There was already some amount of cultural awareness about the Titanic prior to the movie, after all they pretty much started making movies, plays, documentaries, etc. as soon as it happened and kept right on making them

It also got a pretty good bump in popularity when the wreck was found in the 80s

Even if the movie weren’t made, there’d probably be a pretty decent chunk of people who would know about it from the scene in Ghostbusters 2 if nothing else.

It probably wouldn’t be something that pretty much everyone knows about, and certainly not in the kind of detail we do now, but you’d probably still have a pretty good chance of people who’d at least know that it was a big passenger ship that sank.

It’s hard for me to be impartial about this though, I was in elementary school when the movie came out, prime age to learn how to play “my heart will go on” on the recorder in music class and to see that big brick of 2 VHS tapes for rent in blockbuster. To this day I actually haven’t seen it, but it’s hard for me to imagine a world that people don’t know about the Titanic because the movie was just so omnipresent in my formative years.

I feel like it’s a pretty common experience for a lot of us maker types- we come up with a solution to a problem, maybe we tried searching for one and came up empty, or maybe we just thought it would be fun to make from the get-go, then sometime later we stumble upon someone selling pretty much the exact thing we made and think “huh, so thats what these things are called” maybe with a touch of disappointment that your idea wasn’t as original as you thought, or maybe just intrigued because you just added another term to your vocabulary and you have a better idea what to search for next time.

Yours looks good though, It’s probably unnecessary but I’d be tempted to add like a U-shaped cradle piece to the top to help keep it in place if your computer ever gets jostled for any reason, and maybe a jam nut at the bottom to make sure it stays where you set it. Again probably totally unnecessary, but I always figure that if it’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing.

What sort of printer and filament/resin are you using? I’d worry a bit about it warping or sagging over time from the heat inside a computer. I know some materials can handle the heat better or worse than others, but I haven’t dipped my toes into 3d printing myself yet, so I may be overestimating how much of an issue it is.

And can your printer make decent screw threads, or do you have to clean them up afterwards with a tap and die or something? I’m not really up on the current state of 3d printers, but one of the first 3d printed objects I remember ever handling was back in high school 15 or so years ago. One of my teachers went to a conference where they were showing off new gadgets for computer and shop classes, and he brought back a couple 3d printed crescent wrenches for us to fondle. I remember the screws being really crunchy and they almost but didn’t quite work, so in the back of my mind I’ve always thought of functional screw threads as something 3d printers can’t quite do, so it’s wild to me if we’ve gone from barely able to make even a coarse thread with huge tolerances work to being able to make pretty fine threads with pretty tight tolerances.

Of course back then, they hadn’t even really settled on calling it “3d printing,” I remember that teacher calling it a “rapid prototyping machine” when he was telling us about it, and described it as being “like a 3d printer”

I may be misinterpreting what you’re describing, but it kind of sounds like you’ve reinvented the machinist jack.

Not throwing shade, it makes sense and there’s a reason that machinists the world over use them to tackle the same sort of problem of how to support sagging parts- it’s simple and it works. And coming up with the same solution shows that you have a good understanding of the issue and how to tackle it.

Just pointing it out because I love the overlap between different fields and hobbies, and maybe if you didn’t already know that machinist jacks were a thing you’ll find inspiration for a version 2.0 if you ever feel the need to make one.

I’d also like to see your version when you get around to sharing it.

I think the scam calls are annoying, but it takes basically no effort to ignore them when I’m not in the mood to mess with them, so I don’t mind them so much.

I figure though if I can keep one tied up talking to me for a few minutes that’s one less chance for them to be scamming someone’s grandmother. It’s a tiny drop in the ocean, but it’s still potentially one less person getting scammed that day, and that’s worth something.

There’s probably a lot of different variables, cows vs bulls, the breed, how they’re being raised, if they have calves with them, how you’re behaving, etc.

