Personally, I’m happy to just chill where I am for a couple decades until I can retire. If I have to work, this honestly feels about as good as it gets for me. I don’t have any desire to climb the ladder or go hunting for a new job.

I like the hours/schedule, we do 12 hour shifts on a 2-2-3 rotation, which is pretty common in this field, so it’s a long shift but it’s a long shift sitting in an air conditioned bunker, and unless you come in for overtime you never have to work more than 3 days in a row without a 2 day break. Now those 3 days are weekends, which sucks, but the flip side is every other weekend you have a 3 day weekend. And if you plan your vacations and such right you only need to take 2 days to get a whole week off, so my PTO can go a long way. Here we start off with about 2 weeks of vacation time (“about” because it’s based on 8 hour days and we work 12, it more or less works out the same but you’re always kind of left with some fraction of a day carrying over) then after 5 years you get another week, and again at a couple other milestones years. I actually really struggle to use up all of my PTO personally because nearly everything I do fits into a 3 day weekend.

Benefits are solid, pension, decent medical plan, sometimes you can qualify for first responder discounts, etc.

Different places have different policies on this, but where I am what you do between calls is pretty much up to you, as long as you’re not bothering anyone or making a mess, you can bring in a laptop and play video games or watch movies, read, work on some crafts, whatever as long as you can put it down when the phone rings.

I work night shift, so things can get pretty dead and you get a lot of downtime between calls. Most people work 7-7, but I managed to snag myself a 3pm-3am shift, which I think is great- I get to sleep in until noon every day, but I don’t have to turn my schedule totally upside down if I need to do something in the morning.

We’re not union in my county, and while normally I’m all for unions, it’s worked out well for us so far, because one of the first concessions that tends to get made in contract negotiations is mandatory overtime in some form because like I said everywhere struggles with staffing issues, and so far they’ve done a decent job of keeping our pay competitive without it (probably because I think the dispatchers in most if not all of our surroundings counties are unionized, so they know we might jump ship to them if they don’t pay us competitively)

And for all of those practical reasons, it also feels good to know I’m helping people. I have absolutely saved lives in my time here, I’ve delivered babies, I’ve helped people through disasters and all manner of scary situations.

And it’s always interesting. When the phone rings I never know what’s going to be on the other end, which of course has its ups and downs, but it’s always interesting. Some of the people and the things they call about are absolutely infuriating of course, but no matter what it is I always get a great story. I never come home to my wife asking me “how was your day” and have to answer with some boring “same shit, different day” kind of answer, there’s always something interesting. Sometimes it’s something I’m proud of, sometimes it’s something I’m pissed off about, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, and sometimes it’s “can you believe somebody actually called about this?”

I’m a 911 dispatcher, basically every dispatch center in the country is always hiring. There’s a lot of turnover, obviously it’s not a job everyone is cut out for and people get burned out, but also people use it as a stepping stone or career builder to move onto other things, a couple of my coworkers want to be cops and this looks good on that application, one went to work for FEMA, a couple have gone to be the dispatchers at local stations, people get promoted or transfer to other county positions (my agency is part of our county department of public safety, in some areas it might be part of your sheriff’s department, local PD, etc) or just go chasing higher paychecks or dream jobs (pay varies a lot around the country, we make decent enough money where I am, but some places really pay peanuts)

I saw an ad on social media somewhere that they had a hiring event going on, so I went. I was working in a warehouse at the time, and a job where I could sit down in the air conditioning sounded really attractive.

Civil service type jobs were already on my radar, I looked into becoming a park ranger for a while, and I’m an eagle scout, so I had a solid grounding on first aid and such.

I showed up, filled out an application, took their aptitude test (we, and a lot of other agencies use something called criticall if you want to get an idea what that test was like. Some typing, reading comprehension, map reading, listening to some sample calls and answering questions about them, etc.)

I passed the test, so as part of the hiring event I got an interview on the spot. If I applied outside of that, I probably would have had to schedule separate times for the test and interview.

I did alright in the interview so they scheduled me for a job shadow to come in and sit in the room to listen to calls and radio dispatch for a couple hours.

Then a while later I got my conditional offer. I had to get a hearing, vision, and drug test, and schedule a psych eval with the county psychologist.

You all know what hearing and vision tests are like I hope, for the drug test they did a hair test. I shave my head, so I was expecting them to take some beard hair, but apparently their policy is to do underarms if that’s the case.

