For being a science meme community, it’s a place people can vent about things that they can’t vent about elsewhere. We can understand psychological phenomena, but still be personally frustrated by it.

Though I do wish this post weren’t targeted toward Boomers. Younger people buy into this type of thing, too.

I just want to say, as someone who lives near such a bell, I’m grateful that they appear to observe “quiet hours” between 8pm and 8am. When I first moved in, I was worried it’d be dinging all night. Thank goodness that’s not the case.

I just have car alarms going off for no reason at 4am to worry about.

It’s wild to think that, “It’s a quarter to 8,” must be a mental exercise for some people. That is, instead of having an immediate understanding from being able to glance at an analog clock and think, “That’s clearly 1/4 of an hour,” it instead relies on a cognitive exercise that requires a knowledge of division and subtraction (60 divided by 4, then subtract the result from 60.)

Though I tend to think of time spatially, in part due to being raised with analog clocks. They’re much easier for me to read and understand at a glance without having to process much. Reading a digital clock requires converting it to analog in my mind, because the spatial appearance of the hands is what my brain makes sense of. I sometimes hear from people who can’t do that though, who instead have to convert the analog to digital in their minds. Which is fine, it just sounds much more “mathy” to me and like it takes more work than making sense of shapes. But to each their own.

I love this take because it’s the kind of thing only a handful of teenagers would ever think about, let alone understand, yet it speaks to an effect that underlies them all.

It’s the kind of thing I’d say and people would go, “You’re overthinking it.” No, no if anything, you’re underthinking it. Just because the idea doesn’t occur to someone else doesn’t mean it’s not a valid extension of the thought. So it is here, with a train of thought that deviates from expectation, but that leaves one pondering nonetheless.

Time is a funny thing. If current theory holds through, it means that a photon traveling at the speed of light experiences everything in the same instant. It makes looking up at ancient stars feel all the more incredible, thinking that the photon that hits your retina already “experienced” that moment when it was first emitted millions of years ago.

Ah, that makes more sense.

I generally avoid the downvote button, at least, I think so. I downvote AI slop (especially in communities that explicitly forbid it.) Though for comments I may put a train of downvotes for some troll that’s all over a thread.

I feel like there may be a misinterpretation here though. My ratio is more “upvote-oriented” than yours. Unless you mean aggressive with upvoting, which perhaps, I may be.

Ironically, insurance companies are shooting themselves in the foot by alienating people like you. If they had a reasonable cost option, healthy folks would be more likely to go, “Eh, it’s worth having the coverage just in case.” But when they make it this absurd, they’re limiting their customers to those more likely to depend on insurance, i.e. those most likely to file expensive claims and/or hit their deductible.

But hey, that’s the kind of thing that happens when you can’t see beyond short-term profits. Late stage capitalism at its finest.

Major depressive disorder here. Not sure if I’d be dead, but I’d absolutely be welcome to my own demise.

I curate my feed, blocking communities that don’t interest me. So yeah kinda.

Hm, I’ve got an upvote/downvote post ratio of 315:1, and a comment ratio of about 14:1.

I guess I’m an optimist.

I will never not upvote Hitchhiker’s Guide quotes

“As has been the case for decades, nearly all the cases alleged that the pregnant person used a substance during pregnancy,” the report adds. “In 268 cases, substance use was the only allegation made against the pregnant person.

We don’t know what these substances were or how far along in pregnancy these people were. Combined with strict anti-abortion laws, this is such a trap. I got an abortion a few years ago. In part it was because I’m way too poor to afford a child, but it was also in part because I was taking prescribed medications that would’ve been counter-indicated for a pregnancy. The medication I was taking would’ve been particularly harmful in the first trimester, and had I been trying to get pregnant, I would’ve avoided it. However, things can happen even with contraception.