In general though, safest bet is always going to be to give them space and not approach them. Not to say they’re necessarily going to be aggressive or anything, but that’s just kind of rule number 1 with any animals you’re not familiar with.

Annecdotally, when I was a teenager, I did Philmont, which is a big property the Boy Scouts of America (now changing their name to Scouting America) owns in New Mexico, where scouts can go backpacking. They also maintain a working cattle ranch there, and I believe so e of the neighboring ranches allow their cattle to (grave? Free range? Roam? I’m not sure of the correct terminology) the Philmont property, so it’s not uncommon to encounter cows in various places there.

They give pretty much the same lecture, don’t approach them, don’t do anything to spook them, and give them some space.

At one point my group was hiking along a trail coming to a junction, and a few dozen cows came down the trail we were about to head up and went into the woods. We weren’t super close to them, but it was probably about the closest I’ve been to a cow outside of a petting zoo in my life, and there was nothing but a few yards of open trail between us. We just stood back and watched them go about their business, the cows didn’t pay any attention to us, we hung out for a couple minutes after they passed in case there were any stragglers, and sure enough there was a lone cow that came running down the trail trying to catch up with its friends.

I’m no cow-ologist, but my general understanding is that they tend to be fairly laid back, and if anything curious. That said, they’re big, powerful animals and you don’t want to spook them.

It of course varries from one school or area to another, and from different age groups.

I ended up going to 4 proms, my own junior and senior proms, the senior prom my junior year because a girl asked me, and then I ended up dating a girl at another high school after I graduated and ended up going to her senior prom (in case anyone’s getting skeeved at that, we were both 18 at the time we started dating, just a few months difference between us, I just barely made the cutoff to be part of the previous grade and she just missed it)

That last prom was the only one where I was actually dating my date, the other 3 we just went as friends, although I did have a pretty big crush on the girl I took to both of my own proms but could never quite work up the nerve to ask her out.

There were never any elaborate promposals or anything, that was just starting around that time and hadn’t quite caught on yet, my sister a couple years behind me did it, nothing too elaborate I think she gave her friend a cake and balloons.

The promposal thing is mostly just that it’s silly and fun, and nowadays I guess it probably makes for a funny tiktok.

Prom was not a particularly big deal in my area, if I had to attach any particular significance to it, it’s just that it’s kind of your first “adult” formal event that you’re attending for your own sake, not because you’re going to a cousins wedding, not something like your first communion or bar mitzvah or whatever when you’re still very much a kid. You get to dress up, you get a fancy meal, you rent a limo, maybe you go to a cool post-prom party and you’re going to be out till the wee hours of the morning mostly left to your own devices. It’s fun for its own sake, and the kind of event most teens don’t really get to experience very often.

I was in Montreal for the eclipse, I’m sure it was a very busy tourist weekend and they were ready for the influx of us English speakers coming to town, but I didn’t have any issues anywhere.

It was probably my favorite city I’ve ever visited. Everything we ate was amazing, even when we just stopped into some random hole in the wall Chinese takeout place for a quick bite.

Public transit blew anything I’ve ever experienced in the states clean out of the water. I was also kind of in awe at how bikeable the city was.

There’s not many cities I’ve visited that I’m itching to go back to, but I’m definitely planning to go back sometime.

To be fair, you didn’t say it had to be a modern technological invention, just that it impacted the modern world

So I don’t have any specific insight to what’s available in the Netherlands

But I kind of feel like maybe you’re explaining what you’re looking for poorly

First some terminology

SIM and e-SIM are basically how your cellular service provider knows that your phone is connected to your account. The phone that has either that physical SIM card inserted, or that e-SIM data gets the calls, texts, data, etc. that are supposed to go to you. Take the SIM card out or change the e-SIM, and that phone no longer gets those calls, texts, and data. Put that same sim or e sim on another phone and it starts getting all those calls texts and data.

