Do you know how hard I had to read the c/ to see which side of the onion I was on for this one? The fuck

That fire was raging

I bet that guy plays a mean fiddle

Back when social media wasn’t so centralized on Facebook and especially any kind of local news, the odds were higher. Craigslist had a name for itself, although anything in the personals was overshadowed by prostitution.

I’m always surprised to go another day where I don’t hear anyone mention the risk of this mixup with Tushy, the anal porn site, and Hello Tushy, the bidet company.

It likely skews data in conservative states, but likely not by much. At least in 2020, mail-in voting was presented as the greatest boogeyman to ever threaten the GOP that week. That pushed conservative voters to vote in person in conservative states and make a big show about how much more reliable and traceable it was. Democrats already trusted the mail-in option. Conservatives in my blue area were not as polarized by this threat, in my observation, and still used the mail-in option. I imagine they knew they’d be overrun in the electoral vote so it didn’t matter if the popular vote was accurate or not.

This time around, I’m out of the Reddit loop and I’m not subjected to Fox News every day, so I’m not as in touch with the vibe.

I don’t know how I feel about the idea that conservative men create that much change by overwatching wives. I am not saying it doesn’t happen, but if these wives’ outspoken comments are believed to be true, then they’re indoctrinated before voting, not coerced in the booth. Reddit and Lemmy skews left and secular, so I feel they both underestimate the power of promising more Christianity, the power of making women beleive abortions are murder (but theirs can be repented or explained), that undocumented aliens are taking their tax money and all in murderous gangs, and that women can’t even lead. Ask their opinion of Hillary Clinton and they’ll tell you she’s a bitch. Then ask why. You might get something about Benghazi and not satisfying Bill, but that’s probably it. Her looks? Her voice? Nothing concrete.

Most of this thread is overlooking familiarity, consistency. Aside from regional/international differences, the mcdouble you order at home is gonna be exactly as the same as the mcdouble ordered 400 miles away. Your usual will be there. Many people aren’t gonna take a chance on Jeff’s Cafe on the road. Jeff’s Cafe doesn’t spend a billion dollars on ads to tell you they still have the same thing you ate a decade ago. People don’t want to spend as much time and effort as it takes to read Jeff’s menu, decide what sounds good, and then see if it matches their expectation.

“It was a clear case of a cult game failing to find a broader audience.”

The non-gamers assumed it was about the game. The gamers knew it wasn’t about the game. It failed to find any audience. And a decade too late.

710 pages into this mandate and they decide they don’t have room to talk about SS?

This is an excellent science fair project. This is not some hidden solution to derailment. The article is devoid of details other than the student observed great variance in truck spring condition and did extensive hypothetical testing to show it can contribute to derailment.

A contributing factor to both frequency and severity of derailment, sure, but a rare initial cause. “Springs” are not outside the considerations of the FRA. If you ever have trouble sleeping, read an FRA derailment report of some non-catastrophic event. Back in the 90s, they went so far as to identify dampening pads - thin plastic plates in the trucks - as the cause of derailment for new heavier intermodal cars. 1" thick plastic that deformed 1/8" under the 250,000lb+ load hit a harmonic frequency that led the trucks to hunt (wobble left and right but never finding a steady center) until the wheels hopped the tracks when entering a curve.

There is a massive test facility in Pueblo, Colorado that has the smartest engineers on the continent working and testing there. There’s straights, curves, a super loop, road crossings, bridges, and even a concrete wall for crashing. They pull rail cars wired more than your road car all to find something, anything in the data. So can resonant frequency be a big contributor to derailment? Yeah, of course. A push becomes a shove 3 cars later and hits some limit. But there’s absolutely no way to predict or control it because every car, ever load, and every piece of track is going to have some unique critical frequency.

