I’m not really a jewelry-wearer, and certainly not an expensive jewelry wearer

That said, I think it’s kind of fun. If I were the kind of person to wear jewelry, I might consider this. I’m a pretty hands-on, DIYer type of guy, I find myself fucking around with hose clamps pretty often, and hell, I might even say I have a bit of affection for them, I’ve solved a lot of problems with them.

That price seems steep to me, but I feel that way about most jewelry. I don’t know what material it’s made out of or how big it is, maybe that’s a fair price for how much silver or whatever is in it, maybe it’s horribly inflated.

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.

I guess I like the plaid tops more than the hooters tank tops, but otherwise it’s just standard chain restaurant food. Nothing too special.

For me, most importantly I lay in bed with my eyes closed those are the two big prerequisites to sleep. If you’re getting out of bed or keeping your eyes open to use your phone or whatever, of course you’re not gonna get to sleep.

From there, what I do doesn’t matter much. I think about stuff, make up a story, just imagine a bunch of swirly lights and patterns, doesn’t much matter. Keep your eyes closed and eventually sleep happens.

I think these are actually the balls from “balls out” when the engine is going full speed the balls swing way out and are spinning around.

IIRC, “balls to the wall” refers to ball-shaped knobs on the throttle levers of a lot of aircraft. To go fast you push that lever as far as it goes “to the wall”

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?

As an admin, you should probably work on understanding the difference between someone asking the community for advice and someone reaching out to you directly as an admin.

It might just be my regional (Philadelphia) accent, or even just how I personally speak

But I do feel like there is a very subtle difference in how I pronounce scent, cent, and sent.

Like so subtle I absolutely wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t specifically listening for it, and wasn’t even aware of it until just now because I never had a reason to even think about it.

In scent, I sort of stretch out the “s” a little longer, and the “e” feels a little more nasal

With “cent” the “c” becomes almost like a “ts” sound, and the “e” feels a little higher-pitched than in “sent” and I also kind of hit the “t” a little harder which kind of makes the word feel a little shorter and punchier.

Again, this is all “very” subtle, not something most people could probably pick up on at all in actual conversation, but sitting around talking to myself at midnight and really thinking about it I can pick up a little bit of a difference.

The way you described the lady. No nothing wrong with it.

If that’s the actual phrasing he used, I think it was pretty weird. Not necessarily offensive, just weirdly specific in a strangely technical way. Something like “the small Asian lady” would get the point across while sounding less like you’re some kind of robot or alien trying to classify her as a research specimen.

And the bit about either being from an Asian country or having Asian parents is kind of weird, for all OP knows her family might have been in the country for generations. People have a tendency to view people of Asian descent as a sort of perpetual foreigner, and that phrasing kind of feels like it’s playing into that.

“East Asian” also feels needlessly specific. How likely is it that there’s other women who otherwise fit the exact same description but are of, say, southeast Asian descent that OP needs to differentiate her from? I also think it’s probably the kind of distinction a lot of people just won’t understand. At least in the US I know I’ve had to explain what I’m talking about when I’ve talked about southeast Asia for example, a lot of people just don’t think that much about geography, let alone know about the cultures and physical characteristics of people from different regions.

It just all feels like a weird way to describe someone. Personally, I wouldn’t take it as rude, but it would definitely make me think that the person saying it is pretty odd and socially awkward.

I am not, on general principle, opposed to it. I do believe that there are some people who pose significant danger to others with no hope of rehabilitation, which basically leaves 2 options - locking them up forever, possibly in solitary if they’re dangerous enough, or killing them, and in many cases I think the later may be more humane.

But, and I’m not going to go into all of the details because there’s a lot, but I have basically no confidence in any of the systems we have in place to use that power in a fair way that can’t be abused, and I’m skeptical that such a system could ever be implemented

So in actual practice I oppose it.

Let’s not forget about Springfield Township (Montgomery County, PA)

Or, for that matter, Springfield Township (Bucks County, PA)

EDIT: for good measure because your link didn’t play nice with some anti tracking extensions I’m using Springfield Township (Delaware County, PA)

I make no guarantee that there aren’t others. I can’t be bothered to look.

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 have an essential job and basically had to work as normal during COVID

I already commute at kind of weird times and basically never have to deal with much traffic anyway, but with almost everything else shut down and no one else on the road I averaged about 1mpg better than I usually do just from not having to deal with even that little bit of traffic.

And that was basically only for my commute into work, I go home at about 3AM, so even on a busy night I see maybe a dozen other cars on the road, so nothing at all changed there.

Just due to where I live and work and the hours I work, it’s probably never going to make much sense for me to take public transit, I’d pretty much be the only person ever riding that bus or train or whatever at those times (and there probably wouldn’t be too many taking that particular route at other times for that matter) and the nature of my job means I’ll probably always have to work at least part time in-person, but getting everyone who possibly can to WFH and/or take public transit means less traffic for me.

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”

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.

I sometimes borrow my dad’s truck, a '93 ranger, when my car is in the shop or I need to move something big

And the headlights on that thing are terrible, after driving around in more modern vehicles it feels like they barely light up the road in front of you. It’s actually almost a little scary to drive at night sometimes.

It does have halogen bulbs, not significantly different from the ones in my own car, but the way the reflectors and such are designed around those bulbs is clearly very different,.