6
submitted 9 months ago by Drusas@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

I appreciate that earnest made a post yesterday, or maybe it was the day before, saying that he is not dead and hasn't given up on kbin. It's not on this magazine, so I'm not sure where it was since this seems to be the most appropriate one, but in any case.

Reassuring us that things will improve at some point someday probably isn't enough, and I both moderate and donate to him every month, so I'm a pretty "serious" kbinner. I'm sure we've already lost many people who are less dedicated and just want something that works.

This site has been nearly unusable for days. There was the one day recently where it was entirely unusable. Everybody who uses this platform is an 'internet person". We need a platform which is (mostly) fully functional (mostly) every day.

Kbin needs to be fixed.

Ernest needs to give up on this being a one-man show and invite other moderators and contributors. Even I am looking at mbin because usability has just been so terrible that it's not worth the frustration and disappointment.

/rant

Edit: To make this thread even better, I got an error when I tried to post it. Twice.

8
submitted 9 months ago by Drusas@kbin.social to c/diy@beehaw.org

tl;dr: Neighbors' galvanized fence is upside-down and very sharp and pokey. How can I make it not be?

To start with, the neighbor is almost never home and therefore hard to contact. Also, they only bought their property last year and probably don't even realize they own the fence. Anyway.

As you may know, galvanized fences have a top and a bottom. The bottom has sharp bits which dig into the ground while the top is more rounded off.

When I bought my house, there was already a galvanized fence in place between my house and my neighbor's. I'm no fan of these fences in particular, but that's fine. Except that I later noticed that it had been installed upside-down, meaning that the top of the 3-ftish fence is covered in sharp spikes, while the safe end has been buried underground.

When I was younger, I had a dog who had her belly horrifically torn open while jumping over an upside-down galvanized fence, and I have two dogs, so this is a serious concern of mine. While my dogs have fortunately never tried so far, a dog could die trying to jump over a fence like that.

Question is, what can I do about it?

I would offer the neighbor for me to pay for it to replace the fence, except for the fact that we are on a serious and convoluted grade and it is no small matter to replace a fence. Because of the grade, there's no way for me to put up a second fence on my side (trust me, it would require some serious landscaping to do that, in the tens of thousands of dollars--we're on a hill).

So I feel at a loss except for to try to cap off the sharp tops of the galvanized fence, and my searching suggests that there is no pre-made product for this because this fence was just installed wrong.

Any advice?

6
submitted 9 months ago by Drusas@kbin.social to c/diy@beehaw.org

tl;dr: Neighbors' galvanized fence is upside-down and very sharp and pokey. How can I make it not be?

To start with, the neighbor is almost never home and therefore hard to contact. Also, they only bought their property last year and probably don't even realize they own the fence. Anyway.

As you may know, galvanized fences have a top and a bottom. The bottom has sharp bits which dig into the ground while the top is more rounded off.

When I bought my house, there was already a galvanized fence in place between my house and my neighbor's. I'm no fan of these fences in particular, but that's fine. Except that I later noticed that it had been installed upside-down, meaning that the top of the 3-ftish fence is covered in sharp spikes, while the safe end has been buried underground.

When I was younger, I had a dog who had her belly horrifically torn open while jumping over an upside-down galvanized fence, and I have two dogs, so this is a serious concern of mine. While my dogs have fortunately never tried so far, a dog could die trying to jump over a fence like that.

Question is, what can I do about it?

I would offer the neighbor for me to pay for it to replace the fence, except for the fact that we are on a serious and convoluted grade and it is no small matter to replace a fence. Because of the grade, there's no way for me to put up a second fence on my side (trust me, it would require some serious landscaping to do that, in the tens of thousands of dollars--we're on a hill).

So I feel at a loss except for to try to cap off the sharp tops of the galvanized fence, and my searching suggests that there is no pre-made product for this because this fence was just installed wrong.

Any advice?

262

ProPublica editor-at-large Eric Umansky started investigating police oversight after an NYPD officer hit a teenager with a car in 2019. In the years since, he’s learned how police departments have undermined the promise of body-worn cameras.


I got my first real lesson in police accountability in 2019 on Halloween. My wife, Sara Pekow, and our daughter had watched an NYPD officer drive the wrong way up a Brooklyn street and hit a Black teenager. The police had been chasing him as a suspect in the theft of a cellphone. When the boy rolled off the car and ran away, the officers turned their attention to other nearby Black boys who seemed to be simply trick-or-treating. The police lined them against the wall of our neighborhood movie theater, cuffed them and took them away.

