Badabinski

LAX is also just the worst fucking airport. I remember feeling shocked the first time I flew to LAX. I thought that a city like LA would have a nice, efficient airport, given how much traffic that airport gets and how much money LA has. It’s been 10 years since I was last there, but I wouldn’t be surprised if LAX was just as dingy and disorganized now.

I’m sure the whole security theater bullshit would occur no matter what airport you flew through, and I don’t know if the experience would have been any nicer anywhere else. I just don’t like that airport, I’m in a bad mood, and I want to complain about things on the internet.

I definitely haven’t been shouted at in any of the European airports I’ve been in (from memory, KEF, HEL, AMS, MAD, BCN, NCE, and BER, so not super representative of the continent), so to me, it seems like an American phenomenon. I haven’t been to Canada enough to know what it’s like there. It’s also somewhat recent. I’ve been flying for 25ish years now, and I feel like the yelling has only been happening for the past, I dunno, 5-7 years?

As others have said, I don’t think it’s that we like being shouted at. We just have a large number of people who are, uh, “ruggedly individual,” to put it in nice terms. Those people don’t really think about others enough, so you have to yell at them to get them to pay attention to the world around them. I’m the type of person that looks up the rules before I leave and makes sure I have all of my shit out of my pockets before I even enter the security line to ensure I don’t reduce the efficiency of the security checkpoint. I often feel a bit exasperated with the people who don’t think about others in those situations.

As a means of dealing with it, I’ve found that smiling, making eye contact, and nodding at the TSA agent doing the yelling makes them less likely to yell at me while simultaneously making me feel a bit less frustrated—expressing nice feelings and trying to show some common humanity with the people I’m interacting with makes it harder for me to feel angry. Not saying that’d work for everyone, but it’s helpful for me.

I really love mine. It’s probably not the hardest wearing material out there, but my shirt held up well. My only gripe is that you’re not supposed to use any form of bleach (even non-chlorine) which can make stains a bit hard to remove. Stains on a work shirt don’t really matter, but I try to keep my shit looking clean if possible. No oxiclean makes that tough sometimes.

EDIT: and yeah, the price really isn’t too bad. There are also frequent sales. Lemme look up what I paid for mine.

EDIT: Looks like I paid $35 for the two shirts I got later on. I paid the full $50 for the first shirt I bought.

I made the mistake of taking on a DIY construction project when the outside air temperature was 105℉ (40 C) and the UV index was incredibly high (no cloud cover, very direct sunlight, and an elevation of 4200 ft (1.2 km)). This meant that I was sweating like fucking crazy, which is bad for sunscreen. I got this moisture wicking UV blocking hoodie and it fucking saved my ass. I didn’t wear sunscreen once but never got sunburned, even though I was doing 12 hours days of digging 36" (91 cm) deep foundation footings, mixing and pouring concrete, digging out a shitload of turf and dirt for a gravel foundation, or moving 3 tons (2.7 metric tons) of gravel into that foundation. UPF 50 fabric is dope.

I fucking love that shirt. I bought two more of them since I was washing the one I had multiple times a week.

Honorable mentions go to my work pants and Red Wing boots. I don’t know the brand of the pants rn, but they were so good. They’re really thin but didn’t get damaged when I scraped the shit out of them on rocks, and they had lots of useful pockets. They were much cooler than denim and also gave me much more mobility. I got them while shopping for work pants with my partner who was very dissatisfied with the options available in women’s sizes. She saw them and was so happy with them that I felt the need to get some as well.

The boots were also fucking great. They’re expensive and are made from leather, but I got some that can be resoled so I should be able to wear them for decades. As a bonus, the soles are oil resistant so they won’t get all weird and fucked up out in my machine shop.

W.r.t. water bottles, I think it’s because people don’t look at or think about the signs that are often posted. A loud person yelling specifically at you is much more likely to make someone stop and ask themselves if they have a water bottle.

I’m definitely not defending it, but that’s my take on the matter. The whole water bottle thing is just security theater anyways.

Nope, it would have no bearing on my decision-making process. Not my body, not my womb, not my fucking business.

oh my God it’s like you’re in my head get out of my head. I’m reading this because I’m trying to catch up on sleep and need to distract myself from the dread, so this hits way too close to home lol

The timbre and content of our conversation here combined with something I read from your account has led me to perseverate on this conversation, so I’m going to make a comment that’s definitely off-topic to satisfy my brain.

When I received the first response in this thread, I became curious about who I was conversing with. I looked at your profile and saw this in the account bio (or whatever it’s called here):

Independent thinker valuing discussions grounded in reason, not emotions.

