I think all clad is severely overrated

They’re fine pans, don’t get me wrong, almost certainly better than your standard department store celebrity-chef branded pans by Cuisinart or whatever

But the handles are kind of uncomfortable, and I dislike the rivets through the pan.

I’m personally a fan of demeyere pans.

Kind of reminds me of the daisyworld simulation.

It’s been a long time since I read about it, so I may possibly miss some details.

Daisyworld simulates a planet entirely covered by 2 species of daisy- black ones and white ones.

The black ones are better able to absorb the suns rays, so initially outcompete the white ones, however because they’re absorbing more of the rays, that leads to the planet warming up.

At a certain point the planets temperature gets too warm and the black daisies start dying off. Since the white daisies are better able to reflect the sun’s rays, they’re less effected by the increased temperature and start to outcompete the black ones.

After a while the white daisies are dominant, and since most of the planet is now reflecting the sun’s rays the temperature starts to drop, until it gets to a point where it’s too cold for the white daisies but since the black daisies can absorb more of the sun they start to outcompete the black ones again

Lather, rinse, repeat until they reach a sort of equilibrium.

Finer bits of wood, like sawdust, or pencil shavings from sharpening, catch fire much more readily than a solid chunk of wood like a whole pencil.

Given the right environment, finer sawdust can even be explosive.

A lot of campers and other outdoorsy types are probably familiar with using “feather sticks” to start a fire, where you take a stick and cut a bunch of fine curls into it, almost like you’re whittling down the stick but leaving the shavings attached.

The whole stick wouldn’t readily catch fire, but those finer curls attached to it will light pretty easily and spread to the rest of the stick.

And while I’ve seen some pretty impressive feather sticks made by people with a steady hand and sharp knife, most of the time those feathers aren’t quite as fine as most pencil shavings.

My aunt and uncle hosted an exchange student from China.

He was a bit of an awkward weirdo, I kind of got the impression he was somewhat wealthy, seemed nice enough, just weird, and didn’t seem to have much interest in experiencing anything American except for buying clothes and such that I guess we’re more expensive in China.

After a few months, they noticed their cat walking funny and got him checked out, and found what looked like burns on his paws, and they weren’t sure how it happened.

They checked their security cameras, and saw the exchange student holding the cat to the hot stove.

Sent him packing really quick.

People need a place to live, they don’t need stocks to live. By owning more properties than you need you are contributing to a scarcity and inflated pricing for a basic necessity.

The picture quality leaves a bit to be desired, but the two jackets do look pretty different to me. It looks like one may be a quarter zip without any chest pockets and the other is a full zip with chest pockets. And because of the differing picture qualities it’s kind of hard to say just how similar or different the colors are, they almost look like different colors from one picture of the same jacket to the other.

Also there may have been some deliberate choice in that sort of dark earth tone kind of color (or at least that’s what the colors look like to me,) different witnesses could give different answers for what color that jacket even is, I could imagine people calling it black, grey brown, tan, or green, depending on the lighting, how close they were, how much attention they paid, etc. on top of eyewitnesses just being kind of generally unreliable, so until they were able to get the security footage, which probably was at least a few minutes, cops could potentially have been working on conflicting descriptions of the jacket color.

Side note: I work in 911 dispatch, so I spend a lot of my nights trying to get descriptions of people and vehicles, I get a lot of people really struggling to tell me what color something is that’s right in front of them, and when we have multiple callers about something we’re often going to get as many different descriptions as there are callers. I remember one major incident I worked where depending on which caller you got, the description of the subject was either an older white guy wearing camo, a young black guy in a hoodie, or 3 white teenagers in trench coats.

It also looks like there was just another picture released where he was wearing what looks to me like a black or navy puffy jacket.

Also worth noting, I don’t think the NYPD has been totally clear about where these pictures were all taken on the timeline, one was taken at the hostel he was staying at and I’m not even totally clear if it’s actually from the same day as the shooting or not.

Hypothetically, you’d still want to blend into the crowd, “yellow puffy jacket and Knicks hat” is pretty identifiable if someone were to see you changing your clothes, but darker colored midweight hooded jacket could probably describes like 75% of what everyone on any random street in New York is wearing at any given time in the winter.

And the backpacks look like they’re totally different colors. You also wouldn’t want to ditch the bag or clothes too close to the chime scene, don’t want to leave behind evidence that might be easily linked to you.