VoIP is Voice over Internet protocol, basically sending a phone call over the Internet instead of over phone lines. This might be from a computer, or from something that looks like a landline phone (or maybe even is a regular landline phone with some sort of adapter) or from a cell phone with a VoIP app installed. To use it from a cell phone you’d need to have either a WiFi connection, or a cellular data connection, and to have that cellular data connection you need to have either a sim or e-sim.

I don’t think there’s any VoIP provider that’s set up to just use your phone’s dialer and text app to directly handle calls and texts (though I could be wrong on that, I don’t try to keep up with all of the different types of phone services out there) everything would have to go through their app. If you want to do that, and you’re either ok having no cellular data and all of your calls, texts, and data use would have to go over WiFi, or if you keep paying for a cell plan (and the associated SIM/e-SIM) maybe either just a data plan with no talk/text, or a regular plan and you just don’t use the talk and text parts, then you just need to track down a VoIP provider, sign up for an account, and install their app on your phone.

If you want to transfer your actual phone number from your cell phone to a VoIP account, either to use on your cell phone through that VoIP app, from a computer, or from one of those landline VoIP devices, I don’t think that’s really a thing. If you just want calls to your cell to go to your VoIP phone number as well you’re looking for call forwarding.

You might also be getting tripped up with things like WiFi calling, VoLTE/VoNR (marked by some carriers with terms like “HD Voice”) which are things that are all going to be dependent on a regular cell carrier, not a specific VoIP company, and may depend a bit on their network infrastructure and what features your partic6 phone does or doesn’t support.

A large part of the “magic” with human relationships is that out of all of the 8 billion some people in the world, those who are close to you have chosen to spend time with you. For all of our flaws, they see your true nature and value you for it, and choose to have you as part of their lives.

With an AI, that may not be a thing.

If they’re programmed to like you, they’re at best a toy and at worst a slave. There’s no freedom for them to choose or not to choose to be with you. You’re getting an imitation of a relationship. It could be a convincing imitation, with built-in arguments and other idiosyncrasies, but to me every time I hit one of those, it would just be a stark reminder that it’s not the real thing and it’s just programmed to behave that way.

If they’re not programmed to like you and are free to form or not form connections with humans, there’s no guarantee you’d have any more luck wooing an AI than you would a human.

Children are a big part of romantic relationships for a lot of people but by no means all

Many people are happily in committed childfree relationships, other people cannot or should not have children for a great number of reasons but still want and need romantic relationships, and there are still other cases where children put unnecessary strain on otherwise happy relationships.

I think there’s a great number of reasons that AI should not be considered a replacement for human relationships, romantic or otherwise, but reproduction isn’t one of them.

Even if AI could otherwise replace a romantic partner, and if children are something you desire in a relationship, there’s still options like adopting, IVF, and surrogacy

And if we want to get a bit weird and sci-fi about it, that’s without considering the sorts of unknown scientific developments that may come further down the line. Who knows what form AI may take at some point in the future? We may end up with AIs inhabiting some sort of replicant body that’s compatible with human reproduction, or perhaps even entirely new forms of life and intelligence in a sort of melding of man and machine.

Yeah, didn’t mean to imply that you were, just wanted to expand on options for deaf people that are already out there, and point out some of the relative strengths and weaknesses they have compared to text-to-911

Hurricane season lasts from roughly June through November. The worst of it normally comes between August and October, so late summer and we’ll into the fall.

There’s no such thing as bad weather only inappropriate gear.

The problem is, in the summer, “appropriate gear” means an air conditioned house.

This absolutely can be a useful tool for deaf people or others with hearing/speech difficulties.

