My hobby involves some of the oldest technology we've been able to find evidence of.
It started as spinning with a hand spindle using prepared (combed/carded) wool, and has evolved into looking for interesting fleeces directly from the shepherds (plenty given away or sold cheaply around here), figuring out how best to wash and process (hand comb? drum carder? spin directly from the slightly-opened locks?), working on which settings on my spinnng wheel will produce the twist I'm looking for, and most recently, dyeing using Easter egg dye and vinegar, which is surprisingly effective.
Oh, and of course, knitting and crocheting with the results.
I still use hand spindles to spin while walking, watching my kid on the playground, or on transit.
And of course, you can combine those things sometimes - I've seen cattle munching on grass under solar panels in Baden-Württemberg (state just west of Bavaria).
My 75-year-old, retired construction worker dad’s fingers are nearly useless on capacitive screens; half a century of handling cement apparently has that effect. His deep East Texas accent was still only semi comprehensible to Siri the last time I had him try with my phone.
He recently missed several notifications from his truck’s dealership that the part they ordered was in and ready for installation, because they sent text messages that he didn’t read, instead of ever calling and leaving a message when no one responded to the texts. I’m terrified that there’s going to be a doctor’s office sometime that does the same, with more serious consequences.
He’s fine flying as long as one of us can buy the ticket for him and he just needs his ID at the airport; I dread the day airlines start requiring their stupid apps.
This happens to everyone's fingers to some extent because the fingertips dry out as you age. It's a huge source of frustration for elderly folks since it adds to the confusion around using touch interfaces. My family members have had some success moistening their fingers with a wet paper towel periodically as they use their devices, though of course that is impractical on the go.
> I’m terrified that there’s going to be a doctor’s office sometime that does the same, with more serious consequences.
they can send scheduling info, appt reminders, etc via SMS but (1) they must allow opt out, and (2) they cannot send medical info this way — that's where HIPAA requires encrypted "patient portal" messaging because SMS can be intercepted or accessed by others.
That's good to know - I'll tell him to check that with his current doctors' offices, and make sure that he makes it clear for any new practices he visits that he only does phone calls and postal mail.
Do iphones not have "increase touch sensitivity" as a setting? Thats all I had to do for my dad for him to be able to easily use it again, on a samsung though.
There are also phones with buttons again, the unihertz titan 2 elite looks good btw. Or Clicks addon keyboards.
you can buy finger sleves on eg Amazon and any other shop. They're super cheap and work well / entirely resolves that issue
He probably doesn't want it, because he probably just doesn't want to interface with the phone ... Which is fine, I'm just pointing out that the quoted issue has an easy solution.
This is pretty <strikethrough>crazy</strikethrough> blasphemous. Not even Jesus Himself is said to know, and I can't think of a more arrogant, literally blasphemous thing than putting oneself in God's shoes, trying to "make Armageddon happen," like Hegseth and Company are doing.
Agreed. And yet one hears not a peep from "mainstream" Christians about this.
It's my contention that everyday Christians don't push back because they're ok with the general principles of make-believe involved in their faith. Because they're conditioned to here fire and brimstone sermons, they don't question the big picture of "are these people crazy and does their faith significantly factor in to that?"
Apparently 7/10 Americans believe that angels are real. FFS, they should believe Spiderman is real because we've seen so much proof of his existence, just like with angels.
GP was likely referring to J. Marion Sims, who tested operations on enslaved women who couldn’t meaningfully consent (in an era when there was little or no anesthesia), with some women being operated on over a dozen times, performed ovary removal and clitorectomies on women at the behest of their fathers or husbands to treat “hysteria”, and was a Confederate sympathizer who spent the war over in Europe raising money and seeking diplomatic recognition for it.
He also developed several important surgical techniques and operated on cancer patients at a time when that was considered an absolute waste of time and resources, and that latter thing caused him to lose his position at the hospital he had founded, after which he started the first cancer hospital.
