Small addendum, there’s 94 commercial reactors that are generating power for the grid

But there’s a few dozen more active nuclear reactors that exist for things like training and research.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_reactors#United_States

My mom would not be able to wear a hat during the summer obviously heat would stay in and she would get too hot.

I think you’re starting from a faulty assumption here.

In general, it’s often wise to wear a hat in the summer and can help you feel cooler providing a little bit of portable shade, and helps keep the sun out of your eyes and off your face/neck/ears/shoulders.

It’s just about finding the right hat, something lightweight, breathable, and preferably lighter in color (to reflect the sun’s rays instead of absorbing them) and maybe with a wider brim.

Straw hats are a fairly traditional option, something like a panama hat (actually made from palms, also made in Ecuador and not panama BTW) is a classic option, but this is 2024 so there’s lots of moisture wicking synthetic material options out there as well. For other natural materials, linen is also a good choice, certain types and weaves of cotton can be pretty light and breathable, and honestly even some lighter weight wool hats aren’t too bad.

Take a look at people who work or spend a lot of time outdoors in warmer climates, you’ll see a lot of people wearing hats or cultures where people traditionally wore a lot of hats even if they’ve fallen out of style. Baseball caps, visors, cowboy hats, fedoras, pith helmets, beater hats, various types of headscarves, big floppy sun hats, bucket hats, asian conical hats, sombreros, etc.

I wear hats pretty much year-round. The hats I like in the summer are different from my winter hats, but it’s pretty rare that I go out without some kind of hat, and when I forget to grab one on my way out the door, I feel less comfortable for it.

I’m just curious what your interpretation of yellow laces is. I’m not a punk but am vaguely aware of lace codes, and every list I see online has yellow as anti-racist, but I know it varied a bit from place to place.

The house behind my parents has had a string of terrible tenants. Loud assholes, people who let their dogs run loose, people with unruly kids, etc.

Otherwise a pretty decent neighborhood.

There was a younger dude living there for a while, kept kind of weird hours, but my parents never thought much of that, figured he was going to school, working night shift somewhere, etc. Mostly kept to himself, never bothered my parents in any way, always dressed professionally, etc.

He was probably the best neighbor my parents ever had in that house.

Then one day cops raided the place, turns out he’d been dealing a lot of drugs out of there and had a punch bowl full of cocaine sitting out on the kitchen counter.

Some of the other neighbors apparently had noticed some pretty sketchy characters coming and going from the house, they must have entered from the front door though, because my parents never really noticed anyone.

My parents would still take the drug dealer over pretty much anyone else that’s lived there.

Couldn’t tell you how many I had as a little kid, but I’ve probably gone through about 2-3 a year since I was about 16

One time I treated myself to a pair of Oakley’s i found an an REI garage sale, thinking maybe more expensive sunglasses would hold up better or I’d keep better track of them.

They got dropped and stepped on within about a week

That is usually what I go with, because I normally only keep one bottle of wood glue around and it covers pretty much any use case I could ever have for wood glue being waterproof, safe for indirect food contact, etc.

But honestly, for general gluing furniture together and such, even the cheapest no-name brands of wood glue have always done just fine. Pretty much any wood glue out there is stronger than any wood you’re likely getting the be gluing (inb4 some carpentry nerd chimes in with some rare wood that only grows in New Zealand or something that is stronger than steel or something)

For some reason I have a thought in my head that I don’t like Elmer’s wood glue. I don’t know why, I don’t remember it ever letting me down.

Wood glue, no particular brand recommendations, is one of the pew products I trust to do exactly what it claims to - glue wood.

We have 2 major incidents

First one:

Dude A lends Dude B some money, relatively small amount, pretty sure it was less than $50. Dude B decides he’s not going to pay it back, so like mature, reasonable teenagers they decide they’re going to go to the park after school to fight about it.