Thankfully I’m not in a backwards state, but if I had been, would I have been stuck in this trap? Unable to abort, but also taking “substances” that would’ve been harmful to a fetus, there’s no way around it except to say that anyone of child-bearing ability isn’t allowed to take such medications or use “substances” at all. For all we know someone could’ve been casually drinking in the first trimester, without even knowing they were pregnant yet, and now they’re jailed because they dared to live a normal, adult life. The only reason I found out about mine was because I coincidentally got an illness within the first few weeks and the doctor offered a pregnancy test. It was so early, I hadn’t even missed a period yet. With dysregulated cycles (sometimes due to conditions outside of a person’s control), one could go quite a while without being aware of a pregnancy, carrying on life as normal.

It’s so clear the law-makers think of us as merely vessels for child-bearing, with no other life or purpose. We must be pure and perfect, and ready to take on a pregnancy whenever it may happen, regardless of our lifestyles. I feel for this woman and all the others stuck in this situation, keenly aware that if I were to simply move a few hundred miles away, I could be in their shoes.

I’m with you. I wouldn’t appreciate someone standing over my shoulder trying to guess every word I’m about to write, so why would I tolerate that from a word processor? Maybe we are in the minority, but I take care to pick words and phrases that fit what I want to convey. Having a machine assume it can know what’s in my mind better than I do is nonsense.

I’ve had a great experience using Orion’s reader mode to use Wikipedia on my phone. Safari? Not so much. Safari’s reader mode breaks Wikipedia pages, whereas the only issue Orion has with them is not including the titles to subsections. Which I can hardly complain about when all I want is to read an article on a darkened screen before falling asleep.

Those poor kids. The presents under the tree were the last gifts from their mom they’d ever receive. Thank goodness the mom had the awareness to send her son out of the house, and that the baby was unharmed. No matter where they go from here, the older kids, at least, will never be able to look at Christmas the same way again.

It’s such a strange thing to get hostile about. Ironically, it low-key bugs me that we put the dollar sign before the number it’s indicating. “$64” is read as “sixty-four dollars,” not “dollars sixty-four.” So why write it like that? (Not rhetorical, I really want to know. I tried looking up this question to find out the answer, but haven’t found anything conclusive.) Putting the currency symbol behind the number makes more sense, like how some countries write the Euro. (Which also explains why some people might not intuitively place the dollar sign before the number - it’s their native convention and it follows clear logic.)

So maybe the point was ignorance or fear of the foreign? Or a misguided attempt at English language purity? Or they’re a former Redditor who hasn’t quite shaken off the Reddit “pointless, hostile hot-take” mentality?

I don’t have control over a lot of things with my work laptop, since it’s owned/controlled by the company. However, if it doesn’t require an install, then I’ll try that when I get back on Monday. We use Chromebooks (ugh), but any way I could get around ads would be a blessing. Thank you for the suggestion, I’m open to any ad-blocking options I could use.

I’m proud of y’all. My friends in high school in the 00s were the ones doing such hacking, so I can easily imagine this. Good times, good people. I’m glad to hear about other defiant, tech-savvy types out there.

Yep, it bugs me too. As an educator that uses YouTube because some things simply aren’t available on my work computer, there’s only so much I can do. I mute the ads when I can, and skip them as soon as the option becomes available. Sadly, I can’t control my coworkers.

I mentioned this in a different comment on this post, but one thing I’ve been doing to counteract the ad-onslaught is to say, “Boo, ads” whenever they play. My kids think it’s funny. One has started to imitate me.

I can see other kids (that I don’t work with) reacting properly to ads. When my coworker put music from YouTube on for them on the day before Christmas break, one of the kids took it upon herself to go up to the laptop and skip the ads every time they came up. It was heart-warming in many ways.

So yeah. I can’t do much, but some of us are trying.

I use YouTube sometimes with the kids I work with. For like a solid week in November, every single ad was for the new Furby. I mute ads when I can and skip them as soon as the option becomes available, but the ads made me cringe (the new one looks freaky. It’s long. Like the original wasn’t nightmare-inducing enough.)

I was worried the ad would influence the kid. But thankfully, he showed no interest in it when asked what he wanted for Christmas. In fact when the ads started getting replaced, he made some comment about Furby going bye-bye.

It also helps that he looks up to me, and at some point months ago I started saying, “Boo, ads” whenever they came up. Now he thinks it’s funny to boo at commercials. It makes me smile. :)