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Fondots ,

There was already some amount of cultural awareness about the Titanic prior to the movie, after all they pretty much started making movies, plays, documentaries, etc. as soon as it happened and kept right on making them

It also got a pretty good bump in popularity when the wreck was found in the 80s

Even if the movie weren't made, there'd probably be a pretty decent chunk of people who would know about it from the scene in Ghostbusters 2 if nothing else.

It probably wouldn't be something that pretty much everyone knows about, and certainly not in the kind of detail we do now, but you'd probably still have a pretty good chance of people who'd at least know that it was a big passenger ship that sank.

It's hard for me to be impartial about this though, I was in elementary school when the movie came out, prime age to learn how to play "my heart will go on" on the recorder in music class and to see that big brick of 2 VHS tapes for rent in blockbuster. To this day I actually haven't seen it, but it's hard for me to imagine a world that people don't know about the Titanic because the movie was just so omnipresent in my formative years.

Fondots ,

I may be misinterpreting what you're describing, but it kind of sounds like you've reinvented the machinist jack.

Not throwing shade, it makes sense and there's a reason that machinists the world over use them to tackle the same sort of problem of how to support sagging parts- it's simple and it works. And coming up with the same solution shows that you have a good understanding of the issue and how to tackle it.

Just pointing it out because I love the overlap between different fields and hobbies, and maybe if you didn't already know that machinist jacks were a thing you'll find inspiration for a version 2.0 if you ever feel the need to make one.

I'd also like to see your version when you get around to sharing it.

Fondots ,

I feel like it's a pretty common experience for a lot of us maker types- we come up with a solution to a problem, maybe we tried searching for one and came up empty, or maybe we just thought it would be fun to make from the get-go, then sometime later we stumble upon someone selling pretty much the exact thing we made and think "huh, so thats what these things are called" maybe with a touch of disappointment that your idea wasn't as original as you thought, or maybe just intrigued because you just added another term to your vocabulary and you have a better idea what to search for next time.

Yours looks good though, It's probably unnecessary but I'd be tempted to add like a U-shaped cradle piece to the top to help keep it in place if your computer ever gets jostled for any reason, and maybe a jam nut at the bottom to make sure it stays where you set it. Again probably totally unnecessary, but I always figure that if it's worth doing it's worth overdoing.

What sort of printer and filament/resin are you using? I'd worry a bit about it warping or sagging over time from the heat inside a computer. I know some materials can handle the heat better or worse than others, but I haven't dipped my toes into 3d printing myself yet, so I may be overestimating how much of an issue it is.

And can your printer make decent screw threads, or do you have to clean them up afterwards with a tap and die or something? I'm not really up on the current state of 3d printers, but one of the first 3d printed objects I remember ever handling was back in high school 15 or so years ago. One of my teachers went to a conference where they were showing off new gadgets for computer and shop classes, and he brought back a couple 3d printed crescent wrenches for us to fondle. I remember the screws being really crunchy and they almost but didn't quite work, so in the back of my mind I've always thought of functional screw threads as something 3d printers can't quite do, so it's wild to me if we've gone from barely able to make even a coarse thread with huge tolerances work to being able to make pretty fine threads with pretty tight tolerances.

Of course back then, they hadn't even really settled on calling it "3d printing," I remember that teacher calling it a "rapid prototyping machine" when he was telling us about it, and described it as being "like a 3d printer"

Fondots ,

There's probably a lot of different variables, cows vs bulls, the breed, how they're being raised, if they have calves with them, how you're behaving, etc.

In general though, safest bet is always going to be to give them space and not approach them. Not to say they're necessarily going to be aggressive or anything, but that's just kind of rule number 1 with any animals you're not familiar with.

Annecdotally, when I was a teenager, I did Philmont, which is a big property the Boy Scouts of America (now changing their name to Scouting America) owns in New Mexico, where scouts can go backpacking. They also maintain a working cattle ranch there, and I believe so e of the neighboring ranches allow their cattle to (grave? Free range? Roam? I'm not sure of the correct terminology) the Philmont property, so it's not uncommon to encounter cows in various places there.