Dude A is not a big guy, he asks Dude C who is a giant of a human being to come along just to make sure he doesn’t get killed, sort of a referee to pull dude B off of him if things get out of hand, not expecting him to step in or lend a hand or anything.

Dude B apparently has a different idea about how this is going to go down, and has a few friends come along with him with screwdrivers and baseball bats and other such improvised weapons.

Dude C sees this as they’re about to walk off the school property to fight, and does his job, takes these weapons, throws them in his bag, throws his jacket over the protruding bat, and they’re about to continue on their way.

The school, however, got word of this fight about to go down, and a bunch of cops show up.

Dude A lucks the fuck out and a passing senior he kind of knew pulls him into her car and assures the police that he wasn’t involved in this clusterfuck. None of the other kids give him up and he gets off scott-free and cops never figured out who the last unnamed party to this was.

The rest of them are all taken in, questioned, and receive their various punishments. Dude C gets the worst of it since he’s the guy who’s now holding all the weapons. He goes and spends a year or so at an alternative school, and is allowed to come back partially on the condition that he joins the football team. Our senior year we proceeded to win 0 football games, so fat lot of good having a giant on the team did.

Apparently dude C had misled his friends about how much money this was over, when informed by the cops that it was over like $40 he flew into a small rage, threw some things around, then calmly sat down and said “I have been misinformed”

Rumors of course start swirling and the truth gets very lost to the point I heard a version of the story where Dude C attacked the cops with a samurai sword and tried to flee on a motorcycle.

I’m pretty confident that this is a pretty accurate version of events though, a couple of the involved parties have all told me pretty much the exact same story, and it’s relatively unspectacular compared to some of the embellished versions I’ve heard. It’s also pretty much in line with what I know of their personalities.

For the most part, these kids weren’t dangerous, I don’t think any of them really had any other significant problems for the rest of their school career, and I’d describe most of them as nerds and generally decent people, some of them have some mental/emotional baggage, and couple that with some hormones and being stupid teenagers the stars just kind of aligned in the wrong way, and for the most part none of them held any significant grudges against each other and could probably have been considered friends to some extent afterwards.

Second incident:

I’m home sick one day, my mom worked at a school in our district, my sister was in school this day.

The phone rings, it’s an automated message from the district. Something about the district being made aware of a threat to the high school, but that everything is under control, there’s no danger, etc. not a lot of details.

Call my mom, she doesn’t have much more info than I do, she’s, not particularly worried, but of course a lot of parents panic and go to pick up their kids. She texts my sister to see if she wants to be picked up, she declines, she’s having a good time, it’s her and like 3 other people left in her class, they’re chilling and watching movies and such, there’s a news crew and some cop cars outside of the school.

Having nothing better to do, I’m going through all the news I can to figure out what’s up.

Eventually, it took a few days for all of the details to emerge, what we managed to piece together was

There was a kid who was planning a shooting, tried to recruit another kid who turned him in. Cops raided his house, found a bunch of airsoft guns, flea market swords, a half-built pipe bomb, and one gun (that his parents bought him) with no ammo.

This kid had been pulled out of school and was being homeschooled because of bullying. I didn’t know him, he was a few years younger than me, but from what I understand from people who knew him he was mostly bullied because he was an unlikeable racist asshole. The short bit of attention the media gave it tried to make it out like he was bullied for being fat (and let’s make no mistake, this dude was fat he may have been almost as wide as he was tall) but from the stories I’ve heard of him from before this happened, if any kid ever deserved bullying it was him for being such a major asshole.

I wouldn’t really mention his fatness, except that at some point during the trial and such, his mom (herself a very large lady) got in trouble for trying to smuggle him food, which was just icing on the proverbial cake.

The kid who turned him then went and broke into his house a little while later and tried to steal his Xbox or something.

Like many people, I came here about a year ago as part of the reddit exodus.

I didn’t, but I gave some serious thought to creating a couple of the niche communities I enjoyed on Reddit that didn’t have an equivalent here.