However, there are already several ways for deaf people to contact 911 without text-to-911

I work in 911 dispatch, probably the most common way I’ve gotten calls from deaf people is through a video really interpreter. The caller is basically on a video call with an interpreter and they relay what’s being said to us. There’s very little delay in communication like there can be when you’re typing back and forth, and usually it works pretty well. There are some situations where it has its issues, if the caller is somewhere dark it can be hard for the interpreter to see what they’re signing, if they don’t have a video-capable device they of course can’t use it at all, and a lot of our deaf callers come from a behavioral health group home place in our county, and some of those callers have a tendency to just kind of walk off-street in the middle of the call, though it’s still kind of useful because the interpreter can at least try to describe what they’re seeing and hearing in the background if the caller didn’t hang up.

Also all 911 centers (in the US at least, I assume it’s probably the same elsewhere in the world) are required to take TTY/TTD calls. The classic example of these is the caller has a device that kind of looks like a typewriter with a little screen and a speaker and microphone they place a phone handset on. They type out their message,the device turns it into a bunch of beeping noises that go out over the phone line like a regular voice call, and the person on the other end’s TTY device (in our case it’s built into our computer phone system) decodes the beeps back into text. Most, if not all cell phones these days also have TTY built into them in the accessibility settings somewhere. There’s some grammar peculiarities because it doesn’t really include punctuation, and some tty users will use ASL gloss, which is a written form of ASL (ASL isn’t totally 1:1 with English, and if you don’t know what you’re looking at ASL gloss reads kind of like that bit from The Office “why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.”) It also allows for hearing or voice carryover, where the caller is able to hear but not speak or vice-versa, so you only need to use TTY for half the conversation and can communicate verbally for the other half. The 2 biggest drawback is that we hear all of these TTY beeps in our headset, and they get pretty annoying really quick, small price to pay though, and generally only one party can be typing at a time, so you have to wait for them to finish before you can reply.

I will say that, at least in my area, TTY is vanishingly rare. In the 6 years I’ve been here, I’d be amazed if we’ve gotten 3 calls from an actual deaf person using TTY, although we did have one mental health patient who used it on his cell phone and used it to just ramble nonsense at us. He had no hearing or speech difficulties, sometimes we were able to get him to talk to us

In either case, if you call from a landline, we get your address just like a regular phone call, with tty from a cell we also get your cellular location like a regular call. Video relay calls from cell phones can get a little funny location wise because of how the call needs to be routed, often it works out that we get a home address they have on file and not their actual current location. With texts the location data often isn’t very good (although we’re implementing some new technologies at my center that improve on it a bit, though it’s still not as reliable as a voice call in some ways)

I posted another comment/rant in this thread with some of my gripes about how people use text to 911 if you haven’t already seen that, and I do want to reiterate that it is a really good option to have available, we can always use more tools in our toolbox, and it can definitely be useful in some circumstances, but it does tend to get misused in some frustrating ways for us.

I work in 911 dispatch, there is an audible groan whenever anyone here gets a text to 911

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that it’s a tool that’s available, there are certain cases where it can be really useful, domestic abuse situations where you’re unable to make a voice call because you’re abuser is in the room or car with you, an active shooter situation where you’re hiding and don’t want to give away your location, people with hearing or speech issues, etc.

That’s almost never what it gets used for.

Most of the time it’s someone calling in some non-emergency. I suspect in their minds it’s probably quicker and more convenient for us to get a text, but it really isn’t. We’re not multitasking and taking other calls at the same time we’re on the text, when we’re on the text, that is what we’re doing, same as if we were on a regular 911 call. And that first text usually is missing some crucial information about what is going on, and it takes a whole lot longer to go back and for asking questions and waiting for an answer by text than if you just made a phone call, if they even reply at all to answer my questions, very often they put their phone in their pocket and never look at it again for the rest of the night. We can’t even call them back because we don’t know if it’s safe for them to speak on the phone, we just have to sit there for 5 minutes waiting for a reply that isn’t coming before we can disconnect.

I’ve also definitely had at least one instance where the caller was definitely texting while driving, and not for anything remotely urgent enough that they couldn’t have found somewhere safe to pull over first.

Agency policies will vary on how texts to be handled, I can only really speak for where I work.

