I think you’re thinking of paywithfour.com

Which seems to be a standard by-now-pay-later company, which isn’t necessarily a scam, but those companies are very predatory with excessive fees and interest rates and such so they certainly feel scammy. I didn’t do a deep dive on them so I can’t say if they’re necessarily any worse or less legit than any other company (or maybe even better)

But four.com seems to be some sort of enterprise authenticator/SSO company . The website is weird because it doesn’t really tell you much about them, it just kind of has a link to request an invite to sign up

I figure there’s two main options with that. Either they’re sort of a fly by night company just sort of squatting on the domain hoping to profit off of selling it and just have the shell of a website up to give an air of legitimacy

Or they’re just really focused on their enterprise customers and see no reason to really have a public-facing webpage, either your company uses them and you need to log in to manage your account, or you have no real business with them. Maybe they’re sort of a legacy system that a parent company is keeping around to fulfill a contract, maybe they’re getting enough business from in-person sales and word-of-mouth and don’t feel the need to risk overextending themselves by marketing more aggressively

Or of course it could be something nefarious, but without looking into them too much nothing on the face of the website gives me any particular reason to think that.

No because I’m married and my wife wouldn’t like that.

More seriously, It’s not a hard no, but I lean towards probably not, it would probably depend the specifics of their identity and the state of any medical transition.

In general, I’d tend to call myself a straight cis man. If I think long and hard about it, I could make an argument that I’m perhaps something along the lines of a non-binary person with a penis, who just happens to present in a traditionally “masculine” fashion in basically every way, and who is attracted to people with vaginas who present in at least a somewhat feminine way.

That’s a fucking mouthful though, and I’m just not gonna get into the weeds about that in casual conversation.

The fact that I’m a man isn’t really something that’s particularly important to me, I just kind of think of myself as a person. If somehow someone misgendered me it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest (though it may get a chuckle because I’m a bald, hairy dude with a big busty beard and fairly deep voice, not exactly the picture of femininity)

And while I quite enjoy having a penis, I don’t feel as though I’d be particularly bothered by having a vagina instead (although you can miss me with that period nonsense, but I think most vagina-havers would agree on that point) and I’d otherwise live my life the same way.

And how “feminine” a theoretical partner would need to be actually gets a lot of leeway. I can find people pretty far into the tomboy/androgynous/butch/etc end of the spectrum attractive, maybe even preferably to the extreme “girly” end of the spectrum. There’s a line there where they’d be too “masculine” for my tastes, but it’s a fuzzy one.

And for me, a certain amount of physical attraction in a partner is important. It’s a pretty wide spectrum that I’m able to find attractive, but there are limits, and I have preferences and dislikes to varying degrees.

And one of those strongest preferences is that my partner have a vagina. I am just not attracted to people with a penis.

If we want to count it under the trans umbrella, I don’t think that me dating a non-binary person with a vagina would be out of the question.

Maybe even a FTM femboy type who hasn’t had or want bottom surgery.

MTF, which I think is more in the spirit of this question, is a bit murkier though. If they don’t intend to get bottom surgery I think that’s a pretty hard no. And even if they have or intend to I can’t say that I’ve ever seen, let alone touched, a surgically-created vagina, so I don’t know if they’d do it for me the same way as a natural one.

The best comparison I do have is that I generally consider myself to be a boob-guy, and while it’s not an outright disqualifier, fake boobs don’t usually do it for me in quite the same way as real ones, but some are better than others, and while I tend to like big boobs, I have nothing against small ones, and a mastectomy isn’t a deal-breaker for me either.

So I suspect that with bottom surgery, it’s a firm “maybe”

As for a trans partner who has not yet but intends to get that surgery, I guess it kind of depends on the timeline. I don’t really want to have sex with someone with a penis and a sexless relationship for me would have a limited lifespan.

All of that said, regardless of whether I’d date them or not doesn’t change how I’d view their identity. There’s plenty of women out there I wouldn’t date for any number of reasons, but that doesn’t mean I see them as any less of a woman.

Again, it varies, but a lot of places have moved to a central dispatch model where basically everything, emergency and non-emergency, is going through the same dispatch center in one way or another.

In the area I work in, especially after hours and over the weekend, a lot of stations aren’t staffed and everything redirects to us anyway, and even if you do reach someone at the station, often they’re either going to transfer you to us at central dispatch, or take down the information and call us themselves after they hang up with you. They’re not able or not supposed to dispatch much of anything from the station directly.

Technically those calls go behind 911 calls in our queue than calls on actual 911 lines, but luckily in my area our staffing and call volume are at a level where that’s almost never a factor and pretty much all calls are answered immediately.

