• 2 Posts
  • 208 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: January 16th, 2024

help-circle
  • We’ve been getting tons of rain here, but we are still in an outdoor water ban.

    Between 8-5, no lawn watering (except golf courses and businesses), no washing your car (except at a car wash), no watering your ornamental plants (except for farms and garden stores). No filling your pool (even a kiddie pool) or running through the sprinkler (except at the water park).

    It’s not because of drought, but because one of our water sources is offline due to elevated PFAS, so they are blending water from other reservoirs, and those sources combined can’t make up the extra demand.

    And also protecting businesses by making sure we can’t wash our own cars or lollygag through our own sprinklers. Gotta pay for that privilege.

    We have to pay…for the privilege…of lollygagging through our sprinklers.

    I get the lawn part. I hate lawns. But my yard is also a barren mud pit. I gotta put something down. Trying for mostly clover and other plants that don’t need a ton of water, but they still need to stay moist to germinate and start off, and that’s real tough to do if you can’t water it during the hottest parts of the day. I don’t really care what grows as long as it holds the dirt together and it’s comfortable to walk on barefoot.


  • Detroit failed because of automation and off-shoring. Things that could have been repaired or prevented politically, sure. But not directly caused by policies based in bigotry and ignorance.

    If any correlation can be made, it’s from white-flight. Which would be caused by Detroit’s massive loss of jobs and Florida’s massive loss of land. But white flight, imo, is the reaction, not the catalyst, of its downfall.




  • This is bad practice.

    More accurately it should look something like this:

    # Load sys library for exiting with status code
    import sys
    
    def sayHelloWorld(outPhrase: str="Hello World"):
        # Main function, print a phrase and return NoneType
        print(outPhrase)
        return None
    
    if __name__=="__main__":
        # Provide output and exit cleanly when run from shell
        sayHelloWorld()
        sys.exit(0)
    else:
        # Exit with rc!=0 when not run from shell
        sys.exit(1)
    






  • Yeah I rented a Mustang Mach-E and drove between Houston, Austin, Dallas, and back to Houston, without very much charger anxiety. And not being confined to a slow charger…except on the way back to the airport. The first charger I found was a slow charger and all the fast ones were occupied. But still had plenty of charge to find the next station and get it high enough to return


  • JasonDJ@lemmy.ziptoxkcd@lemmy.worldxkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    11 days ago

    Suburbs are intentionally designed to not be walkable.

    To get to the neighbor behind my house, without cutting anybody’s yard, I have to walk about a mile. We aren’t far. His daughters play with my sons through our shared fence.

    And that’s a modest example. Plenty of cul de sacs that are “close” to the main street, as a crow flies but a lot further if you’re an East Asian Chinchilla Monkey running as fast as you can.







  • Consider the difference between “would do” and “could do” to be the same as “will do” and “can do”, respectively.

    One implies action, the other implies capability.

    There’s also “should”, which implies permission.

    Consider, also, the progress of learning Python (programming language):

    1. Could I do this in Python?
    2. I would do this in Python.
    3. I shouldn’t do this in Python.

    Edit to add: Would, could, and should are usually considered future-tense. But add “have” and it’s past-tense…“I would have done that”


  • It’s not racism, it’s racism+.

    White caste is totally okay with accepting certain people from black caste, or Asian caste, or Latino caste.

    It’s not as black and white as it was a couple generations ago. Irish and Italians are white now. Far more accepting.

    We still have deep psychological instincts to be more distrustful of others. But who is an “other”, we’ve long since learned, is defined by upbringing, not a certain distinct quality. We learn who the others are by experiences, and the words and actions of those we respect (peers and elders).

    We now push our identities into several different buckets…race is only one, gender and sexuality another, mental capabilities, music tastes, vehicle choice, job, whatever. We still segmentize and judge, just with extra steps.