Can’t speak for the neck gaiter, a black gaiter is a pretty unremarkable article of clothing, I know a few people who have started wearing them semi regularly over the winter since COVID, it’s probably not enough to be identifiable on its own, he could have simply forgotten about it, it could be functional by hiding something identifiable (neck tattoos, scars, who knows, maybe even a tracheostomy that the insurance company fucked him over with in some way) he may have wanted to keep it readily at hand to quickly cover his face again if needed, etc.

If it were up to me, I wouldn’t. But my wife likes Christmas so I do. I’m an atheist, she’s Wiccan, we were raised Catholic and vaguely catholic-ish respectively.

We do a real tree, if I’m gonna go through the trouble I’m gonna do it right. It also means I don’t have to haul the damn thing up and down the ladder to my attic every year, I just strap it back onto my car and haul it over to my friends house for our next bonfire.

We do a string of lights around our porch and put out a garden flag and that’s about all of our exterior decoration.

My wife also puts out a few interior decorations inside the house, stockings by the fireplace, etc.

I’m not saying it’s what happened here, but I’ve always figured that if I intended to commit a crime and escape, I’d change my outer clothes as fast as possible. If you were wearing a mask, if you put on a different jacket, backpack, hat, pants, and shoes you’re basically unrecognizable barring any recognizable scars or tattoos or whatever.

I don’t know how much time would have elapsed between the two pictures, but if you plan for it by wearing two layers, it wouldn’t take very long to pull a second bag from your backpack and stuff the first backpack and your jacket into the second pack.

It looks like the guy in both sets of pictures might be wearing the same sort of neck gaiter, but that’s pretty flimsy evidence to say the least

My dude, what the actual fuck are you on about?

“Know your enemy” isn’t a saying about peaceful turn-the-other-cheek, love-thy-neighbor, forgiveness bullshit

It’s about knowing how and why they fight so you know how to defeat them.

You can’t and won’t win over every individual Nazi or klansman and make them see the light, but each one you do is one less enemy on their side and one more ally on yours, and my talking to them you get a better understanding on how to beat them.

If you didn’t think people can change, you probably wouldn’t spend as much time arguing with people on the internet as you do. Not really much point in doing that since you’re not going to change their minds after all.

But even if you genuinely don’t think people are capable of improvement, I think it would still be worthwhile in a “know your enemy” sort of way.

I have a friend who worked at a convenience store in an area where the KKK still has a decent presence. The local grand wizard or dragon or whatever ridiculous rank he had took a liking to my friend (it should maybe be noted that my friend is practically a caricature of blond, blue-eyed whiteness.) I wouldn’t say they were friends, it was more than he was on the clock and couldn’t really afford to lose his job by telling some racist fuck to pound sand, they didn’t keep in contact outside of work, neither of them changed each other’s minds about anything (my friend is now engaged to a black woman) but they did have some fairly in depth and civil conversations about race and society and such.

I can’t say for what Mr Pointy Hat’s takeaway was from their talks, but my friend’s overall impression is that the klan guy was kind of stuck. He kind of seemed to know that the world had changed around him, and that maybe he was in the wrong and there was no place for someone like him anymore, but he was unable and/or unwilling to change himself to adapt to the new world and to different ways of thinking than he’d been brought up with, so the kkk was kind of his way of carving a safe space for himself out of the world where he knew how things worked and where he had some sort of value. And his hatred towards black people and other people different from himself wasn’t really that they should be killed or enslaved or treated poorly, but that he didn’t get why they needed to be part of the same society as him, sort of like if they could just all go off and live in their own countries he’d wish them the best in their endeavors.

I’m not saying that’s at all a good philosophy, I find it absolutely abhorrent, but it’s also more nuanced than I would have otherwise thought a klansman would be capable of.

I also won’t say that my friend necessarily had a perfect read on this guy, it could very well be that he totally took the wrong things away from what the guy said. And even if he did hit the nail on the head, with a sample size of 1, you can’t exactly extrapolate that to say that the rest of the klan or other racist shitbags feel the same way.

But I do think there can be some value in talking to some of these types of people, maybe not befriending them exactly, but building some sort of mutual understanding might help get some of them onto the right path before they end up too old and stuck in their ways like that guy.

First of all, I find your phrasing that he “is/was” a cop kind of interesting. Is he a cop or is he not? If he was but is no longer a cop, it could very well be that he left that career because he shares some of your same thoughts and feelings and you’re getting yourself worked up over nothing.

Anyway

To me, ACAB means that all cops are bastards collectively

It does not mean that each individual cop is a bastard.

There are undoubtedly some cops that are good people, doing their damnedest to do the right thing, standing up for the little guy against the bastards, who are trying to make the system better from the inside, who understand the role that policing should be, etc.