So most of us here are of the opinion that people are better off just calling 911 for anything except for basic administrative things that need to be handled by the office at the local station, basically everything else needs to go through us so you might as well cut out the middle-man and go to us directly. And worst-case scenario we can’t help you and we’ll tell you who to call instead (you really need to be a major nuisance before anyone even begins to think about trying to get you in trouble for misusing 911 for a non-emergency, none of us want the paperwork or to have to go to court or anything else that would have to go with that.

Again, the situation varies a lot from place-to-place, non-emergency lines may be more useful in other areas, call volumes and staffing levels may be worse and you may not want to tie up the 911 lines, etc. so it pays to be aware of the situation in your local area.

Again, this all varies, but that’s pretty much how things seem to work everywhere within a couple hours of where I work.

It’s going to vary a bit by jurisdiction, everywhere handles things a little differently

The coroner’s office should have an office number and you can certainly try calling that. It may or may not be staffed overnight or over the weekend and they’ll have some sort of on-call procedures in place (in my county, when they don’t have anyone in the office, their phones actually come through to us at the dispatch center to have the on-call coroner paged. Generally speaking we don’t do that for the general public, just for police, hospitals, etc.)

Whatever funeral home you intend to use may also be able to handle it.

But in general, just call 911. I won’t lie, a lot of what happens after that kind of happens in a black box from my perspective, I take the call, hang up and police/fire/EMS go out and do their thing and I get very little follow-up from there. But they have the experience with this kind of thing, they know what steps to take from there.

I also get a decent amount of calls where my callers are kind of clueless about what’s going on, it’s happened that they tell me the patient is conscious and alert only for the field units to report that they are in fact stiff and cold to the touch and an obvious class 5, and the opposite way around where they’re sure someone is dead and when they get out there the person is in fact up and talking and seems to be in perfect health, and of course everything and anything in-between. So it never hurts to have someone go out there to make sure things are actually as they seem. And of course we want to double check to make sure there wasn’t anything suspicious about the death as well.

I remember I had a caller one time who had been transferred to us from a nearby county where she was located. She told me her father had just died and she was having trouble getting ahold of her relatives in our county to let them know so she wanted us to go try to make contact with them for her (this would be about a priority 4 BTW, emergency and non-emergency calls all get handled through our central dispatch here)

Of course she didn’t have her relatives addresses, good phone numbers or much of anything for us to actually help us make contact with her relatives. But I was trying my best trying to help her, asking a lot of questions trying to figure things out trying to get her to describe where they live etc.

But the more I’m talking to her, things just seem kind of off, so I ask her when exactly her dad died

It was like literally right before the call, she was still sitting around in the home with the body and the first thing she thought to do about it was call her relatives that she apparently barely spoke to anyway.

Which, fine, I get wanting to let your relatives know about a death in the family, and different families and cultures have their own funeral practices and such, but you probably want to do something about the corpse in your living room first.

So I got her back over with the dispatch for her county, both so they can do whatever they need to about notifying the coroner and whatever other policies they have in place and because her local police would probably be better able to run the information through their system to find contact info for the relatives than I would be over the phone with her.

I work in 911 dispatch, at my agency our calls are assigned a priority from 1-5, 1 being the most severe, 5 the least

1 and 2 are considered high priority, you’re getting all the lights and sirens and everything, 3-5 are low, on the police end of thing a priority 5 is pretty much just us giving information to them, not something they actually need to do anything about, maybe they need to drive by and check on something, and maybe make a call afterwards to to public works or something to have them deal with an exceptionally bad pothole.

On the EMS side of things what that looks like is

1- pretty much what you expect, cardiac arrest, shootings, choking, traumatic amputations, etc.

2- honestly most of the EMS calls we get are a class 2. Things people need to go to the hospital with some urgency, but aren’t in immediate danger of expiring on the way there.

3- these are sort of the “you really called 911 about this?” calls. Like, sure, you should probably get this checked out, but you probably could have driven yourself or gotten a friend to take you to an urgent care, it probably could have waited a few hours, and the doctors probably just gonna tell you to take some Tylenol and take it easy for a few days.

4- this is basically psych patients. Physically there’s nothing wrong with them, they’re just mentally unwell

Which brings us to the point of this rant: class 5- obviously dead people. They can’t get any deader, so no real rush. They basically just need someone with some medical training to go out there and go “yep, that’s a corpse” and maybe check up on the family member who’s having a panic attack over it. Doesn’t get much more stable than that.