And in this most recent comment in the thread:

I don’t believe in free will nor self

I’m assuming that you are a determinist. I’m also a determinist! I believe that our actions and identity are ultimately the product of the way our brains interact with the environment around them. I believe that free will is an illusion many people see because the way our brain interacts with its environment is incredibly complicated and is almost impossible to quantify. I think we agree to some degree on this, although I could be totally wrong. I just wanted to see if I could establish a shared (if limited) understanding of how the brain do its thang based on the quote I’ve taken from this thread.

I wanted to write about emotions. I used to believe that emotions were not helpful when discussing fractious issues and when doing things like, say, software development. I’ve come to believe that I felt this way because I was not taught how to understand or process emotions. Because I didn’t understand them, I was frustrated when they’d come to lead a conversation. I thought that if people could just be purely rational beings, we’d all be able to talk about hard things and come up with mutually beneficial solutions to our problems.

That sounds pretty naive because it is. I absolutely acknowledge that there are more nuanced arguments for why emotions should be kept out of debates, but I don’t properly understand those arguments so I can’t represent them here. Normally this would be enough for me to not make this comment, but I think I have a way to make my point that doesn’t really depend on whether or not emotions should be involved in discussions.

Basically, I feel that it is impossible for two people to discuss something without that discussion involving emotions. I believe this is the case for the same reasons I believe in a deterministic universe (which is a ridiculous sentence lol, I sound so pompous right now). I think that a person’s capability to express rational thought is either the result of emotions, or is inextricably linked to emotions. The human brain is a glorious fucking mess. The brain interacts with itself in ways that are just as dynamic and complicated as how the outside environment affects the brain. There’s been a lot of research done to try and separate out what’s responsible for cognition and emotion. Those efforts have failed, and there’s now a lot of literature out there showing how you can’t have one without the other. That’s all really nice and cerebral and such, but I’m not qualified to talk about any of that and don’t want to barf out another debate on the internet on “how does an brain work.” There are enough of those. All I can do is talk about personal experience.

Like, emotions can be really useful in guiding rational thought. I’m a software developer by trade, and I’ve learned over the years that I architect, write, test, and debug software based on how I feel on a moment-to-moment basis. When I’m trying to filter a list, I just kinda let my fingers move and pound something out. I read it, and if I feel bad (e.g. anxious), I let my fingers delete some stuff and add more stuff, and I keep doing that until I’m happy. Sometimes I’ll stop and think more consciously and “rationally” about what I’m doing, but like, I only do so when I’ve hit a point of feeling consistently unhappy for 3-5 minutes. My emotions and instincts have done most of the work in filtering out the contents of a list or coming up with a state machine or designing a class hierarchy or whatever, which is all pretty logical and rational shit. I work that way and my code works pretty well and is pretty fast and people generally like to read it and work with it. The times when I’ve struggled are when I’ve lacked the necessary instinct or “feel” for what’s good and bad and have had to think purely rationally about what I’m doing.

I’ve found this to be true for debates as well. I’m far more convincing when I allow my emotions to guide my rational arguments. I’ve changed far more minds, and I’ve had my mind changed far more often when I include my emotions as an essential component of my rationality.

I’m just some random dude on the internet making a comment about something nobody asked about, so take this for what it is. I figured it’d be fun to write about, and I guess it was since I’m approaching kbin’s 5000 character limit for a single comment.

For future reference, here is a direct link to the comment on my instance, and here is the contents of the comment:

I’m a cop and I can tell you that, at least in my country, you’d have no reason to not unlock your phone if you haven’t done anything.

I can understand that in some countries cops can be seen as criminals (and are behaving like criminals), but I don’t think a generality should be made. Just like a generality shouldn’t be made about people from an origin all doing the same bad thing.

Also don’t take advices from what you see on Lemmy as every user comes from a different country with different laws.

In my country, we can take your phone but we aren’t allowed to unlock it without your consent or without a prosecutor saying so.

I’m purposefully not including their username here in case they want to delete their comments at a later date.

That’s a pretty rough thread to read. It makes me feel pretty damn bummed out. The cop (who I will refer to as “they”, “them”, and “the commenter” from now on) clearly believes in their position, and like, I get it. I think everybody would be happy to live in a world where following the belief that “you have nothing to hide” truly resulted in universally positive outcomes. They mention that cops in some countries act like criminals, which is a true (if perhaps incomplete) statement. I think there may be some defensiveness in their comment, but that’s pretty natural when commenting on an article that’s written on the basis that everyone doing their job is bad and should not be trusted. They probably have a hard job, and I’m guessing that part of the way they (and many cops) get through the day is to view their role as a protector of the innocent. That’s not a groundbreaking statement or anything, but I figured I should include it. I’ll also say that they did a pretty good job of avoiding aggressive language. It’s natural to want to fight when dearly held beliefs are attacked, and they did a good job of avoiding that.

