I think you’re going to get into some “no true Scotsman” territory here pretty quickly, there’s not exactly a worldwide organization that determines the “feminist agenda” or a universally agreed-upon checklist that determines that you are or aren’t a feminist if you check so many boxes. It’s going to depend a bit on who you are, where you come from, etc.

For example, if you come from some sort of backwards ultra-conservative Christian background, it might be fair to call you a feminist just because you think women should be allowed to wear pants instead of a dress, because in that context you are, even if most of the rest of the world has long-since moved past that stage of feminism.

I think most if not all TERFs probably hold some amount of views that could be called feminist from certain perspectives. Whether or not they mesh with any of the more mainstream views on feminism is a different matter entirely.

EDIT: to be clear, TERFs absolutely do not mesh with my idea of feminism, to me you’re way behind the curve on feminism if you’re not recognizing trans women as women.

Sort of a tangential example to how this kind of law works

Interstate highways (the ones that start with an I in front of the number) receive federal funding for upkeep.

As part of that, they generally can’t be toll roads, and rest stops can’t be commercialized- so no stores, restaurants, or gas stations (the idea being that the highways are supposed to be for everyone to use and rest stops shouldn’t be competing with local businesses)

There are exceptions for cases like the PA turnpike (I76) which was originally built before the interstate highway act and then later integrated into the interstate system. So they’re grandfathered in so they have tolls and commercialized rest stops because they already had them. (The tolls were also supposed to be temporary until the construction was paid off but that’s neither here nor there)

You got some misinformation here

The current Post Exposure rabies Prophylaxis (PEP) regimen is definitely not “a shot a day” for 20 days

First day you get a dose of vaccine and a dose of human rabies immune globulin (HRIG)

Then you get an additional vaccine dose on days 3, 7, 14, and if you’re immunocompromised you get an additional dose on day 28

And if you’ve previously received the rabies vaccine (for either pre- or post- exposure) you only need a booster on days 0 and 3.

And the incubation period varies, like you said location and viral load plays into it, in humans it can be as little as a week, but more commonly it’s a couple months, and even up to a year. There are a lot of variables at play, and the sooner you can start PEP the better of course, but generally speaking it’s usually not a “rush immediately to the hospital in an ambulance or you will die” situation. If it comes to it, you usually have at least a couple days of wiggle room to start PEP.

And no, bats don’t always bite the neck. Head and neck are pretty common, they’re usually pretty exposed, and bats fly so it would be kind of weird for them to bite you on the leg for example, but it’s not like they’re magically drawn to act out the plot of a vampire movie. It is true though that a lot of people don’t recognize a bat bite for what it is.

Yeah, overall the policies where I am are pretty damn sensible. Technically we’re not supposed to, but unless you do something stupid like show up to work high, I’d have a hard time thinking of a way you’d get in trouble for it.

Of course if you ended up getting in trouble somehow on your own time, since it’s still illegal here it would probably lead to some sort of disciplinary action, revoked certifications, termination, etc. which I suppose is understandable

It’s always interesting to me how different some of these policies are from one agency to another. I see a lot of dispatchers in other places talking about how intense their background checks were, and they had to do a polygraph test and all of that. My background check process was all pretty out-of-sight/out-of-mind. Filled out some paperwork, I don’t even think they called any of my references (although to be fair, I was able to list a few firefighters and such as references, and got a friend of a friend who works here to vouch for me, which I’m sure helped) no polygraph, did have to go to the county detectives to get fingerprinted during training, but technically I was already hired at that point, and that was about the extent of it.

I once played a warlock with a kraken for a patron.

My character had been a sailor, shipwrecked in a storm, saved by the kraken in exchange for my service.

I washed up on an island full of kuo toa. Started up a little cargo cult to direct their worship towards the kraken, so that he could ascend to full godhood with the help of the psychic energy bullshit.

Of course things went a bit sideways, the kuo toa kind of fixated on me a little bit since I was the one sitting on a throne in front of them and not the kraken itself.

I also kind of figured that whatever the kraken wanted with godhood was probably bad for the world in general.

So I ran the fuck away from that island before the start of the campaign.

And so I constantly had a bunch of koa toa trying to track me down to drag me back to the island, or maybe to eat me, kind of hard to say. The kraken felt he had invested too much time and energy with me to just let me go so he kept pointing the little fish monsters in my direction to try to get me back on track with his plans.

Sometimes when they showed up I could leverage my position as the object of their worship to bend them to my will. Other times not so much.

I don’t have any specific recommendations for software or services, but I do have a couple general thoughts on this problem

How many pieces are missing and how ornate is the set?

If you have at least one of every piece the easiest course of action is probably to 3d scan them. A scanner is probably a bit pricey to buy just for this one project, but if you ask around you can probably find a hobbyist or makerspace that will let you use theirs.

