I registered Republican to vote in their primaries

It’s gonna be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in the generals

But I’m hopeful that I can try to head off the worst of the crazies in the primaries before it gets to the general

I mean, Erasmus is a pretty well-known historical figure (and where, I assume, that programme gets its name)

That’s where my mind went first.

Turns out we’re both wrong and it’s just OP’s name like he said in the other comment, but I’m curious how you made that connection? Not passing any judgement on it, just curious since your brain reached a different conclusion than mine and I’m curious how you got there.

You are right, I admit that I’m Americans so I’m used to thinking in football fields and bananas as my units, so grams don’t inherently mean much to my brain. Not sure if Google steered me wrong with the weight of mosquitoes or if I missed a metric prefix or didn’t move a decimal point somewhere. Don’t have time to go back and fix my math right now but I did throw a little disclaimer in my comment. I’ll try to fix that later.

Just kind of thinking this through

EDIT: my math is wrong. I think I didn’t move a decimal point or missed a metric prefix somewhere, don’t have time to go through and correct myself right now, but go ahead and double check that.

A typical beer is around 5%, so about 25x higher than the concentration in your blood if you’re at .2

A Google search tells me a mosquito drinks about .001 to .01 milliliters of blood per meal, let’s just go with the higher number. Just gonna assume the density of blood is close enough to water which is a nice 1:1 conversion, so that’s about .01g of blood.

A mosquito weighs somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-3grams

So after eating, a mosquito has drank about 1/200 to 1/300 of it’s body weight in blood.

Gonna mix units now, sorry science people.

1 pint weighs around 1lb. If you weigh about 200lbs, and have one beer, you’ve drank about that same ratio of beer to your body weight in terms of just how much liquid youve drank.

But again, the concentration of alcohol in a beer is much higher than the concentration in your blood.

So 1 mosquito bite is roughly the same in terms of volume to one beer, but in terms of alcohol content, it would be more like 1/25th of a beer.

So if a mosquito really gorged itself and drank 25x the normal amount of blood at once, it might start feeling a tiny buzz, but that might just be the fact that it’s a mosquito (because they buzz, get it?)

So that’s sort of drinking a whole case of beer but only one of them actually had alcohol.

If you’re a hardcore alcoholic you might be able to double that BAC to about .4%, which is about where most people would be unconscious and possibly have some significant medical complications.

But that would still only get the mosquito to about 2 beers worth of alcohol if they drank way more than they normally would in one meal.

This is all assuming mosquitoes process alcohol similarly to us, things don’t always scale up and down so nicely and mosquitoes are of course different animals than humans, so that could throw things off quite a bit.

My wife and I have kind of turned into eclipse chasers, we did TN in 2016, Montreal 2024, and in a couple days we’re off to Iceland for another.

We always plan on not doing much the day of the eclipse, figuring that traffic and such would be a nightmare, and leave ourselves a couple days on either side of the eclipse to hopefully avoid even more traffic.

I don’t remember exactly what days we did for TN, but I remember on our way home a couple days later we still hit what seemed like a weird amount of traffic for the area we were in.

Day of the 2017 eclipse we really lucked out. We stayed at a little campground a little bit outside of Nashville, and about 10 minutes away from there we found some sort of wildlife conservation area. It was gated and I’m not totally clear if it was really supposed open to the public, but as luck would have it just as we were pulling up to the gate some sort of conservation officer/ranger/game warden type guy also pulled up there. We asked if we were allowed in, he asked what we were gonna do and we said we basically just planned to set up a couple camp chairs and a camera on a tripod and look and watch the eclipse and he gave us the go-ahead, so we had a big open field to ourselves.

For Montreal, we took the train up from NYC, and the AirBnB we booked had a really nice rooftop deck, so we just posted up there.

We’ll see where we end up in Reykjavik, fingers crossed the weather cooperates.