They give pretty much the same lecture, don't approach them, don't do anything to spook them, and give them some space.

At one point my group was hiking along a trail coming to a junction, and a few dozen cows came down the trail we were about to head up and went into the woods. We weren't super close to them, but it was probably about the closest I've been to a cow outside of a petting zoo in my life, and there was nothing but a few yards of open trail between us. We just stood back and watched them go about their business, the cows didn't pay any attention to us, we hung out for a couple minutes after they passed in case there were any stragglers, and sure enough there was a lone cow that came running down the trail trying to catch up with its friends.

I'm no cow-ologist, but my general understanding is that they tend to be fairly laid back, and if anything curious. That said, they're big, powerful animals and you don't want to spook them.

Fondots ,

It depends on what I'm doing

If I'm going somewhere out of easy driving distance and hoping maybe some friends will come along, I'll start floating the idea about a year out, start making more solid plans about 6 months out. Give people time to get passports, save up for plane tickets, etc.

If it's an overnight to a long weekend with just me and my wife, maybe a couple weeks, we could probably do day-of sometimes but we gotta make sure someone can watch our dog.

Fondots ,

Not exactly the same thing, but my wife and I saw Logan at a drive in theater when it came out

Towards the end when he's all fucked up and near death, the audio started doing all kinds of weird shit, cutting in and out, getting fuzzy and distorted, etc.

We thought it was a pretty cool effect to show the sort of state he was in and we were all about it.

Then we heard some crystal clear audio coming from the cars next to us, turns out it was just my car's battery dying from running the radio.

Still think it was a cool effect, would watch it again that way if it were an option.

I've since picked up a battery powered radio for future drive-ins (we try to go at least once a year)

Fondots ,

Every time I see one of those "employees must wash hands" signs, I think about getting some custom made "and everyone else should too" signs made up to start posting below them in public bathrooms everywhere I go.

Fondots ,

The problem is that the one thing I want to do that I'm not already doing is "not work"

I don't have any grand plans to take up new hobbies or anything in my retirement (though I'm sure I'll continue collecting hobbies just as I always have) I just want to be able to do them on my own schedule

Fondots ,

You could chant primary colors at kindergarteners online line for a maximum of 20 hours per week, or in person for a maximum of 10 hours per week

That may work for you, and if it does I'm happy for you, but for me, as much as I want more time for myself and my hobbies, one thing I want even more is to not ever spend any amount of time doing anything even remotely like that.

I also have no real interest in working abroad even if I didn't think that job sounded horrible. A week or two of vacation, sure, but by the end of week 2, I'm ready to go home, and that's really the point here, I want to be able to just stay home, and only leave when it's to do something I want to do.

What is a good second career?

The wife and I are getting older. We have been working for decades at this point. But we are too young to retire, and we had kids late. But one of us could totally switch over to a lower stress second career. Ideally something with benefits, maybe even a chance to get a pension. And since we still have kids, needs to be...

Fondots ,

If you have a government job, pensions are still very much a thing. Something like 1/3 of jobs are in the public sector and the majority of them offer a pension, and they're pretty rare but there are still some private sector jobs offering pensions as well, though I wouldn't hold my breath trying to get one of those.

It takes a whole lot of people to keep the local, state, and federal governments running, pull up your county job listings sometimes, they're probably hiring for a few different jobs at any given time, some require very specific skills, training, or education, others are going to be basic janitorial work, office clerks, etc. and everything in between that pretty much anyone could manage, and everything in between, and almost all of them will qualify for a pension plan.

Source- am 911 dispatcher, vested in my pension, still another 15-20ish years before I can collect on it

Fondots ,

A lot of those are features of some government jobs, but not necessarily government jobs in general

they do not pay commensurate to similar jobs in non-gov positions.

No, but they do make up for it at least somewhat in benefits, which sounds like something OP is interested in, and since they're looking for a less stressful job, they probably have also come to terms with the fact that the pay would likely be lower

you must conduct mandatory quarterly drug tests to ensure you are in compliance to federal drug laws.