I don’t have any desire at all to be in charge of, run, or moderate a community. My general plan was to just kind of sit on it until someone who did have that interest and didn’t seem like an asshole would come along and then foist it off onto them.

The reasoning I had was basically to make sure that some power-tripping asshole wouldn’t come along and scoop up those communities and turn them shitty, and I guess also give my fellow migrants a place to pick up where we left off on Reddit.

I didn’t because it would mean that I’d be stuck moderating those communities until someone else came along, and I had no interest in doing that, I also wasn’t totally sure if I was gonna stay with Lemmy long-term, and if those communities didn’t pick up steam and I left, that’d be kind of a dick move if anyone came along later and actually wanted those communities and they’d have to jump through hoops with the admins to get control of them.

I suspect a lot of those empty communities were started by similarly minded folks who ended up not sticking it out, or didn’t have what it took to build them into active communities.

Yeah, listening is totally allowed, just don’t transmit without a license. Depending on the radio there’s often a way to lock out the PTT button so you don’t accidentally key up.

Programming the radio can sometimes be a bit of a pain in the ass, CHIRP is a free program that’s often recommended for baofengs, you’ll also need to figure out what repeaters are in your area so you know what frequencies to listen to

Laws and regulations will vary a bit depending on what country you live in, but assuming you’re in the US the process is pretty simple but involves some studying

Pass the test, buy a radio, start talking.

There’s 3 classes of license- technician, general, and extra that give you permission to use different bands and modes, extra of course gives you the most options, technician the fewest. If you pass your technician exam you can usually go ahead and take your general exam right then and there, and if you pass that you can go ahead and get extra all in the same sitting.

Finding somewhere to take the test is the tricky part, but if you look up amateur radio clubs in your area they probably have it published somewhere and I think the ARRL website has a list of places/clubs that do it and when. I think some of them have started offering an online test since covid but I don’t really know how that works.

There’s a license/test fee, don’t remember what that is off the top of my head, I want to say around $40 but don’t quote me.

As far as studying, there’s a lot of resources out there, apps, reference books, the FCC publishes the question pool they use for the test, etc.

As far as radios, you can get a baofeng handheld for like $20 on Amazon, a lot of hams give them shit but they probably also have one or two kicking around because they’re so cheap. They don’t have a lot of bells and whistles but they’re probably the cheapest way to just start talking to other hams.

Radios get expensive quick, that’s one of the reasons I haven’t gotten too into it, I have better things to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on, but you can find some good deals on used equipment, ebay, flea markets, etc.

Start with a baofeng, talk to other hams, maybe go to club meetings or events, figure out what else you want to do and go from there.

Also ham is not an acronym, no need to capitalize, I believe the consensus is that it originated because amateur radio operators were more ham-fisted in their radio usage than professional radio operators so they started calling them hams.

I don’t know the specifics of commercial broadcast radio, but I know with ham radio hams are required to identify every 10 minutes while they’re transmitting including automated repeaters that will usually do it in Morse code

If you listen to some ham radio communications (sometimes it’s interesting, but usually it’s just old guys talking about antennas) every 10 minutes the repeater will beep out a bunch of Morse code and everyone rattles off their call signs

For commercial radio I think it’s every hour so at least that often they’ll have to cut to “you’re listening to WXYZ 99.9 FM blah blah blah” which also provides a good segue to a commercial break.

I’m sure most of them probably just schedule that at the top of the hour to make it easy for themselves

They have a lot more information about what OP thinks and has told them about the situation, which may or may not accurately reflect the reality (I’m not trying to call OP a liar or anything, it’s the old thing about there being 3 sides to every story- yours, theirs, and the truth.)

They also probably don’t know much more about the law and how it pertains to OP’s situation than you or I do. I wouldn’t expect a therapist to be any more knowledgeable about employment laws than I would expect a lawyer to be knowledgeable about psychology, or that I would expect either of them to be about wastewater treatment, it’s not their field.

There’s also the issue of why the therapist thinks op should pursue it.

