We’d had dogs, who we never crated with no issues. We brought home a dog that, from everything we’d been told was fully trained, with no mention of any sort of separation anxiety issues, and from everything we were able to tell beforehand was a well-behaved dog.

The crate was an effort to buy us some time to work on these newly discovered issues without him killing himself.

Dickhead.

Yeah, and I also think that the sort of temporary nature of most girl scout troops also hampers, what I think, was one of the most key parts of the boy scout program- the idea of “boys teaching boys” (I suppose they may phrase it more like “kids teaching kids” now)

The older kids in the troop took a really active role in running the program. Often we’d pretty much just get sort of a list of bullet points from the adult leaders for what we needed to accomplish and it was up to us to figure out how to make it happen, put together a plan, delegate responsibilities, and get the younger kids up to speed, while the adults stood by off to the side somewhere pretty much just making sure we didn’t do anything too stupid.

Not all of us were exactly natural-born leaders, but because of that sort of organizational structure we all kind of learned some passable leadership skills.

But without that ongoing recruitment and the kids of different ages being active in the troop together, that kind of youth leadership can’t really happen to the same extent

I’ve also heard some things, and I have no clue how true they are, about their adult leader training being a little excessive, like there’s separate classes you’re supposed to take before you do pretty much anything, like you need to take the training before you can go on a camping trip, and then there’s a second training for if you want to have a campfire, and another if you want to go on a hike, etc. and I believe those are all trainings you would need to pay for

So if that’s true (and it may not be, this is half-rememered info from probably about 2 decades ago) that does put a pretty high barrier of entry for a lot of people.

Yeah that doesn’t really answer the question, dipshit.

Assuming that you cannot stay home 24/7 for an extended period of time with a dog to deal with this sort of issue, what sort of “plan” are you supposed to have for how to keep a dog who is that anxious and destructive from harming themselves?

And dude, it was my parents house when I was a fucking kid. It’s a big house that they bought in a not very desirable neighborhood where the previous owner shot himself in one of the bedrooms so they got a good deal on it. My parents worked as a secretary at a public elementary school and an operator at the local sewer plant, they weren’t wealthy.

Look, I know a lot of you Lemmy armchair animal behaviorists have a lot of opinions about crates, so enlighten me, assuming that, like most people who aren’t wealthy, we couldn’t afford to put our lives on hold to stay home for probably months to work him through these issues, what could we have done?

Allow him to destroy everything in our house and probably injure or kill himself before too long?

And the basement, while not exactly finished, wasn’t a totally unfinished space either, and this was a fairly large house, I know people with small rancher houses comparable in square footage to that basement. It wasn’t some small, dark, dank dungeon.

I work in 911 dispatch, and apparently we have a couple emu farms in my area, and at least one rich asshole who just has one as a pet.

And one of them manages to get loose maybe once every year or two on average.

So we have a weirdly thorough document about loose emus, the best ways to approach them, the ways they’ll attack if they feel threatened, what vets and animal rescues and such are willing to help catch, tranquilize, house, and treat an emu, what to feed them, etc.

And a note that the state game commission will not assist because it’s not a native bird.

But what’s especially baffling to me in that very often we have no idea where these emu came from, we call around to all of the farms and rich assholes in the area, and they’ll all say that their entire flock is accounted for. A couple usually offer to take it off of our hands if no one else claims it. Before I started there was one that was loose for months we kept getting calls about that they were pretty sure was someone’s pet because it had approached people looking for food and attention a few times, but no one reported one missing, stepped forward to claim it, and even though it was a pretty big local buzz in that area we didn’t even get any tips like “you know, John Smith over on Maple Street used to have an emu but I haven’t seen it out in his yard in a while”

One summer my family adopted Scrappy

A friend of a friends daughter had him at college but could not longer keep him.

He was a really nice dog, some mystery combination of lab and who-know-what

But she had him in a house with a few roommates who all had different schedules, and this dog had never really been left alone, plus he was in a new environment with new people.

First few days we had him there was always someone home with him. He was great, meshed right into our family.

Then we tried to leave him alone and we discovered this dog had massive separation anxiety. We weren’t gone for very long, maybe an hour, he destroyed a beanbag chair, and a bunch of blinds.

We tried crating him, he mangled the crate.

We tried locking him in the basement with some toys and such and this dog busted through the drywall to get out and cause havoc upstairs.

We got him over the summer, summer break was winding down and we knew we wouldn’t have the time to work with him on this. It broke our hearts but we had to give him back.

Last we heard, he was actually in training to be some sort of service dog, he was still pretty young and was a very smart well-behaved dog as long as someone was with him, and I feel like a situation like that where he could always be with his human was a great fit for him. I hope it worked out for him.

