My first exposure to cast iron was through boy scouts with cast iron griddles and Dutch ovens cooking on an open fire.

They got left out in the rain, blasted with heat hot enough to melt lesser metals*, had all manner of acidic foods cooked in them, got scrubbed clean with steel wool and dish soap, spent most of their lives when they weren’t in use in a garage with no climate control where the humidity often got pretty gross, and generally got used, abused, and neglected. Never had any issues with the seasoning, rust, etc. I think one time after a camping trip by the beach where they sat out getting lightly twisted with salt spray all weekend, they picked up a bit of rust, so someone’s dad got them sandblasted at his job, and after a trip or to through the oven for reseasoning they went right back in service, and that was the only special treatment they ever got.

So it was really weird to me when I got older and got some pans of my own to see people talking about babying their cast iron like they do. I’m a little more careful with my pans than I was with the ones we had in scouts, but not by much. And when I take them camping I’m not above throwing them into the fire to burn off any really stubborn, burnt-on crud.

And at the end of the day, there’s not much that you can realistically do to a cast iron pan that you can’t fix with some sandpaper and elbow grease and a quick reseasoning.

*At one point, we somehow ended up with an aluminum griddle in one of our cook kits. It was a pretty much indistinguishable from our iron ones except that it weighed less, it was a pretty solid griddle. On one camping trip it was left on the fire after breakfast, and I don’t know exactly how it came to pass because it was another patrol, but they somehow got the fire up hot en

Even that article is talking about it like it’s some weird new idea that’s “gaining traction” (reading between the lines means that this is an idea that doesn’t have traction.)

It’s also written by some LinkedIn “editor,” so basically some chud whose job is to produce blog spam about the job market.

And the only two examples he could offer are some non profit in Toronto, and another based in the UK that I don’t think even exists anymore as of a year later.

And his poll reports 5% of 3000-some responses saying this is a thing, that’s gonna have some major biases because the only people who are even gonna see this poll are the kinds of weirdos who give a shit what this LinkedIn idiot says, and that sample live reflects a miniscule fraction of a percent that really can’t be interpreted as a all representative of the millions of people who have had job interviews. I can’t see the actual wording of how he phrased it’s because I’m not gonna install the LinkedIn app, but he could also have skewed the question in a way that would include stuff like getting compensated for travel expenses to attend an interview, which is something you might reasonably expect in some cases.

Besides that and a few people like you around the internet, I really can’t see anywhere saying that this is even remotely a thing, it’s something that a handful of employers might do but they’re a statistical anomaly.

Or they’re a pyramid scheme offering you a $50 gift card to show up and “interview” to sell steak knives.

I’m sure that’s probably the case, but that’s kind of my point.

Even if I landed another, better, job between my initial interview and my job shadow, I probably would have still shown up for the shadow because when else are you going to get a chance to peek behind the curtain like that?

I may not have pursued it any further from that, but to me being able to just show up and listen to 911 calls being handled for a bit would be too cool of an opportunity to pass up. I’m pretty sure I would have jumped at the opportunity to do that even if I wasn’t trying to get hired.

But again, I’m biased, I work here and like my job so of course I think it’s kind of neat.

I don’t know what sort of fantasy land you live in, but I’ve never heard of anywhere paying someone for a job interview.

It is sitting there listening to and watching someone do the job.

They’re not answering calls, they’re not entering anything into the computer, they’re not doing paperwork, the most they’re going to be asked to do is “hey can you move your chair a bit, I need to get into that drawer”

In fact, if they tried to do any of those things they’d be kicked right the fuck out, that would be a whole mess of liability issues since they don’t have any of the necessary training or certifications.

They’re observing to see what the job entails. They’re (hopefully) asking questions to see if it’s a good fit for them, and we’re seeing how they react to what they’re hearing and what their attitude is like to see if they’re going to be a good fit.

When I have a job shadow with me, nothing changes about how I do my job except I scoot my chair a little further to the left to make room for them, and between calls I’m chatting mostly with them instead of my coworkers or reading, and once they’re done I have a short questionnaire to fill out about whether I think they’re a good candidate.

They sit there quietly watching and listening to me handle calls, and in between we just chit chat. They usually ask some questions about the calls they heard me take or the job in general (they all seem to ask what the craziest call I ever took was) I usually ask a few of my own to get a feel for them. I tell them stories about the job, crack some jokes, I point out a couple things that I think are neat (like the document we have with information about what we’re supposed to do if we get a call about a loose emu- it happens more often than you’d think)

Then after they leave I have a short questionnaire to fill out about if I think they’re a good candidate or not.

