I am not deaf, but this is triggering a pet peeve.

It seems a pretty common occurrence that I will be walking into a restaurant, bar, airport, doctor's office, or whatever, and there will be a TV on a news channel with the sound muted or very low. For F's sake, put the captioning on! What's wrong with you?!?

literally good for you

I actually asked my family doctor at one point about the health effects of masturbation. She said that as a guy, if you are not otherwise sexually active, it's good for the prostate to keep the plumbing working down there.

I suppose it is a kind of survival training? One of my bandmates who's served came up after. "So here's the deal. You watch what everyone else is eating. If they're meticulously avoiding the peach cobbler or whatever it is, you F'ing stay away from that S if you know what's good for you!"

That's why we need passive daytime radiative cooling. In theory, it could completely eliminate the urban heat island, but it still seems to be mostly at the pilot project stage so far. I did read somewhere that you can DIY with some packaging tape (which somehow has the right properties?) over a reflective backing. Maybe I'll experiment a bit this summer.

The article seems focused on Arizona Mormons, and that's a swing state.

True story. I was looking for an answer to an obscure problem and found it in a 10-year-old stackoverflow post. Then I looked more closely at the author…

Hey! Me from 10 years ago, stop being such a smart ass! It's obnoxious.

Lemmy, in its current state, reminds me of a university online forum. It has a university-ish population of active users who seem reasonably well-educated, and you run into people with disproportionately varied interests and passions compared to the general population.

I joined last summer when I became annoyed by the reddit shenanigans and have never looked back. For me, at least, lemmy already has the critical mass needed to occupy my attention. After the initial reddit wave, the active user count dropped steadily from around 70k to 40k, but seems to be slowly rebounding now as it has climbed back to 50k or so recently.

I think one thing of note is that when people flood into the fediverse for whatever reason, there is a tendency for them to congregate at whatever is perceived as the most central instances. This can be devastating if the servers in question are not up to the task of a sudden influx. I am guilty of this myself. I initially opened an account at kbin.social which was swamped. As I learned how the fediverse works, I eventually settled on lemmy.ca, which is a middling size instance that seems quite stable.

I guess my worry, then, is if lemmy goes viral at some point, it may not be up to the task of dealing with all the people flooding in? Viral trends have an exponential growth pattern, so it only takes a few doublings before you're looking at a million users and beyond. At the moment, scalability worries me more than social concerns in terms of the future of lemmy. But I suppose that may, to some extent, be because it's much harder to predict how the latter will play out with a much larger network, so I am giving it the benefit of the doubt?

When anti-lock braking systems (ABS) were first introduced in premium cars, accidents increased initially for that sector owing to driver over-confidence. The same effect is again being seen with modern driving assist systems. Since large vehicles are especially safe for their occupants at low speeds, this has a pernicious effect on driver attention, consequently increasing casualty figures for other road users. Every year there are fewer victims of car accidents – but not among pedestrians, cyclists and other light vehicle users.

My driving instructor years ago: "The plain fact of the matter is if you replaced airbags with spring-loaded spikes that shoot out of the steering column, the streets would be far safer."

I was astonished by the Great Green Wall Initiative in Africa. The plan is to create a continent-spanning wall of vegetation to prevent the Sahara Desert from expanding southward. It is nothing if not ambitious.

Apparently, the first phase is to create huge number of these tiny plots shaped in a special way to prevent rainwater from running off and planting drought-hardy native species in them, some of which can be harvested as a food source. Eventually, once the soil has recovered sufficiently, they can plant trees.

The initiative is high-tech in the sense of applying state-of-the-art knowledge on land management but low-tech in the sense that it will involve a whole lot of manual labour with simple implements.

But the scope of it is insane with 22 countries having signed on. It gives me hope that collective action in the face of climate change is possible anywhere in the world.

In an email to Global News on Sunday, Alberta’s health minister said that if the federal government pursues a national pharmacare program, Alberta intends to opt out, and instead intends to obtain a full per capita share of the funding.

So they can just pocket the money like that with no strings attached? wth

I can only think of 2 downsides to our bidet:

• Ours attaches to a regular toilet, and it does make it harder to clean particularly around the jet mechanism. Someone needs to invent a bidet for cleaning bidets.
• Going anyplace without one now makes me hate life.

I think it depends a lot on the individual cat? In my experience, their attitudes towards humans can vary quite considerably.

Some are more aloof and independent and see their human as a source of food like you say.

But then I think about our current cat. He’s a rescue who’s clearly been through a lot on the streets. When I come home, he just wants to climb onto me and head butt and do that slow blink thing. He wants this more than food, even, which is a first for me.

When we were adopting him, we fostered first for a couple of weeks before he had to go in for a surgery, and in the week or so when e was boarded, the staff said he was wailing every night wanting to go home. So he had clearly developed an attachment to us that transcended simply wanting any human who provides food and shelter.