Also depending on when and where in the world you grew up, the Brussels sprouts of today’s may be a very different variety than the ones your mom served you as a kid, they’re a lot sweeter and less bitter now.

I’m wondering what exactly counts as a site for these purposes

I’ve been out of scouting for a long time now so I really don’t know how they’re working it

But I feel like different patrol areas at a lot of BSA summer camp sites probably offer more privacy and separation than there is at 2 adjacent sites at some non-bsa campgrounds.

I know at the summer camp my troop usually went to, you usually couldn’t really see or necessarily even hear what was going on in another patrol’s area, even though they were technically all part of the same site.

But at one state park we camped at a few times, we could pretty much see and hear everything that was going on in the adjacent group sites.

It’s always been wild to me that steak houses are seen as sort of a fancy/high-end dining experience

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good steak, and steaks can get pricey, so I get it from that angle

But steak isn’t hard to do, even the fancy-schmanciest preparations usually aren’t exactly complicated.

And the sides are usually pretty damn straightforward as well- baked or mashed potatoes, various vegetables that have basically been just been roasted or sauteed with some fat and seasonings

My wife and I have sort of a “no steakhouses” rule for our date nights. It’s not that we wouldn’t enjoy the food, but it’s also mostly stuff that we could make at home for half the price and not much effort.

Sounds like you basically discovered Milk Toast

Normally the milk is warm or they get fancier and make a bechamel kind of sauce, and maybe add some sugar and/or spices

I had it once in a while growing up, haven’t thought about it in years but I do remember liking it a lot, maybe I’ll have some as a late night snack when I get home

As for my own weird food thing, when my wife is out of town I often grab myself a jar of pickled pigs feet. Not a common thing in my neck of the woods so I can’t always find them. And it’s not that my wife wouldn’t be upset about me eating them or anything, it’s just that I’d probably be cooking actual meals instead of sitting around in my underwear fishing chunks of meat out of a jar

A big part of the problem with girl scouts, in my opinion, is that a lot of the time the troops are kind of temporary.

Usually group of girls and their parents (usually moms, who may or may not have any scouting experience of their own) start up a troop, more-or-less from scratch when the girls are brownie or daisy-aged, and then that’s pretty much it, they don’t really do any ongoing recruitment, it stays just those same girls until they all either quit or age out of the program and then the troop dissolves.

Meanwhile, the (boy scout) troop I came up through is going to be celebrating its 100 year anniversary in a year or two. They have a garage full of troop gear, money in the bank, and decades of institutional knowledge of how to be a scout and how to run a scout program. We had one or two kids whose or father and I think even grandfather had earned their eagle from the same troop, the current scoutmaster was in the troop a couple years before me and his kids are in it now, the one before him was already scoutmaster when I started before his kid was old enough to join and stayed on for a few years after his son aged out, and every year we got a new batch of kids joining, some years more than others sure, but there was always new blood coming in

So there’s a lot more continuity and something like generational wealth going on with the BSA. Girl scouts generally need to hit the cookies and fundraising hard because they’re often kind of starting from 0 (not that there isn’t some valid criticism about how the cookie sales work and how the money is distributed and used, but I don’t know enough about that to really go into it)

And as far as recruitment, boy scouts made it really easy to find a troop, there’s a website you can go on and find all of the ones near you, so if your kid just suddenly wanted to join, or if you moved and needed to find a new one it was dead simple to look that up. At least at the time when I was in, girl scouts didn’t really have anything similar, unless you were already in the know about when and where the existing troops met you were kind of SOL if you wanted to join one. I remember one of our leaders talking about some sort of community event they were trying to put together, they had some representatives from a couple other local organizations and other scout troops and such coming, and they wanted to see if any of the local girl scout troops would want to take part, but he just couldn’t get in touch with any of them, couldn’t find contact info, when he reached out to their local council they basically stonewalled him

And unfortunately just by the nature of it usually being the moms who are the involved parents with girl scouts as opposed to usually the dads with boy scouts, there’s often a bit less outdoorsy knowledge to build on (some of my best hiking/camping/fishing buddies are women, but until I was the one who started inviting them out, a lot of them had never done much that kind of thing, and unfortunately that’s not a terribly uncommon situation, whereas guys tend to be more likely to grow up doing that sort of thing with their dads)

All that said, I’ve known a decent amount of girl scouts, and while a lot of them got stuck with shitty programs, there were a handful that actually probably went harder than we did in boy scouts. The odds aren’t exactly in your favor of ending up in one of those girl scout troops, but with the right parents, kids, and resources they actually can put on a really good outdoor program (and their campgrounds are usually really nice as well) they just don’t have the systems in place to make sure that all of their troops are able to do that to the same extent boy scouts can.