This will all be a bit of a simplification

Calories are a unit of energy. When were talking about food we’re usually talking about kilocalories, in the US we usually just say Calories (with a capital C) some other countries may list them as “kcal.” It’s the same thing, 1000 calories (with a lower case c) is 1 dietary Calorie/kilocalorie. The calorie is defined as the amount of energy it takes to raise 1ml of water 1 degree Celsius. That might feel like a weird way to think about energy from food, but energy is energy, whether you’re using it to think, move, or just keep your body temperature where it’s supposed to be

The fuels your body uses for most of its energy are sugars. Sugars are a type of carbohydrate (carb,) which are chemicals that are basically just chains of different amounts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen.

We general group these into 3 main types

Simple carbs (mono- and di- saccharides)- basically sugars. Glucose is a sugar and the one your body primarily uses, most other carbs basically get broken down into glucose. Sugars are easy for your body to break down and use almost immediately. Sucrose (table sugar) fructose (from plants) maltose, dextrose, lactose, basically anything you might see on a food label that ends in -ose.

Complex carbs (polysaccharides)- these are things like starches. They’re basically just a bigger molecule that your body needs a little more time to break down into simpler sugars, so you’re not really going to be getting energy from them for a few hours or even the next day. This is why you might hear about athletes “carbo-loading” with something like a big spaghetti dinner the day before a big event, the energy from that dinner will be available to them in time for that event.

Dietary fiber - these are basically just really complex carbs that your body can’t really break down like cellulose (there’s that -ose ending again.) Some other animals can break them down for energy, like cows do some extra fermentation in their guts which is why they have 4-chambered stomachs that lets them break it down, but we can’t. It’s still important to other aspects of digestion for us but we’re not burning it for fuel.

Related to that is the glycemic index, which is basically a measure of how fast your body can process those carbs. Sugars have a high glycemic index and raise your blood sugar rapidly. Complex carbs have a lower glycemic index and raise it more gradually.

It wasn’t part of your question, but I feel like that obviously leads to some discussion about insulin and diabetes. Insulin is a hormone that regulates how fast glucose (which remember is the basic sugar that your body runs on and everything else pretty much gets broken down into) is absorbed from your blood into the rest of your body. People with diabetes don’t produce enough insulin, which means that sugar just kind of builds up in their blood and doesn’t get absorbed by their body, which, putting it mildly, is very bad. Not gonna go into too much detail on that, because it’s outside of the scope of the question, and we’re also dancing around the limits of my own knowledge.

Also a bit off topic but let’s talk about fat. You’ve eaten more calories than you really need to sustain yourself, what does your body do with the excess energy/sugar? Well it will try to convert some of that sugar into fat to store for later use when you’re getting less calories from your diet that you really need. It’s an emergency store of energy. It’s sort of slow and energy intensive for your body to convert fat back into sugars that it can use, so your body really only starts burning those fat reserves when there’s no other source of energy available.

Which brings around to the last thing you asked about - gluten. Gluten is a protein found in some grains, when you knead dough made from flour which contains gluten you basically get all of those gluten proteins to get all tangled up and form a stretchy web which makes the dough nice and stretchy, let’s it trap gas bubbles from yeast fermenting or chemical leaveners like baking soda/baking powder, and gives bread a bit of a chewy texture.

Just like with fat and carbs, your body can break down protein for energy (and it kind of needs other things from proteins, but that’s neither here nor there) and for most people gluten is just fine, not much different than if they were eating meat or beans or other protein-rich foods.

But some people have medical issues that prevent their bodies from processing gluten properly and eating it makes them sick, so they need to avoid it in their diet.

Gluten-free foods aren’t necessarily low-carb (or low-calorie,) something like a potato is basically all carbs, but has no gluten.

But if you’re trying to create a substitute for something that would normally be made with something like wheat flour (which is what most bread and pasta is made from, for example, and has a lot gluten and tons of carbs) one of the obvious ways to do that is by substituting something else for that flour that doesn’t contain gluten, like maybe chickpeas, and most of those substitutes are going to be lower-carb than flour, so most gluten-free substitutes tend to be fairly low carb, which sometimes makes them handy for people who need to reduce how many carbs they’re eating even if they don’t have any real need to avoid gluten.

Under some circumstances, a car may need to brake suddenly, like if a kid or deer or something runs out into the road, the car in front of you suddenly breaks down, a car suddenly swerves into your lane, etc.

And so you need to be allowing enough space between yourself and the car in front of you and paying attention so that you can stop in case that car does suddenly.