At the time, I was editing coverage of the Trump administration, not policing. But I was troubled and, frankly, curious. I ended up waiting outside the police precinct with the boys’ families. The boys were released hours later, with no explanation, no paperwork and no apology.

The next day I reached out to the NYPD’s press office and asked about what happened. Eventually, a spokesperson told me that nothing inappropriate had occurred. A police car hadn’t hit the kid, he said. The kid had run over the hood of the car.

I couldn’t get it out of my head. Not just what had happened, but the NYPD’s brazen denial of what my family and others had witnessed. Surely, I thought, that wouldn’t be the end of it.

I was wrong.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 144 points 11 months ago

Justice Engoron, in a plea to Trump's attorney, Chris Kise, implored, “Mr. Kise, please control your client.” However, the attempt to rein in Trump proved futile as he continued his tirade, even bringing up the prosecutor's alleged political motives, including what he called her "failed" run for Governor.

Should have charged him with contempt.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 126 points 11 months ago

companies legitimately trying to retain top talent

Basically blacklisting them from their field for a year after leaving your company is not how you retain talent. Pay them better. Give them better health coverage or other benefits. Only being able to retain talent by basically threatening them if they leave is not a good look.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 135 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

A huge percentage of pregnancies end in miscarriage, very often before the woman even knows she was pregnant. This is the same. She should have to take special care of the mass her body rejected just because it was in there a little longer? What's the cutoff for having to report that you had a miscarriage, then? Every period? Every time you have a period that's a week or two late, because that is reasonably likely to have been a miscarriage?

This was a non-viable fetus. It was never going to be a person. It's not a corpse.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 111 points 1 year ago

This is so baffling to me, as an older millennial. My history education from elementary through high school was at least 25% about the Holocaust.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 155 points 1 year ago

And this is the sort of legislation that should be passed by direct referendum, will of the people, and not by representatives who have been bought out by special interest groups. Desperately needed but unlikely to happen.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 162 points 1 year ago

The "horrible thing" is fingernail loss, which mostly occurs after a prolonged spacewalk. It occurs more often in poorly-fitted gloves and in women, but can occur in well-fitted gloves and in men.

Those are basically all of the facts in the article.

35
submitted 1 year ago by Drusas@kbin.social to c/knitting@lemmy.world

I have this hat (beanie type, I guess) that I've had for just about 20 years now. I've been wearing it regularly, and it still seems to be in good shape, but I know it won't last forever. I'm very attached to this hat, silly though it may sound.

I'd like to have a replica or two of it made. I don't have a pattern, but it's not all that complicated. Seems to be made of acrylic, although relatively high quality and comfortable. Not entirely certain. If I can find somebody in the Pacific Northwest to make it for me, I could bring the hat over.

Sorry if this type of request isn't what the community is for. I can provide pictures if anyone is interested.

51
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Drusas@kbin.social to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

I've got a nephew who is 3-something years old. He's really into airplanes. All of the ideas of gifts I've found have either been books (I give him books, but I'd like to give him something interactive) or toys that are way above his age level.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good gift for a 3 to 4-year-old who loves airplanes?

Edit: I just want to give a big thanks to all of you for being so helpful. I've got some great ideas for Christmas, his birthday, and beyond if he remains fascinated by planes. Very helpful.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 122 points 1 year ago

Good. Do it. They deserve healthcare and reasonable wages.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 151 points 1 year ago

No one should be buying anything from Tyson. Pure evil company, not only with deliberately squeezing money from the cash-strapped like this, but the way they treat their animals absolutely should be illegal.

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 132 points 1 year ago

All the news keeps talking about her vaping as though that's the main problem here. Maybe don't engage in sexual activities in public. Like, actual sexual activities such as fondling genitals. Not conservatives' idea of sexual activities, which involves wearing skirts and makeup.

191

In a conversation with Mike Solan, the head of the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild, Seattle Police Department officer and SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer minimized the killing of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula by police officer Kevin Dave and joked that she had “limited value” as a “regular person” who was only 26 years old.

In the video, taken in the early morning after Dave hit Kandula in a crosswalk while speeding to respond to a call from a man who believed he had taken too much cocaine, Auderer says he has talked to Dave and he is “good,” adding that ” it does not seem like there’s a criminal investigation going on” because Dave was “going 50 [mph]—that’s not out of control” and because Kandula may not have even been in a crosswalk. Auderer added that Dave had “lights and sirens” on, which video confirmed was not true.