However, I can also understand how that comment makes some people very, very angry. For example, it makes me feel frustrated because I feel like it is missing important context (e.g. roughly where they’re from and how the police and community interact there), and I feel that it is presenting an argument that is problematic and evidently untrue in some contexts. I also feel like it’s a potentially reckless comment. When I read that comment, I feel I’m being told that I may be less safe if I try to maintain my right to privacy. I personally disagree with that idea, and I’m guessing that the people who made very aggressive responses feel much more strongly about that than I do. I won’t claim to understand all the reasons why people are so angry at the police, so all I can do is share my reasons for feeling upset when reading that comment.

I dunno. I’m torn about that whole thread. I think the commenter was arguing in good faith and was communicating somewhat effectively, but I also don’t think they considered how hurt and angry people are. It’s not their job to avoid provoking trauma responses and angering random people on the internet. I have had times where I had to say something that I knew would really upset and activate my partner. However, I have found that I have better outcomes when I take some time to empathize before saying something that I know will potentially activate someone. I can hear them out, show empathy (or compassion if I have the resources to express it and am comfortable giving it), help them come back to the here-and-now, and then continue the discussion. That wasn’t done, and the folks who have a hard time regulating their emotions made aggressive comments.

I don’t feel like they were expressing vulnerable feelings, so I’m hoping that they had an emotional shield up and didn’t experience harm. I’m sure it was hurtful, but I hope it wasn’t harmful. I hope that the people who clearly feel such deep rage are eventually able to find peace and a safe place to recover from whatever shit they went through, assuming they have unprocessed shit to deal with. I obviously hope that we’ll someday look back at police brutality some day and be horrified that we ever lived like that, but that’s a nothingburger of a statement in this context. The commenter has expressed their desire to move on from the topic so I won’t leave a comment over there, but I figured I’d share my thoughts here. There’s not really a point to what I’m saying beyond that.

I have some perspective on this that’s a bit hard to share, but I’ll try to do so briefly. My partner had a very traumatic upbringing and has spent several years processing all of that trauma in therapy. She has occasionally said things while in an activated state that she later came to deeply regret. When she has said these hurtful things, I’ve been able to see an injured and frightened 18, 15, 12, 10, 7, or 5 year old kid lashing out as the only defense to an existential threat. There was no existential threat in our time or place, but the trapped knot of trauma that was smashed into her brain by her circumstances saw it as one and tried to survive. With that understanding, it became hard to feel anything but sadness and compassion on the very rare occasion when her anger turned to me.

This has had a profound impact on how I view angry discourse out in the world. Most people haven’t been through the shit my partner has, but most people have absolutely been through something terrible that has wounded them. Those wounds often turn into trauma, and that trauma can sometimes explode out into the world.

I don’t think that having trauma means that adults aren’t responsible for their actions. My philosophy is that every person has a duty to take care of themselves and to not harm others, in that order. Harming someone else is not acceptable to me unless it must be done to protect your present self. I just no longer feel like I am able to assign blame or worthiness to these types of comments and the people making them. When I see someone saying something like “ACAB” and expressing really painful trauma, I think of my partner and all the pain she’s gone through and all the work she’s done to get to the bright place she’s at today.

All of this is to say that I just can’t agree with calling them assholes. I think that there are times when they could be misguided and hurtful and even harmful, but that makes me sad rather than angry. The comments that make me angry are the ones made in bad faith, but thankfully the block and report buttons are easy to reach.

I’m curious about the incident you mentioned. Would you be able to link it to me? I might like to comment over there if possible.

EDIT: I was not, in fact, brief.

EDIT: Found it: https://kbin.earth/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/353424/-/comment/2994009
I’m shit at the fediverse so sorry for my dumb link. I think there’s a better way to link stuff, but I don’t know what or how even.

People get angry, and sometimes they need to vent that anger. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being angry, just like there’s nothing wrong with feeling any of the feelings a person can have. There’s not even anything wrong with expressing that anger. The body keeps the score, and it will not forgive someone for their unprocessed emotions. Expression is often a part of that processing.

Everything after this is my opinion and should be taken as opinion, not any sort of expression of fact.

It is my opinion that an angry statement like “ACAB” isn’t harmful as long as the audience is right. I have no issues with someone saying “ACAB” under an article about police brutality. I would be displeased with an ACAB comment as a direct response to someone who is a cop and was expressing vulnerable feelings about being a cop. It’s been my belief and experience that that type of moment is where the right words can actually change someone’s mind a little bit, whereas the wrong words can cause harm and push someone to double down on their beliefs. The only times I’ve managed to change minds is when I first try to express some degree of understanding before attempting to reverse the connection to show the other person why they would benefit from understanding.

I do see the irony present in my specific example here, since bad cops generalize and act out those generalizations on individuals in painful (and sometimes lethal) ways. I am not able to feel or act that way, so the bad cops get to do something that I can’t. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Basically, as long as a commenter is venting at a distance, I think it’s relatively harmless. It makes me unhappy when a human is being directly and aggressively dumped on, because the chances for real harm are greatly increased.