That varies on the nature of the job and the agency you work for. Like I said, I work in 911 dispatch, so I'm subject to a lot of federal regulations and such, including about drug use, but the only time I got drug tested was when I was hired, the only circumstance I'm subject to testing is if they have reason to think I'm intoxicated on the job. (The test when I was hired was a hair test, fun fact, at least at the place that did our testing, their policy is if you shave your head like I do, the next place they take a sample from is your armpit, I was expecting them to take it from my beard, but they wanted pit hair)

you must submit fingerprint and/or DNA samples

I did get fingerprinted, that is true. No DNA samples though. Not exactly unique to government jobs though, a lot of private sector childcare and healthcare employees, casino workers, bank employees, and security companies, just to name a few, require fingerprinting.

you must disclose many financial, foreign family, or unusual hobbies, so they can legally deny you things such as certain rights in case you are in a job that requires security clearances or NDAs.

Don't recall that ever coming up in my hiring process, and I handle a lot of privileged info. Not exactly a security clearance or NDA, but lots of personal info and such that I can't talk about outside of work.

it's difficult to promote to higher pay positions unless you grease the right hands and network the right people or simply be lucky right-place-right-time, you will simply stagnate in your place for a long time (or just simply be furloughed).

The same can be said about a whole lot of private sector jobs as well. Networking is a big deal. This also depends on the exact agency/department you work for, a lot of agencies do like to promote internally to fill openings and new positions when possible. At my work it's pretty rare to see someone totally new brought in to fill most of our positions we get people being promoted and moved around a fair bit when there's an opening, and most of my chain of command up to the director of my department started out as dispatchers and worked their way up through various supervisory roles, deputy directors, etc. Some positions are of course more of a dead end than others, there's only so many places you can move up to from courthouse clerk, but it can also be pretty easy to transfer to a different department, I've had a fair amount of coworkers move from the communications division (which dispatch is a part of) to logistics, IT, emergency planning, the coroners office, there have been cases where underperforming dispatchers have been found other jobs in the county, etc. And not everyone cares about promotion, I'm happy to keep answering 911 calls for the next 20 or so years, and I suspect that OP maybe doesn't care too much about long term career prospects since it sounds like= they're basically just looking for something to hold them over until retirement.

if the gov shuts down, you don't get paid.

If a private company shuts down, you don't get paid and you have to go looking for a new job because it's probably not going to open back up in a few days or weeks after the assholes in charge get their heads out of their asses.

Fondots ,

I work in 911 dispatch, there is an audible groan whenever anyone here gets a text to 911

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that it's a tool that's available, there are certain cases where it can be really useful, domestic abuse situations where you're unable to make a voice call because you're abuser is in the room or car with you, an active shooter situation where you're hiding and don't want to give away your location, people with hearing or speech issues, etc.

That's almost never what it gets used for.

Most of the time it's someone calling in some non-emergency. I suspect in their minds it's probably quicker and more convenient for us to get a text, but it really isn't. We're not multitasking and taking other calls at the same time we're on the text, when we're on the text, that is what we're doing, same as if we were on a regular 911 call. And that first text usually is missing some crucial information about what is going on, and it takes a whole lot longer to go back and for asking questions and waiting for an answer by text than if you just made a phone call, if they even reply at all to answer my questions, very often they put their phone in their pocket and never look at it again for the rest of the night. We can't even call them back because we don't know if it's safe for them to speak on the phone, we just have to sit there for 5 minutes waiting for a reply that isn't coming before we can disconnect.

I've also definitely had at least one instance where the caller was definitely texting while driving, and not for anything remotely urgent enough that they couldn't have found somewhere safe to pull over first.

Agency policies will vary on how texts to be handled, I can only really speak for where I work.

Most calls, even a lot of actual actual emergencies, if my caller is cooperative and knows where they are, and the situation isn't actively evolving while I'm on the phone, I can handle in about 2 minutes or less, sometimes I can even get it down to less than a minute. I'm going to easily spend twice that on most text conversations, and often I'm going to be tied up on it significantly longer.