The psych eval wasn’t anything too in depth, sat down with him for a few minutes, chatted about my mental health (no real issues there) then I got handed a very long test booklet to go fill out, lots of multiple choice questions that seemed to basically be gauging if I can play well with others.

And I assume at some point in there they ran background checks and such. Some places get really in depth with that, interviews with the sheriff, polygraph tests, etc. but mine was all pretty out of sight and out of mind.

Then class started. About a week into it we had to go to the county detectives office to be fingerprinted. But otherwise after that it was just all training.

Requirements here are pretty minimal, clean background check, high school diploma/GED, ability to pass all the pre employment screening, etc. At my agency past drug use isn’t necessarily a disqualifier, as long as you can pass the drug test to get hired and don’t get caught lying about anything you have done. Some other places are of course more strict about that.

If anyone thinks they may want to pursue a dispatch job, your local agency may list the job under a couple different names, dispatcher, calltaker, telecommunicator, etc.

I have a really complicated relationship with coconut, because I really like the flavor, but hate the texture. The flavor wins out for me but not by much.

And come to think of it, I think a lot of the commercially made ones use some sort of coconut creme filling instead of cream cheese so it’s more shelf stable and doesn’t require refrigeration. I like the cream cheese ones slightly more.

I don’t really lack for motivation, I’ll take on some pretty wild culinary adventures, but occasionally I run into things that I just can’t logistically make happen.

For example, nowhere in my house has the right sort of temperature/humidity to cure my own salami and such (I’ve checked,) and I just don’t have the space to squeeze in another fridge with humidity controls and such to make a curing chamber.

I’ve made my own bacon, various kinds of sausages (including smoking my own kielbasa, andouille, and hot dogs) I’ve helped butcher chickens, I’ve made beef Wellington, sushi, I’ve baked bread and cakes in a Dutch oven in a fire pit, I’ve made ice cream, homemade pierogies.

Camden I think is the original location, but they have a couple other places now, Mt Holly and Medford I think?

I generally don’t let many people from Jersey know this, but you guys may have the best cheesesteaks with Donkeys Place. They’re a little heretical with the seeded Kaiser roll, but they’re damn good.

Ah fuck, can’t believe I forgot birch beer.

Any time I manage to get someone with any influence at a local brewery’s attention I try to put the idea for a hard birch beer into their mind. I don’t think it’s taken root anywhere yet, but hopefully someday.

Applejack to an extent, I don’t think it has quite as much cultural significance to Philly, but maybe to NJ with Lairds.

While I’m on NJ, the Taylor ham/pork roll debate is weird to me, it says pork roll on the package.

And while we’re talking drinks, I suppose honorable mention goes to Yuengling. Pottsville is a bit outside of the Philly area, but it’s ubiquitous in and around the city, if you order a “lager” you get a Yuengling. Its a solid alternative to the Bud/Miller/Coors big brand beers, but really nothing too special. I avoid buying it myself anymore because Dick Yuengling is kind of a dick, and there’s plenty of other great beers being made in and around the city, but I’ve probably drank more lagers in my life than any other single beer.

EDIT: On birch beer, if you ever find yourself up to Ulysses PA in, I think, Potter County, they have the Pennsylvania lumber museum, they have a birch still there, and at least the one time I was there they had a guy talking about it with a little vial of birch oil from the still you could smell. He had a lot of cool information about birch trees/oil, turns out birch trees contain a compound that’s similar to aspirin. And the birch oil does smell very much like birch beer.

Philly area

Yes cheesesteak, hoagie, soft pretzels.

But I believe strongly that a roast pork Italiano sandwich loaded up with sharp provolone, roasted long hots, and broccoli rabe is the best Philly sandwich.

Go a little out into the suburbs around Norristown, and you’ll also find the “Zep” a sort of pared-down hoagie, one kind of meat, cheese, oil and spices, tomatoes, and plenty of onions.

I’m not going to wade into the minefield of which sandwich shops are best except to say Pat’s and Geno’s are garbage, but maybe worth it for the experience if you’re a tourist. Avoid anywhere that advertises as a “Philly Cheesesteak” look for cheesesteak, steak sandwiches, or even just steaks. For a Zep I don’t think it’s controversial to say Lou’s ro Eve’s are the places to go.

Tomato pie- close relative of pizza, thick sort of focaccia-like crust, square, thick tomato sauce, dusting of Parmesan cheese, served cold. Staple of many parties here.

