aramis87

While I like the idea of challenges to get them used to computers, I’d also suggest balancing these with challenges that may help them outside the digital/technological world. Maybe challenge them to write a short story or a letter to their grandparents in cursive. Maybe hand-stitch a running hem, mentally add and subtract numbers, walk a quarter-mile every day. Later on, maybe have them plan out and cook a really simple meal, or do some kind of simple repair or put together a flat-pack table or something. Solder or glue something.

I dunno, it just feels like so many skills aren’t being taught to kids and they graduate with little knowledge of skills that make your life easier and less expensive - simple repairs, being able to research stuff, being unafraid to do things on your own. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud your kid’s drive and your desire to make them ready for the digitally-focused world they’ll live in, I just see too many kids graduating and needing a massive amount of hand-holding for even the simplest things.

That happened to me a few years ago, just tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. One day toward the end of this horrible run, I called my best friend to remind them of something random, like “remember it’s X’s birthday this weekend” or something. Friend wasn’t home, her mom said she’d have Friend call me back. No worries.

Anyway, my friend gets home, and her mom is in the dining room having tea with a neighbor. Mom says, “Oh, hey, Aramis called, I told 'em you’d call back,” and the neighbor immediately exclaimed, “Oh my God, what’s happened to that poor person now?!?!”

I was driving along these narrow backcountry roads once, the ones with little drainage ditches on either side of the road. It’s dark out A deer comes bounding across the road in front of me. Knowing that deer travel in packs, I stopped.

Some asshole fucker in a lifted truck or SUV, speeding toward me way over the speed limit on these tiny backcountry roads, did not stop. Another deer ran across the road and the truck/SUV hit the deer and catapulted it right into my car, then kept speeding off into the night. My car was mostly totalled, as in it (extremely unhappily) managed to limp me home at about 3 miles an hour, screaming the entire way. [It was a back road and I was afraid of another asshole coming along and driving right into my car before a tow truck could possibly get to me. And there was no place on the side of the road where I could safely wait for a tow truck.]

All my friends were like, “Oh no, did you get the plate number of the guy?” And I’m like, “Initially they were too far away, then their headlights were blinding me - and how they missed seeing the deers with those lights is beyond me. And by the time they were close enough for me to see a plate, there was a deer in the way.” Then they’re like, “Did you call your insurance company?” And I’m like, “Why in the world would I do that? What world do you live in? My car is 16 years old, they’d give me $500 and then raise my premiums a thousand dollars a year for the next decade.”

I hope that fucker in the truck/SUV wrecks their next five cars in ditches and bogs and gets stuck in snowbanks in the middle of winter for the next decade. Fucker.

Story time?

Ask your company if they can do matching funds for your donation.

One interesting thing about the Quantum Leap finale is that God is played by Bruce McGill (who shows up in a number of Bellisario’s shows, but ignore that for now). Which doesn’t seem particularly interesting until you realize that Bruce McGill also appeared in the Quantum Leap pilot, implying that God has been involved in the whole “Leap that went wrong” thing from the very beginning. I’ve never been entirely sure how I felt about that, but it was an interesting bit of casting, regardless.

Came here for this!

A lot of them end up culling the believers too in the end.

Robespierre was killed by the Revolution.

A tuna hoagie and some chips.

Buccee’s is incredibly awful to their employees.

I remember during the later part of the Troubles, one group set up an exchange student program, where junior- and senior-year Catholic and Protestant kids were sent to spend the year in the US, like regular exchange students. Except every host family took in two kids, matched in sex and roughly matched in age, one Catholic and one Protestant. Living together for a year in an alien country, they came to see each other as human, and friends.

Not really. The NYT ran an interesting article a couple years ago on generational support for Israel. [This is from memory, so don’t get down on me for history or generation errors.] The people who reached adulthood in the 1940s and early 50s supported Israel wholeheartedly; they saw Israel as the underdog. The people who reached adulthood in the 60s and 70s saw the 1967 war and saw a militarized grown-up state holding it’s own. The 80’s and 90’s adults saw them as over-weaponized and aggressive. And people reaching adulthood after 2000 saw them as overly aggressive, oppressive and approaching genocide (that opinion forming before the current genocide, obs).

