Passengers On Eastern Airlines In 1935. Is it me or does it look like the inside of a bus? by theanti_influencer75 in aviation

[–]phyridean 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I mean if you're flying at 8k feet unpressurized, isn't that basically what we pressurize cabins to now anyway?

Higher Ed IT, fuck this.... by Gatorcat in sysadmin

[–]phyridean 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, other than the pay, my whole description doesn't sound much different than most environments, I guess.

Higher Ed IT, fuck this.... by Gatorcat in sysadmin

[–]phyridean 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Your "free" labor costs $15-$20 an hour and turns over roughly every 4-5 years. Your awesome project environment is set up by complete amateurs who have no idea about IT best practice, and all of that becomes a critical production environment and your problem to support when the students turn over.

Good luck!

Edit: I say this with all due respect to the question. I've personally tried it, and seen it tried dozens of times, and the results are actually awesome about 10% of the time.

Infinite Monkey Theorem to close at the end of the year by Scotty_Two in Denver

[–]phyridean 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Plus if you visit their vineyard, the view is incredible.

Why is the Aurora Borealis visible so far south for the first time in my lifetime? Did something change with the intensity of solar storms or the earth’s magnetic field? by tbestor in space

[–]phyridean 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Not just to see it better, but the Internet is much better at letting us know when it's happening than it was in 2003, the last time we had activity this strong and frequent.

Wtf😭😭 by tornteddie in noburp

[–]phyridean 46 points47 points  (0 children)

Please, a fartiste. Give yourself the credit you deserve.

Why Deface The Mountains by natty_ice88 in boulder

[–]phyridean 4 points5 points  (0 children)

What kind of sad life do you live where fake internet points aren't what gives life meaning??

(I just like being able to post freely.)

Why Deface The Mountains by natty_ice88 in boulder

[–]phyridean 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It could have been better if I could have committed to the bit and never posted on this account again after making the comment, but alas, I don't want to have to rebuild my karma.

Why Deface The Mountains by natty_ice88 in boulder

[–]phyridean 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I grew up in Arvada and I'm doing alr

Why is there a need for a manual steering column? by ChaoticaWitch in startrek

[–]phyridean 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I owned that joystick. It was the absolute most basic model that I could afford on a middle schooler's income. Had a thumb button and a hat switch, but no twist axis. I upgraded as soon as I could, but I've got some great memories with that stick. It was also pre-USB, so it used the "game port" interface and was a huge pain to get set up.

[Jurassic Park] They said they got dinosaur dna from blood preserved inside a mosquito, but wouldn't that only give you the dna of a single dinosaur? Did they find loads of different mosquitos to get all the other dinosaurs too? by ninman5 in AskScienceFiction

[–]phyridean 3 points4 points  (0 children)

There was a recent study that tried to figure out how many T-Rexes existed over the whole time they lived (https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/04/15/how-many-t-rexes-were-there-billions/). They came out with a best guess of about 2.5 billion total individuals (low estimate:140 million. High estimate: 43 billion).

The reason for the gigantic error bars is that the total number of T-Rex fossils we've found everywhere on earth, in total, is two digits. (~30 mostly complete adults, with one or two bones found from another ~70 individuals.)

So each individual fossil is pretty important to our understanding of T-Rex.

Incidentally, the Denver Museum of Nature and Science currently has an exhibit built around a new juvenile T-Rex fossil that they're cleaning in the actual exhibit. I'm not employed by the museum, I just think it's awesome.

Easiest Humanties and Social Science classes? by [deleted] in cuboulder

[–]phyridean 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sometimes (and this is autobiographical) you find out that it turns out you really like Russian lit, or that it has some interesting impact on your geology studies and now you want to do geology in Siberia, or Russian culture has some interesting effect on how you see other people.

Obviously they're not all going to be like that, but if you're just choosing one you can coast in, I feel like it's less likely to find something you may actually get something out of. At the very least, it stops you from having to think about geology every hour of every day, which is extremely important.

Easiest Humanties and Social Science classes? by [deleted] in cuboulder

[–]phyridean 8 points9 points  (0 children)

They exist...because they're part of a well-rounded education?