Do they think it’s because OP is likely to win their case? Again, I don’t think they’re necessarily in a great position or qualified to say one way or the other. OP needs to consult with a lawyer to know if it makes sense for them from a legal/financial perspective to try to pursue this.

Do they think it would be good for OP to have this opportunity to confront their former employer, to try to hold them accountable, get justice, etc. because they think it might bring OP some sort of closure/catharsis? That could certainly be a valid reason, but at the end of the day, it kind of falls on OP to make that judgement call, would it be worth the time, energy, and money to go to court over this, or is it something they can just move on from? And in case they don’t win, what then? Would just having the opportunity be enough for OP whether or not they win, or would a loss make OP feel even worse, leave them right back at square one or worse, and still needing to find a way to deal with it?

Are they genuinely suggesting OP pursue it, or are they saying it to spur OP to think about these kinds of things themselves and make a decision-any decision, because it needs to happen now, 3 months isn’t much time left.

For starters, hermaphrodite isn’t really a term that’s used anymore.

With “true” hermaphroditism, which is now know as ovotesticular syndrome, a person is born with both testiclular and ovarian tissue in some configuration- organs containing a mix of both tissue, two complete sets of ovaries and testicles, one of each, etc. This is an incredibly rare condition, with only around 500 recorded cases ever.

There’s also what used to be called “pseudohermaphrodism” and both, as well as several other conditions would now fall under the umbrella of terms like “intersex” or “DSD” (Disorders of Sex Development" which is a very broad and much more common category that covers a range of different conditions with different causes and presentations that mean that in some way their physical attributes don’t align neatly with their biological sex. By some estimates, up to 1.7% of people could be considered intersex by some definition.

This wikipedia article has a list of a few dozen different conditions that could be considered intersex in the prevalence section.

There’s also conditions that most wouldn’t consider rise to the level of being intersex, but result in abnormal hormone levels and secondary sex characteristics (man-boobs, women growing facial hair, etc.)

Transgender is when a person does not identify with the gender they are assigned at birth. They may be intersex in some way, or they may have totally normal sexual development, but at birth based on the way their genitals looked, whether they were normal or abnormal, their parents essentially decided “you are a boy” or “you are a girl” and raised them in accordance with that, but at some point in their life they realized that they don’t feel like that gender and identity as the other (or neither, or both in the case of non-binary gender identities)

There’s one organization that claims to have tested her and found that she has XY chromosomes. That organization has a bit of a shifty record though and while it’s certainly a possibility, I don’t trust them enough to consider it settled.

But even if she does have a y chromosome, there’s a handful of conditions that a genotypically male could be in all obvious ways phenotypically female, and you would never know unless you did genetic testing or did some medical imaging on their urogenital systems that wouldn’t give them any particular competitive edge. If they have, for example, someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome would have XY chromosomes, but in all ways appear female, and their body is essentially immune to testosterone so they wouldn’t have any competitive edge.

She’s competing at some of the highest levels of female boxing, but she is competing she’s not absolutely dominating the sport, she’s lost matches, she’s not a shoe-in for the gold medal.

We have no reason to think she’s trans, she’s never expressed anything to that effect, though even if she did, her options to express that, let alone seek gender affirming treatment, would likely be limited since Algeria isn’t exactly the most LGBTQ friendly country (putting it mildly)

She may or may not be intersex in some fashion, like I said I don’t exactly trust the one source that claims to have tested her. The possibility exists, but I’m not convinced until/unless those results are corroborated by a more trustworthy organization. And if she does turn out to be intersex, what of it? Which gender should someone compete as if they don’t neatly fit into the traditional gender binary? She identifies as female and she’s competitive in the female competition, why not allow her to compete there?

