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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 23rd, 2023

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  • Birds. I guess it doesn’t feel that niche because I know lots of people are into bird watching, but it’s my thing.

    There’s this app called Merlin that I swear to god is magic. You can just open your mic and it’ll listen to and identify all of the birds you’re hearing.

    And it really works! For the longest time, it kept identifying a Carolina Wren in my yard, and I thought it was just wrong. I’ll be damned if I didn’t eventually see that wren, and now it frequents the bird feeder I set up on my deck. It’s just my shyest bird. But the app knew it was out there.

    I’ve learned so much about birds and identifying them from using the app. And I’ve gotten really into how, when, and what to feed birds because I want to find more different kinds, and I just love watching them on the deck interacting. I call it my cat TV haha

    I’m also learning a ton about owls specifically over on the superbowl@lemmy.world community. Did you know there are owls in the desert and owls in Jamaica? Come over to the community where @anon6789@lemmy.world makes the most amazing educational posts. It’s a lot of fun.








  • All of the Apollo missions, actually, including 13. In fact, Apollo 13 marks the farthest distance human beings have ever been from Earth because of the modified trajectory they had to use in order to get back to Earth faster with their damaged spacecraft.

    But Apollo 13 also is the only moon mission where there was never a single individual alone in the ship when it went dark behind the moon. (On all other missions, the Command Module Pilot remained in the ship while the other two landed on the surface, so for the duration of that time, they were doing solo orbits that took them through the silent shadow of the moon.



  • Yes, Massachusetts. I have a dual fuel heat pump with natural gas backup installed in 2020, so it’s a newer system. And I have one heat pump mini split in the least energy efficient, but most used room in my house (large, high ceilings, exterior walls on three sides, and a skylight).

    The first couple of years I noticed when it got just below freezing, the central heat pump seemed to struggle to keep up. Then this year I replaced my windows and got new wall insulation in both of the main bedrooms and bathrooms (previous insulation was original from the 1960s and shredded to bits with huge gaps.)

    After those improvements, I’ve been running my heat pump down to 20⁰F/-7⁰C so far without any issues at all. I’m excited to see how cold we can get and this system still keep up. I am still supplementing my one large room with the mini split, but that’s mostly because all my plants are in here, so I keep this room warmer than 68⁰F/20⁰C.



  • Bullshit

    I’m born and raised in Appalachia, my daddy worked in the coal mines and drove an 18 wheeler. Certified redneck enough that I confuse the shit out of my New England neighbors.

    I went out and marched with striking nurses when Bernie put out the call, and I’ve never voted Republican in my entire fucking life.

    OP, you need to learn what a redneck is.




  • To me, it’s all about rational return on investment providing economic incentives to achieve what we want to achieve.

    My favorite example to explain what I mean is my own personal health insurance. I have a chronic medical condition that requires constant medication, frequent visits to specialists, and expensive medical tests and procedures. There is simply zero chance that I will ever pay enough in a monthly premium to cover what I cost. Meaning I am always a net financial loss for a private, for-profit insurance company.

    This gives a private company every incentive in the world to obstruct and deny my care in hopes that I’ll get frustrated and give up, or maybe even die and get off their books forever.

    The government, on the other hand, has a positive financial incentive to keep me healthy. If I am healthy, I am working, paying taxes, buying goods and services that contribute to the economy, and hopefully contributing something beneficial to my community. Only the government (acting as a proxy for “society”) naturally profits from insuring my healthcare.

    This is why I believe we should have fully socialized medical care. Because there are some specific things that only the government has natural positive economic incentives that align with what is beneficial for the general public.

    Whatever those things are, they should be socialized. And generally those things are basic life sustaining things like food, housing, medicine, education, utilities.

    I’m fine with privatized capitalism in a very restricted, heavily regulated niche form. But all the basic necessities should be socialized.


  • Not true really. Wayfair is just a drop shipping company, in a similar vein as Amazon. Except with actual customer service. You can search specifically for solid wood furniture, so you don’t end up with cheap MDF toy furniture, their reviews are accurate and not gamed, and their search has robust filtering so you can drill down and find exactly what you want. I buy a lot of shit from Wayfair that is definitely better quality than Ikea.

    That doesn’t mean their CEO isn’t a labor abusing bag of dicks. I still think they should unionize.