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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Perhaps. But you realize it now, and you also have the opportunity to take things in a different direction if you want.

    Communication is important. Admitting when you did something that you think is wrong is good, we all make mistakes. Tell her that you’re sorry and why, and let it be. Either she will forgive you and you guys can move forward if it works, or she won’t want anything to do with you, and both are fine. Emotions are complicated.




  • So I will preface my comment with the fact that I hate Internet ads and do everything within my power to block and/or avoid them. Aside from being annoying they’re a blatant security and malware risk, and I avoid them for that reason alone.

    That being said, hosting websites gets pretty expensive pretty fast when lots of people come to your site, especially with the advent of much higher bandwidth media that goes along with better quality images and video.

    In my opinion the fact that the majority of people just have an expectation that everything online should be free is THE problem. I was there when the Internet was free and open and without ads. That was the culture, and the root of the issue we have today is that that culture is the foundation of the general expectation that it should continue to be so.

    But that’s not sustainable with the costs involved in hosting today. Shit costs money yo, why should other people bear that so you can search for recipes for free without it being annoying for you?

    The fact that nobody is willing to pay for content via subscriptions or paid apps is literally why the ad-based model is the overwhelming majority of the Internet, and apps, and why data collection/sales is so rampant.

    Web development and running a webpage is not easy. Even for those that are skilled enough that it’s easy for them, it takes a ton of time. Usually multiple people’s time for any site with enough visitors to make it a good site. App development is hard and takes a skill set that requires a lot of training or time investment to learn. Why should all that go for free for you?

    Until people are willing to pay for content they find valuable the Internet will be a hell hole ridden with ads. YouTube ads are awful, but do you have any idea how much it costs to run YouTube? You think someone should just absorb that out of the goodness of their hearts? Ridiculous.

    The goal of the Internet is still to share information and communicate, but all the hardware and bandwidth and time costs real dollars, and the only way for most sites to recoup that is via ads because people just won’t pay anything if given an option, they’ll just go to another site that has free content, because there’s SO MUCH stuff that you can generally find what you want, for free with ads, somewhere else.

    There’s only two possible solutions that I see:

    1. everyone starts being willing to pay for content they find valuable. I don’t see this happening. There’s too many people that share your opinion without taking into account what it costs to actually run a modern website.

    2. some complicated type of system that directly pays websites for use, based off of usage from people. I think this is almost too complicated to implement that it’s likely impossible with today’s Internet. If we want to also maintain privacy/anonymity when surfing I can’t see how this can ever work - so unless we have some future system where people are uniquely identifiable on the Internet, and then some additional system that somehow “fairly” compensates websites for traffic from users, this won’t happen. It would need to involve ISPs, their customers, and web site owners in some coordinated payment system to work.

    Not to sound too preachy but to me your comment comes off as super entitled.

    I pay for apps that I think are valuable, even ones with no cost like Signal. Because I value what they provide. I subscribe to sites that I find valuable enough to do so when it’s an option. I abhor data collection and ads and I fight them without prejudice. But even I don’t think I pay enough directly to offset how much I cost providers, I’m sure I don’t, but that’s mostly laziness because it’s a pain to pay every site directly so I donate to the ones I really appreciate and use heavily. If I could pay my ISP for my link and then have a direct credit system that throws dollars and cents directly into website coffers as I use them, that would be great - but I don’t want to give up my privacy either, so… Yeah.

    Long story short, ad-based content is going nowhere until there’s a fundamental shift in either people or how the Internet operates.


  • I left home 15 years ago for work. In that time I’ve traveled to dozens of countries and lived in several places in the USA, but no place has the diverse, welcoming people as home, and the natural beauty on display.

    This week, work took me home. I’ve gotten to work with organizations that I was a part of as a child, eat at restaurants that I loved and worked at, and visit old haunts. Today I drove by the house I grew up in and parked outside to take a selfie to send my mom, and a lady stepped out, and I (awkwardly) approached her and had a lovely conversation about the house. They’ve fixed it up so nicely, and we laughed about how weird it was (originally built as a single story partially underground, and then had a second story built on top and turned into a duplex, and then once again lived in as a single family home).