Also in the suburbs - Franzones pizza, Bridgeport is the original location, but the original owner sold it to a relative and opened the one in Plymouth/Conshy location and another in Manayunk. You’re going to either love or hate the pizza, thin crust, very sweet sauce in a spiral on top of the cheese. There’s a few imitators out there but Franzones is the original.

This is the right time of year for them so “Irish Potato” candies. Sweet cream cheese and shredded coconut, rolled in cinnamon. Nothing Irish about them but they kind of look like potatoes.

Zitners Easter eggs- chocolate candies with various fillings.

Goldenbergs Peanut Chews- chewy molasses candy with peanuts covered in chocolate

Mallow Cups- like a Reese’s cup but full of marshmallow and coconut instead of peanut butter

Scrapple - don’t ask what’s in it, just eat it.

Pork roll (kind of a jersey thing, but ubiquitous in Philly too) it’s basically round spam

Pepperpot soup- this is old Philly food, like revolutionary war Philly, it’s damn hard to find these days but every few years some local restaurant gets the idea to recreate it. It’s a hearty, slightly spicy beef and trip soup. There’s some Caribbean pepper pot soups that are kind of similar.

don’t use colloquialisms, or soft language.

Honestly, part of the problem with the current crop of right wing assholes, is that a lot of them are so fucking brainwashed that they don’t even realize that what they’re supporting is just outright fascist/Nazi bullshit, so if you ask them point-blank “Are you a Nazi/fascist” they’re going to answer “no” and truly believe that, even as they’re supporting rounding up immigrants into concentration camps and “ironically” making Nazi salutes.

They have absolutely mastered 1984-style doublethink and duckspeak. They’ll prattle on about being free speech absolutists while wanting to remove books about trans people from libraries or banning people with different opinions from their social media sites. They’ll talk about being fiscally conservative while absolutely fucking the economy. They’ll rant about draining the swamp and eliminating the deep state while they give some unelected goon unprecedented power to do whatever the hell he wants in the government with no consequences.

And they see absolutely no contradictions there.

So you kind of have to play fucking word games with them if you want to actually sus out what their actual thoughts are.

You can see a pretty clear difference looking at fertility rates between red states and blue states. So there is definitely something to the idea.

What’s a bit harder to sort out is whether it’s because more conservatives are choosing to have kids in general, or if those who do are just more likely to have multiple kids.

I don’t think the argument is really that becoming a parent makes you more conservative, it’s more the other way around- conservatives are more likely to become parents

On paper it makes some amount of sense, with the lack of belief in abortion and contraception, emphasis on “traditional family values” and such.

In actuality, I don’t know if it holds water. I’ve seen a couple studies done on that idea, and the results have kind of been a bit of a mixed bag, I think my takeaway was more that conservatives who have kids tend to have more of them than liberals who have kids, but overall rates of liberals and conservatives who have kids in general were pretty damn close.

The first words in the body of his post are “barrel jacks” so to me it definitely reads like he knows exactly what they are and they are what inspired his post.

Since other, probably more common, names for “coaxial power connector” include things like “barrel plugs” and “barrel connectors” and such terms are used pretty frequently in the article you linked.

The rest of it feels like he’s just trying to explain the concept to people who aren’t as familiar with them.

But otherwise I agree with your comment, the lack of a standard is a big reason. In my various bins of wires, cables, and adapters I can find plenty of different mismatched wall warts with the same connector but otherwise wildly different specs. You don’t really want to be mixing and matching those all willy-nilly.

Also they’re overall a fine connector if all you need to do is deliver power to something, you only need a hot and neutral wire and the corresponding part of the inner and outer part of the plug (I feel like I’ve seen some that have a ground too, but don’t quote me on that, I’m not going to go digging through my bins to confirm that)

But nowadays we also often need a way to carry data to/from the device in addition to charging it. So to carry those data signals in addition to power you’d need more connections in the plug. You’d need to either have a couple pins inside the barrel which would need to be lined up properly which kind of negates the convenience of it being omnidirectional like OP wants (think maybe something like a ps/2 or S-Video plug) or you’d need to have multiple concentric rings which would make the plug bulky, probably too much so to conveniently fit into something like a cell phone.

Now a lot of the devices we’re charging by USB don’t necessarily need or even support any sort of data through their ports, and so could be charged or powered just as well through a barrel plug. So why USB?

IMO a lot of it comes back to iPods. For a lot of us who were around in the pre-smartphone days, that was our first experience with something that charged over USB. I seem to recall that apple didn’t even include a wall charger with them (pretty sure I remember a Foamy the Squirrel flash animation where he ranted about that) you just got a USB cable and either charged it off your computer or you went out and bought a wall adapter.