As a result of this “Class 5” has also entered our jargon as shorthanded for a dead person. So much so that some of our local news stations have picked up on it, if it’s a slow news day and they’re listening to the scanner fishing for a story and they hear “class 5” they might get a little nosey about it (I have a friend who worked for one who told me that after I started working here)

That’s all well and good when you’re asking them for knowledge that’s outside of what’s needed for their core job functions

However being aware of what’s going on in the world is kind of a big part of what is expected of the president. And again, this was actually a pretty big story, there was a lot of debate around if/how the US would/should be involved

A presidential candidate at that time not knowing what Aleppo is, would be kind of like one today not knowing what Crimea is.

When a candidate is doing an interview like this, it’s sort of like they’re doing a job interview for the role of president with the entire country, because of course they can’t go interview with every citizen one-on-one. If you were hiring, for example, a plumber, for a job, and you asked them about how they would do something with PEX pipe because that’s part of what’s going to be needed on the job, and they replied “what’s PEX pipe?” You’d probably go with a different applicant.

Not that that necessarily means that the applicant is a bad plumber, they might be an absolute wizard who can solder copper pipe upsidedown, blindfolded, and with one hand tied behind his back but the job at-hand needs PEX and not copper. Sure, they could probably learn to work with PEX, but it would take time to get them up to speed and you need to hit the ground running with the project to get it done before the drywallers can do their job.

And again, I don’t think that was really the case with him here, once prompted that it was about the situation in Syria he was able to rattle off a reasonably coherent plan of how it should be handled (not that I particularly agreed with how he would have handled it, but it was generally in-line with his other policies) so I think it just took him a moment to switch gears and realize they were talking about something else now.

I think the average person could maybe be forgiven not knowing Aleppo

But for anyone who was paying attention to world/middle east news at the time, which I think is reasonable to expect of someone running for president, the Syrian Civil War, and specifically the battle of Aleppo was in full swing at the time, it was a fairly big news story .

And so a lot of people were paying attention to Syria at the time this was around the same time that ISIS was pretty big in the news, the last “S” standing, of course, for Syria. If you were on Reddit at the time you might remember a whole lot of people seemed to think it was really important to call them “Daesh” instead of “ISIS.” So while maybe not quite a household name, but probably something that would have rang some bells for a lot of people to at least be able to say “oh yeah, that’s a city in Syria where something is happening right now”

Now with that said, I am actually willing to give him a little leeway on that, I’m pretty sure I remember that question being a little out of left-field, like immediately before the “and what would you do about Aleppo?” question they were talking about something completely different and there wasn’t really anything to segue from that to the topic of Syria, and I can understand that, we all have brain-farts now and then, and it can take a second for your brain to switch gears, I think we’ve all experienced that once or twice.

Almost 2 decades ago I paid close to that for a 50" plasma TV as one of my first big purchases after I got my first job.

Of course this isn’t a direct 1:1 comparison, they’re different display technologies, TVs these days have a 4k if not 8k resolution when that one I bought was 720p, there’s been almost 20 years of advancement driving costs down, and 20 years of inflation driving them up, etc.

So I don’t even know where to begin trying to fairly compare the relative costs of those 2 TVs

But back then tv manufacturers also weren’t getting paid to include apps, and put a button on their remotes to launch Amazon prime, or show me ads, or anything of the sort. Their only revenue stream was me buying the tv.

Counterpoint- why hasn’t blocking been more common?

I’m a millennial, so I’ve basically grown up with the internet. Blocking has been a feature on basically any website, app, etc. that lets you interact with other people for as long as I can remember.

And I’ve never been afraid to use it. I’ve blocked probably hundreds of people across countless platforms over the last 2 decades or so, and I think my Internet experience has been better for it.

When I was in school, and I assume still to this day, one of the big things that always seemed to have people’s feathers ruffled was “cyberbullying” and other sorts of online harassment.

Now I’ll admit, somehow I ended up a reasonably well-liked, maybe even popular dude, (no idea how my weird, antisocial, probably-autistic ass pulled that off) so I was never really the target of it myself.

But it always baffled me how people let it be a thing. A whole lot of those problems always seemed like they could have been solved by just hitting the block button.

Not all of them of course, but a lot of them. Blocking someone of course doesn’t stop them from talking about you to someone else, but at that point a lot of it can just be out of sight and out of mind.