Technology also varies a bit from one place to another, but we also don't get the same kind of location info with a text like we do on a regular phonecall (and even on a call our location data may not always be super accurate or useful) we did recently get some of our systems updated, and we get more information than we did before, but it's still less reliable than on a phone call.

And we also can't transfer a text like we can with a voice call, so if you're texting regarding something going on at your grandma's house in another state (we get calls like that all the time, where someone tells a friend or relative about something going on, but can't or won't call 911 themselves) we have to either A convince you to take a voice call so we can transfer you, or B make a call to them while still texting you, and play middle man relaying questions and answers between you and the other dispatcher, so you're tying up dispatchers in 2 jurisdictions on your call (it used to be that we weren't able to make an outgoing call while we were on a text, so we'd have to have 2 dispatchers at our center tied up on these texts, one to message back and forth with you, and another to relay the info to the correct agency by phone. We're a pretty well-funded county, so I'm sure there's a lot of dispatch centers still out there where that's still the case)

I already occasionally get people trying to send us pictures and links with no explanation (pro-tip, we can't see your pictures or open your links with our current tech, and even if we could opening links would probably be a no-no from a cyber security standpoint)

If at all possible, please just make a voice call, it will be quicker. If you genuinely cannot make a voice call, at least make sure your first text contains the correct location (address, municipality, nearest cross street, apartment number or name of the business if applicable should cover your bases pretty well) and a good description of what is going on. Then please keep your phone with you and try to answer any follow up texts we send you quickly and succinctly.

And again, don't get me wrong, it really can be an amazing tool when it's needed, but it's a massive pain in the ass for us when people use it when it's not necessary and usually makes just about every part of our job harder and slower, which means slower responses to your emergency.

Fondots ,

This absolutely can be a useful tool for deaf people or others with hearing/speech difficulties.

However, there are already several ways for deaf people to contact 911 without text-to-911

I work in 911 dispatch, probably the most common way I've gotten calls from deaf people is through a video really interpreter. The caller is basically on a video call with an interpreter and they relay what's being said to us. There's very little delay in communication like there can be when you're typing back and forth, and usually it works pretty well. There are some situations where it has its issues, if the caller is somewhere dark it can be hard for the interpreter to see what they're signing, if they don't have a video-capable device they of course can't use it at all, and a lot of our deaf callers come from a behavioral health group home place in our county, and some of those callers have a tendency to just kind of walk off-street in the middle of the call, though it's still kind of useful because the interpreter can at least try to describe what they're seeing and hearing in the background if the caller didn't hang up.

Also all 911 centers (in the US at least, I assume it's probably the same elsewhere in the world) are required to take TTY/TTD calls. The classic example of these is the caller has a device that kind of looks like a typewriter with a little screen and a speaker and microphone they place a phone handset on. They type out their message,the device turns it into a bunch of beeping noises that go out over the phone line like a regular voice call, and the person on the other end's TTY device (in our case it's built into our computer phone system) decodes the beeps back into text. Most, if not all cell phones these days also have TTY built into them in the accessibility settings somewhere. There's some grammar peculiarities because it doesn't really include punctuation, and some tty users will use ASL gloss, which is a written form of ASL (ASL isn't totally 1:1 with English, and if you don't know what you're looking at ASL gloss reads kind of like that bit from The Office "why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.") It also allows for hearing or voice carryover, where the caller is able to hear but not speak or vice-versa, so you only need to use TTY for half the conversation and can communicate verbally for the other half. The 2 biggest drawback is that we hear all of these TTY beeps in our headset, and they get pretty annoying really quick, small price to pay though, and generally only one party can be typing at a time, so you have to wait for them to finish before you can reply.

