• polysexualstick@lemmy.world
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    52 minutes ago

    Youth worker here: How much fucking work it is to just keep things from falling apart constantly. People assume most of my work is planning and doing activities with teenagers. But a lot of the time I’m like 50% caretaker.

  • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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    4 hours ago

    Horoscopes on radio shows? Made up on the spot or stolen from google. And I’m willing to bet the ones on newspapers and websites are too.

    I wonder how many astrology girlies would have their hearts broken by this.

    Learned this when I interned at a radio station. (My field is communications; Journalism + Marketing.)

  • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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    5 hours ago

    Millions of government employees work hard every day on so much shit you’ll never see or understand that does in fact make your life so much nicer than you deserve when you complain about government workers.

    And I’m NOT talking about the cultic worshipped military. I’m talking civilian civil servants at all levels of government.

    SOME people are really gonna wonder why everything’s getting shittier and never make the connection that their idiotic notions about government led to it.

  • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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    4 hours ago

    Lotta boring crap about PLUs, SKUs, UPCs, TPRs, and such. Stores have dedicated pricing staff for a reason. One trick that might be interesting, but not surprising, is the way stores hide price increases by putting a product “on sale” this week, so it’s cheaper than last week, but raising the regular price, so it costs more when the sale price ends.

    • qevlarr@lemmy.world
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      6 minutes ago

      This can’t be said enough. It’s almost always not worth the strain on your mental health. You’re not a student but a worker for your professor and getting paid way too little

  • Norin@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Academia, USA.

    You’re getting the exact same quality of education for introductory classes at a community college, state school, and private school.

    I know because I teach the same suite of classes at all 3 as an adjunct. Same book, same syllabus, same schedule, same assignments. The only difference is the price tag, and I’m hardly alone in that.

    Actually, scratch that. You’re getting a better education at the community college because the people in charge there bother to remember that I exist and treat me as an equal.

    • SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
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      5 hours ago

      I got degrees from both a community college and a major research university. The two don’t share instructors, but on average, the quality is much better at the community college.

      Community college instructors are there to teach. They go to continuing education classes to learn how to do it better. Some classes at a research university are taught by similar, dedicated instructors, but some are taught by the professor who drew the metaphorical short straw that semester, and who’d rather be focusing on her research. She will put in her best effort, don’t get me wrong, but her first priority is research.

      That is to say, for anyone thinking about a degree, don’t overlook the value of community college.

      (ETA: I work at a research university now; the research professors who also teach are some of my co-workers.)

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 hours ago

    Your house is insanely easy to break into unless it’s built with special materials or has steel bars over all openings.

    Disregarding the fact that windows break, pretty much every residential door (both interior and exterior) can be busted down by anyone with a decent body weight or with a framing hammer. Hammer thru the door skin, or claw pry on the jamb to force the latch to release, or even just bodyslamming it can be enough to separate the lock block and stiles and the doors will simply fall apart from there.

  • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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    11 hours ago

    Working with electricity is actually quite simple in a lot of respects, and I make a lot of money mainly because people are afraid of it (and rightfully so, me too). But many of the small things like changing plugs/switches out and hanging fixtures can be done easily by anyone with a basic knowledge hand tool use and basic rules like a) turn off the main if you don’t know which breaker you’re working with, b) check that it’s off with a meter or hot stick, c) even then, don’t directly touch the shiny parts, and d) match your colors exactly as you found them (take pictures to be safe). Granted I’ve been doing this for 10+ years, but even a layman can save themselves a service call with a couple basics and YouTube is a great resource for such things.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      My favorite electrical tip is swapping the capacitor in your AC when it stops working. $12 on Amazon. $175 for a service call. I keep a spare.

      • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
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        4 hours ago

        Better yet, having a (halfway decent) multimeter and knowing how to use it is huge. A good one can test capacitance, but simply tracing voltage isn’t too tricky.