    I’m home. And I can’t wait to come back when I quit this job, and bring my family here and move back into the same neighborhood I grew up in, and live in joy until I die.





  • Maintaining geosynchronous orbit does require maintenance because there’s still a non-trivial amount of air resistance that will slowly decrease speed and de-orbit the satellite.

    With a bit more detail: there is a specific altitude and speed that an object must maintain in order to stay in orbit above a fixed point above the earth. Earth’s mass, and thus its gravitational pull, dictate this speed and altitude through physics. There are other speeds and attitudes that can achieve the same effect (geosynchronous orbit) but they require propulsion to maintain. With the Earth, that “sweet spot” where you can achieve the correct orbital velocity to keep a geosynchronous orbit is still within the atmosphere, albeit very thin, so friction with the air slowly makes satellites lose speed. An orbit is based on speed (speed up and you get farther away from the planet, slow down and you draw closer to the planet) so as the satellites slow down they have to periodically “boost up” or eventually their orbit will decay and they’ll re-enter and burn up.

    Self destruct? Not a good idea. Controlled re-entry is essentially self destruct.

    More space junk from just a random explosion is really bad. Space junk is really bad. If it gets bad enough it can potentially have a cascading effect where space junk collides with other stuff and causes more space junk and explosions, starting a chain reaction that creates a scatter field of junk that traps us on the planet. The concept is known as Kessler Syndrome.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome



  • That’s a pretty common perspective for anyone that’s never lived a life where you must hunt in order to put food on your family’s table, or you need to shoot coyotes or other pests that attach your livestock or crops that threaten your farm-to-table, or lived in an area where there’s literally no police for an hour or more and it’s just you if anyone comes knocking.

    Poor rural folks don’t have a huge representation on Lemmy but there are plenty that live this way in the USA.

    You don’t see it in the bigger cities and suburbs, rightfully so.

    I don’t even live in a small town and there’s plenty of people I work with that drive in ~45 minutes and have livestock that have to worry about coyotes and other wild dogs attacking their livestock.

    Guns are a tool. If you can’t imagine what they’re a tool for all it means is you lack perspective to see how - no judgment, just stating the fact. I mention all this because this misunderstanding is a huge reason for the divide between pro/anti gun crowds, and closing the gap can help set us up for better discussions about where we want to go in terms of gun legislation (assuming you’re in the USA - if not then all applies in general, not to you specifically)



  • Hand guns are so, so much more common in crime, rifles are barely a blip on the map. Also, handguns have almost no use other than killing humans/sport. (You can argue that they can offer some sort of protection from wild animals when you’re hiking, by scaring them away with noise… I can’t really think of much else)

    Semi automatic rifles cover the gamut of utility. They’re not JUST for killing people and/or sport. Every reason you could legitimately need a gun for, the broad category “semi auto rifle” covers, so banning them has a disproportionate impact to people who use them legally and as tools vs banning handguns.

    If people seriously want to make a dent in gun crime/accidental deaths/suicide we need to look at handguns, but they’re not scary looking enough so there’s no clout. Instead we get stupid laws that try to ban scary looking black guns or limit magazine sizes. Pisses off gun owners that know it’s useless and doesn’t actually get at anything that can make a difference. It’s all theater.


  • It really doesn’t. AR-15s are everything you said, but just because you take this one specific model rifle it off the market doesn’t mean there aren’t thousands of lightweight semi automatic rifles that are cheap and just as capable to buy instead. They might not be the gun owner’s version of LEGO, but they’re just as available and just as lethal.

    If someone wants to be a mass shooter they have unlimited options in the USA. AR-15s are just so common you see them more. Starting this decade about 1/4 of the firearms produced in the USA are AR-15s.

    If 1/4 the cars sold in the USA were Corollas because they’re cheap and easy to drive, would banning Corollas in Maryland reduce car wrecks? No, people would just drive Camrys or Civics or whatever and still drive like idiots.