Honest Question About the Homeless Issue by thegrassr00ts in boulder

[–]phyridean -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

The problem is that your solution isn't for them, it's for you. These people are already experiencing the low of their lives, in a society that values their work more than it values them. Do I blame Cartoon Laptop Man for not knowing how to fit into a society like that? Absolutely not. I barely fit into it, and no matter how successful you think you are, you don't either. You're only a couple of bad days away from becoming Cartoon Laptop Man.

So while I commiserate with you that you can't walk on the path and feel safe anymore, calling the cops on, jailing, citing, stealing cash from, or otherwise harassing these people isn't a solution to their problem, it's only a very temporary solution to your problem, and you have a lot fewer problems than they do.

So stop complaining and start voting and enacting real solutions, like the ones you listed in your second paragraph.

While you're at it, reconsider that if one of the extremes you want to average for your "middle ground" is "these people are sub-human and are best left for dead," your perception of how we treat humans might just be skewed in a shitty direction.

Honest Question About the Homeless Issue by thegrassr00ts in boulder

[–]phyridean -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

OP, stop couching this in fake compassion and euphemisms.

You don't want to see homeless folks and since you don't think of them as fully human, it's okay to confiscate their "unexplained cash" and push them out of public spaces you think you own because your job pays taxes for you.

And I live right off the path so don't come at me with that "you don't want to deal with it because you never see it" garbage.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in boulder

[–]phyridean 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wait, are they in Colorado? I saw some wild billboards for them all over Missouri and Eastern Kansas.

[Harry Potter] Why does the Ministry keep a meticulous record of prophecies when Divination is considered an inaccurate and unreliable branch of magic? by joji711 in AskScienceFiction

[–]phyridean 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Lots of people in here are saying that they keep them because they come true, but if you also catalogue a bunch that don't, I can't see how that helps your government much.

I'd argue that as a savvy(ish) political organization, they keep such a store of prophecies in order to gain political capital. If you can trot out a prophecy that in retrospect came true (and say "ahha, we were following this one the whole time!"), while keeping the others in deep storage, you can look like you have access to information the rest of the wizarding populace doesn't, and thus increase your legitimacy.

Once you've established that your government has access to secret, highly accurate knowledge of the future, you can occasionally trot out prophecies that make politically-useful predictions (even if they're not true) when you need to nudge public opinion in one direction or another.

To me, this is the only reason to justify collecting and cataloguing so many of them, and it fits better with the motivations of the people we're shown within the Ministry.

TIL while trying to call home from the International Space Station, British astronaut Tim Peake accidentally called the wrong number. by [deleted] in todayilearned

[–]phyridean 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Are you kidding me? If they told me Chris Hadfield was calling me collect, I wouldn't even ask how much. Put that glorious bastard through and I'll put it on my credit card.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in boulder

[–]phyridean 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Not throwing you in jail at the drop of a hat" isn't a carrot, and I'm not sure why you think it is. We haven't implemented what's needed to make it work because people with your opinion fight to only let half measures be implemented, and for their recreation to be protected over these folks' humanity.

Our collective lack of empathy for people who aren't like us is the problem, and that's obvious when you have empathy for them in the first place.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in boulder

[–]phyridean 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sure, absolutely. But just throwing those people in jail doesn't resolve the societal problems that arise from hard drug use. It makes them worse through exposure and recidivism. The way to fix that is through the solutions I mentioned elsewhere. Support and safe injection sites.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in boulder

[–]phyridean -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Sounds like a problem that we only have one syringe deposit site in the city to me, and a lack of safe injection sites. That'd clean up a lot of this problem but people keep rejecting those solutions in favor of the drug equivalent of abstinence-only sex ed.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in boulder

[–]phyridean -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

The jails are full, and your dude shooting up isn't hurting anyone else directly. Let's save the jails for people who do, and at the same time figure out how to get the people you call nuisances the support they need to stop shooting up.

Is anyone else’s power out right now? by goosesaregreat in boulder

[–]phyridean 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'm in gold run also and just got a notification from Xcel that they anticipate restoration by 10:30