It sounds like maybe something that comes out of legal jargon to my ears (disclaimer, I am no lawyer or anything of the sort, most of my understanding of lawyer talk comes from tv shows and movies which are not usually the most accurate)

I could kind of imagine some sort of statement beginning with something like “Where the defendant, having been…” followed by some descriptions of circumstances and legal precedents and such.

as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)…

As I understand it (and to be fair, I’m no octopus scientist or human medical doctor) it’s pretty much just breathing that’s the issue. It doesn’t really directly cause any damage on its own (though the consequences of not breathing can and will of course cause quite a lot of damage in pretty short order)

The venom causes paralysis, basically by (someone correct me if I’m wrong) clogging up the receptors your body uses to send signals to your muscles. It will all get cleared up in about 24 hours or so though.

Problem is that you use some of those muscles to breathe. But if you make it to shore (you also need some of those muscles to swim) and if you get put on a ventilator right away (to do the breathing for you,) your prognosis is actually pretty good and there’s a nearly 100% survival rate (although that has to be two of the biggest “ifs” in all of medicine)

Another thing that comes to mind is your heart also uses muscles to do its thing, and I’m not totally clear on why that doesn’t seem to be a factor here, since paralyzing those muscles is basically just instant cardiac arrest. I did a bit of googling, but I’ll be honest I was in deep over my head in medical jargon and couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. I think my takeaway is that tetrodotoxincan affect the heart muscles, but I guess for whatever reason (dosage? Different kinds of muscles? The way your body processes the venom and moves it around your body? I really don’t know) it just kind of doesn’t, which I guess is lucky for us. I’m kind of hoping someone who speak doctor will maybe see this and give an ELI5 answer to that.

I suspect there’s probably a lot of minor consequences, like I bet your next trip to the bathroom once you recover in going to be some sort of event after your bowels stopped moving for 24 hours, but otherwise it seems like if you hang out on a ventilator for a day unable to move (which, to be fair, is probably one of the last ways I’d want to spend a day, but I guess it narrowly beats out a refrigerated cubby in the morgue) you’re pretty much in the clear to get on with your life.

The CB radio thing is going to be very location specific, I work in 911 dispatch, I think the state police around me theoretically monitor channel 9 on the highways, but in practice I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in that, they barely look at info we send them over the computer, CB also has a somewhat limited range, so you’re counting on them having an officer somewhat nearby or you being close to their station.

As for local police, around me I suspect a few of them probably still have a CB antenna on the roof of their station and maybe even an old radio stashed somewhere in a closet but not hooked up and not being monitored, and the officers definitely don’t have them in their vehicles.

I’m in a pretty dense suburban area outside of a major city, they might still get some use in more rural areas where cell signals aren’t as reliable, though you’re probably going to run into the same issues with range limitations, in normal ideal conditions, you might get a range of about 20 miles or so, depending on atmospheric conditions, geography, etc. you might get only a fraction of that.

EDIT: FWIW, I keep a CB in my car, decent amount of chatter still happens on 19 around me, and a few other channels, and somehow channel 9 seems to have become essentially the Spanish language channel.

I’ve dabbled in ham radio a bit, comms is something that at least some of the right are thinking about with these kinds of things, there’s more than a handful of right wing doomsday pepper lunatics in the ham radio circle, if you ever decide to listen in on CB radio chatter, there’s a good chance you’re gonna hear some lunatic ranting about conspiracy bullshit, I’m pretty sure I saw some pictures of guys at 1/6 with some baofengs (cheap Chinese ham radios, pretty much every ham has one or two kicking around)

I remember when I first started looking into ham radio, I was googling some stuff, clicking into a whole bunch of different results not paying too much attention to where I was, and I found one forum thread that was actually pretty informative until halfway down the thread someone said something really unhinged about race wars or something, and no one called him out about it and some even agreed with him, so I took a look at what site I was on and it was the stormfront forums. Nope I out of there really quick.

Also not the only experience I had like that, few of my hobbies and interests have significant overlap with the right wing lunatics fringe since I’m into some outdoors camping and survivalist type stuff, the algorithms try really hard to suck me into crazytown sometimes.

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)