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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • They’re not cool. They’re fast and good for giving lots of shots in a situation where you need to get a lot of people in a hurry - especially if you’re giving multiple vaccinations at the same time.

    I got one of those used on me in basic training - a place where you need to vaccinate a few thousand people in about 30 minutes. Each one could do 4 shots at a time, and they had them in multiple configurations so you could get up to 4 in each arm for each “injection” station. We stepped through the line, and you got whatever shots you were missing in your records.

    It hurts, like you could imagine a high pressure power washer with a needle-point burst with 4 heads blasting vaccines in your arms. It works, in the machine-like way the military works, and it is highly effective for mass vaccinations. So, I guess it makes it cool, but also it sucks like you’d expect 4-30 vaccines at once would suck.








  • We all know this. We are all powerless to change it. Corporations and governments control whether or not it can be changed. Politicians worldwide are being fed by the pollution industry. The poors voting changes nothing until the corporations and politicians decide to do something about it.

    Walkable cities? Great idea. Needs politicians to approve zoning restrictions. Don’t drive cars? Great idea. Needs politicians to build public transportation infrastructure. Electric cars? Great idea. Needs corporations to produce them at an affordable cost. Etc etc etc.

    There will never be a day when 10 billion people in the world get on the same page to demand the end of anything. We can’t even get a tenth of that many to agree to stop killing each other over border squabbles.




  • Where I live, I have hills, big hills in every direction. I own both types of bike, a rad runner 6 for long, fast rides from my house, and then 20 miles up into the mountains along back roads.

    I have a road bike that I bought when I couldn’t really afford it, and paid about 1,000 for it. It’s a tomasso. It’s ok. I wish I had a trek, or a specialized hybrid road with the slightly thicker tires than the tiny ones my road bike has. I can’t really afford those.

    I use the RAD bike more for cardio, generally leave it in pedal assist 2 or 3 and just try to get a quick workout during lunch time. I take the other plain road bike out with a cycling club locally one or two nights a week. I don’t own a car, and I work from home. Biking makes me happy, but I get lazy when it’s really hot, so I ride the e-bikes more when it’s hot.

    I’m 45. It’s not as easy as 45 to build muscle back up and get superfit in a short amount of time. The e-bike helps with cardio and keeps me excited about taking a quick spin without getting totally smoked by all of the hill climbs it takes to get out of my neighborhood, much less through the foothills of the smokies and Appalachians.


  • Even if you’re going off to the side you’re on, it’s a distraction. It will draw my attention back to see if you’ve fallen, crashed, or gotten hurt. I will check my mirrors for you to see if there are additional dangers to me. I ride around bike-like objects all the time. Passing you isn’t even going to be a thing that I notice. You’ll get a “On your left, passing” from me when I’m about to go by so you know not to do any funny business in my direction. I don’t expect you to exit the lane. Heck, if you’re doing 15MPH, we might ride and bullshit with each other for a bit.


  • Every Unity developer is under the same agreement. The changes were not announced to be “moving forward”. It’s a change to existing licenses to use Unity. For everyone. Everywhere.

    I don’t know that licensing changes have been retroactive in the past. How do lawyers prevent companies from retroactively changing licensing? My guess would be to sue after the fact, which is probably why these developers are hinting that they’re going to suffer economic harm if Unity follows through with this. This statement may be their lawyers doing the work they’d normally do in this kind of circumstance.


  • That was me in 1996. My parents worked in factories when I was in elementary school, getting paid a piece rate for work. By the time I graduated from high school, their factory jobs had been sent overseas or to Mexico, and they were working as a handyman & selling shoes at Walmart. Combined, they made somewhere in the low to mid $30k per year range, and had 3 boys to raise. I had to take loans to go to college. I worked as much as I could to try and cover my bills while in college. I had the GI Bill from the national guard providing a couple hundred dollars per month.

    I ended up dropping out of college after a few years because I couldn’t keep up. I went back after my daughter was born, and used the max federal Stafford loans (~10k/yr) to help pay living expenses because I was working 2-3 part time jobs to work around my schedule and helping to pay rent, utilities, and food for myself, my wife, and a baby while my wife went to school as well. I worked so much that I barely remember my kid before she was in 2nd or 3rd grade. I don’t think I could have worked more.

    But now, conservatives say that I shouldn’t have taken loans. I shouldn’t have gone to school because I couldn’t afford it. What is the alternative? A life of raising a family making minimum wage delivering pizzas? Relying on public assistance and tax credits? Or working my ass off for a few years, taking some loans, paying them back slowly with maybe some forgiveness at some point, and now paying 13-15k per year in taxes?

    Kind of weird to be told to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, do that, and then be told that you should have just stayed poor because your parents couldn’t afford to pay for college for you.