I will say that, at least in my area, TTY is vanishingly rare. In the 6 years I've been here, I'd be amazed if we've gotten 3 calls from an actual deaf person using TTY, although we did have one mental health patient who used it on his cell phone and used it to just ramble nonsense at us. He had no hearing or speech difficulties, sometimes we were able to get him to talk to us

In either case, if you call from a landline, we get your address just like a regular phone call, with tty from a cell we also get your cellular location like a regular call. Video relay calls from cell phones can get a little funny location wise because of how the call needs to be routed, often it works out that we get a home address they have on file and not their actual current location. With texts the location data often isn't very good (although we're implementing some new technologies at my center that improve on it a bit, though it's still not as reliable as a voice call in some ways)

I posted another comment/rant in this thread with some of my gripes about how people use text to 911 if you haven't already seen that, and I do want to reiterate that it is a really good option to have available, we can always use more tools in our toolbox, and it can definitely be useful in some circumstances, but it does tend to get misused in some frustrating ways for us.

Fondots ,

Yeah, didn't mean to imply that you were, just wanted to expand on options for deaf people that are already out there, and point out some of the relative strengths and weaknesses they have compared to text-to-911

Fondots ,

FYI, there's a little debate over this in the English language, but many would say that the proper demonyms are Afghan for the Pashtun ethnic group, and Afghanistani (or rarely Afghanese) for people from Afghanistan regardless of ethnicity.

Afghani is their currency.

I believe it comes from a discrepancy between the Persian and Pashto languages. Afghani being the correct term in Persian, and Afghan being the term in Pashto.

Afghani is pretty widely used in English, and even appears in some dictionaries, but many argue that it's not correct.

So a person is an Afghan, they eat Afghan food, wear Afghan clothing, have Afghan customs, and their currency is the Afghan Afghani (in case some other country ever adopts a currency called the Afghani and you need to differentiate between them)

Fondots ,

Unfortunately I don't have any recommendations for you, but I just wanted to say that I recently visited Montreal for the eclipse and I found myself feeling really jealous of your bike infrastructure compared to what we have around me in the Philadelphia area. I'm not super well-traveled, so maybe Philly is just that far behind the curve that anything else looks impressive, but at least from my perspective you guys really seemed to have it figured out.

I had a great time up there, probably one of my favorite cities I've ever visited, I'm already looking for excuses to go back.

Fondots ,

Yeah, sadly it doesn't feel like they've done a whole lot to expand things in the last decade.

The bike share is decent enough, but the situation with the actual bike lanes is pretty abysmal. Where the lanes even exist, you're lucky if you can make it a block or two at a time without them being blocked by a delivery truck, someone just straight-up parked there, or a dumpster or construction materials/equipment, and Philly traffic is scary enough in a car, let alone a bike.

Though to give credit where it's due, I do love some of the bike trails we have, the Schuylkill river trail, Fairmount park, the Perkiomen trail out in the suburbs, etc. all great to enjoy a rid, but not necessarily to get from point a to point b.

Fondots ,

One of my favorite scary facts about the moonies that I don't see talked about much is that a couple of the founders sons had a falling out with the church, and went and started their own, even crazier church. They made the news a few years back doing some rifle blessings and some kind of mass wedding ceremony (also with rifles)

Not for nothing, they also own kahr firearms

Fondots ,

Long before I was born, my town was a working class mill town, steel mill, tire factory, textile mills, etc. the steel mill is still there, but it's not a big feature of the town like it once was.

Even up into my lifetime, it was still essentially a working class town, nothing wrong with it, perfectly safe town, walkable, convenient to pretty much every major highway, public transportation, major shopping areas, etc. but it just had a little bit of a reputation for being kind of a slightly lower class town compared to a lot of its neighbors.

Within the last decade or so it's kind of exploded, property values have gone through the roof, lots of cool bars and restaurants, a whole bunch of new high rise apartment buildings, etc. It's attracted a lot of yuppies and priced a lot of the old families out of the area. It's also created some significant traffic and parking issues, with new apartments and such bringing in more people, and people wanting to come into town for the bars and restaurants and such the infrastructure just isn't there for that many cars.

I can't afford to live there anymore, but with my parents and relatives who still live there not getting any younger, sooner or later I should be able to snag up one of their houses, my sister already managed to snag my grandmother's house for herself.