A quick check of OBI (our main home-improvement chain) shows that I can get that 800w "balcony" plug-and-go system for 300-600 EUR depending on the exact panels and inverter I want, and it's all pre-approved. I have fill in a simple, free form online announcing that I've done so or am planning to, and I'm now technically an energy seller - my local utility pays some for power fed back into the network (not nearly the rate they charge for delivering power, but better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick). If I don't want to accept 0.08 EUR/kWH, I'm free to plug in a battery for any excess. Our base load when I have my work computer and monitor on during the day is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300w, so I think this would work out well for us. I need to get off my bum and do it.
Shockingly unbureaucratic for Germany.
There is, as one could imagine, somewhat more burden for larger systems that require the involvement of someone who is actually an electrician, but I don't want my neighbors to be able to DIY fire hazards.
I have rejected much of my Southern Baptist upbringing - I am pleased that the church I’m now a member of is accepting and affirming of various sexual and gender identities, I have a wide variety of non-Christian friends who I feel no need to convert, and I say a prayer of thanks on a regular basis that I was able to get an abortion without any questions when I had an ectopic pregnancy and support anyone else’s decision about what to do with their own body.
I am right with my late grandfather, a Baptist preacher, on the subject of gambling after watching people back home constantly checking their phones during the college bowl games and periodically sighing and cussing over the performance of teams they had never cared about before.
Between the 24/7 gambling and the easy answers machine being in their pockets (“well, ChatGPT says…”), the resulting brain rot hurts my soul.
The ones who consider Rome to be holy aren’t, generally speaking, the ones to worry about (at least in this matter). Catholicism considers US Evangelical-style Rapture theology to be heretical, and Catholic soldiers would likely find being pressed by commanders to consider it just as offensive as atheists and other non-Christians would.
As I understand it, there are parts of France that spent time as parts of Germany and are still somewhat culturally German that do church tax in a similar way - much of what was Alsace-Lorraine (Elsaß-Lothringen).
To be clear: (almost) no one is forced to pay church tax in Germany - only members of the churches that have an agreement with the government to collect it on top of income tax have to pay it, and you can choose to leave those churches. For Protestants ("evangelisch"), that's usually not as big of a deal as it is for Catholics who still believe; there are plenty of non-church-tax-collecting Protestant churches around the country, including the one I'm a member of.
"Almost": there were many couples with very unequal incomes in which the non/lower-earner would stay in the church so that the family would still get the various services (baptisms, weddings, preferential admission to church-affiliated schools, etc) while the higher earner would "leave" (on paper), leaving the family paying far less in church tax. That loophole was closed - if the higher earner isn't a member of another church collecting church tax, they can be required to pay church tax to their spouse's church. I'm not sure this is still in effect, but it was for a while.
Humans and dogs: how many dog owners have to store their dog’s food in a bin the dog can’t get into? How many can’t leave more than one meal’s worth of food out at a time?
Until the past century or so, “eat up the available food while available” was generally a plus for survival for most populations - a person who could keep some of that excess around on them was more likely to survive a famine than their leaner peers.
Even my grandmothers (born in early 1920s Texas) remembered not always getting as much to eat as they wanted as children, and it wasn’t because their mothers were afraid of them getting fat - there just wasn’t any extra food. One of them likely did have a caloric deficit a few times here and there around age 10-12, and it showed: she was rather small.
One of my grandfathers lied his way into the Army at 16 just to be one less mouth for his mother to have to feed.
We’re really not that far separated from “eat all the food” being a health benefit.
It started as spinning with a hand spindle using prepared (combed/carded) wool, and has evolved into looking for interesting fleeces directly from the shepherds (plenty given away or sold cheaply around here), figuring out how best to wash and process (hand comb? drum carder? spin directly from the slightly-opened locks?), working on which settings on my spinnng wheel will produce the twist I'm looking for, and most recently, dyeing using Easter egg dye and vinegar, which is surprisingly effective.
Oh, and of course, knitting and crocheting with the results.
I still use hand spindles to spin while walking, watching my kid on the playground, or on transit.
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