Back when I still had a Facebook, I had probably half of my town blocked because they were always posting dumb shit in the local groups. I had a bunch of businesses blocked because they spammed advertisements everywhere. I had actual friends who I hung out with IRL blocked or at least unfollowed because they flooded my feed with shitposts. Half of my family was blocked because I just didn’t want to deal with them on social media. I preemptively blocked people I work with or otherwise knew casually because they don’t need to see what I’m doing online.

Slight counterpoint

I have 2 TVs in my house. A 70" Vizio as my main TV and a 40-ish inch Samsung fame in the bedroom

Haven’t used the TVs smart features in years, everything I watch is run through a game console or dedicated streaming device (currently a 4k Chromecast)

Their software is kind of dogshit, but I never interact with it except once in a blue moon after a power outage or something when it defaults back to that. I otherwise find it to be a perfectly fine TV for the price I paid for it.

However, as bad as the software is on the Vizio, the Samsung is 10x worse. And unfortunately as bad as it is, that’s what we use because it was hard enough trying to hide the box the TV came with (the way they get the frame TV’s so light and thin is by moving all of the electronics into a separate box, I installed a cabinet in the wall behind the TV to hide it) let alone trying to hide a separate streaming stick/box along with it. I also feel like using one of those may not play as well with the art mode as the built-in software, which is kind of the whole point.

Totally anecdotal, but I work in 911 dispatch, so I have a bit of insight on people involving themselves in emergencies

It’s really hit or miss.

Fires, gunshots, medical emergencies, fights, things blowing up, car accidents, noise complaints, aircraft crashes, I’ve probably taken a call about it, and those calls have come in from the person involved, a neighbor , a random passerby, their grandmother who lives in another state, or some random follower on tiktok.

And sometimes we get a hundred calls about the same thing. There are times I can just about answer the phone with “911, if you’re calling about the [thing] in [place] we’re already aware, help is on the way.” And be right about 90% of the time while that thing is going on. (To be clear I don’t do that, because almost every time I crack a joke about my job or vent about stupid shit our callers do, some self-righteous dipshit comes at me with a whole “if that’s how you talk to your callers maybe you’re not cut out for this job” spiel as if no one ever vents about the idiots they have to deal with at work.)

And there are other times where we get exactly one call about something serious happening in a very public place and we’re left wondering if it was a prank call until our police/fire/EMS get out there and confirm that yes, everything is exactly as described or even worse, it’s a total shit-show and all hell’s breaking loose.

Sometimes it seems like a whole town is turning out to help people with a minor fender-bender, and sometimes hundreds of people are driving right by an overturned vehicle.

Usually, of course, it’s somewhere in-between. We got a handful of calls about something but our phones aren’t ringing off the hook about it.

Moral of my rant is, a lot of times people will step in to help or at least call 911 in an emergency, but you can’t always count on that. The idea of the bystander effect is exaggerated and misinterpreted, but the core takeaway about it is solid. You can’t always take it for granted that someone else is going to do something to help, so if you find yourself in a position where you can be the one who helps, you should do so.

I think I see a bit of steam escaping from the pan, so I think they tried to weigh it after cooking

Which makes sense, there’s going to be some weight change after you cook it because of evaporation and such… hence the steam

Before cooking you couldn’t really call it Jollof Rice, it would just be a big pot of the raw ingredients for Jollof Rice

And they know the weight of the ingredients going in already, they’re quoted in the article, so that’s just simple addition to figure out.

Luckily I don’t have it quite that bad I am just very uncomfortable with it.

Sprained my knee really badly once and the doctor used a giant syringe to drain some fluid after the swelling hadn’t gone down much after a couple weeks. Really didn’t like that, wasn’t even close to passing out, but can’t think I’ve ever been more uncomfortable.

Similarly I’ve also been on-scene with some pretty nasty injuries, and I work in 911 dispatch, I’m generally not bothered by too much.

I have 3

I cannot juggle. I don’t generally lack in hand-eye coordination (not that I’m overly-gifted with it either, but I’d generally say that I’m at least average,) and I understand the theory of it well enough, I’ve even been able to teach people to juggle successfully, it’s just that I, myself, cannot juggle.

I’m also a reasonably handy, technically-minded person, again not an absolute wizard, but if I crack a gadget open, with a couple Google searches and how-to guides, I can usually understand more or less how things work and how to fix them if they’re broken.

But something about sewing machines breaks my mind. There’s something going on right around the bobbin that just doesn’t make sense to my brain and doesn’t seem like it should work, but it apparently does, because I’ve successfully used a sewing machine and can confirm first-hand that they work.