When they assign fault for an accident, it’s usually not 100% one party or the other’s fault. In a case where someone slams on the brakes for legitimately no reason, they’re probably going to be at least partially at fault

But regardless of whether they were or weren’t in the right to stop suddenly, if you were following too closely to stop in time or not paying attention, you’re also at fault because the accident could have been avoided if you had been doing your part.

You can’t control what the cars in front or behind you are doing, but you can control what you are doing, and if there was something you could have reasonably done to avoid the accident but didn’t, you’re going to be at least partially at fault.

FYI

A “fare” is a price you pay to go somewhere, for example a bus fare

A “fair” is an event with vendors and attractions and such.

You might have to pay a fare to enter the fair.

Although classifying anything this administration is doing as some kind of price we have to pay does feel kind of appropriate.

I think you are under the assumption that perhaps everyone critically examines everything they hear rather than just accepts it.

I’m not under that assumption, that’s why I said that part of the puzzle is strong public education so that people learn that they need to be thinking critically about everything

Due to barrier to entry you can’t just challenge whatever company or political movement you want.

Which is where the stronger social safety nets and limits on corporations come in. If I wanted to start up, let’s say my own ISP to compete with the likes of Verizon and Comcast in my area, that idea would be dead in the water. They’re in charge of a ton of infrastructure that should be public, and have shaped regulations so that it would be nearly impossible for anyone else to break into the market here. That just shouldn’t be the case and that would need to be fixed.

And as it is right now, I don’t have the time or money to invest into that sort of project, because I’m a wage slave that needs my current job to feed myself. With better social safety nets like UBI and affordable housing, I could leave or at least step back from this job and be able to dedicate myself to that, attempt to raise funds to do it (which would be easier because people would be better educated to understand that it’s really needed, and more financially secure themselves to be able to help fund it, plus the increased regulations would mean that banks couldn’t hold their purse strings quite so tightly if I needed loans to make it happen) and recruit others to my cause with the other necessary skills and qualifications to actually implement it.

This couldn’t be an overnight change, if everyone got onboard and actively worked towards it, maybe we’d start to see some tangible signs of things shaping up the way I’m envisioning in 2 or 3 generations. I probably won’t get to live in the world I want to create, we just need to change too much about how people think and act. And a whole lot of the steps to get there are basically socialism, regulations, redistributing wealth, social programs, etc. to make sure that people are on a more even footing and educated enough to understand what their responsibilities are and how to effectively use their money so that we can start slowly peeling back some of the regulations to let people make those decisions for themselves.

Hate speech is free speech

So is criticizing the assholes who say it, turnabout it fair play.

There are some cultures, religions, etc. with pretty abhorrent customs that people should be free to criticize, and if you’re not careful with how you craft and apply hate speech laws, people may not be able to speak out against those injustices like they should be.

I’d also rather have the assholes be out in the open about their shitty beliefs. If you’re dumb enough to, for example, fly a Nazi flag at your home, business, on a bumper sticker on your car, etc. that’s convenient for me because I know not to give you business, hire you, stop to help you with a flat tire, give you a friendly wave, etc. If you’re keeping your nazidom in the closet and pretending to be a decent human being, how would I know not to give you the time of day?

I have a tiny bit of a libertarian streak, I’m not a “Big L” libertarian who thinks that roads should be privatized and corporations should be able to do whatever they want, and all of that other bullshit, I like receiving government services when I need them and I’m generally fine with my tax dollars paying for them for others (not that I don’t have some strong criticism about some of what the government does with my taxes)

But I do like individual liberties, and I think that with the right guard rails in place (mostly strong public education and social safety nets to make sure that people can afford to “vote with their wallets” and the ability to make responsible, informed decisions about how they do that, as well as strong limits on corporate power to make sure that there can be alternatives that people can take their money to) capitalism can be a pretty neat and tidy solution to a lot of problems.

In my sort of ideal world if someone is spouting hate speech, they just become a social pariah, no one would want to hire them, no one would buy their products, no one would sell products or services to them, no one would give them a platform or an audience, and when they get up on their soapbox they’d be immediately shouted down off of it by everyone within earshot. And if the local bakery, car dealer ISP, grocery store, energy company, etc. happens to be owned by one of those pieces of shit, it should be within the reach of anyone to start up their own competing company and drive the asshole out of business because given the alternative everyone should want to give their business to them instead of the asshole.

