Schwim Dandy

I’m just hopping from one shuttered instance to another.

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Joined 1 month ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • The crew didn’t blow up(src).

    The flight, and the astronauts’ lives, did not end at that point, 73 seconds after launch. After Challenger was torn apart, the pieces continued upward from their own momentum, reaching a peak altitude of 65,000 feet before arching back down into the water. The cabin hit the surface 2 minutes and 45 seconds after breakup, and all investigations indicate the crew was still alive until then.

    We were led out of our classrooms to watch it since we lived in FL. When the launch went pear-shaped, nobody really understood what had happened, we just thought it was part of the fuel tanks dropping away. We went back in, sat down and continued our day. I don’t think the teachers ever told us something went wrong and I found out about it that night at home.



  • I’ve only bought two new cars but don’t consider the depreciation a scam, it’s something everyone knows is going to happen going into it so although I feel I made a bad choice doing it, I don’t blame the dealership. The high-pressure bullshit is also to be expected, sadly.

    Used, OTOH, is an absolute scam. On trade-in, they make number adjustments to get the used car basically free and on the sale-end, they dress it up, tell the buyer that it’s been through a 5,000 point quality check and sell you whatever got bought at auction or traded in. They get even scammier if you finance through them. I’ve seen 16% interest rate for a buyer with an 800+ credit score.

    The whole thing is predatory in nature.



  • Just so I’m clear I also think Reddit is garbage at keeping out the bad apples, and the community moderators on Reddit tend to be free speech absolutists too, but at least on Reddit there is more actual human content.

    You could have saved a lot of writing by just replacing everything with “it’s not busy enough for me.” I guess you just needed to complain about the other stuff that you admit also exists at the place you’re going back to but are ok with when it’s at that site.










  • In answer to your question, if I’m understanding it correctly, you are still being tracked as long as you use the web. Meta has profiles for people that have never logged into facebook, used their site in a browser or used an app they control.

    The profile might not have a name attached but Facebook provides a ton of websites with FB-related statistics, social widgets and more. Each of those services place FB code on the page that phones home with unique visitor information. That gets compiled into profiles that they can eventually tie to an identity when more information is compiled (as an example, your highschool friend from 15 years ago installs a Meta app like instagram and clicks ok on allowing it to dig through their contacts).

    Apps and extensions like Privacy Badger, uBlockO and Ghostery help with the tracking code but I’ve no doubt that Meta spends a lot of time finding workarounds for the blocks.


  • The issue with that in his situation is 911 does not take kindly to “Hey, can you call my dad and tell him I ran out of gas?”

    If it’s not a true emergency that they are expected to handle, emergency services frown on calling them.

    His father’s argument is legitimate regarding needing a cellular carrier unless the poster would never unexpectedly need to contact family for help.




  • I suspect you’re going to get mostly sarcasm and mockery tropes but there have always been countries that have allied themselves with American interests. When you say “when help when needed”, if you’re thinking of an actual war on home turf, invasion or something similar, that’s unlikely to ever happen due to our geographical position. If you mean financial help, we take loans from a lot of different countries. If you’re asking about assistance when we engage in war elsewhere, again, that would be all the allied nations.

    Militarily speaking, the US is still one of the superpowers just because of the mind-boggling amount of money we spend on it. There’s not many countries that can compete with just the sheer number of US things that are designed to go boom.

    Things like goodwill and assistance are currently in a downward transitional trend due to the current administration. It seems a lot of countries feel ostracized by the US due to Trump’s constant foolish and often hostile actions towards them but these types of things follow an ebb and flow, the next administration to reside in office will begin the process of patching things up and relationships will improve.