Lastly, I don’t like needles. It’s not a horrible phobia that sends me running for the hills, but something about needles sleeves me out like nothing else. I can suck it up and get my necessary vaccines and such, but I do kind of have to give myself a little internal pep-talk first. It’s not a fear of pain, I have pretty solid pain tolerance and needles really don’t hurt that much at all, it’s specifically needles that weird me out. If there was an option to get my vaccines where a doctor would shank me with a scalpel and rub the vaccine into the wound, I’d absolutely go for it.

Generally speaking, recipes can’t be copyrighted (the specific wording of a written recipe might be protected, but the general idea of combining certain ingredients in a specific way can’t)

The names of the flavors, branding, etc. can be (or trademarked, or various other IP terms)

And aspects of the production process might be covered by patents and such.

And of course non-competes and such could complicate things for the actual people involved

And how you acquire those recipes can be a factor, that could rub up against non-disclosure agreements, corporate espionage laws, etc. you may need to be able to say that you came up with it on your own independent of the original recipe or pieced it together from publicly available information.

But in general, if anyone wanted to start up an ice cream company selling exact duplicates of Ben & Jerry’s flavors,they could do that as long as they called them all something different

How “no install” does it need to be? Because in one sense, duct-taping a flashlight to the ceiling could technically be considered an install if we really want to split hairs.

I’m assuming the main thing is you don’t want to be running wires and cutting holes in the ceiling.

If screwing something into the ceiling isn’t too tall of an ask, a plug-in chandelier/pendant lamp might be a good option, but finding an attractive way to route the wires may prove tricky.

Some command hooks and string lights may do the trick

You could also try some rope rights along the perimeter of your ceiling held on with command strips/double stick tape

A tall floor lamp could sort fill the role of a ceiling light, at an old apartment I had a lamp that was basically an enormous version of the Pixar lamp that filled that role pretty well.

You might be able to find some sort of battery/rechargeable/maybe even solar powered light fixture that you can mount to your ceiling to get around needing to run a power cord to it, but I have a feeling you’ll find the light output and battery life of most options disappointing.

Not what you’re asking for, but just a final thought- my childhood home had almost no overhead lighting, there was a light fixture or two in the kitchen, a couple bare bulbs in the basement, and a wall fixture in the bathroom. Everywhere else we just had floor, table, and desk lamps and never really had a problem with it. I feel like that’s still a perfectly serviceable solution, especially with the modern option of having smart bulbs and/or outlets to control those lights.

I think it looks pretty good from the side, but from pretty much any other angle it’s just an ugly box.

When it was first revealed, I was a fan of the design (not that I was going to be buying anything from muskrat) but the more I saw of it the less I liked the looks.

It’s kind of like they spent the whole time designing it from the side view, then ran out of time before they were going to reveal it and decided to just connect the two sides with some rectangles and straight lines.

I kind of feel like this is kind of one of those rare cases where we should ideally be letting the free market do its thing.

If a print shop, bakery, etc. wants to refuse your business on ideological grounds like this, you take your business elsewhere and tell everyone else to do the same.

It of course kind of falls apart with big companies like office Depot, where they’ve often driven all of the local competition out of business and someone can just keep running their complaint up the corporate chain of command until they reach a soulless bean-counter who only sees dollar signs.

In no particular order, and not an exhaustive list

• The Big Lebowski
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Sin City
• Lord of The Rings Trilogy
• Star wars Original Trilogy & Rogue One
• Casablanca
• Mad Max Fury Road
• Arrival
• Pulp Fiction
• All the Studio Ghibli movies, but Especially Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited away, and Grave of the Fireflies
• Blazing Saddles
• Young Frankenstein
• Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life
• Monty Python & the Holy Grail
• Jurassic Park
• Rocky Horror Picture Show
• Blade Runner
• Blade Runner 2049
• Mary & Max
• Akira
• Rocky
• The Godfather 1 & 2, and at that point I guess you might as well watch 3 as well
• Rashomon
• Chinatown
• Jaws
• All quiet on the western front
• Psycho
• Kill Bill 1&2
• The Shawshank Redemption
• Forest Gump
• Fight Club
• The Matrix (just 1)
• Silence of the Lambs
• Taxi Driver
• Back to the future trilogy
• The Usual Suspects
• Apocalypse Now
• Indiana Jones Trilogy
• Dune parts 1&2
• The Shining
• Dredd
• Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• The Room
• A Clockwork Orange
• Gone with the Wind
• V for Vendetta
• Trainspotting
• Fargo
• Ben Hur
• Children of Men
• Shoot 'em Up
• Logan *The Princess Bride
• Old Yeller
• John Wick series
• Most Disney/Pixar movies
• Most Don Bluth movies

Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.