And, for the record, the vast majority of those “1300 derailment per day” are low speed (which the article mentions) inside yards when assembling the full train (which the article does not mention). And, while the individual root cause of other derailments is varied, a majority of them are triggered by hard braking. It takes a few minutes for the brake signal to reach the end of the train - it’s a system operated by air pressure that’s used for both signaling and applying brakes. This means when the locomotive slams the brakes, the back of the train is still trying to shove it ahead at full speed long after the locomotive passes the engineer’s original line of sight. This force can be so great it makes the rail roll out form underneath the train. Add in coupler cushions and the train can shorten itself by a few hundred feet under this pressure, shoving couplers to the sides, taking out all the cushion slack, and adding slack towards the front as the middle and rear cars apply the brakes, creating a slinky longer than a mile weighing 140 tons per link. And yes, they’ve certainly “figured out” that empty cars in front of loaded cars is a huge contributing factor to these forces, there’s nothing easy about staying competitive. This platform shows it’s well aware of how much ground rail is losing to truck transportation. By rate and by severity, trucks vastly outweigh trains in terms of damage. The problem is rail failure is much more catastrophic and gets more news. 1 fiery derailment is news. 100 fiery trucks are a statistic. Same as planes. Way safer per passenger mile, way more deadly in failure.

And why do brakes perform so poorly? Because the benefits that come from “interchange” of rail cars between trains, lines, and companies, also comes with a massive interchangeability headache for any changes. I’m not defending the rail industry as if they’re innocent bystanders, but we should all be able to understand the difficulty in trying to convert 1.4 million freight cars to a new system for the first time in, literally, 100 years. Many of these cars reach 50 years of service before being scrapped. Someone owns the rail, someone owns the locomotive, someone owns the freight car base, someone might own the freight car body, and someone owns the cargo. These are often entirely different entities for each. You can’t really do a soft rollout, it’s all or nothing. So here, we sit, with centurion technology. Ironically, the only type that has the same loco and cars every day is the least progressive load - coal trains. It’s runs from the coal processor to the coal plant and back, nothing else. Every other freight train can be diced and hashed multiple times a day.

It’s not all doom and gloom. The East Palestine derailment put “wayside detectors” into the general public’s lexicon. They were talking about relatively simple infrared sensors placed next to the tracks to look for hot bearings. That’s old tech. There are currently massive sheds being implemented filled with cameras that record terabytes of info for each train passing through. It can identify missing bolts, cracked springs, and other failures on the spot. Control is notified and if it’s urgent, the car can be routed to a repair shop or the train can be stopped. There’s even a type with a trolley that rolls along with each truck to image the entire circumference of the wheels, looking for chips and cracks. A stall in the rolling tech doesn’t mean a stall in the industry. Make no mistake, derailment are expensive and companies and trying damn hard to sell solutions to the rail lines.

Passenger trains have their own headaches. Practically each line has its own design engineers reinventing the wheel. While some lines may buy existing designs (notable, the Amtrak Acela that runs from DC to Boston is a French TGV), they have their own design flares (such as doubling the number of trucks for the Acela). These trains do run as consistent units, so they tend to have intercar communication systems and hydraulic brakes, minimizing the overall braking time. That’s why their derailments usually come from speeding or collisions rather than “random” accidents.

Conrail has left the chat.

The portion of the global population that experiences fall colors is somewhat high, but I never really thought about how little of the world’s land sees it. Northeast north america, half of Europe, and part of China. Warmer places don’t make trees go into winter mode and colder places don’t support deciduous trees as well. It can’t be too dry for them, either, which precludes much of the southern hemisphere. So it happens across the globe mostly in the same couple of months

I read this as you saying OP’s claim was a fallacy but a re-read (and small dive into what type of Xerox you are) makes me beleive you meant binary thinking itself is a logical fallacy

The only story telling I’ve heard it used was A Series of Unfortunate Events. Pretty sure each caretaker gets a cousin designation. But that, of course, is entirely fiction in an excessively diverse, rich, bodacious literary presentation filled to the brim with grimly austere vernacular from the Vocabulary For Defiants.

If salts were present when the water froze, the salts would still be there. If the ice is pure water but you can’t microscopically brush away all the salts during thawing, can fresh water be extracted?