In fact, as we reported exclusively, Dave was driving 74 miles an hour in a 25 mile per hour zone and struck Kandula while she was attempting to cross the street in a marked and well-lighted crosswalk.

“I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, she flew off the car. But she is dead. No, it’s a regular person. Yeah, just write a check. Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.”—Seattle police officer Daniel Auderer, joking with police union president Mike Solan about the death of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula earlier that night.

“I don’t think she was thrown 40 feet either,” Auderer told Solan. “I think she went up on the hood, hit the windshield, then when he hit the brakes, she flew off the car. But she is dead.” Then Auderer laughed loudly at something Solan said. “No, it’s a regular person. Yeah.”

We have asked SPOG via email what Solan asked that made Auderer clarify that Kandula was a “regular” person, as opposed to another type of person Dave might have hit.

“Yeah, just write a check,” Auderer continued. Then he laughed again for several seconds. “Yeah, $11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value.” At this point, Auderer turned off his body camera and the recording stops.

Joel Merkel, the co-chair of Seattle’s Community Police Commission, called the video “shockingly insensitive.

“I was just really struck by the casual laughter and attitude—this was moments after she was killed,” Merkel said. “You have the vice president of SPOG on the telephone with the president of SPOG essentially laughing and joking about the pedestrian’s death and putting a dollar value on her head, and that alone is just disgusting and inhumane,” Merkel said.

[article continues]

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 238 points 1 year ago

The extremelyinfuriating part: these people vote.

0
submitted 1 year ago by Drusas@kbin.social to c/politics@kbin.social

Vladimir Putin's attempts to justify the invasion of Ukraine as a just war to reunite historically Russian lands reflect the expansionist ideology at the heart modern Russia's imperial identity, write Glenn Chafetz and John Sipher.

To understand Russia’s current obsession with Ukraine, it is important to recognize that Russia was never a state in the common usage of the term. Unlike the modern Turkish state that emerged from the Ottoman Empire, or Great Britain, which acquired and lost an empire, Russia never had an identity separate from empire. As British historian Geoffrey Hosking observed, “Britain had an empire, but Russia was an empire.”

The Kremlin’s preferred narrative of Russia rising from present-day Ukraine (“Kyivan Rus”) is a Moscow-concocted fairy tale. The officially endorsed 1000-year history of Russia is a self-created and self-perpetuated myth that generations of Russian dictators have promoted to justify their external expansion and internal repression.

Instead, what we think of today as Russia started out as a loose collection of independent city states that included Novgorod, Pskov, Smolensk, Tver, and Moscow, the last of which attained particular significance toward the end of Mongol rule a little over 500 years ago. Kyiv was no more a part of Russia then than it is now. There was no common language, no common administration, and no joint identity. Indeed, it would be centuries before the rulers of Muscovy attempted to assert their dominance over Kyiv and the lands of today’s Ukraine.

It was the era of Mongol rule and not the Kyivan Rus inheritance that paved the way for the rise of the Russian Empire. Under Ivan III (“The Great”), Muscovy established itself as the strongest of the city states to emerge from the Mongol period. Ivan called himself “Tsar of all Rus,” but he was actually more like the mayor of Greater Moscow. It was Ivan who started the expansion of Muscovy, initiating the so-called “gathering of Russian lands.” His expansionist vision has been embraced by virtually every subsequent ruler of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation.

Ivan III’s quest to acquire new territories, often under the guise of “reuniting the lands of the ancient Rus,” continues to this day and has had a profound impact on world history. As Historian Stephen Kotkin has noted, “Beginning with the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, Russia managed to expand at an average rate of fifty square miles per day for hundreds of years, eventually covering one-sixth of the earth’s landmass.”

Few of the peoples inhabiting the lands Ivan III and his successors claimed saw themselves as Russian, at least not before they were “gathered.” At the time of Ivan III’s death, Muscovy covered less than a fifth of the area of today’s Russia; notably, it did not include the territory of modern Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, or all of Siberia. Crimea, about which Vladimir Putin rhapsodizes, was not part of the Russian Empire until Catherine II took it from the Crimean Khans in 1783.

