

    At the time, it seemed like every other children’s show had a chicken pox episode with one or more of the characters getting chicken pox, their parents talking about having a chicken pox party to get their kids infected, etc. it kind of seemed like it was almost inevitable that either I’d get chicken pox at some point or a lot of kids I knew would.

    But I, and most of the kids I went to school with, did end up getting the vaccine, and very few kids in my school ever ended up with chickenpox. I can probably just about count the number of cases on my fingers in a school with hundreds of kids.

    So vaccines work.

    Funny story though, at one point in my childhood I got sick and ended up getting a prescription for amoxicillin. I started breaking out in sort of a rash/hives, and for a while they thought it might be chicken pox.

    Turns out I’m actually just allergic to amoxicillin.

    And then to make things even weirder, my sister gets a similar reaction from the azithromycin I usually got instead.


  • I’m also in the process of learning Esperanto (there’s actually a decent amount of us on Lemmy)

    I don’t foresee it ever being particularly useful on its own, but it is a really easy language to learn, and I think it’s a great way to learn how to learn languages. I feel like after casually teaching myself it for a few years I’m a lot better prepared to learn another language somewhere down the road

    There’s a few Esperanto clubs and such out there, I’m not a part of any of them so I can’t really comment on the community all that much.

    One thing that does kind of interest me is Pasporta Servo, which is sort of a free Airbnb/couchsurfing thing for esperantists. Seems like that could be a cool way to travel around on the cheap and probably a good way to get more involved in the Esperanto community. Unfortunately most of my traveling is done with my wife and I haven’t been able to convince her to learn Esperanto with me so I doubt she’s gonna want to go hang out with me chatting with someone in a made up language in a foreign land.

    Mostly I talk to my dog in it. She knows most of her basic commands in both English and Esperanto.


  • I don’t know every chain off the top of my head to double check, but I assume that those two and the 3 I mentioned are probably more-or-less the top 5

    And using the locators on their websites, I can find 1 VCA-affiliated vet, and a handful of Banfield (mostly out of PetSmart) and blue Pearl locations operating under their own names. Nothing else came up around me

    I suppose it’s possible some of them may be part of some smaller chains, and I’m not going to comb through every last vet in my area, but a cursory glance at a handful of them that I’ve used doesn’t look like any of them are affiliated with any kind of chain.


  • I very well may live in a bubble, but this is actually the first time I’ve heard of them, are they really that widespread?

    I can think of about a half-dozen independent veterinarians off the top of my head within maybe about 20 minutes of me

    We do have a handful of Banfield and Blue Pearl locations around, which now that I’m looking into it also seem to be owned by Mars, which is wild

    But even still, they’re still dwarfed by the number of independent vets.


  • In the US at least it’s sort of a legal grey area

    We of course have our usual patchwork of different local and state laws, and I believe it is outright banned in some parts of the country

    But overall, federally, I believe it’s more of an issue that there’s so little demand for it that no slaughterhouse for horses has bothered to open and go through the necessary USDA inspections and such to process horses for human consumption.

    I believe, if you really wanted to, you could go slaughter a horse yourself and feed it to your friends and family and be totally in the clear, but if you try to sell that horse meat anywhere you’d have the USDA beating down your door (not a lawyer, don’t go feeding your friends horse based on my understanding of the issue)

    As for the cultural reasons that Americans don’t want to eat horses and why it is outright banned in some parts of the country, I can’t really comment on that. I’d eat a horse and wouldn’t feel the least bit bad about it.


  • In a weird way this is almost refreshing

    It kind of shows that your mom actually put a little thought into the meaning of the word “woke” instead of just using it to mean “liberal stuff I don’t like”

    It’s supposed to mean that you’re aware of the various problems in the world, that you’re “awake” and paying attention as opposed to “asleep” and blissfully unaware while it all goes down around you

    Of course she’s dead-wrong about what’s going on, the world she thinks exists around her in just a weird fever dream and she is absolutely not woke

    But even that tiny bit of being able to think about the words you’re saying and not just spewing some 1984 duckspeak is so rare among conservatives that it almost feels like it should be celebrated in some small way.


  • BotW and TotK are such weird games to me

    They built these big beautiful worlds, and designed some really cool mechanics

    And just kind of did nothing with them.

    TotK was a bit better, but still fell pretty short.

    Also it’s so weird that TotK is clearly a direct sequel to BotW, but there’s almost no actual continuity between the games. There’s a handful of characters that are missing without much of an explanation, and other characters from the previous game act as if you’ve never met them before. I get that for gameplay reasons you kind of have to start things over from square one in some ways, but it just felt weird.

    And the weapon degradation never really felt fun to me. I feel like at the very least once you get the master sword and recharge it to its full power or whatever you should have that as an option that just doesn’t wear down, even if other weapons that do break might be better suited for the task.

    And having to go out and farm a thousand different fish and master parts and whatever else to upgrade your armor is just bullshit.


  • I actually did a make your own pizza party a while back, I encouraged people to get weird with it and a lot of my my friends are kind of foodies, so here’s a couple standouts

    Goat cheese, hot honey, fig preserves, and capocllo

    Spicy hawaiian - grilled pineapple, bacon, ham or spam, jalapenos, drizzle of hoisin sauce

    Mac & cheese

    Taco- taco meat, cheddar, red onions, jalapenos, lettuce tomato

    Cheeseburger - ground beef, cheddar, mustard, ketchup, pickles, onions

    Desert pizza- pie filling, vanilla glaze, crumb topping

    Sort of a knock-off flammkuchen- creme fraise (sour cream would probably also work fine,) gruyere, onions, bacon

    Buffalo Chicken - chicken, hot sauce, blue cheese crumbles, diced celery, shredded carrots

    Breakfast pizza- eggs (we used quail eggs because my pizza oven is on the small side and we could get them, just crack them right onto the top of the pizza,) bacon, sausage, hash browns

    Chicken Tika masala

    Greek- kalamata olives, feta, spinach tomatoes, balsamic

    And of course we had all of the standard pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms, olives, peppers, etc.

    A couple different sauces - standard pizza sauce, pesto, vodka sauce, Alfredo, etc.