The Israeli government knows the US opinion had been generationally changing as well. It’s why they’ve invested so much money in AIPAC, news organizations and US politicians, and why they’re constantly supporting older-generation politicians.

Are any of these what you’re thinking about?

They’re going by the 50’s as presented by b&w tv - The Honeymooners, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, My Three Sons.

Even if you’re raised in a culture that has vampires, sometimes you still get caught out. I remember watching some vampire series pre-Buffy and the whole poppy seed thing left me totally flummoxed.

You’re welcome!

I don’t bother with the exact ratings, but it has to be water resistant. If you’re researching phone options, open a tab in desktop view and go to Versus.

There’s also the Guitang Group in China. They have a massive farm that grows sugar cane, which is processed at their sugar refinery and then sold. But the sugar refining process generates spent molasses, so they built a plant that takes the spent molasses and creates alcohol, which they then also sell.

The alcohol plant also creates alcohol residue, so they built a fertilizer plant that makes the alcohol residue into fertilizer, which they use on their sugar cane farm.

The sugar refinery also has crushed sugar cane as a result of their processing, so they built a plant to turn the crushed sugar cane into pulp, then a paper mill to turn the pulp into paper, which is sold.

The pulp plant creates a black liquid as a side product, so they send that through an alkali recovery process; the recovered alkali is sent back to the pulp plant to create more pulp.

The alkali recovery process also creates a white sludge byproduct so they built a cement mill. They take the white sludge from the alkali recovery process, along with the filter sludge that comes out of the sugar refinery, and make cement.

So they wanted to sell sugar, but they’ve limited pollution and waste, improved their plantation’s output with inexpensive fertilizer, and also get to sell alcohol, paper and cement.

Mbin has a browsable / searchable list of magazines, but I’m not sure how to get to it from Lemmy.

Instead of focusing on the efforts of individual persons and households, I think more effort should be focused on industrial symbiosis - identifying industrial waste and side streams that can be useful inputs into the products of other industries, and connecting those industries.

For example, you might have a local electricity-generating station that takes some of the steam that’s created as a side effect of their process, and sends that steam to an oil refinery located next door. The oil refinery has a water hook-up and sends regular water to power station for their power generation, but they also send their treated effluent water for the power plant to use in cleaning as well as stabilizing fly ash, and they also send over their flare gas as an extra energy source for generating power.

The oil refinery could send it’s excess gas to a gypsum board manufacturer just down the road; the gypsum board manufacturer could also get most of it’s gypsum from the power plant’s sulfur dioxide scrubbers.

The power station could also send more of it’s excess steam to a nearby pharmaceutical manufacturer; the pharmaceutical manufacturer could send some of the bio-sludge waste it produces to local farms as fertilizer, and the rest of the sludge might get processed into biofuel for the power station. Hot water from the pharmaceutical plant could be sent to the local wastewater treatment plant, which generates sludge, which could be sold to a soil remediation firm.

The power station could use it’s excess heat to heat a bunch of local homes, some local greenhouses, and then they could also send some more excess heat to a fish farm. The sludge from the fish farm could be used as fertilizer at local farms.

The power station’s fly ash and clinker could be sent to roadbuilders and cement manufacturers, and the oil refinery’s recovered sulfur could be sold to a sulfuric acid manufacturer.

Such a theoretical symbiosis could prevent 200,000 tons of fly ash and clinker and 80,000 tons of scrubber sludge from going into a local landfill; 130,000 tons of carbon dioxide and 4,300-5,300 tons of sulfur/sulfur dioxide being released into the air; and 1,000,000 cubic meters of sludge headed to either the landfill or the sea.

Oh, wait - that’s not fantasy, that’s the Kalundborg Eco-industrial Park in Denmark. It’s not 100% recycling, but it’s fucking glorious.