I like the UI of Aurora (purple teal logo). I don’t remember why, but I paid for Pro. I also have alerts on my phone from the site https://aurora-alerts.uk/ There’s of course the NOAA website but the UI isn’t as smooth or I just don’t know what I’m doing. Aurora has a nice prediction map that’s updated every few minutes. Aurora-alerts/Glendale has good alerts when it detects storm bursts. On 10/10, it alerted me ~20 minutes prior to each of the 3 bursts.

Honorable mention to Aurora Notifier (black green logo). It’s map isn’t as helpful as Aurora, but it incorporates usergsubmitted settings by location. When Europe has a ton of green dots, I know the activity is at least producing aurora

It’s possible. We need activity and alignment for it to happen. Get some apps, check some forecasts. The 3-day forecast only tells you if you should expect to check the daily forecast. The daily forecast tells you to check thebjourly forecast. The hourly forecast tells you if you should be at the viewing area already. I just saw them last week around 40deg N for the first time. It’s unique.

Interesting. I had an increase in fungal presence, but I figured it was excessive boot usage due to starting motorcycle riding 5 months after my first covid infection. It clear near winter for the most part but I wonder if I just hadn’t noticed the initial spread.

“can’t scroll all day”

I keep saying that’s a positive thing for other productivity, but sadly, that’s not happening for me. Turns out, I want to sit and bum just as much as I always did before. I’m more likely to actually read articles, but I know meta gets more screen time now. As you said, lemmy doesn’t have those full niche communities. I know, sacrilege to admit around here.

I agree with this and want to add my take on “pretending to have your shit together”

Its not so much as trying to impress everyone around you as much as it is focusing on positives. If you need specific help to get something done and I’m the person that can help, by all means, tell me you don’t have your shit together and I’ll work with you. But otherwise, I don’t really need to hear about how bad you are at getting laundry done. Most people in my area have shitty retail/cust svc jobs that aren’t much to write home about. Does it pay the bills? Do you have a normal amount of time off? If yes and yes, then great, let’s talk about some social trend or play a game or drink beer. You have a 2-basket laundry system, I haven’t vacuumed in 3 years. We don’t need to judge each other’s lives over those details. We’re not hanging out to be the two most shit-togethered people in the room, we’re here for common interests and well-paired attitudes.

I’ll offer another price of experience in my 30s. I had no friends at 25. I lost all my school friends, my neighborhood friends all had new neighborhoods, I was overqualified but stuck at a bullshit job, and my cousins got different lives. Sure, I hung out with people from work, I found a new set of cousins with my spouse, and I found a like-minded group from a hobby. But those don’t count, right? Not my actual cousins, I only see the hobby people during hobby activities and related gatherings, and that’s just “work” people.

Wrong.

Don’t put qualifiers on who is a real friend. Do you have a good time together? Do you meet sometimes? Do you beleive they mean you no harm? Great, those are real friends. Nearly all friends in life will be friends of proximity. A neighbor, a classmate, a coworker, a hobbyist. When you lose the proximity by moving, changing schools, exiting a hobby, or changing jobs, most will fade into the background. Shared experiences keep friendships moving so when you take away the common setting, it doesn’t flow as easily. The inside jokes from coworkers about new policies now need a preface to get the other person up to speed. The former neighbor needs to make plans with you to meet for dinner instead of just coming around the corner. The hobbyists used to talk about their next project but, previously, never talked about life with you.

Maybe you’ll have a good lifelong friend or two with whom you always reconnect instantly. It’s probably because of some similarity in your formative years that keeps you in the same book, if not on the same page. Other than that, you’ll always be bouncing around between groups. Please, don’t disqualify them as temporary or not serious enough. Live in the moment. Are you having a good time with these people right now? Then let the good times roll.

It hit me hardest around my wedding. I felt like I had no one to invite and was part of why I pushed it off. I ended up with about 20 aquaintices at a 120-guest wedding. I got to see several weddings shortly before mine and realized I fit in just fine at those. When I was at my welcome party the night before and saw all these different groups mingling with each other, they didn’t really care about the qualifiers of their presence, either. They asked how they knew the wedding couple but moved onto their regular small talk. A party isn’t a place to be the sole star of your own show, a party is a happy group of people partaking in festivities. Your cultivated group of aquaintices will be more compatible than you realize.