I’m sure that was a cost-cutting/cash-grab attempt by apple. They could sell you an iPod without a charger and save a few pennies there, and then also sell you a charger for even more money.

Around that same time, phones were also getting USB ports, or some proprietary connectors that you could buy an overpriced cable to connect it to a computer via USB so that you could pull your .5 megapixel flip phone photos off of it and post them to your Myspace. Often they came with a charger that had a mini or micro USB port or the proprietary connector on one end and was hard-wired to a wall wart on the other end.

I’m sure some bean counters at Nokia or Motorola or wherever decided “why the hell are we going to add 5¢ to the production cost of a phone to have a charging port and a USB port for data when USB already can deliver 5v of power? Just build the phone battery around that and nix the charging port”

And I’m sure that played out with plenty of other devices that needed power and data connections- GPS, PDAs, etc.

And so from there, people started having an iPod and cell phone in their pockets that both charged over USB, and before long they’d have a USB charger at home, at work, in their car, in every room in their house, so other devices kind of latched onto that as sort of a marketing thing “you don’t need to keep track of a separate charger just for this thing, you can use the same one you charge your phone with”

And of course before too long TVs, game consoles, AV receivers, etc. all got USB ports too.

As I recall, it mostly started with things that made sense, things you were probably using with your phone or computer anyway- Bluetooth earpieces, mice, keyboards, etc. then sort of branched out into everything else over the years.

You got a typo for mastodon (mastadon)

I don’t really have any input on how it is to self-host, but I’ve been playing around with friendica a bit and I think that has a lot of potential and may be worth mentioning. I think it has a lot of potential as almost a unified fediverse portal in addition to its obvious purpose of being a Facebook alternative, from what I’ve seen it seems to play pretty nicely with a lot of other fediverse services, and also supports RSS feeds

It needs some polishing, I think the default UI is pretty wonky, but there’s a lot of functionality there if you can be bothered to figure it out.

I overall agree with technology connections on this with two caveats.

I have, in my day, used some truly craptastic electric stoves that seriously struggled to get a normal sized pot of water to a rolling boil. This was definitely the cheapest, crappiest stove that an Airbnb owner could possibly find to furnish the kitchen with.

I’ve also used some really crappy gas stoves but none have struggled that hard. So I think if you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for budget brand stoves, you may find yourself really frustrated with some electric options.

Also, my home stove is a somewhat less craptastic electric stove, but still not at all high end. I find that for some of my cookware the burners are too small resulting in some serious hotspots in the middle while you can barely cook on the outer edges even after letting the pan preheat for a decent amount of time. You’re always going to have some amount of a hotspot with almost any stove, but this one is really drastic, and I’ve never experienced anything so bad on gas stoves, probably because the heat escaping around the edges manages to heat the outer parts of the pan a little better.

I’m not exactly pining for a gas stove, and I can’t have one in this house even if I wanted one, but it is a little frustrating sometimes as someone who likes to cook, which technology connections has admitted is not one of his many niche interests.

My next stove will be induction, and probably every stove I ever buy after that.

I guess the overall takeaway from this is, if you’re buying an electric stove and actually like to cook, don’t cheap out and make sure you get one where the burners can handle the size cookware you might use.

I work in 911 dispatch in the US, in addition to my local callers who come from a variety of backgrounds with various accents and speech impediments, I also get calls from alarm companies and a lot of them seem to be outsourcing their call centers or at least hiring a lot of non-native speakers (looking at you, Johnson Controls)

When their accents are so thick that you can’t even understand a basic address, like 123 Main St in Springfield, and you’re counting on a timely dispatch for a fire alarm, that’s a problem.

We also have access to a translation service, but that really slows everything down because everything has to go through the interpreter, so off the bat it’s taking twice as long, and often significantly longer because I can’t know when to cut my caller off because the interpreter can’t really start until the caller finishes talking, so I don’t know if the 3 minute rant the caller went on actually is pertinent information I need to know, or are they just rambling and repeating the same useless details over and over again.

I sometimes have to use that translation service when the caller actually speaks pretty decent English but their accent is just totally incomprehensible to my English-speaking ears (especially when you throw in a bad phone connection, I swear some of my callers have found a way to make a phone call from a kazoo.) I’ve gotten a pretty good ear for the more common accents we get- Spanish, Korean, Hindi, Haitian Creole, Arabic, etc. but every once in a while a curveball gets thrown at me, I legitimately don’t think I’d ever heard someone speak Berber or Albanian until I got a call from someone who did, so I’ve never had a chance to train my ear to those accents.