I don’t know if I feel quite the same way about “muskrat.” Like, that’s very much about a specific person, but the dude is literally never going to read that comment. I very much dislike Elon Musk and usually don’t say his name in conversation without the word “fucking” in front of it. I personally don’t believe that an internet comment can ever make that man act in a better way, so I don’t know that there’s any point in trying to treat him nicely. I dunno. Feelings and shit are hard.

EDIT: I should also mention that ACAB is not an insult, it is a symbol of a movement. That symbol can be insulting to some, but it can also provide a sense of solidarity to others. I am a very privileged person that hasn’t had bad experiences with the police, so my understanding of the anger behind it is the product of empathy and relating it to my own traumas. I would not personally say that to a cop in a situation where I might be able to change their mind a bit, but I haven’t suffered from oppression and pain at the hands of the police. Props to themeatbridge for their comment, because it made me realize that I was framing ACAB as a pejorative rather than what it is.

I wish I had a better source, but it appears that the details are hidden in the agreement people sign to become partners on YouTube: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/177353i/you_should_at_least_know_that_55_of_youtube/

Basically, YouTube does a 55/45% split between the individual and YouTube respectively. I’m not totally clear on how the actual value of a Premium view is calculated based on the contents of the contract snippet included in that post. All I know is that I’ve heard several YouTubers say that it’s much more than they get from ad revenue per watcher. That was enough evidence for me to continue on with Premium, but I haven’t done extensive research on this.

Ikr? Nowadays, I’m quite fond of the idea of forcing media companies to license to all comers if they license to one company. Movie theaters don’t have exclusive rights to movies, so why do we let streaming services pull this shit? Having the same content across all platforms would mean that streaming services would have to compete on price and service quality.

I miss that :( my partner and I always talk about how that was such a nice time. I gave them my $8 every month and had access to all the shows I wanted to watch and it was great. I completely gave up on piracy, and I was more likely to rent/buy the occasional movie that wasn’t on Netflix.

I pay for it as well. I started when it was Youtube Red because I absolutely fucking despise ads. I learned later on that YouTubers get paid a lot more per Premium view, and that’s helped to keep me paying for it. I tend to watch channels that don’t do sponsorships, and many of those channels have videos that are quite expensive to produce (Project Farm and Torque Test Channel stand out in that regard). I like these people and what they do, so I want to help them.

It’s expensive (I have the family version so my partner and her dad can be covered as well), but I have the means to afford it.

If YouTubers stop getting paid more for my views, I’ll probably drop it and switch to NewPipe (which I already use on occasion for videos that have intrusive sponsorships).

I used Google maps to get these values. I’m using Google’s estimated walking distance and will also include Google’s estimated walking time.

• Convenience store
  • Distance: 800 m
  • Time: 11 minutes
• Chain supermarket
  • Distance: 1.1 km
  • Time: 15 minutes
• Bus stop
  • Distance: 230 m
  • Time: 3 minutes
• Park:
  • Distance: 450 m
  • Time: 7 minutes
• Big supermarket (Walmart)
  • Distance: 1.7 km
  • Time: 23 minutes
• Library
  • Distance: 2.7 km
  • Time: 37 minutes
• Train station (local light rail)
  • Distance: 3.1 km
  • Time: 43 minutes

I’m in Utah somewhere south of Salt Lake City (the state capitol). The numbers aren’t great, but they’re far better than some places I’ve lived here. As a kid, I remember biking for 20+ minutes to make it to a small supermarket.

EDIT: as others have said, my paths can be quite bendy at times, but it’s different than many suburbs in the US. Salt Lake City (and, by extension, most of the valley that it’s in) is built on a fairly rigorous grid system. We have lots of straight roads with large blocks (in some cases, it can be 1-2 km between lights and crosswalks). We don’t have too many ratfucked suburban mazes, so the walkability problem here is primarily due to sprawl and a dearth of crosswalks.

I played so many games on my Palm Pilot back in middle school. My Palm Tungsten T3 was great, and there were a shitload of freeware or shareware games released over the years.

I’m guessing it’s nostalgia. The bananas in the original game had stickers on them, but the newer games didn’t. There are a lot of people who love the old SMB games and are happy when anything is done to make the new ones like the old ones.

I don’t get being so excited about it, but these games weren’t a core part of my childhood. I played the party games in SMB 1 once and those were fun, but I don’t think I ever actually played the main game.

the ability to write to busy executable files

Thank god, this has been such a pain in the ass for SO LONG.

I’m guessing it was because my comment is off-topic and lengthy. I would have sent you a DM, but I can’t seem to figure out how to do that in my mbin client 😅