If Putin is concerned with righting historical wrongs, he should give Crimea back to the Crimean Tatars. He won’t do this, of course, because the dynamic of imperial conquest and Russification is a key component of legitimacy for Putin, as it has been for almost all of Russia’s rulers (Yeltsin and Gorbachev partially excepted). Russia expands because its rulers need an external threat to justify their autocracy. This was as true for the Soviet period as it had been for Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great.

Putin’s Russia laments the loss of imperial glory, and has never come to terms with its repressive past. The security-expansion paradox driving Russia’s foreign and domestic policies is a vicious cycle that all empires experience to one extent or another. Acquisition creates threats inside the newly acquired territories and on the expanding borders of the growing empire. Expansion demands inward Russification and repression, and further outward expansion. As Catherine the Great famously said, “I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them.”

This dynamic can end in two ways: Either through external containment or internal democratization. The latter has proved problematic for the Russian people, and is not something Russia’s neighbors should count on happening any time soon. The former has worked before, during the Cold War.

Modern Russia remains an empire and does not see itself as a Great Power unless it dominates its neighbors. Consequently, Russia will continue to threaten, attack, and absorb its neighbors until the West acts collectively to contain it.

Russia and its apologists will complain that containment ignores Russia’s legitimate security concerns. This is a canard because Russia’s security concerns constantly expand. In reality, Russian leaders have absolutely nothing to worry about if they return to their country’s internationally recognized 1991 borders. The West has always respected these borders; it is Russia that has not. Until modern Russia moves beyond its deeply ingrained imperial identity, this is unlikely to change.

1
submitted 1 year ago by Drusas@kbin.social to c/politics@kbin.social

"Just say aye," Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Patty Murray repeatedly pleaded to Feinstein during the vote. Eventually, Feinstein did just that.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday appeared confused and attempted to deliver a longer speech during a Senate hearing, the latest in a string of episodes that have raised further questions about her ability to continue serving in office.

"Just say aye," Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Patty Murray repeatedly pleaded with her colleague.

Instead of a short reply, Feinstein began her response by saying, "I would like to support a yes vote on this, it provides $823 billion ...." As the California Democrat continued to speak, an aide also intervened to try to remind the lawmaker that this was not the time for speeches.

"OK," Feinstein then said as Murray reminded her one final time to "just say aye." "Aye," she finally said.

[article continues]

1
submitted 1 year ago by Drusas@kbin.social to c/politics@kbin.social

Jadarrius Rose, 23, is seen on video during the July 4 traffic stop with his hands up surrendering to police before an officer deployed his canine.

A police dog mauled a Black man in Ohio during a July 4th traffic stop after he surrendered to authorities with his hands raised in the air following a "lengthy pursuit," according to officials.

A Motor Carrier Enforcement inspector with the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP) attempted to stop 23-year-old Jadarrius Rose who was driving a semi-tractor trailer because it "was missing a left rear mud flap," according to an incident report. Rose was traveling westbound on U.S. Route 35 and failed to stop for the inspector and troopers who were called in for help.

Stop sticks were deployed twice on the vehicle before it came to a stop on U.S. Route 23.

"After several times of being ordered to exit the vehicle, the suspect exited the vehicle from the driver’s side door," the incident report stated. "The driver was given orders to get down on the ground and the suspect would not comply."

Rose can be seen on video released by the OSHP standing in front of troopers with his hands in the air.

An officer with the Circleville Police Department who has a K9 with him can be heard telling Rose to "go on the ground or you’re gonna get bit." Meanwhile, a trooper with the OSHP is telling Rose to "come to me."

It was then that the Circleville Police Department officer, identified as "R. Speakman," deployed his K9.

[article continues]

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 169 points 1 year ago

I will never understand how people don't realize that Hunter Biden is irrelevant. He's not a politician.

2
submitted 1 year ago by Drusas@kbin.social to c/fishing@lemmy.world
1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Drusas@kbin.social to c/fishing@lemmy.world

I've got a Scotty mount for their pot puller and would like to invest in a downrigger for Chinook salmon trolling. I see there are a number of options and was wondering if anyone has any particular recommendations on which to go for. I will probably use it exclusively for salmon, typically trolling in something like 45 to 120 feet of water.

Anyone have a model you like?

[-] Drusas@kbin.social 117 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I agree with you, except it will be the opposite. "How did people think it was okay to force women into this with no choice? Even at the risk of their own lives in a country with a high maternal mortality rate."

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Drusas

joined 2 years ago