Almost every depiction of Anomalocaris, particularly in those CGI documentaries, make members of this genus look like enormous hideous sea monsters.

But in reality, these things are small, all less than 40 cm (like the largest ones are slightly more than a foot for us in the USA).

Giants of that era I guess and certainly an order of magnitude or more larger than superficially similar modern day relatives like sea monkeys and fairy shrimp. But they’re like the size of a lobster, we’d probably be eating them to extinction these days if they weren’t already extinct.

I’m game for it. Southern hemisphere celebrates Christmas in summer, I see no reason why we northerners can’t as well.

And time, goes by so slowly. And time can do so much.

This is why I go out of my way quite a bit to poison the AI with my pointless boomer anecdotes, largely made up or confiscated. Plus, I rarely proof read my comments anymore, so apologies for the grammatical issues and the hard to believe and rarely either one way or the other but twice the times there’s another type of type that you can also quite not, right?

Also interesting reading the comments about how many other countries are wrong. I have a hunch this entire graphic is wrong.

I certainly would not be surprised if there are some inaccuracies, but of the comments I’ve read so far suggesting that the numbers don’t capture the truth appear to be misunderstanding what the data is showing (nationwide statutory paid time off and paid public holidays).

As an example, you mentioned the 7 paid federal holidays in the USA. But similar to some of the other observations in question, those aren’t what this graphic is capturing. Outside of government jobs and maybe certain industries, those 7 public holidays are not required by statute on a nationwide level – it’s not even close to applying to everyone. Even if we agree that most jobs give people paid time off (but not because they are legally required to) or that some states require it, that’s still not what this graphic is showing, so those don’t make the 0 in any way inaccurate.

To be perfectly honest, if a CEO is truly working 80+ hours a week, you almost have to wonder where they would find the time to write walls of text to rejected candidates and to play around on social media.

Granted, I suspect a lot of higher level folks are like the ones I know, they’re very generous with what they qualify as “working hours” for themselves. For instance, “I work 12 hour days” translates to I leave for work at 7 a.m. and I don’t get home until 7 p.m." so basically they consider their travel to/from the office, the 2 hour lunch break + gym time, picking up kids after school, etc to be part of their working hours. Or if they’re away from home for 3 days at a conference, that’s 70+ hours of work right there.

And the thing is, I don’t completely disagree with any of that, it’s just that they tend to take the opposite stance when it comes to people actually doing the work. If you’re not sitting in front of your computer or on the phone making calls, then you’re not working. Your commute to/from work doesn’t count. Your lunch break doesn’t count. Your travel time to and from the conference doesn’t count for your 38.5 hour minimum billable time for that week.

It’s like dun-dun dun dun-dun-dun dun dun dun-dun. DUHN-DUHN DUHN-DUHN-DUHN-DUHN DUHN DUHN DUHN-DUHN.

I’m hoping to be wrong, but I have to agree with the experts who are saying that current AI (i.e. generative AI / LLMs) are a financial bubble. It’s good, it does some things very well, but it’s not the AGI that the average non-technical person seems to view it as, and it’s not the replacement for real work that CEOs and CFOs seem to believe it is.

We’re just not there from what I can see. This is like 3D media and virtual reality, in a lot of ways. Every decade or so there’s a big break through, giant leap forward, brand new tech that’s going to revolutionize everything. But most of us are currently staring at conventional 2D screens right now thinking the VR stuff is cool but it doesn’t really deliver on the promise.

I don’t know if it’s my “favourite” but I remember how hilarious it was the first time I heard that original Resident Evil line about “you, the master of unlocking”. Granted, at the time I assumed it was all intentional B-grade horror movie parody.

I won’t claim to be super optimistic, but I’m in a conservative region in the rural south where the cracks are showing and people aren’t just ignoring it anymore. Folks are starting to talk openly and vocally in opposition.

If you’ve never lived in a conservative, rural area before then know that it’s the type of place where “Fuck Biden” signs littered the yards of so called Christians while gas pumps and egg shelves were covered in “I did that” stickers. You hear someone verbally bashing a Democrat politician or liberals while you’re standing in line to check out, then you know it’s a day that ends in Y.

It’s hard to stress how jarring it is to hear anybody expressing any degree of dissatisfaction with a Republican policy / politician in this area, in public, around strangers. And that’s especially true when it comes to criticism of Trump. But let me tell you, it is happening with increasing regularity.

People are pissed that grocery prices are only getting higher. They’re upset that they have to wait in line for 45 minutes at the post office because there’s only 1 employee working. They are absolutely livid that the local hospital may be closing down because of medicaid cuts.

They’re talking about this in public with strangers. And they’re blaming Trump. There’s no push back. I’ve literally never seen this before.

Obviously a day late and a dollar short, since the time to have done the easy thing was back in November 2024. But at this stage of the game, I’ll take whatever fickle alliance I can get.

The relatively new rural hospital that’s saved the lives of people in my family and offered others the ability to spend their final day(s) / hour(s) of life close to home is on the chopping block. I just found out this morning that it may be closing, specifically cited as being due to medicaid cuts.

As far as I am aware, the next closest hospitals are going to add another 20 - 30 minutes or so to an ambulance ride for people in that area.

