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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Lots of advice here, some of it good, some of it questionable.

    Two things I’ll amplify from other comments: there’s a reason your therapist missed. It’s could be anything from messing up in their calendar app to a pet or a family member being injured it passing unexpectedly. This falls into the “shit happens” category. You’re allowed to be angry, upset, disappointed, or any combination - your time was wasted. There are generally two outcomes - 1) the miss was unintentional or unavoidable or 2) the therapist is unreliable. Until you find out that it’s case 2, recognize that a couple of wasted hours - in the course of your life- is small potatoes (perspective).

    Another is the concept of “agency”. There are things you can affect in your life, in your relationships, and in the world. There are things you cannot. Nobody can force you to allow yourself to ignore the latter. They will always get under your skin. However, if you find yourself dwelling on those items, try and take a step back and identify things in your life you control or which you can alter/adjust. Finding those areas where you have agency allows you to impart your will, to be a positive force in your life trajectory.

    I won’t even begin to tell you this is easy. It is a process and a way of interacting. Here’s an example - recognize your disappointment with your therapist but take the initiative to reschedule. Taking it a step further, the day before your next meeting, confirm the appointment. It can be a text or email - simple, low contact. If you don’t get a response, escalate near the end if the work day (or first thing the morning of the appointment) with a call. These are things you can do to manage your therapist and your collective schedules. Most professionals (I am one fwiw) will not be offended in the least with good (but not excessive) communication. If they are, or if the therapist still flakes out on you - well, we’re back to case (2) above and you’re on the troublesome path of finding a new / another therapist. BUT - you’ve done all you can in your power to make this a success. Recognize your initiative as a positive, personal attribute you will continue to leverage in your life.

    I wish you the best!


  • You know what’s funny - before I clicked through to see the context, I thought you were replying to a comment I made about the Houthis attacking it ships in the Middle East. We get attacked by terrorists all the time. Lots of people around the world hate Americans because, like most of the colonial powers, we’ve been reading assholes to lot of people. They also hate us because the rules of life that were made up in the name of our imaginary deity conflicts with the version of rules that they made up in the name of their imaginary deity. And we hate them back.

    People are kidnapped and/or killed on a regular basis by “terrorists”. That’s a tragedy to everyone who hold them close. The lack of perspective is thinking that one particular tragedy is somehow larger because of the news coverage afforded.



  • Americans have no sense of perspective. I have friends who were affected by the tower collapse in NY. We sent more service members to die looking for Bin Laden than were killed that day. And more than 10 times a many people die from gun violence in the US every God damned year than died in all four plane strikes. And every one of those other tragedies destroys families and communities.

    It’s so overblown it’s practically a meme to everyone but the boomers and Christian “patriots” who need a way to make people angry about foreigners so they can ignore our home grown violent tendencies.



  • You’ve touched on a great point. The power provided is so low that solar can effectively provide equivalent power in nearly every application except one where the continuous operating environment is pitch black. 15x15mm for 0.0001w is small. For comparison, that’s about 1/6 of the power that falls on a 15x15mm patch in an indoor office (300lux environment with led lighting), out about the same as could be harvested by an efficient solar panel off the same size. You could collect a full days power from this battery (and store it in a 2mm thick li cell behind the panel) in roughly three minutes of sunshine or ten to fifteen minutes on an overcast day.

    There certainly are applications where it would be useful, but most could just as easily be served by a small solar patch and lithium cell or super capacitor.






  • Probably a poor selection, or some who drives a “performance” vehicle for pleasure, or possibly an older vehicle The only real thing to concern yourself with is that there has has not been sitting for a long time (weeks/months), but any popular station will have multiple deliveries a week. Get the cheap stuff. If you feel guilty you can run a cleaner and dryer through the system occasionally, but modern consumer vehicles are pretty well designed to function efficiently on a range of gasoline-based fuels.


  • And, let me tell you, those chairs are worth it. I paid about $1200 for my Leap (I needed an extra tank one for a drafting table desk) and have had it 15 years now. 8-10 hours a day my job is to ensure that my chair does not float away using only my 200lb body mass. Not only is it still in good shape* I never have a sore back even after a long day of ballasting. Prior to owning the Leap I’d go through a $100 office store chair in a couple of years.

    *the seat cushion was a little worn at the edges and the cushion not quite as supple so I replaced that this year.


  • Cheapest city with moderately decent public transit is probably Washington DC. With an average home price comparable to the one I live in without public transit of about $600,000 more than my current home. Even if I didn’t own my truck outright (8 years old, 58k miles) and the price of gasoline doubled, my payback period for 100% free public transit is greater than infinity with a 5% cost of money calculated in.

    It’s a bit like solar. I’ve run the numbers, and had others run the numbers, and the conclusion is that it would require replacing solar panels twice before I made back my investment, even with a 0% loan for the panels and install.

    I’d love to be part of it. I’d love to have European-style public transit. Even in the few places where viable public transit exists in the US, it’s not affordable to move to those places. shrug


  • I weighed anchor despite paying for Prime for years. For one, you never know when they’ll drop a show, and two I prefer all my media in my polled interface.

    I ended up dropping Prime two years ago because Amazon simply can’t hold up their end of their 2 day bargain. I live in a college town and when the school year starts their delivery time stretches to nearly 2 weeks. The rest of the year it fluctuates between 3 and 7 days. That’s not Prime in any way. Of course, without prime, note they wait 3-6 days before even shipping my packages so everything is a week to ten days. OTOH, Walmart - though having a smaller selection- is being me next day service on about 60% of my orders and two day on the rest …for less than half the annual fee.

    My only lament is the weird Chinese electronics/components Amazon sellers stock FBA. It doesn’t take me too long to get to $35, but I do miss the $5 impulse buy of small packs of arduino actuators or pneumatic push connectors when inspiration strikes.