If you can’t find a scanner, as long as your set isn’t too ornate, most chest sets are probably pretty easy to model for the most part. Except for the knights which are of course horses which are a weird irregular shape, most chess pieces are essentially cylinders and cones of various sizes stacked on top of each other. With a little quality time taking measurements with some calipers and some youtube how-to videos, you could probably learn enough to make a pretty decent model pretty quickly.

You might even be able to carefully trace your pieces onto a piece of paper or maybe use a contour gauge to do the same, scan that tracing into your computer, and create a 3d model from that profile. Heck, you might even be able to just take a picture of the pieces then trace them on your computer.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done any 3d modeling personally, but something like that is a feature in a lot of software I’ve used.

Then you’d just need to add some details- a slot cut into the bishops hat, some crenulations at the top of the rook, a cross on top of the king, etc. which should all also be pretty straightforward to model

Again, if you ask around at makerspaces and such you can probably find someone willing to take up the challenge or help you figure out how to do that.

Of course if your set has a lot of textures and details you wouldn’t be able to capture them that way, like if your pieces have a face or otherwise aren’t rotationally symmetrical, or the rook has a brick pattern, etc.

And if you need to model the knight, that’s going to take some more advanced modeling skills unless it’s a really simple and kind of abstract horse.

If you are missing pieces entirely, unless you can track down another set to use as a reference, you’re going to have to recreate them from scratch. You can take some styling cues from the other pieces- like the bases are probably all pretty much the same, but beyond that you’d kind of have to work off of memory and eyeballing them.

EDIT: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I was thinking about good ways to recreate your missing pieces by 3D printing so I kind of forgot to consider other techniques

Again, assuming you have at least one of each of the pieces you need, make a mold and cast new ones out of epoxy or something.

Also, again assuming no detailed textures, except for the knights, most chess pieces are almost perfect lathe projects. There’s some really cheap tiny lathes to be had on Amazon that would probably be up to the task of turning a chunk of plastic into a chess piece.

Policies vary on this place to place, and of course there’s no accounting for police who don’t bother to follow the policies

But as a current dispatcher.

1. Yes, people do call about that. I went into some more detail on that in my other comment.

2. Phone calls are only half of what we do, we’re also the ones on the radio with the field units. If they pull a traffic or pedestrian stop, they call it in to us over the radio so we can check their status, send backup, run information for them, etc. because if we don’t know they’re out on, for example, a traffic stop and something happens, we otherwise wouldn’t know about it until it’s too late. They give us a short disposition at the end of the call- if someone was cited, parties advised to separate, they turned the music down, crowd dispersing, subject in custody, etc. We don’t get all the details, we don’t get their full reports or anything, but we have a pretty good general overview of the outcome.

Current 911 dispatcher here, same kind of experience.

Recreational is not legal in our state. FWIW, I don’t smoke myself.

Seen our officers give plenty of warnings for weed, but really the only time anyone gets cited for it is when the person is already getting taken in on multiple charges and being a massive dick about it so the officers are really throwing the book at them.

I know at least one of the sergeants in my county used to smoke a lot because he went to high school with me. I’ve occasionally seen him enter some colorful notes into calls, like that he gave someone a “warning for the electric lettuce”

I know a handful of my fellow dispatchers smoke, and I’m pretty sure at least one of my supervisors does, and even more of my coworkers admit to smoking in the past (as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired, past drug use is not a disqualifier for our agency, though lying about it could be if something about it comes up on your background check, and unless they have reason to think that you’re under the influence on the job we’re not subject to testing otherwise)

We pretty much all roll our eyes when we get a call where the main complaint is “someone’s smoking marijuana”

We have to enter something about it, we can’t just ignore a 911 call for liability reasons. But we all know it’s a waste of everyone’s time and resources. We don’t really have a specific code to enter it as so unfortunately we usually have to enter it as something like “suspicious activity” which is a fairly high-priority call, but when we can we’ll try to bury it in something trivial like a noise complaint because cops don’t really need to be going out lights & sirens to tell someone to be more discreet with their smoking.

Funny thing I noticed today when I did some grocery shopping.

For most of my life I’ve always just purchased store brand large eggs. I’ve never really looked at the price, I need eggs and they’re cheap, but of course I took notice today that my usual eggs are now something like $5.49/dozen.

Then I look next to them to the fancier organic cage-free eggs and they’re 4.99/dozen.

Almost like if you don’t keep thousands of chickens crammed together in cages they’re less likely to pass bird flu around.

Because they mostly all have terrible personalities and would find each other totally unbearable just like the rest of us do.

