jadero

Yes, it was very badly constructed. I had to read it a couple of times to decode it, and I have the advantage of having graded essays :)

That would have been awesome, but I suspect that it was just the arms and that it was powered in some way, hence “pendulum-like”.

Gauges measured stress on the metacarpals during punches and slaps on padded-dumbbell targets created with a pendulum-like device.

I take “a pendulum-like device” to mean they suspended either the arms or the targets and swung them to a collision.

Gauges measured stress on the metacarpals during punches and slaps on padded-dumbbell targets created with a pendulum-like device.

I take “a pendulum-like device” to mean they suspended either the arms or the targets and swung them to a collision.

Oh that’s not good. Obviously, I’ve chosen to allow js, but basic stuff should work without it.

Heh. I gave up trying to figure out voting a long time ago. I find it both fascinating and disturbing that there are people out there who see anything I write as worthy of a dowvote. :)

Anyone who hasn’t followed that link needs to do so now! It’s got human cadaver arms manipulated with fishing line and guitar tuning knobs. It’s got a link to an article titled “Your Face: Punching Bag or Spandrel?”

You can’t possibly find a better way to spend 10 minutes!

Same with my dad. He said that the military liked red/green colour blindness for spotting camouflaged stuff.

Yeah, I’ve started thinking that, too, so I push back every chance I get. As an actual boomer, I think it’s my prerogative, in a kind of “get off lawn” way. :)

Really? Every boomer I know, including me, was an absolute pothead. Many still indulge regularly.

Yes, I agree. My perception of hobby communities, at least the online ones, is that there is an inordinate amount of time spent trying to figure out how to monetize what used to be seen as a primarily recreational activity.

I know that some of it is self defense, in the sense that some hobbies are expensive enough to stretch a budget to the breaking point.

Some of it is likely due to incomes not keeping up with the cost of living and, of course, some people are budding entrepreneurs.

But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who feel that it’s not reasonable to have a hobby that has no income potential.

I’ve tried to explain this to people before, without success. I’m starting to think that most people have no concept of what it means to be passionate about something, so they go through life with nothing more than pastimes to keep their minds off reality.

For me it’s building boats. I’ve only ever built 2, the last one 20 years ago. But the amount of time and money I spent on magazines and plans both before and after those actual builds dwarfs the time and money it would take to run a lemmy instance. And now I’ve got 3 years and several thousand dollars into building and equipping a shop so I can build another one.

I’ll throw out a few bucks here and there because it feels like the right thing to do, but I actually want hobbyists, people with a passion for it, running the show. After all, that is what made reddit work. All the passionate mods doing their thing as a hobby.

Perhaps, but my personal experience was that Usenet was well on its way to being a dumpster fire of trolls, creeps, and spammers before the Web 2.0 technologies were more than a glimmer in anyone’s eyes.

Everything is about community. Usenet all but disappeared because it got overrun with selfish assholes. It’s not that hard for a community to be killed by its own membership. There are many examples both online and off.

Moderation isn’t the answer, or at least not a complete answer, because Reddit brought to the fore that moderators can be selfish assholes, too. If I understand what’s behind certain recent defederation decisions, those selfish assholes are already here.

Explicit federation (and defederation) is an interesting twist on decentralized, but it is unlikely to be a panacea.

I think we’re all running the Red Queen’s Race. Some of us are forever doomed to run away from the selfish assholes and the selfish assholes are forever doomed to chase us in the hopes of finding a place to showcase themselves. They are not and never will be happy to just be selfish assholes in their own spaces because that would be neither selfish nor asshole-ish.

Yes, and thanks!

Yeah, I’m not a fan of the form of capitalism that’s about selling what they want us to buy instead of what we want to buy, but it seems to be working for pretty much every company out there.

I guess we missed our window of opportunity with Netflix. We moved to the middle of nowhere with no internet or cell service 12 years ago. We’ve had Starlink for nearly 2 years and are just starting to run out of stuff available for free on our Roku. It’s been a couple of decades since I played with, um, other options, but I somehow doubt it’s become more difficult. :)

Former water treatment plant operator. Thanks for living up to your name.