BubbleMonkey

And a little light ball, like a reflection off a watch face, that sometimes appears that just randomly moves around and, importantly, can be “caught” (as in has a physical presence, sometimes).

Oh, yeah no it’s not the cable, it’s the receiving port on the device itself. Sorry for the confusion :)

TIL my external hard drives use micro 3b. I didn’t realize that was a standard.. figured it was a proprietary to prevent using the wrong cable..

I’ve had it with shoddy c ports on various devices, including a phone (thankfully had wireless charging also). The connection pin thingy breaks off pretty easily, and causes the same issue you described for several weeks/months ahead of the actual breakoff, where it has to be in exactly the right position (and wiggling it to hit the right position obviously exacerbates the problem).

I’ve actually bought some magnetic chargers for the more fragile electronics, so I never have to put strain on the port..

What I don’t get is how anyone can sleep with anything other than blackout curtains. Even the ambient light from street lights and stuff is too bright for me.

I mean I know people do it, I just don’t understand how.

I lived in Houston during hurricane ike back in like 2008 or whatever, and it wasn’t a super strong storm or anything, but power was out for over a week where I was in Pasadena. My downstairs neighbor and I built a bonfire on our apartment sidewalk to cook up all the freezer/fridge stuff that was thawing or going bad, and invited everyone around to partake. The cops showed up because of the fire, saw it was contained, told us to be careful, took an offered beer, and shot the shit for 20 min.

I remember going with the neighbors to get bottled water, I’m still not really sure how they heard about it, and it was an all day event to stand around in a shade-free line waiting for the tiny aid package. Fruit, bread, and a case of water. Not like we had anything else to do, but still.

Frankly I don’t blame people for getting power where they can. Utilities there really are absolute nonsense. And with smart phones being a literal lifesaver now, in addition to just providing -something- to do while power is out, I am not actually terribly surprised.

Iirc part of the reason for sterile releases is to shift the populations. So for example they release them for malaria-carrying sub-populations but leave intact clean populations to fill in the niche.

There’s also some experimentation with releasing fully fertile specimens that have a specific gut bacteria which makes them unable to carry some of the diseases impacting humans, and is passed down to the young.

I got a full set of silverware for backpacking that collapses down to about the size of those folding reader glasses (plus a little hard storage case just like the glasses). It’s a spoon, fork, knife, and chopsticks. I think I paid $6 for the set. Not super high quality, since the focus was on weight and utility, but definitely does the job.

I don’t use it much anymore, but it was great for lunch at work, and is good when traveling (staying at hotels and getting takeout - no plastic trash!). I mostly keep it in my overnight backpack so it’s available whenever I’m not home and I can’t forget it.

I never said it wasn’t low. It’s low, but 14 million people is still a lot of actual people, people just like you, under a different circumstance.

14 million people looking for work means there are a lot of potential scabs, because our social safety nets are fucking laughable. They don’t even exist for a lot of people, such as those with no work history yet (can’t get unemployment if you’ve never been employed, for example, and if you only have a couple years employment history, unemployment in a lot of places doesn’t cover shit).

Having been one of the underemployed, you often take what you can get because you don’t have the luxury of finding the “right job”.

Or you and your family become homeless.

Those are basically the options these days and I’m not willing to say that’s not the case just because unemployment (which does not include underemployment, nor those who left the job market) is low by some economists standards, because it absolutely is for millions of people.

So sure, many of those people might be looking for “the right job”, but in the interim, they find and take “the right now” job. And that might be scabby.

All good friend; we do agree and it really sucks that it’s so difficult to get people to support their own best interest if it costs them in a tangible way (even if the benefits are exponentially more impactful).

This is an education thing and we are fighting a lot of anti-union propaganda, here and everywhere. We see people lose their jobs over joining.

Who can blame them not wanting to sign up?

Union leaders need to fight fire with -water-. They need an unyielding stream of information to fight the fanned flames of disinformation and anti-union propaganda going out to perspective members, and that’s… unfortunately just not generally practical.

I don’t really have a solution, I’m sorry, but I am absolutely behind yours and every other union. I will support you all with every breath in my body, for whatever that’s worth.

Ahh, I wish it were that easy, but 4.1% of 350 million is like 14 million people (I’m willing to accept that my math is wrong but I double checked it 4 times including using the internet.. and idk if I mathed it wrong or if that’s just an accurate number… I really kinda hope I’m wrong..)

That’s a lot of people either way.. and you can’t fault them for looking out for themselves or their family.

I’m really sorry to hear that. Genuinely. We all need better.

I am a firm believer in unions and collective action, despite never having the opportunity to be part of a union myself. And like they don’t have a lot of power here.. they got most of it removed by law years and years ago.

But it doesn’t stop us trying at least, I suppose. And the general vibe is to support the unions. I’m sure there are tons of scabs here, but.. they aren’t winning social favor being scabs at least.

Even if they are largely toothless, it’s better to be toothless together; A pack of starving wolves with one tooth each is enough to do a lot of damage if they attack together often enough.

The real problem is getting them to be part of the pack. I mean each wolf is toothless anyway, so getting them to join the pack is super important for their survival too.