They sit with a call-taker for about 30-45 minutes listening to 911 calls coming in, then go sit with a dispatcher for about the same amount of time to listen to calls being given out over the radio the the field units, then there’s a short, pretty informal interview with the on-duty supervisors and/or someone from our training department.

They’re not getting trained, they’re not expected to retain any of the information or understand everything, and they’re certainly not expected to be able to do the job after sitting with me. It’s pretty much all about vibes. Do they like the vibe of the workplace, and do we like their vibe as a potential coworker.

new job

For a new job, sure, you should be getting paid. This is part of the hiring process, you don’t have the job yet.

I’ve known a lot of people who’ve gotten jobs that have had a half dozen or so rounds of interviews, how many hours does that add up to? Every other interview I’ve ever done was at least 30-45 minutes, so after 3 rounds or so of interviews at another job you’ve pretty much broken even on that.

And with other jobs that’s often spread over multiple days or weeks that you’d probably need to take time off from your current job for. I’d gladly take this hour or two on a night or weekend over that.

A lot of things vary from one agency to another, but where I work I don’t think most people would consider this a last resort job. Most of us are here either because this is what we want to do or because it’s a good career builder towards other public safety/law enforcement type jobs.

For my part, if I have to work, I think this is about as good as it gets for me. I like the hours, the pay isn’t amazing but it’s livable, benefits are solid, and it’s interesting and satisfying work.

It’s also not the quickest hiring process since they usually wait until they have a few people to run a training class, it’s been a few years now but I believe I did my aptitude test and interview in mid August (same day because they were doing a hiring event, sometimes they have to get scheduled separately) did my job shadow a week or two later with another short interview, got my conditional offer around mid September, had to do a drug, hearing, and vision test and a psych eval, and class started in about mid-late October, so about 2 months start to finish.

I have a friend who tested at the same time as me and got picked up for the next class they ran, so it was a couple extra months for him.

And some other agencies have extra steps in the process. More rounds of interviews, really in-depth background checks with interviews with the sheriff and a polygraph test and such (thankfully the agency I work for isn’t like that since polygraphs are bullshit)

No not ideal for someone who really needs a job ASAP.

I don’t think death note ever quite fully explored the possibilities of what it can and can’t make happen.

My mars colony example is probably more than a 20 day project no matter what, so that’s probably out.

But I don’t think it’s totally clear whether it would be able to make someone have an out-of-the-blue eureka moment about cold fusion, hole up in their bedroom writing out the scientific proofs for a week not eating or drinking, then keel over dead of dehydration (I figure that’s maybe a bit more realistic than my heart attack from shock example)

It can certainly make people do things they otherwise wouldn’t, but I don’t know if it’s clear that it could plant that kind of knowledge in someone’s head.

In addition to the economy thing that everyone else has already pointed out (and is totally valid)

I think it’s worth pointing out that in the northern hemisphere it’s summer right now, so if that’s where you’re located there’s a lot of people going on vacations and having parties right now.

My social circles aren’t exactly rolling in it, but at any given time over the summer, there’s still at least a couple people I know are the beach, camping, having a BBQ or bonfire, or hanging out at a pool somewhere on their downtime when they might have been at a bar or something otherwise.

If you live in a touristy area, yeah, that’s the economy, bars should be booming there.

I remember a couple years ago on a whim a couple of friends and I decided to go to a bar that’s usually packed with a line well out the door of people waiting to get it. But it just happened to be a holiday weekend so lots of people had other plans, and we got in no problem.

Do you expect people to get paid for showing up to a job interview? Because that’s, in essence, what it is- a second round of interviews, albeit a pretty informal one.

And since we’re obviously a 24/7 operation, there’s a lot of flexibility on when we can schedule it, not like most interviews where you probably have to take time off of work for it, we do a lot of them on weekends and evenings.

It’s also a really good chance to see what the workplace culture and actual day-to-day reality of the job is like and to talk to people who are actually doing the job instead of just taking some suit from HR’s word for it.

No more than for any other sort of job interview. They’re not answering calls, they’re sitting there listening.

And honestly I thought it was a great experience when I got hired, it gave me a real inside look to what the workplace culture was before I started here, and a chance to talk to and ask questions to people who are actually doing the job I was applying for instead of some HR/supervisor/deputy director type.

And since we obviously work 24/7/365 we can pretty much make any time work for these applicants, so they don’t need to take off from work or anything to come in and do it. We get a lot of them on nights and weekends.