And there are of course some who are bastards, who abuse their power and do all of the things that make policing shitty.

And there are cops who aren’t actively bastards themselves, but also aren’t doing anything to make waves and stand up against the bastards.

It’s a case of a few rotten apples spoiling the bunch. The apple barrel has a couple absolutely amazing apples in there that are everything you could ever want from an apple, a whole bunch of meh run-of-the-mill grocery store apples, that do the job of being an apple well enough, but aren’t going to make you stand up and say “holy shit, that’s a good fucking apple,” and then there’s a handful of rotten apples that will make you puke your guts up, and unfortunately you don’t get to pick and choose which apple you’re eating, you just have to reach in blind and take a bite, and since those rotten apples are in there, it’s a pretty big gamble to make, you have to really need that apple for it to be worth it.

However, entering into a friendship is different than other interactions you’d have with the police. You get a chance to inspect the apple before you eat it, to see if it’s good, ok, or rotten to the core.

I’d say don’t dismiss him outright because he’s a cop, but try to feel him out, see what his attitude and philosophy is like, don’t grill him on it, but take note of how he reacts when different subjects are brought up, and if you find something problematic with what he says, try to explain how your views are different in a non-confrontational way, don’t make it a fight or an argument or a debate, just try to explain your thoughts and feelings and try to understand why he thinks the way he does as well. With the right people around him, it’s possible that you could help make him or keep him a good cop when otherwise he might go bad, it’s up to you if you want to take on that task.

I feel like that leaves a little weird wiggle room though.

Let’s say you’re born in a Spanish speaking country, maybe Mexico, for the first few years of life you grow up surrounded by Spanish speakers, your first words are in Spanish, you only know Spanish, everyone you know only speaks Spanish.

Then when you’re about 3 years old, before you’re even forming really solid, permanent memories, you go to live in the US, you’re surrounded by English speakers, almost everyone around you stops speaking Spanish regularly and switches to English, your English vocabulary quickly catches up to or maybe even surpasses your Spanish ability. Your first real memories are of people speaking English, and you spend the rest of your life primarily speaking English. You still speak Spanish though, you keep up with your education in that language and can speak both fluently.

I think there’s a valid argument that both could be considered your native language, even if Spanish was your first language, you’ve still grown up speaking both.

*Arlo

But yeah, the movie was pretty bad. It’s based somewhat on real events but with a lot of made up shit thrown in that Arlo himself didn’t like. The real-life Alice actually just died a few weeks ago.

It depends, some things, like freeze dried fruit may not necessarily need to be rehydrated.

For things that need to be rehydrated, you may not need as much water to rehydrate it to be edible as would be in the regular ingredients. Hypothetically if you were to make soup from scratch, you’d lose some of the water to evaporation as you cook it. If you were to premake and dehydrate soup, it wouldn’t need to be cooked as long or to as high of a temperature - everything is already cooked you just need to rehydrate it and warm it up to your liking, no need to get it up to a boil and simmer it for however many minutes or hours so less is lost to evaporation.

And depending on the area you’re backpacking in, you’re probably going to be refilling you water from streams and such several times along the way so you can plan around that. In the areas I normally backpack, you’re probably going to cross over or hike along a few different streams every day, running out of water isn’t a major concern.

One time in particular comes to mind, where I did have to plan around having enough water to cook my meal. Normally we plan on our lunch being cold- jerky, trail mix, etc. and we do a freeze dried meal or something similar for dinner that requires water. Around lunch time we were by a stream, and looking at our map the area we were planning to camp for the night wouldn’t be near a water source (pretty much at the very top of a mountain) so we decided we’d have our hot meal for lunch so we could refill our water to make sure we’d have enough to last us until we were able to refill later the next day.

It kind of sucked though, as we were getting closer to our campsite, the temperature started dropping, and a thick fog rolled in. By the time we made camp, we were all kind of cold, everything was damp, and we were generally pretty miserable, and we didn’t even have a hot meal to look forward to. So we pretty much just scarfed down whatever jerky or crackers or whatever we had and went right to bed. The next day though, everything had cleared up, and when we made our way to the summit to enjoy the view. We looked down into the valley below us and we saw a cloud, and we realized that the fog from the night before wasn’t just fog, it was a cloud passing over the mountain, and we hiked through it, so that was pretty cool.

But the next time you go mattress shopping and the salesperson is telling you “it’s like sleeping on a cloud” run away, clouds suck and don’t make for good sleep.

Probably to account for people who won’t store it properly, degradation of the packaging material, etc.

