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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Yeah, it’s really frustrating when someone with higher body fat that floats like a cork tries to tell you how to do it.

    Technique can’t overcome density. I will say that I got slightly better at it after learning to SCUBA dive (or maybe I just got fatter). In scuba, you move up and down in the water column by adjusting the range of your breathing. You basically try to get your neutrally boyant setpoint at 50% lung capacity. To go down, you try to control your breathing from 0-50% and to go up, you breathe from 50-100%. It made me slightly better at keeping my lungs really topped up with air.

    To float, I basically have to hold my lungs at max capacity, and then exhale-inhale as fast as possible, which is unnatural and takes concentration. I usually have to use my arms for a little bit of upward thrust through that breath.

    There’s no lungs in my legs, so those will sink no matter what. People claim you can “use your core” or some other BS to keep your legs afloat, but the fact of the matter is that if your upper body is positively buoyant and your lower body is negatively buoyant, there will be a rotational moment pulling your legs down, and it can only be counteracted by external application of force (i.e., kicking your feet). I can either float on my back with a mild amount of kicking, or i can do like a face-in-water deadman float, and just pull my head out of the water occasionally to quickly breathe.








  • My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn’t drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:

    • Faulty water level sensor
    • Clogged water level sensor hose
    • Clogged filter
    • Clog around the heating element
    • Broken check valve
    • Faulty pump
    • Clog between drum and liner
    • Faulty control board

    The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you’d think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I’ve found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.

    I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.





  • One thing to keep in mind with a lot of responses is often when someone says “we didn’t learn about x in high school”, what they should be saying is “I didn’t learn about x in high school”. I’ve certainly heard former classmates claiming not to have learned something even though they were sitting next to me when I learned it.

    When i was a preteen, we learned about WW2, mainly from a US perspective, and had a fairly large focus on the holocaust, including a visit to a holocaust museum.

    As a teen, I had a class on specifically European history. In there, we learned about lot more about the rise of the nazis (though not much on Italian fascists).

    Here’s the tl;dr on what I remember learning about then:

    WWI ended with the treaty of Versailles which was not a realistic, sustainable peace. We learned about the economic trouble like hyperinflation. We learned about the beer hall putsch, and that it was effectively unpunished. We learned that Hitler then sought power through legal means by allying with a broad range of groups unhappy with the current government. As he rose to power, various elements were purged from the government. Concurrently, political violence from the stormtroopers suppressed minorities and other enemies from organizing against them. This culminated in Hitler being elected chancellor, and then the enabling act gave him ultimate power. In the night of the long knives, all the allied elements in the party were purged. After that was kristallnacht, the remilitarization of the rhineland, annexation of Austria and the sudetenland, and then finally the invasion of Poland.


  • It’s salsa roja, salsa verde, salsa fresca, and any other fruit (mango is common) based condiment that you’d eat with chips. Salsa de mole, we just call mole. Other types of Mexican sauce like what you’d put over enchiladas, just gets called “enchilada sauce”.

    It’s a common thing with loan words to have them only applied to the subset of things that were originally imported and called by that name. No one out of Italy, for example would call pizza bianca “pizza” if you gave them a piece and asked what it is (I’m talking about roman pizza bianca, not “white pizza” being back translated).

    Sometimes the opposite happens, like “curry” being derived from a specific thing in a specific part of India, being applied by the British (and everywhere else they exported it) to basically any saucy Indian food.




  • Yeah, I think this is the most reasonable approach. Everyone else is suggesting that falling on your sword is the first line of defense, and it really shouldn’t be.

    If you are the attorney general, and the president asks you to fire someone prosecuting him, sure, resign.

    If you are just some person trying to get by, shooting yourself in the foot isn’t going to help anyone. If you refuse to do a job, and they just hire someone else to do it, you’ve only really lost a lot at the cost of a small moral victory immediately rendered nil.

    Not to get too utilitarian, but the ultimate goal should be to have the best outcome for everyone, not to just make the first decision that seems to be right.

    There’s a saying about fascism “Do not obey in advance”, and the idea is that during the rise of fascism, the fascists don’t actually have to make people do what they want. Lots of people comply with their goals well before being forced to. We are seeing many companies eliminating DEI objectives because it’s what the fascists want, even though they don’t have to.

    This could be one of those situations where a frank conversation with the project lead to see if that’s what’s happening because there is a chance to convince them not to obey in advance. It could also be that the training is going for federal agencies that have been “legally” required to eliminate “gender” from any training materials.

    I think it would be foolish to turn down the job without at least establishing that.


  • The act that they performed this under is the “International Emergency Economic Powers Act” which allows the president to declare a national emergency and take some other actions if there is an:

    unusual and extraordinary threat… to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States

    It specially says the powers:

    may not be exercised for any other purpose

    The Powers include:

    (1) At the times and to the extent specified in section 1701 of this title, the President may, under such regulations as he may prescribe, by means of instructions, licenses, or otherwise— (A) investigate, regulate, or prohibit— (i) any transactions in foreign exchange, (ii) transfers of credit or payments between, by, through, or to any banking institution, to the extent that such transfers or payments involve any interest of any foreign country or a national thereof, (iii) the importing or exporting of currency or securities, by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; (B) investigate, block during the pendency of an investigation, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition, holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; and.[1] © when the United States is engaged in armed hostilities or has been attacked by a foreign country or foreign nationals, confiscate any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, of any foreign person, foreign organization, or foreign country that he determines has planned, authorized, aided, or engaged in such hostilities or attacks against the United States; and all right, title, and interest in any property so confiscated shall vest, when, as, and upon the terms directed by the President, in such agency or person as the President may designate from time to time, and upon such terms and conditions as the President may prescribe, such interest or property shall be held, used, administered, liquidated, sold, or otherwise dealt with in the interest of and for the benefit of the United States, and such designated agency or person may perform any and all acts incident to the accomplishment or furtherance of these purposes.

    Noticeably absent from that list is tariffs. Under the major questions doctrine, the fact that congress did not specifically delegate that power to the executive branch means that it did not do so.