It’s also pretty necessary to make sure people can handle it. It can get really intense at times, and seeing an incident unfold in real time is a very different experience than listening to a recording of a call after the fact. Class space to train new dispatchers is limited, and almost every dispatch center is constantly short-staffed, so we really need to make our hires count, and we lose plenty enough throughout the training process as it is, we don’t want to spend a couple months training someone only to get them out on the floor to realize that they can’t emotionally handle listening to, let alone actually handling 911 calls.

Does our choosing a cause of death preclude them from dying of other causes? Because you could potentially do some wild stuff to postpone death of loved ones by, for example, deciding they’ll die 60 years in the future of old age.

And how much control do you have around the circumstances surrounding their death? Could I specify “dies of heart attack brought on by shock of working out the key to practical cold fusion on paper” or “head trauma due to fall while adjusting to lower gravity in main living area of self-sustaining mars colony” to force us forward in technology and science?

Because that’s basically what I’d do.

Only very tangentially related to this

I work in 911 dispatch. Part of our hiring process is after the initial interview and aptitude test, they have applicants come in to do a job shadow with us for an hour or two. Basically just sit with us while we’re answering and dispatching calls, see what the work we do is actually like, gives them a chance ask us questions, and we can kind of feel them out to see if they’d be a good fit.

And a shocking amount of people make it to that stage and then don’t show up for their job shadow.

I’m admittedly biased, since I work here, but I feel like even if I didn’t actually have any interest in the job, that would be an interesting peek behind the curtain that I’d still want to see regardless.

I played a lot of it back in the day and thoroughly enjoyed it, and I’m certainly not above admitting that it was kind of corny but I can appreciate corniness for its own sake

But I recently picked it back up and it’s just not clicking for me anymore.

I feel like it’s kind of a skill issue. Years ago I got pretty good at it, and so my memories of it are colored by that. But it’s been well over a decade since I’ve played it, so I’ve lost all of those skills, and when your memories are of rolling around at the speed of sound, it feels pretty janky to be back at square 1 missing the timing of everything

Just pointing out some assumptions you’re making and shoehorning in a couple of my own thoughts on the matter.

1. We’re assuming that there is life elsewhere in the universe. (I personally tend to believe there is something, somewhere out there that could check the boxes to be considered “life” but it’s not exactly a sure thing)

2. We’re assuming that whatever life exists out there possesses a soul (If I did believe in souls, which I personally do not, I don’t think that every living thing necessarily would have a soul- bacteria, fungus, plants, etc. I wouldn’t think have souls, nor necessarily all animals, I don’t think I’d say that things like placozoans, sea sponges, coral, and jellyfish have souls for example.)

3. We’re assuming that those souls operate in a similar manner to our own and are compatible with us. As far as we can tell all life on earth evolved from a common ancestor, so all souls have at least have somewhat similar biological “hardware” (wetware? Squishyware?) to run on. Would our souls be compatible with life elsewhere in the universe that might be based around totally different chemistry?

4. Even if they’re technically compatible, would our souls even be part of the same system as the souls of aliens? I think that in most belief systems that involve reincarnation, the point of reincarnation is to somehow build upon the souls’ prior experiences on earth, to make up for or be punished for things you did wrong, to settle unfinished business, to inch closer to enlightenment with new experiences and knowledge, etc. Can you do that effectively if your soul reincarnates on an entirely different planet? Could, for example, the Dalai Lama, be an effective spiritual leader for the Tibetan people if he reincarnated somewhere near Betelgeuse? And if we are currently operating in 2 different “soul-ar” systems (couldn’t resist the pun) what happens if first contact is made? Do our two soul cycles merge into one since our two civilizations would be able to have an impact on one another? Does it happen evenly across the entire human race? Would a member of, for example, the Sentinelese people, who would probably remain unaware of and have no impact on the affairs of aliens, be part of that merged system, or would their souls remain largely in their own bubble?

5. How fast can souls travel? Are they bound by the light speed limit that everything else in the universe seems to be, or can they go faster than that? If they can, does this open up some sort of back-door to FTL travel or communication where all we need to do is off somebody and let them reincarnate across the universe to awaken their latent memories of past lives? Can we encode information on a soul somehow and transmit it that way?

Sort of tangential to parts 2, 3, and 4, the Catholic Church, while not believing in reincarnation, has actually given some thought to the idea of alien souls, and determined that it’s possible, even likely, that if there is intelligent life out there somewhere, that they may not be in need of Jesus’ salvation in the same way humans are. Since they’re not descended from Adam & Eve like they believe all humans are, they may not be burdened with original sin. So there’s at least one religion that thinks alien souls may be, in some way, fundamentally different from our own.