They also generally don’t really want to date any sort of actual human that exists in the real world. They want to date a perfect parody of the opposite sex, incels are looking for someone who looks like Barbie (or whatever their idea of a perfect body type is, some go for a the petite almost childlike look after all) who wakes up looking like she just left the salon, who is totally subservient to all of his wants and needs, never speaks up unless it’s to stroke his ego, a perfect cook and maid, an oversexed freak in the sheets, who will bear however many children his twisted ego wants to inflict on the world but never gain a pound or show any stretch marks, wrinkles, or grey hair

In short they don’t want to date a real person, they want a real doll who does their laundry and squeezes out children.

And they’re convinced that these mythical creatures exist out in the real world but that someone is conspiring to keep them from them, because obviously they’re the perfect example of masculinity and why wouldn’t these perfect females be flocking to them otherwise?

And I’m not certain exactly what sort of fictitious Superman feels are after, but the same overall sentiment applies.

Or else they’re just deeply in the closet.

There’s no reason to arrest him, he didn’t break any laws.

However, the NFL isn’t the government, they’re a private organization, they can tell someone that they’re banned from their properties and events just about as easily as you can tell someone that they’re not welcome at your back yard BBQ (as long as they’re not banning them because they belong to a protected class)

They’re probably well within their rights here to ban them just because they don’t like what he did.

However, I can almost guarantee you that with an organization as lawyered-up as the NFL he signed some sort of contact to be a part of the performance where he agreed to some policy or code of conduct or something that says in some way that performers aren’t permitted to go off-script like that, and not only can they decide to ban him for that but they may be able to sue him for breach of contract or something.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know all of the minute technological or legal details about how and why our systems work the way I do. At the end of the day I’m a user of the systems, and not really privy to all of the technical and policy decisions happening behind the scenes.

I believe that handset gps based location is part of the Next Gen 911 (NG911) standards that are in the process of rolling out. Different agencies and corporations that own and maintain the infrastructure are in different stages of implementing that in different places. I don’t really know what the timetable is on all of that is, if there even is one, I’m genuinely not sure if there’s any set in stone date where everything everywhere must be fully ng911 compliant by then.

The handful of counties around me are definitely in different stages of rolling it out, my dispatch center has had text to 911 capabilities since well before I started there 6 years ago, and I’m pretty sure one of our neighboring agencies only got the ability to handle it within the last 2 years or so. Another neighboring county is or is about to get video capabilities, which we don’t have yet.

I suspect that the current state of the regulations is that new phones must have the ability to send that gps data, but I don’t think it needs to be turned on by default, and I don’t think dispatch centers are required to make use of it yet, but again I’m not sure.

The current state of it where I work is we get it on a lot of our calls but not all. It’s also kind of a hacked together system where it comes through on a web page and not directly integrated into our phone or CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) systems. I believe the new CAD we’re upgrading to will have it fully integrated, but last I heard that is probably still a couple years away.

Phone networks are kind of a mess, countless different companies, contractors, and different levels of government, have all been working together (or sometimes against each other depending on your point of view) to patch together old legacy systems to the new stuff coming out- copper, fiber, analog, digital, cellular, satellite, VoIP, etc. And different levels of government have more or less funds available to them and allocate those funds differently, so the wheels of government, as they say, turn slowly. I work in a relatively wealthy county with a pretty large population in a highly developed part of the country, so we’re probably towards the leading edge of the new tech rolling out compared to some dispatch center in the backwoods middle of nowhere (I have had to talk to dispatchers all over the country and occasionally even in other countries, there are definitely some with better capabilities than we have, and there are also some where you get the distinct impression that you’re talking to one of two old ladies sitting in a trailer behind the police station sharing a carton of Virginia Slims and entering calls into a computer with a faded sticker proudly declaring that it’s Y2K ready.)

Hanging up will send your info to them and they will call back to make sure there isn’t an emergency.

911 dispatcher here

This will depend a bit on agency policies and technological capabilities as well as what emergency info you’ve filled out on your phone and unable to be shared in an emergency call

At my agency we get a lot of butt dials, our policy for hang ups or open line calls from a cell phone is that as long as we didn’t hear anything suspicious (someone yelling, gunshots, etc) we will usually disregard the call. If we have an open line we’ll listen for about 30 seconds or so and if nothing sounds off we’ll disconnect and continue about our day. If something sounds fishy we’ll stay on the line/call back, and we’ll send police to the area if we have a good location.

There’s a couple exceptions, like certain wifi calling or femtocell setups are treated as being from a landline because we have a solid address, so we’ll always dispatch police unless you stay on the line and confirm that there’s no emergency.

And our discretion comes into play a bit. We might ignore 1 or 2 hang ups from the same number, especially since the calls may not even ring through to the same calltaker so it may not be obvious we’ve gotten multiple calls until we’ve gotten a good handful.

Different agencies policies on that will vary. I know one of our neighboring counties will always send police to the area when they get a hang up whether or not they heard something suspicious.