  • It does not lower your credit score to pay debt off early, where did you get that idea from?

    Over time if you show that you aren’t delinquent on payments your score goes up. That’s the vast majority of how a FICO score is calculated.

    Other things that impact your credit score are the LENGTH of time you have established credit (aka don’t close your oldest credit card for most people, even if it sits unused), the total amount of available unused credit compared to your income (ie if you have a ton of high credit availability cards sitting there - you could run up hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and disappear to a non extradition country being a risk), and lastly your overall utilization of your available credit (ie you want to be using 10-20% of both your available credit both on individual cards (“revolving credit”) and your overall total revolving credit across all your cards together).

    The last one is a bit harder to explain, so here’s an example:

    -you have three lines of revolving credit (credit cards)

    -one card has a 1000 limit, one has a 5000 limit, and one has a 10,000 limit

    -ideally you’re posting a balance of 200, 1000, and 1500. That’s between 10-20% on each card, and it’s between 10-20% of all cards in total.

    Other things that impact your score (negatively) are bankruptcies, late bill payments, things in collections, and having a high debt to income ratio.

    At no point will you be penalized for paying debt off early. The only thing that can possibly affect your score in that sense is if you ONLY have a loan, no revolving credit, and you pay it off - now you have no credit utilization at all, which potentially could ding you a bit, but not much. That’s also not very common - most people have several credit cards and few loans, if any.


  • That same target audience would be the least equipped to install a new drive or handle any problems that do come up. How many John Q public people have even opened up their laptop to dust it out?

    Problems might be rare, but if I am selling a product (in this case new storage with Linux on it) I need to be able to charge enough to cover all my overhead. Every time I sell it and it doesn’t work out of the box that’s time spent helping the customer, more shipping/return costs, or both. Markup has to cover all that, and I’d guess that it’s not viable as a business model to charge a high enough price to deal with all the random static from computer illiterate people.

    I get what you’re saying but I just don’t see it being a viable business strategy to sell this product to that target audience.

    Anyone who knows enough to seek out and purchase a Linux OS drive can just download and install it themselves.



  • I’m not an expert but I have five orchids in the house and they’re all doing really well, so I just be doing something right - one of them was in worse shape than yours when I got it six months ago, and it’s about to bloom for the first time very soon :D

    All that to say, caveat this advice with the fact that the watering method/frequency might not be 100% optimal. All the products I use are listed at the end of this post.

    All my orchids are potted in orchid bark, with the slitted plastic orchid pots inside of beauty pots.

    I use a water bottle and thoroughly spray every orchid once a day, generally in the mornings. I use enough water to start saturating the roots (you can tell when they start to change color from white ish to a darker color). I also make sure to get the potting medium nice and wet, but not so saturated that the pot drains freely, and I want it to be dry 24 hours later so it doesn’t mold. It’s usually about 25-30 pumps per orchid. I have tried ice cubes in the past but I really don’t like that method - very difficult to get water on all the roots.

    Once weekly I do the same application method but I use a probiotic&fertilizer spray that I mix instead. I follow the quantum orchid probiotic directions to mix one gallon of liquid, and add about 1/4 teaspoon of better-gro orchid better-bloom (instead of the normal mix ratio that’s 1 teaspoon per gallon, because I apply it 4x a month instead of 1x a month as the fertilizer directions state. You can use probiotic daily if you want and it won’t hurt the orchids but you can definitely over-fertilize).

    Trim the dead/dying parts, get it into some good fresh potting medium, and water regularly. Good chance it’ll come back, but it’ll look dormant for a while. If you see new leaves start to grow you’re in business! Good luck.

    Potting medium: https://www.ebstone.org/product/orchid-bark-fine-med/ Pots (something like this): https://www.repotme.com/collections/slotted-orchid-pot Spray bottles: https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B096LN2NBH Probiotic: https://www.repotme.com/products/quantum-orchid Fertilizer: https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B004Z8OL12