So that exactly is your end goal continually spamming this here on Lemmy?

Let’s assume that there actually is something fishy going on here.

Do you think that a bunch of mostly Linux nerds on the internet, mostly not in the UK, have some sort of investigative power to get to the bottom of this and hold someone responsible?

You’ve been at this for a few months now, clearly whatever goal you have isn’t working and you need to change your tactics.

Maybe start saving money to hire private investigators to look into this.

Or at least start contacting UK authorities about your concerns.

Maybe take some classes on lifesaving to better understand what happens to drowning victims to make a more informed opinion about how likely or unlikely it is that these were simple accidents and explain your reasoning.

What about this in particular is so fascinating to you?

You read it somewhere, so clearly someone has reported it

The issues are how do you

1. Get people to pay attention to those reports and care?
2. Get those people to vote accordingly?
3. Get those elected officials to hold the electric companies accountable?
4. Hold those elected officials accountable when they don’t?
5. Keep those people engaged and doing points 1-4 consistently so that it doesn’t happen again?

I don’t think it needs to be an actual AI to cause a “Chernobyl Moment” maybe almost literally.

We have tech bros and random clueless idiots trying to shoehorn these glorified chat bots into basically everything, and an administration that doesn’t seem interested in putting meaningful guardrails on the technology. What happens when it gets put in charge of something it really shouldn’t and starts to hallucinate?

If it somehow ends up in charge of critical safety systems in a nuclear plant? (Remember that some of these tech bros want to have their own plants to power their data centers)

Or air traffic control and causes multiple crashes? (Pretty sure I’ve already seen that idea being floated)

Maybe every cybertruck goes haywire stuck on self-driving mode and they cause tons of damages and deaths for a few hours until their batteries run out.

Maybe it gets used to route navigation in Google maps and it ends up causing massive gridlock in every major city around the world for a day or two

Perhaps it gets used for identifying vehicles on traffic cameras and automatically issuing citations, but ends up citing everyone on the highway for a week whether or not they actually did anything plus a bunch of cars that it hallucinated before someone catches on. Millions of tickets are issued and need to be sorted out, if anyone actually pays the fines refunds need to be issued, some people maybe get their license revoked and maybe even get arrested because of it and all of that needs to be set straight

If any of these kinds of things happen on a big enough scale, I think that could be a Chernobyl Moment for AI

This will vary a lot of course, but in a lot of cases your local library may not be just your local library.

The library in my town isn’t anything too special, it’s a little small and doesn’t really have a lot of the cool things people talk about libraries having these days (though I am occasionally surprised, they have mobile hotspots you can borrow for example)

But it’s part of a network of libraries from around my county, so I can go check things out of around 30 different libraries and some of those other branches have a lot more cool stuff than mine does

1. Why is this some research? Shouldn’t this just be a it allows or it doesn’t allow?

Research can sometimes be as simple as “I googled it”

But have you ever looked at the full text of HIPAA? Or really just about any law for that matter?

HIPAA is something like 150 pages long, with a lot of specific details about what’s forbidden, permitted, and required under different circumstances. There’s a lot to comb over there.

And it’s written in legalese, and there’s good reason that laws are written that way, but it is often difficult for the average person to parse.

And there’s places where laws reference other laws, and then you may have to go look up the relevant parts of those laws to fully understand what the law you were initially looking up is trying to say.

Point is that laws are complex and difficult for most people to understand, there’s a reason we have professions like lawyers and paralegals whose whole jobs are basically to understand what laws apply under what circumstances. Understanding the nuances involved is rarely as cut-and-dry as looking up the law and seeing it spelled out in plain English that “X is/isn’t legal” and when you see a law explained like that, there’s a good chance that it’s leaving out a lot of nuance about certain circumstances where the opposite might be true.

3. If you are the person answering the phone, why do you care?

Because being gainfully employed is how most people afford basic necessities like food and shelter, and if your boss finds out you’re doing that you’re not going to be keeping that job for very long.