Kind of depends on how you define “race” (it’s pretty much scientifically meaningless, so define it however the hell you like)

But we have several currently ongoing attempts at genocide happening around the world, that to me tells me that a hell of a lot of people out there care a whole lot about race.

American racism is particularly odd to me due to how broadly we categorize race, trying to lump people into a black/white/Hispanic/Asian/etc. category based on not much more than skin color. And we’re also unusuallly open about the fact that racism is a thing here. A lot of the world kind of keeps it more on the down-low.

But if you go with narrower definitions of race, you’ll see the same kind of things happening around the world as in America. I’ve seen people from the UK talk about Polish immigrants in much the same way people here talk about Mexicans, and that’s not even going into the cluster fuck of how much of Europe treats Romani people. A whole lot of people in Asian countries have issues with other people from other Asian countries, or even different ethnic groups within their own countries (like Uyghurs in china.) Parts of Africa are patchworks of different ethnic groups that are often at each other’s throats, and of course South Africa is still a long way from having its shit fully sorted out. A lot of white Australians have pretty significant biases against Aboriginal people.

I could go on.

There was a pretty large, family-run business near me, it was a pretty popular local landmark, and it sat on a pretty big property, probably a handful of acres.

The owner died, his kids didn’t really want to run the place, so they did everything they could to run it into the ground so that they say that it wasn’t profitable to avoid some of the backlash from closing it down.

They had some sort of scheme to turn it into housing for homeless veterans. Noble enough idea I suppose, though I don’t know how they thought that was going to work, let alone be profitable.

Of course there was a bit of the usual NIMBY backlash, veterans or not, a lot of people don’t particularly want some low income housing project springing up in their neighborhood.

But more importantly, it just didn’t seem like anyone was particularly interested in living there.

This is sort of the rural end of the suburbs. We’re not out in the country, I’d hesitate to even call it exurban, but things are less dense, not much is walkable, no public transportation, there’s not all that much around. A couple of the basics are nearby like a grocery store, but not much beyond that.

If you have a car and money for gas, it’s not a terrible place to be, pretty much anything you could want is within about a 30-45 minute drive, if traffic cooperates, you might even be able to get downtown in the city in about an hour.

But thinking about it in the context of a bunch of homeless people, what the hell are they supposed to do? Not many opportunities for them to find work around there, certainly not anything well-paying enough to help them improve their situation by much. If they need any sort of mental health or drug/alcohol treatment, their options would be severely limited there. It’s not at all convenient to the VA hospital nearest to us. And unless they manage to get their hands on a car, they’d basically be stuck there to sit at home, or maybe wander around town and do nothing in particular.

So that project never got off the ground.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that it didn’t happen earlier.

I’m way out of the dating game at this point, and also a man, so it’s very likely that I’m just out of the loop

But I hadn’t heard anything about this app until a couple weeks ago when I saw an article or two about it

Then about a week later this happened

So I kind of feel like maybe most of the assholes who did this were similarly unaware of it until it got some exposure and then it was on their radar.

I would certainly imagine that most women using this app probably weren’t telling the angry misogynists in their lives about this app.

Also depends on what type of heat you use

I have a heat pump, so my air conditioner is my heater, heat pumps are basically just an AC running in reverse.

In general, my wife and I don’t mind it being cold, we’re willing to let the temperature in our house get down to about the mid-low 50s (F, obviously) in the winter, so we do end up using a lot less electricity in the winter. But if we tried to keep our house at a warmer temperature that most people would find comfortable, it would probably be about the same.

There’s a small part of me that has kind of wished that this kind of pseudo age verification was a thing for a while (even though there’s a much bigger part that doesn’t want any corporation to know a damn thing about me.)

I remember swinging through Walmart once to pick up a couple things.

My cart had, IIRC, some deodorant (old spice classic,) masking tape, a can of spray paint, some plumbing parts, a few fishing lures, socks, and a couple of snacks.

I had one of those “I’ve become my dad” moments looking at my cart. I feel like that shopping list is practically a distillation of every suburban dad who’s ever existed.

But of course, I rang up the spray paint, and an employee had to come over to confirm that I was in fact some boring suburban white dude and not a teenager who was going to use it for mischief or huff it to get high.

Maybe I’m giving the juvenile delinquents of today too little credit, or maybe my fellow grown-ups too much, but I feel like the venn diagram of people buying fishing lures, a new toilet flapper, and socks, has basically no overlap with vandals and paint-sniffers.

So I kind of felt like maybe the almighty algorithm could have picked up on that and let me skip having the underpaid giving me a quick looking-at before punching his code into the self-checkout.