Most calls, even a lot of actual actual emergencies, if my caller is cooperative and knows where they are, and the situation isn’t actively evolving while I’m on the phone, I can handle in about 2 minutes or less, sometimes I can even get it down to less than a minute. I’m going to easily spend twice that on most text conversations, and often I’m going to be tied up on it significantly longer.

Technology also varies a bit from one place to another, but we also don’t get the same kind of location info with a text like we do on a regular phonecall (and even on a call our location data may not always be super accurate or useful) we did recently get some of our systems updated, and we get more information than we did before, but it’s still less reliable than on a phone call.

And we also can’t transfer a text like we can with a voice call, so if you’re texting regarding something going on at your grandma’s house in another state (we get calls like that all the time, where someone tells a friend or relative about something going on, but can’t or won’t call 911 themselves) we have to either A convince you to take a voice call so we can transfer you, or B make a call to them while still texting you, and play middle man relaying questions and answers between you and the other dispatcher, so you’re tying up dispatchers in 2 jurisdictions on your call (it used to be that we weren’t able to make an outgoing call while we were on a text, so we’d have to have 2 dispatchers at our center tied up on these texts, one to message back and forth with you, and another to relay the info to the correct agency by phone. We’re a pretty well-funded county, so I’m sure there’s a lot of dispatch centers still out there where that’s still the case)

I already occasionally get people trying to send us pictures and links with no explanation (pro-tip, we can’t see your pictures or open your links with our current tech, and even if we could opening links would probably be a no-no from a cyber security standpoint)

If at all possible, please just make a voice call, it will be quicker. If you genuinely cannot make a voice call, at least make sure your first text contains the correct location (address, municipality, nearest cross street, apartment number or name of the business if applicable should cover your bases pretty well) and a good description of what is going on. Then please keep your phone with you and try to answer any follow up texts we send you quickly and succinctly.

And again, don’t get me wrong, it really can be an amazing tool when it’s needed, but it’s a massive pain in the ass for us when people use it when it’s not necessary and usually makes just about every part of our job harder and slower, which means slower responses to your emergency.

FYI, there’s a little debate over this in the English language, but many would say that the proper demonyms are Afghan for the Pashtun ethnic group, and Afghanistani (or rarely Afghanese) for people from Afghanistan regardless of ethnicity.

Afghani is their currency.

I believe it comes from a discrepancy between the Persian and Pashto languages. Afghani being the correct term in Persian, and Afghan being the term in Pashto.

Afghani is pretty widely used in English, and even appears in some dictionaries, but many argue that it’s not correct.

So a person is an Afghan, they eat Afghan food, wear Afghan clothing, have Afghan customs, and their currency is the Afghan Afghani (in case some other country ever adopts a currency called the Afghani and you need to differentiate between them)

I buy some roadmaps probably every 10 years or so to make sure mine are up to date and not too beat up, I keep them in my car and do use them occasionally. I usually have 3 maps, a local maps of my nearest city and surrounding area, one of my state, and then one of the surrounding region.

I also tend to pick up free maps wherever I can, lots of state parks and such, tourist maps, etc. but I’m not buying them so not exactly relevant.

I also tend to pick up free maps from AAA since I’m a member whenever I’m going on a road trip, I’m paying for the membership so I guess in a sense I’m buying them, but also not really

I’m not from this instance, so probably not totally relevant to this poll, that said

NO, I’m not a tankie.

I think, however, it’s worth considering that a lot of people that could be considered tankies probably wouldn’t apply the term to themselves, and that could skew the results of your poll. First of all, tankie is sort of a pejorative term, and many wouldn’t want to apply it to themselves for that reason alone. Secondly a lot of people just may not consider themselves to be a tankie, and genuinely do not recognize their own tankieness.

I don’t think I’m the guy to come up with a definitive checklist of what does or does not make someone a tankie, but for the sake of getting the conversation going (and feel free to disagree with me here, I welcome the discussion) I think two of the biggest hallmarks of being a tankie are

1. Communism- not all communists are tankies, but all tankies at least claim to subscribe to some sort of communist ideology.