You even get some situations where due to different dialects and regional accents, even the interpreters sometimes have trouble understanding the caller. For example, different Arabic dialects for example can have a lot of variation, and there’s some variation in Spanish dialects. If the interpreter is mostly fluent in Egyptian Arabic or Castilian Spanish, they can sometimes have a hard time understanding a caller who speaks Saudi Arabic or Guatemalan Spanish.

I’m not convinced that the AI tech is ready to be inserted into a 911 call, but if it ever does get to that point it could be a very useful tool for some of my callers. If we can sort of neutralize their accents, we may not need to use translators as often when the caller speaks OK English, and I may not have to ask the alarm to operator to repeat themselves 3 times to understand that they’re saying the alarm is at the “Wendy’s” (I would have sworn that they were saying “Landis,” we have a couple businesses by that name in the area, but none in that shopping center)

Even people who are native English speakers can be kind of hard to understand because of accents. Once in a while I get someone from the UK, or the US south, or hell, even just certain neighborhoods of the city I live just outside of, that can be hard to understand.

And don’t get me wrong, I love all the different accents, I’m proud of my own local linguistic quirks, I’m sad that my own ancestors didn’t keep their native languages alive with their children (I would be able to speak at least 4 or 5 different languages if they did) and these people who speak English with a heavy accent speak more languages than I can, so I can’t really talk shit on them. But it does present a significant barrier to communication and being able to smooth that out would be really useful sometimes

My family is polish, I’ll second the bacon. Also dried mushrooms, I want to say my babci used porcini

Hanging up will send your info to them and they will call back to make sure there isn’t an emergency.

911 dispatcher here

This will depend a bit on agency policies and technological capabilities as well as what emergency info you’ve filled out on your phone and unable to be shared in an emergency call

At my agency we get a lot of butt dials, our policy for hang ups or open line calls from a cell phone is that as long as we didn’t hear anything suspicious (someone yelling, gunshots, etc) we will usually disregard the call. If we have an open line we’ll listen for about 30 seconds or so and if nothing sounds off we’ll disconnect and continue about our day. If something sounds fishy we’ll stay on the line/call back, and we’ll send police to the area if we have a good location.

There’s a couple exceptions, like certain wifi calling or femtocell setups are treated as being from a landline because we have a solid address, so we’ll always dispatch police unless you stay on the line and confirm that there’s no emergency.

And our discretion comes into play a bit. We might ignore 1 or 2 hang ups from the same number, especially since the calls may not even ring through to the same calltaker so it may not be obvious we’ve gotten multiple calls until we’ve gotten a good handful.

Different agencies policies on that will vary. I know one of our neighboring counties will always send police to the area when they get a hang up whether or not they heard something suspicious.

And as for the information that’s shared, by default all we get is your phone number, carrier, which cell tower it hit off of, and an approximate location based on cell tower triangulation (which is kind of hit or miss, sometimes it’s really accurate, other times it’s basically useless)

If we need to we can contact the phone provider to try to get subscriber info. That can take a while and can be hit or miss too, like if you haven’t updated all your information with them, if you’re on a family plan with other people, or if you’re using a smaller provider that is really just reselling Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T service, it can make it a little hard to accurately track down who actually owns that phone.

If you’ve called recently, we can try to look up your information from priors on your phone number.

If you’ve filled out your emergency/sos info, and enabled it to be shared with us, we can access that, It also often gives us access to a more accurate location for you, but otherwise we only get what you’ve put in there. If you haven’t kept your name, address, emergency contacts, medical info, etc. accurate and up to date there, that’s another stumbling block for us. We can sometimes work backwards from what info is there, if we have your name and age we can try to narrow things down, but if you have a common name it can be hard to tell which 27 year old John Smith is the one who called us.

Do with that what you will, fill out your emergency info or don’t depending on what you’re comfortable sharing with us, consider how it might be used to save your life if you’re, for example, in a car crash and too hurt to speak to us, or how an oppressive government might use it to track you down at a protest (from 911 we can’t just access data on random people’s phones unless they call us, and we can only request a ping on a phone number from your phone company under certain circumstances, and that’s a bit of a process and all it returns is your location based on cell tower triangulation, which again isn’t always very accurate. Police and certainly the feds have a bit more leeway than we do, though I don’t know the extent of that, and if they set up a stingray or similar device I have absolutely no idea what they might be able to access)