For example, if you store your blister pack of KI on a sunny shelf in your bathroom, UV rays eventually weaken the plastic packaging, cracks develop in the plastic letting in water vapor from your shower, and a stray mold space makes its way in as well and eventually you end up with mold growing on your pills. The KI itself may still be perfectly fine and able to do its job, but that mold might make you sick.

FYI, duck hunt was an NES game, which was an 8 bit console, the SNES was Nintendo’s 16 bit generation

Like others are saying, crypto laws are a bit murky

In general though, it’s pretty well in agreement that you’re supposed to pay capital gains tax when you sell, I imagine that’s something they may try to do away with.

I bought a tiny amount of Bitcoin probably a decade ago, and have basically been sitting on it ever since. It’s of course grown in value significantly since then (though we’re still only talking enough for maybe a couple nice dinners or a modest vacation, not life-changing wealth)

Capital gains tax takes a pretty good chunk out of what I’d earn from it, don’t get me wrong, I’d still make money off of it no matter where I tried to cash out, but currently it’s hovering right around the point where I’m not sure if it’s worth the hassle of having one more thing to keep track of and figure out on my taxes for a relatively small payoff.

If they did away with the capital gains tax on crypto, I’d probably cash out right now (and never look back, I don’t feel I need to repeat this experiment)

I’m not saying that they should do away with capital gains on crypto, just kind of pointing out one way they could get it and how it might affect me personally.

I work in 911 dispatch

The location we get from your phone isn’t exactly a magic “here’s exactly where this person is” button.

For the most part, we rely on triangulation from the cell towers, which means the quality of that location is highly dependent on how many towers are around, how close you are to them, signal strength, the surrounding geography, whether you’re inside a building, in a basement, outside, etc. and the location isn’t constantly updating.

I work in an area with pretty solid service, and at my cunter our policy is that if our ping is accurate to within about 300 meters we can use that if we can’t get any other location information from the caller, and most of the time we’re well within that, but not always. And a 300 meter radius is still a pretty big area, if that drops within a crowded downtown area, or if they’re in a high rise apartment or office building, that could be pretty much useless. And it takes us about 20 seconds to refresh the location and the new location may not be accurate when it does come in, so they’re in a moving vehicle they might well be a half mile away from where they were by the time the next ping comes in. And once you hang up we stop getting that location info and if we want to ping your phone again it’s a bit of a process that requires our officers or our dispatch supervisor calling the phone company, faxing or emailing them paperwork, etc. so not something we can just do totally on the fly, and for whatever reason the pings we get when we do that never seem to be very accurate, and it takes some time and we only get one ping at a time, and if we’re lucky we get one maybe every 10 minutes. We can also only request those pings when we have reason to believe that someone is in danger.

I suspect that there’s a whole mess of local/state/federal laws and regulations, and department/agency/corporate policies that come into play with all of this with a million different exceptions, but overall that’s going to be broadly true in most places around the IS at least.

We are starting to get more gps-based cellular location, this kind of depends on your phone’s capabilities and settings, what network you’re on, and your local 911 center’s capabilities. We’re generally a bit ahead of the curve on our technology and capabilities, so that’s not something everywhere can do yet. We’ve actually had it for a while but the implementation was pretty janky and not very useful, but we got some upgrades within the last year or so. It’s usually, but not always, more accurate than triangulation, the location updates faster, and we do continue to get location updates after you hang up but only for about a minute or so.

Generally speaking, we also have no quick way of knowing who’s calling from a cell phone. Your name won’t usually come up on our caller ID, just your carrier. If you have your emergency info filled out on your smartphone and made it available we can access that, but frankly most people haven’t. If you’ve called before and given your name, we can search for prior calls (in our jurisdiction) from your phone number. Otherwise we can try our luck with some free phone number lookup websites, or try to get the subscriber information from your provider, and if you’re on some kind of a family plan that may mean we’d get maybe your parents information from the phone company not yours, and some prepaid plans don’t really seem to have much if any information on their subscribers on file so it ends up being a dead end.

And that’s pretty much the extent of what we can do from 911. There may be other resources cops can use or other options for exceptional circumstances, but that’s outside the scope of 911 tracking your phone.

Also if you call a non-emergency line, even if it’s one that redirects into a 911 center (we answer a lot of the departments when they’re out of the office, some of them just always come into us, and even if you reach someone at the station there’s a good chance they’ll transfer you to our central dispatch) we won’t get any location info and we need to go through the phone company to get a ping.

And calls from TextNow numbers and other similar apps can be really hard to track down.