I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper. I got rear-ended which totaled my car. Theoretically it was repairable, but when your car is old enough to vote it doesn’t take much damage for it to get totaled.

There was other damage, but one thing that still pisses me off is that a few hundred bucks of that calculation was my spare tire cover, which had some cracks after the accident, and the insurance company would not let that drop.

It was a plastic shell that is mostly just decorative that covered the spare bolted to the back of my vehicle. I didn’t care that it was cracked, it in no way affected the safety of my vehicle, I would have happily driven that car for another decade with it being cracked, if they slapped 5¢ worth of epoxy on it I would have been more than satisfied, or hurry they could have just thrown the damn thing away and I guess my spare would get a little dirtier that it would if it was covered.

But they had to include that in the repair cost estimate, and since it was kind of an uncommon older car, replacement spare tire covers were scarce and pricey and added a few hundred bucks onto the estimate.

I don’t know if that was the thing that pushed me over the edge to a total loss but it certainly didn’t help

I had a perfectly mechanically sound vehicle that was paid off, and could possibly still be on the road today, and instead I got stuck with a couple years of car payments on a car I liked less than that one.

I’m betting on some language or accent just sort of dropping/mashing syllables together and that pronunciation just kind of catching on or getting passed along to someone else who further mangles to pronunciation until it finally ended up at bike.

Personally, as a Philadelphian, when I say “bicycle” I’m usually not fully saying 3 syllables like “bi-sih-kul” it usually comes out more like “bise-kul”

Take that a step further to maybe something like “bi-kul” and then finally onto “bike”

I’m admittedly in a bit of a bubble, but right now my PC gamer friends are a pretty even split between windows and Linux. Know anyone with a steam deck? They’re gaming on Linux.

No, it’s not quite as user-friendly as windows, and it takes a couple extra steps to get things running, especially if you’re playing non-steam games, but that’s one-time setup stuff then you’re golden. Most games are able to run fine on Linux these days, by some measures more PC games may actually work on Linux than in Windows because sometimes new versions of Windows have broken compatibility issues with older games.

There’s edge-cases to be sure, like some stuff with kernel-level anticheat have issues, but the state of that constantly improving, even the game devs are improving Linux support from their end in a lot of cases.

Anecdotally, I’ve had some cases where games are even running better for me on Linux than they did on Windows. Part of that is that most of the main components of my computer are pushing 15 years old, but I think that alone is a pretty big endorsement for Linux gaming that in some cases it can keep your rig relevant for longer.

When I was about 17 I started training for my first backpacking trip. First shakedown hike I loaded my pack up with about 40 or 50lbs, and I think I lasted about 5 minutes before I went back to my car to lighten my load because I was dying carrying it.

Worked my way up to doing it no problem over the next few months, and for the next few years I hiked and backpacked pretty regularly. I never exactly got in good shape, I had a gut the whole time but I could carry a heavy backpack 10 or occasionally 20 miles a day up and down mountains no problem.

I’ve been a lot more sedentary the last few years just due to being a busy adult with a wonky schedule. I still squeeze in some hikes here or there, but nothing with a heavy pack, and rarely doing more than 10 miles, and usually not going up and down any significant mountains, and I’m definitely not hitting the gym or anything, and I’ve probably packed on about 50lbs of mostly fat since I was 17.

But still, a couple months ago I went backpacking with a friend. Didn’t really do anything in particular to prepare for it, and I still carried about 40-50lbs in my pack

And I did just fine. Definitely huffed and puffed a bit more than when I was in my prime backpacking shape, and I was definitely a bit sore and had some blisters after it, but I was able to hit the trail with a heavy pack and almost no prep and I definitely couldn’t have done that when I was just starting out at 17 years old despite being generally younger, healthier, and more active back then.

So to a pretty great extent, my body definitely “remembers” how to backpack.

Most people do not consciously give a shit.

Most people also subconsciously kind of do. People are going to tend to treat a guy wearing jeans and a hoodie, with bit of stubble differently than they would treat the same guy if he was clean shaven, in a well-tailored suit, than they would if he was in a grimy work clothes than if if he was wearing slacks and a polo… And that’s going to depend on you and the kind of experiences you’ve had and what kind of associations your brain has made with people who look certain ways. You almost certainly have some biases about this even if you don’t realize it.