It can be used as a heat source sure

But the thing that makes steel steel is that it contains carbon

Dig iron ore up from the ground, and it’s not going to have much if any carbon in it.

And unless you have some crazy particles accelerator/fusion reactor nonsense going on, nothing you do with just hydrogen is going to get carbon into that steel, because there’s no carbon in hydrogen either.

Coal, however, is mostly carbon, so using as the heat source naturally tends to add carbon into your iron to make steel.

There’s other ways of doing it, but at the end of the day most of them kind of rely on coal in one way or another at some point in the process because it’s a really convenient source of carbon.

The next best alternative is probably cutting down a bunch of trees to process into charcoal

Would be really damn cool to be able to suck CO₂ out of the air and use that carbon somehow, but to the best of my knowledge no one has figured out any efficient way to do that at scale.

I tend to reply “Thank, I grew it myself”

I don’t exactly go respirator-shopping super often, and I of course have no idea what stores around you stock, but dn my experience, yellow and black are pretty widely available, and I don’t think that I’ve ever personally seen white or green in the wild, but I’ve also never specifically gone shopping for them either, since my main use case is for things like spray paint so I’m mostly concerned with organic solvents fumes.

Another one I’ve gotten a lot of good mileage out of

I once joked to my wife that avocados need to get better prizes because I always seem to get the same one- a little wooden ball.

Now, anytime I’m in the kitchen preparing something with avocados, I’ll let out an audible groan of frustration.

Which always prompts my wife to ask, usually from the other room “What’s wrong?”

To which I always reply “Another wooden ball”

Always good for a groan and some eye rolls from the wife. She never seems to see it coming.

So you know how geese fly in that V-formation to reduce air resistance?

You know how sometimes the one arm of the “V” is longer than the other?

You know why that is?

Best told while you’re just out shooting the shit walking around outside when you can point out some geese acting like you’re just pointing out another fun nature fact.

Some of it is stress, but we get it just as much on the boring stuff too (we also handle a lot of the non emergency lines in my county) for things like a parking complaint where there’s nothing urgent going on and the caller is cool as a cucumber, they’re just completely clueless about anything I’m asking.

Like the other person said I think the question was about the ICE car

But I work in 911 dispatch, so I spend a good chunk of my night getting vehicle descriptions, you would be absolutely amazed at how many have no clue what kind of car they’re driving themselves or can’t even give a basic description

Me: What kind of vehicle is it?
Caller: I don’t know, I’m not really a car-person.
Me: Can you tell if it’s a sedan, an SUV, or a pickup truck?
Caller: I don’t know, I just told you that I’m not a car-person!

Also a shocking number of people don’t know their own address, phone number, what the nearest cross-street is to their house (or even the nearest major road or big intersection,) what municipality they live in (it may be different than the “city” part of their mailing address,) what the address is of their work, whether their car has power locks and power windows (and in fact what that even means,) whether their spouse has any important medical history, where water shut-offs are in their house, the difference between a smoke detector going off and giving a low-battery chirp, etc.

There’s no one answer

People work different schedules, the schedule I personally work has me working slightly more hours than average overall but I have more days off, so I’m free on a lot of weekdays, other people have more flexible schedules or work nights or weekends

Some people have PTO they can use, some have cool bosses who will just let them take time off whenever they want to, some people are those cool bosses or are self-employed and can set their own schedule

Some people are unemployed, some are retired (I’ve seen a lot of older folks at some protests near me)

Others are financially secure enough to be able to take the hit and think little to nothing of it

Others make sacrifices in order to make it work (if I had to take off without pay, I’d be out a few hundred bucks, it would hurt but I wouldn’t be ruined for it, I might have to skip out on a few things I’d like to do, maybe cut some corners and buy cheaper groceries, cancel a subscription or two, borrow a couple bucks from friends or family, put a couple things on my credit card to pay off later that I otherwise might have paid for outright, or maybe work some overtime before or after it to make up the difference, but nothing I couldn’t recover from fairly quickly.)

And with some exceptions, not everyone is going to every protest, some may only make it to a couple, some may make it to all or most of them, some may not be able to make it to any but may find other ways to help

N95 is probably better than nothing, but for these purposes it’s probably far from good enough

Most pepper sprays and such are oil based, and n-rated respirators are not oil resistant. For that you really want an R-, or even better P-rated mask for oily mists.

Disposable masks suitable for that do exist, but more often you’re going to find reusable cartridge-based ones which will have some additional ratings that probably aren’t relevant to specifically pepper spray but could maybe be relevant for other

White labeled cartridges are suitable for acid gases like chlorine

Black labeled are suitable for organic vapors like from paint thinners and other solvents

Yellow are suitable for both

Green are rated for ammonia and methylamine