And as for the information that’s shared, by default all we get is your phone number, carrier, which cell tower it hit off of, and an approximate location based on cell tower triangulation (which is kind of hit or miss, sometimes it’s really accurate, other times it’s basically useless)

If we need to we can contact the phone provider to try to get subscriber info. That can take a while and can be hit or miss too, like if you haven’t updated all your information with them, if you’re on a family plan with other people, or if you’re using a smaller provider that is really just reselling Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T service, it can make it a little hard to accurately track down who actually owns that phone.

If you’ve called recently, we can try to look up your information from priors on your phone number.

If you’ve filled out your emergency/sos info, and enabled it to be shared with us, we can access that, It also often gives us access to a more accurate location for you, but otherwise we only get what you’ve put in there. If you haven’t kept your name, address, emergency contacts, medical info, etc. accurate and up to date there, that’s another stumbling block for us. We can sometimes work backwards from what info is there, if we have your name and age we can try to narrow things down, but if you have a common name it can be hard to tell which 27 year old John Smith is the one who called us.

Do with that what you will, fill out your emergency info or don’t depending on what you’re comfortable sharing with us, consider how it might be used to save your life if you’re, for example, in a car crash and too hurt to speak to us, or how an oppressive government might use it to track you down at a protest (from 911 we can’t just access data on random people’s phones unless they call us, and we can only request a ping on a phone number from your phone company under certain circumstances, and that’s a bit of a process and all it returns is your location based on cell tower triangulation, which again isn’t always very accurate. Police and certainly the feds have a bit more leeway than we do, though I don’t know the extent of that, and if they set up a stingray or similar device I have absolutely no idea what they might be able to access)

Not quite, it’s an international sign that a vessel is in distress.

Then mostly right wing lunatics co-opted it to mean that our country is in distress.

Unless you read the prompt as the baguette will always remain slightly stale, so no matter how you attempt to freshen it up, it will still be slightly stale.

I contact every James Randi-type paranormal debunker that I can find and explain my power to them. I agree to all of their terms and agree to demonstrate it to them under whatever tightly controlled absolutely perfectly sterile conditions they want.

And I do it for them, claim my prize money, and continue on with my life.

My power is to summon a baguette, not unlimited baguettes, so I gotta make that one count and I think that’s my best to get the most bang for my buck.

Or if I get to decide where exactly that baguette is summoned to, perhaps I will have it spring into existence occupying the same space as [REDACTED]'s brain stem. Having them out of the picture would greatly enrich my life.

Esperanto

krokodili- verb, literally something like “to crocodile”

It means when an Esperanto-speaker speaks in a language other than Esperanto while amongst other Esperanto-speakers.

No one’s quite sure why that’s the term for it, most likely because crocodiles have a big mouth.

When I learned that, it suddenly made a lot of sense why Duolingo taught me the word for “crocodile” so early.

That is literally false

Yes and no

When we’re dealing with terrorist organizations like ISIS, things aren’t always totally clear-cut, there’s always going to be groups merging and splitting off, alliances between different groups being made and broken, people switching sides, internal power struggles, name changes, etc.

So yes in the sense that he was not specifically part of the organization known as ISIS when it was known as ISIS

However, al-Nusra Front was at least very closely tied to or even a part of ISI, and ISI would later essentially become ISIS (or ISIL, IS, Daesh, whatever you want to call it)

Personally I’d consider making a distinction between ISI and ISIS to be uselessly pedantic hairsplitting. And depending on how you regard the relationship between ISI(S) and al-Nusra Front, I think it’s fair to say that he was either part of or at least very closely-allied with them.

Now as of right now, al-Sharaa/al-Julani seems to be doing an alright job as leader of Syria all things considered, he could certainly be doing a lot worse. But it’s still a new and evolving situation and it’s hard to say exactly what his intentions are/were, how his thoughts, beliefs, and allegiances have or have not changed. It could be that his actions with ISI were part of a means to this specific end to be a decent leader for Syria, it could be that over the years he has genuinely had a change of heart from being a jihadist, or it could be that the current situation is just a facade to keep international heat off of himself while he consolidates power in Syria and once he has he’ll go right back to full-on islamist extremism.

I hope for the best, I’m not really qualified to offer much of an opinion on him beyond that, and I suppose only time will tell.

My aunt and uncle hosted an exchange student from China.

He was a bit of an awkward weirdo, I kind of got the impression he was somewhat wealthy, seemed nice enough, just weird, and didn’t seem to have much interest in experiencing anything American except for buying clothes and such that I guess we’re more expensive in China.

After a few months, they noticed their cat walking funny and got him checked out, and found what looked like burns on his paws, and they weren’t sure how it happened.

They checked their security cameras, and saw the exchange student holding the cat to the hot stove.

Sent him packing really quick.

People need a place to live, they don’t need stocks to live. By owning more properties than you need you are contributing to a scarcity and inflated pricing for a basic necessity.