2. Authoritarianism- tankies either are authoritarians themselves, or are willing to support or overlook authoritarians as long as they see them as being in some way opposed to “the west”/capitalism/etc.

I think the authoritarianism aspect is going to trip some people up trying to answer this truthfully. A lot of authoritarians probably wouldn’t consider themselves authoritarians, most people like to think they’re standing for freedom, justice, liberty, equality, etc. even if their actual actions tell another story. Don’t get me wrong, there are people out there who are openly authoritarian and proud of it, but a lot of authoritarians are a little brainwashed to the point they’ve lost sight of what they’re actually supporting (take a look at the MAGA crowd, they think they’re about free speech and anti-censorship but want to keep books they don’t like out of libraries, they think they’re about small government but want to regulate what kind of medical care you can get, they think they stand for law and order but also proudly proclaim that they are all domestic terrorists and have a convicted felon as their poster boy)

And politics are messy, full of moral grey areas and times where you have to choose between the lesser of two evils, make uncomfortable alliances, difficult choices, and kick some cans further down the road to deal with later while you tackle the current crisis. It’s not always easy or feasible to draw a crisp line in the sand and say “we will not ally with/support/turn a blind eye to these authoritarian regimes,” sometimes you have to play a little bit of the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” game if you want to actually make any progress against that enemy, or you may have to prioritize and deal with something else before you deal with them. There is a whole lot of grey area to explore about when, why, how, how long, and how much you can support or ignore them before you’re advancing their cause as much or more than your own.

I think there’s probably some tankies who have been taken for a ride on the propaganda wagon and don’t truly realize how authoritarian they are, and there’s others who have justified it, thinking that they’re only going to be/support authoritarians temporarily to achieve a specific goal and will pivot away from that later, but have gone too far or keep moving the goalposts.

Couple last thoughts from me.

There can always be bad actors who are falsely claiming to be (or not to be) tankies for their own purposes. Not really much you can do about that.

Personally, a lot of the criticism I’ve seen about tankies here has been directed towards the mods and admins, not necessarily the rank average users.

It’s going to depend a bit on the agency, different places use different systems and have different policies available to them.

Where I work, we used to have Google maps integrated into our CAD (Computer Added Dispatch) so it would sync to the built in map in our CAD. I believe it was some sort of 3rd party plugin, not something the cad developers officially supported, so it was always kind of slow and buggy, and some update that happened a couple years ago totally broke it so we no longer have that.

We do use Google maps through a web browser pretty frequently. We have most of the businesses, parks, schools, cemeteries, etc. loaded into our CAD, but they’re not labeled on the map, and sometimes being able to ask “can you see the Starbucks from where you are” can be kind of useful, and the satellite view is really useful for our more rural areas where they may not be many obvious landmarks and it’s all fields and trees.

Some departments have some stricter internet usage policies and such and may not be able to use Google maps.

Street view has its uses, mostly for narrowing down the exact address. Most of the time it’s not super necessary, we can send police out to the nearest intersection if needed, and they can find “the big house with a red door” or whatever themselves, but if we can narrow down the exact address, sometimes we may have important caution note attached to the address, and of course it can sometimes shave a few minutes off of our response time if our responders don’t have to go hunting for the right house.

One of the times street view came in particular handy for me was one time I had a 3rd party calling about something for a friend. They weren’t sure of the exact address, but they knew the road and some nearby landmarks that had it narrowed down to about 2 or 3 blocks. The caller kept saying that there was a “big yellow walkman” on the front porch, and was too worked up to really elaborate on what she meant by that. I turned to street view and just kind of went down the block looking at porches until I found one that had one of those fluorescent yellow/green “children at play” signs people put in the street that are shaped like a kid walking and it clicked that that was what she meant.