I think about the “widow maker” heart attack or the aftermath of the car accident that shouldn’t have been survivable, and I wonder if those situations would have turned out differently if it took 20 extra minutes before starting surgery / treatment.

I also think about the ambulance rides that insurance increasingly considers “out of network” and thus people are on the hook for 100% of the cost. Those often charge by the mile. One way or another, things are going to be even more expensive for those folks.

See up there near the top where it says "Take 1 capsule by mouth every

morning"?

I was dog sitting for a buddy of mine once, and ended up giving the dog a triple dose of its medication partially because of what I’d call less than ideal label design and instructions.

My buddy left instructions to give the dog 300 mg of its meds. So, I found the bottle with the correct name of the medication, it said 100 mg pills, so I gave the dog three pills.

The problem is, the label actually said something like "This medication is not to be given with

100 mg pills".

Because the bottle was super skinny, it meant that the top line wasn’t even fully visible without turning the bottle to read it, plus there was so much space between the top line and the bottom one that they otherwise looked unrelated. Strangely, the actual dose of 300 mg was not like in the picture above, it was in a tiny non-bold font and much less conspicuous than the larger bolder font used for the directions so I didn’t even notice it until I went back later and searched for it.

Granted, it didn’t help that I was not aware that this dog had 2 different prescriptions for two different strengths, which would have hopefully prompted more scrutiny on my part if I’d known because I probably wouldn’t have just assumed the first bottle I grabbed with the correct name on it was the right one to give her.

The good news is, the vet said that it wasn’t anything medically significant and that the dog would probably just be a little sleepier than normal for the next several hours. And she was, but otherwise perfectly okay.

Okay, but have you seen the price of rotisserie chickens lately? I’m not made of money.

We all love to hate on Walmart, but in my part of the world, it’s got the closest implementation to what I consider acceptable self-checkouts.

The biggest quality of life feature is that they don’t use the the weight sensors in the bagging area. You can use the hand scanner to scan every item in your cart sans weighted produce, as fast as your body will allow.

On the flip side, most of the chain grocery stores in my area have the bagging area scanners that need constant overrides, use AI cameras that lock up after every third item and require an override each time, slow machines that seem to have to compute the pi to the 10 sextillionth digit after each item is scanned before it will be ready for you to place it in the bagging area, and things of that nature. Those suck for sure.

No? Ducktales not good enough? Okay, then what about …

Heathcliff, Heathcliff, no one should terrorize their neighborhood. But Heathcliff just won’t be undone, playing pranks on every one.

Honestly, I know it’s not the same, but that’s why I have always gravitated towards “news aggregators”, basically the sites that bore progeny like Reddit and Lemmy, where you’re presented with links to news or random websites and people have their say about it in the comments.

I never heard of Third Voice and truthfully anything that is 100% reliant on a third party app or plugin / extension / mod / etc probably isn’t my bag of tea, but still a cool idea.

The ambulance ride is $2,500 USD. It’s out of network, so you owe 100% on that, we don’t pay for it. No, you don’t get to choose which ambulance service comes to pick you up, you get what you get and you have to pay if it’s not in network. Oh, great news! Your emergency room is fully covered! But you haven’t met your maximum out of pocket, and you still have your co-insurance and deductible, so another $2,500 USD, please. So, uh, the doctor in the emergency room that you never even saw, he’s also out of network, so that’s an additional $900. And the ibuprofen they gave you, that’s $45 because we only cover 90 day prescriptions and those have to be pre-authorized. On the bright side, your share of the imaging is only only $1,800 USD. Pinky swear, we actually paid out $7,200 USD on that one.

For me personally it’s the “almost nothing else” that went into the dishwasher with the plunger that truly pushed the narrative into holy shit territory.

The sad part is, this image is still noticeably better quality than most of the stuff that ends up on those “confusing perspective” and similar type communities where there’s supposedly something hidden or confusing going on but actually it’d be perfectly recognizable and not confusing at all if the photo weren’t compressed all to hell and back multiple times using shitty settings.

My experience has been starkly different from Sterile_Techniques and I’m also living in what might be termed as “the middle of Ya’ll Quaeda” USA. So, it’s interesting to hear that there’s such a big difference in opinion / understanding on this topic.

For sure, 20 - 25 years ago it seemed like almost nobody had heard of it, and whenever someone said they were allergic to meat because of a tick bite, there was a lot of skepticism and denial.

However, these days, pretty much everybody knows someone who has this allergy, and that’s no exaggeration. Even the most backwoods, anti-science, do my own thing, fuck your feelings kind of people are telling others to check themselves for ticks and/or taking steps to keep ticks off them because they’re aware of all the risks from tick bites. Now, they might be claiming that it’s government bio-warfare, related to 5G and/or covid, or some other unnecessarily contrarian bullshit, but they do take it seriously from what I’ve experienced.

Also, the good news is (or bad news I guess depending on your perspective) is that a lot of people seem to experience improvement of symptoms in time, so it’s not necessarily a permanent thing for everybody. I don’t know if it’s just that some people continue to test the limits and end up inadvertently putting themselves through exposure therapy or if the immune response itself just naturally wanes over time, but several people I know who’ve had this for 5 - 10+ years say they can usually get away with a small amount of mammal meat, like maybe a hotdog now and then at a minimum, even though a small bite would have caused them a lot of trouble when they first developed the allergy.