  • superkret@feddit.org
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    13 hours ago

    If you ask a computer expert to fix the weird thing Outlook just did, or explain why Excel is suddenly writing Gibberish into your tables –
    Even if we wanted to explain it to you, we can’t. No human being alive on earth knows the reason and how to fix it.
    Some of us are really good at poking it till it behaves again.
    Others are brave enough to venture into the dark lands of learn.microsoft.com .
    But what awaits us there are articles written by Copilot about how it worked before Microsoft changed it again for no reason.

    • dingus@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      First, I do NOT work in IT or anything like that. But I seem to be the most tech savvy of all my coworkers. Occasionally one of them will ask for help and I’ll fix something for them. Sometimes one of them will comment that I am good with computers or something. Honestly, I figure things out just by clicking on everything. I think sometimes people are too afraid to click too many things for fear of breaking stuff, but there’s not a whole lot that can go catastrophically wrong imo. I tend to just click shit until I figure out what to do.

    • chaosCruiser@futurology.today
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      12 hours ago

      Speaking of Excel, here’s a fun little experiment into the nature of binary numbers and rounding errors.

      Start with some number and add a fraction like =A1+(1/3) to it. In the cell below, add that same fraction to the previous one. Copy this formula downwards and watch the numbers grow. After about 50 rows, you’ll have a number that looks like something specific, such as 71, but it isn’t exactly. There’s a sneaky rounding error hidden in there. The actual number is very close to the one displayed, but not exactly what you think it is.

      If you’re using IF statements or XLOOKUP with numbers like this, you’ll run into some perplexing errors. If I recall correctly, you can even test the number with =A50=71, which will return TRUE but the xlookup still fails. It’s been a while since I tested this one, but I remember it being really weird in all sorts of unexpected ways. It’s weekend, so I’m not touching my work computer today.

      You just need to know that a long series of fractions causes weird binary rounding errors to happen behind the scenes. Adding a series of whole numbers and neat decimal numbers was perfectly ok though.

      Also, trying to explain this to some coworkers won’t be worth the effort.

  • BertramDitore@lemm.ee
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    11 hours ago

    The drinking water systems in the United States are so precarious and vulnerable, that I’m genuinely shocked we haven’t had more widespread issues with the water supply. The systems are made up of thousands of locally-managed interconnected intakes and outflows, and oversight is spotty and combative.

    Please use a water filter. And thank your local utilities and maintenance people for their hard work keeping us alive.

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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      3 hours ago

      I saw a survey of small town watertowers in the US. There were a terrifying amount of dead birds in there, and living birds shitting.

      • pdxfed@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        And that was with the EPA in existence. Just wait until the rivers catch on fire again. Psychotic idiots.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    11 hours ago

    This is common knowledge by now I think, and yet evidence shows common doesn’t mean people remember. If you ship anything, fragile or not, be sure to pack it like it’s going to be thrown, dropped, get wet, and stepped on. It’s not even that workers in shipping do this (most damage is usually either bad packaging or mechanical damage in the automated parts), but things happen between point A and point B, many of them unavoidable. And I see SO MANY packages that consist of just some thin cardboard with a few pieces of tape, or a plastic bag that’s easily torn, or documents/letters that are smaller than the label we put on them(??? That won’t get lost :/ )

    Pack things like you want to to make it there. Just look at packages you get successfully, and I guarantee on many you’ll see marks of the war zone they went through. Now imagine if they had been sent with an old worn out box you found in the garage and threw some tape on and didn’t bother putting any protective packing inside because “it’ll be fine if it bounces around a bit”.

  • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    The better you get at coding, the less you’ll probably write code. This is for two reasons: you can’t fuck up code that isn’t written and you need people that understand the bigger picture to focus on making that picture clearer. This unfortunately leads to junior and mid-level developers writing most of the code. But it’s not like things would be 10x better if senior devs wrote everything, because even for someone experienced coding well is fucking hard.

    • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Coding: expert level fitting a square peg into a round hole. Every now and then you find a square or rectangle hole.