Like all cases of gentrification it has its plusses and minuses. The bars and restaurants and other new businesses are pretty great. Getting priced out of the town my family has lived in for over a century kind of blows, even if I have a roadmap laid out in front of me to get back. Some of my favorite cheap dive bars are no longer very cheap or divey, which is a bummer. The traffic can be a nightmare when you have to deal with it. The character of the town has definitely changed, there's a definite difference in attitude between people who have deep roots there, own homes, and intend to spend the rest of their lives here and the newcomers, landlords, house flippers, renters, etc. who don't have any real attachment to the town.

Fondots ,

Even if it was for batteries, unless we get fusion factors down to something that can fit in a car, power drill, smartphone, etc. batteries are still going to be a big part of the equation.

Sure, you can generate enough juice to power whatever you want, but only as long as it's plugged in, anything that needs to get detached from the grid is still going to need batteries, and you probably don't want your car hooked up to a 10 mile long power cord for your commute.

Fondots ,

There was one team fairly recently that thought they had developed one that got a lot of press, but it turned out to not be true.

But that was only for that one specific case, it didn't prove that room temperature superconductors can't exist in general, there are still other teams working on developing them, and theoretically they could be possible, we just haven't quite worked out what materials will exhibit superconductivity at room temperature, under what circumstances, and how to make them.

And we have some materials that come pretty damn close, Lanthanum decahydride can exhibit superconductivity at temperatures just a few degrees colder than some home freezers can manage (although at very high pressures)

Fondots ,

The issue people are worried about is that no one is making the decision to kill kids, it's the AI making the call. It's being given another objective and in the process of carrying that out makes the call to kill kids as part of that objective.

For example, you give an AI drone instructions to fly over an area to identify and drop bombs on military installations, and the AI misidentifies a school as a military base and bombs it. Or you send a dog bot in to patrol an area for intruders, and it misidentifies kids playing out in the streets as armed insurgents.

In a situation where it's human pilots, soldiers, and analysts and such making the call, we would (or at least should) expect the people involved to face some sort of repercussions- jail time, fines, demotions, etc.

None of which you can really do for a drone.

And that's of course before you get into the really crazy sci Fi dystopia stuff, where you send a team of robots into a city with general instructions to clear it of insurgents, and the AI comes to the conclusion somehow that the fastest and most efficient way to accomplish that is to just kill every person in the city since it can't be absolutely sure who is and isn't a terrorist

Fondots ,

English

A very tiny bit of French, I can understand more than I can speak if they talk slowly, my French education was kind of shitty and it's been well over a decade since high school since I've really used it so

I've been learning Esperanto on Duolingo, it's been going pretty well, I'm just about at the point where I can confidently read a book without having too look up too many words. I'm far from fluent, but I getting there.

Fondots ,

I rarely drink coffee on my days off, when I work I bring a 20oz mug of drip coffee with me. At my old job, I'd probably polish of a pot or two to myself most days, mostly because walking back to the break room and brewing a pot when it was empty was a good way to avoid actually working that no one ever batted an eye at.

Fondots ,

Not exactly sending them to coworkers, but I did kind of refer a coworker to one once.

I work in 911 dispatch, it's kind of hard not to end up a little desensitized to some crazy shit. We once had a call about some kind of industrial accident, someone's arm caught in a machine or something along those lines. Obviously not going to share too many specific details about the incident, but we did have a teams on location ready to do a field amputation if needed, but luckily they were able to get the person out without any major injuries.

So our conversations tended to be about a lot of the crazy gory fucked up things we'd taken calls about or otherwise seen or heard about, and I mentioned the Russian lathe accident video to one of my coworkers (don't look that up if you're not the kind of fucked up who can deal with that sort of thing, it's a guy getting caught in a heavy duty lathe and spun around and mashed against the machine until someone comes and hits the emergency stop, at which point there's nothing much left of him)

That piqued her interest, and she went and watched it on her phone at her next break.

I wouldn't send the video to anyone, especially not out of the blue, and when it comes up I warn people not to look it up if they're the type of person who would be significantly disturbed by it. In general I won't even mention it to people who don't work either in some sort of emergency services or medical sort of field where we have to occasionally deal with that kind of thing, or in a machine shop where they're working around those kinds of machines, and even then it's something that only gets brought up to certain people in certain contexts.

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