Ask Lemmy

banning permanent lights aimed at the sky would allow millions more people to see stars at night with no downsides. but nobody seems to care.

Vacuum cleaner noise

I wfh so my car is 99% of the time outside my house. It's in the shop for a few days and no one is choosing to park in front of my house! I swear to God they must think I'm a raging hambeast or something, ready to screech out the window if someone parks there. It's not MY spot. I don't own it. Please park there when my car isn't there! So annoying!

😕

Okay, if you're looking for weird?

Bad perforations. Drives me insane. Any product that is perforated to tear easily, 9 times out of 10 they fucked it up and the perforations may as well not even be there or even make it worse

My vitamin packets: I try to separate one out but then accidentally tear open another vitamin behind it.

Cardboard food packaging: I start tearing a strip to open but then the strip breaks and leaves 3/4 still stuck on the packaging.

Plastic food packaging: "This bag is resealable!" Or, what they mean to say is that if you try to tear it open using the pre-cut line, you'll tear below the resealable part.

Glass bottles/jars sealed with plastic: You're lucky if you can even tell where they perforated it. Try ruining your nail pulling up every edge you can find until maybe it tears eventually (likely not where the actual perforation is, either). Or you can ruin a knife scratching your own tear against the metal cap instead.

Toilet paper: You'd think the sections that are already partially punctured would be the weakest point to tear most easily, but it's actually the middle of the goddamn sheet, as we all know.

Bonus points for other packages where a top film or foil covering a container is weaker than the glue used to seal it around the edges, so you're left with little bits of lid that can't be removed except surgically with tweezers.

If you can't fucking do food packaging right, save some money by not even trying and just tell me I need to use scissors or a knife, because that's what ends up happening most of the time anyways. Fuck.

Anything text editing not supporting Vim mode, especially programming context.

I love cars. I also love this planet. Cars are bad for the planet.

How am I supposed to care about a series that takes 4 years between seasons

Bicycle drivetrains keep getting more complex and expensive. A 3x9 drivetrain is beyond adequate, bulletproof, and inexpensive. But NooOoOoOooo, it's nearly impossible to get a quality bike with 3x9 now, without a full custom, DIY build. Everything has to be 1x11/12, which is expensive, touchy, and very particular, all while still lacking the gear range of 3x9.

It all seriously sticks in my craw.

Random thing I was disappointed by recently. I live near a hospital that has a pizza vending machine near the cafeteria. So whenever I have to go to the hospital for appointments and stuff, I like to get some pizza. I went for an appointment a few days ago but the machine was broken so I didn't get to have pizza.

Invasive species.

My region is absolutely infested with Siberian Elm and Tree Of Heaven (A.K.A., the “semen tree”). You cannot cut them down, because they will resprout like a hydra from the stump. You cannot dig them out, because the smallest root left behind can and will resprout wherever it is, leading to a many-year game of whack-a-mole.

I have near-daily fantasies of going around with a powerful backpack sprayer filled with glyphosate (Round-Up) and an application wand that can extend from 1m to 10m, and hitting everything just as they’re sending nutrients to the roots for winter.

The problem is, Glyphosate is highly restricted to purchase and own in Canada unless you have both the appropriate class of Pesticide Applicator’s License (an agricultural variant, for example) as well as the venue to use it in (own or manage an orchard, for example). Thankfully my family owns an orchard, and I am starting the process for the former.

But still. It’s an absolutely bizarre thing to be obsessing over and I. Just. Cannot. Help. Myself. Every time I drive and see clumps of those disgusting trees, I start to uncontrollably strategize how I could hit them with glyphosate in late September.

Who decides when a species becomes naturalized / stops being invasive? As an example, the European Starling has been living in North America since 1890 and are still considered invasive. They have natural predators. The ecosystem is adapting around them. Just let them have citizenship already!

Another thing: Taxonomy. Just all taxonomy. If a shark and a trout are both fish then we must also be fish because both of those animals are closer relatives to us than they are to each other. Obviously the way we define a fish has to change. Why has nobody done this? There are a TON of things like this in taxonomy and that all make me absurdly angry.

There are so many people who are fundamentally wrong about what the Fermi paradox means, and proceed to present their shower thoughts about "what if everyone just, like, decides not to colonize the universe" as if they were profound or novel insights.