But those opinions can also be manipulated.

Let’s look at John Fetterman, who is somewhat famous for wearing shorts and a hoodie whenever he can get away with it instead of the suit we normally associate with a politician.

(And let’s pretend it’s 2019, before the stroke and he went mask-off as the piece of shit he’s always kind of been.)

Democrats, overall, tended to look at him as a bit of a breath of fresh air. This wasn’t some well-groomed schmuck in a suit like all the other politicians we’ve come to know and hate. He looks like that guy you see at the local bar or riding the bus with you or out buying something at Walmart at 10pm to fix his leaky toilet because the hardware store is closed. He was sold as someone more like us, who shares our frustrations, and who was going to fight for us, and for a lot of people that worked.

And let’s be real, have you ever looked at the fetterman-looking guy next to you on the bus and thought “yeah, this guy seems like he knows what he’s doing, I’d vote for him?” No, probably not. You probably didn’t think much about him at all. But based on how he dressed, you probably still subconsciously made some assumptions about him, like maybe whether or not he looked like someone you’d get along with, you may not have gotten as far as thinking about what he does for a living, but odds are that if you were asked to guess you probably wouldn’t have said that he’s a politician, you’d probably have guessed he works some sort of normal, dead-end job like the rest of us. If you saw a guy in a suit who wasn’t at a funeral or something, you’d probably be more likely to assume he works in, maybe not politics, but maybe a law firm, or in some sort of finance, that wherever he works he’s probably not the lowest guy on the totem pole, etc.

Republicans, on the other hand, played things up the other way- that he showed disrespect to his office, if he can’t even be bothered to put on a suit and clean himself up a bit, can he really be trusted to do his job as a politician, etc. and that also worked for a lot of people on their side.

But to a lot of those same Republicans, you could also easily spin things differently and they’d eat it up just as readily. If Fetterman ran as a Republican (and as we’re seeing now, he sure could have) the spin machine would probably have been more like:

“This is what a real man looks like. He doesn’t wear skinny jeans or purple hair, he’s wearing shorts, not a skirt. He’s not some out-of-touch politician in a fancy suit from a metropolis like Philly or Pittsburgh, he’s a real working man from Braddock in the heart of pennsyltucky, where people are farmers and loggers and harvest clean-burning natural gas from the same earth that our forefathers worked for generations until those gay commies from the big city tried to take it away. He owns a shotgun and he’s not afraid to point it at the first black guy who cares to run past his house.”

Fast forward a few years, if Fetterman was just entering politics now, saying he’d vote the way he has been, a lot of us would probably assume he’s a Republican, and be outraged that they’re not even trying to hide what they are by trying to install some skinhead-looking motherfucker who’s not even trying to look like a politician, they obviously just want some puppet who will vote for their bullshit.

So those opinions are malleable and can be shaped by the context and what other people are saying about them.

And politicians and the media are aware of that and try to use it to their advantage.

If some talking head never pointed out that Obama was wearing a tan suit, most people probably would never have given it a second thought.

For most of us a suit is a suit and we’re not looking into it a whole lot beyond that. Maybe, maybe we notice if the suit fits well, or is wrinkled, or is a really outdated style or otherwise a particularly unusual style choice, but so few of us wear or are around people in suits often enough that we just don’t have an eye for those kinds of details. We might clock a lighter colored suit as somewhat less formal than a darker colored one, but we’d still think that almost any suit is still appropriately dressy for just about anything but a funeral (in which case the suit should be dark,) a tan suit wouldn’t exactly turn heads in any board room or what-have-you, and previous presidents have worn tan suits without a lick of controversy.

Some people do have stronger opinions about style and what level of formality is appropriate for different occasions, but most of those people aren’t in any position where we’re going to give much weight to their opinions.

But some talking head latched onto that idea one way or another and realized they could spin up a bit of controversy over it, and their base was already primed to hate Obama for any reason they could come up with, so they latched right onto that idea. If it hadn’t been pointed out to them, I doubt anyone would have even noticed.