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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Carriers will offer better deals on the phones though if you’re planning to stick with them.

    I’m looking at a $1000 phone that ATT will give me for 2.99/month for 2 years. That’s over 85% off on the phone. The trick is they give it to you by actually charging like $42/month, but then giving a $39 credit every bill for 2 years, so you have to pay the difference on the $1,000 phone if you jump carriers.

    But since they’re the only carrier that works at my office, and this is gonna be a work phone (my company pays me a monthly stipend for it), I can live with that.


  • There are 12 notes in most Western music. When you double a frequency you go up an octave, but keep the same note.

    Music is played in different “keys” though with 7-note scales, with letters assigned A-G. If you play the notes in order starting and ending at the letter for which the scale is named, then do the same for a different scale, the relationship between the notes will sound the same between the 2 scales, but your starting and ending pitch will be different.

    Piano keys are arranged with all 12 notes being available, but arranged in the key of C-major or A-minor, where all notes are natural notes (no sharps or flats).

    If you play just the white keys starting from C, you’ll be playing a C-major scale : C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. However, to play the F-major scale, you’re going to need to skip one white key and hit a black key: (F, G, A, Bb, C, D, and E). No letter repeats on a scale.

    A sharp (#) or flat (b) note is just moving the smallest step you can to the right or left, respectively. For most notes, that’s moving to a black key, but there’s no black key between B and C or E and F sometimes it’s moving to another white key.

    Why don’t we just ignore weird notes like Cb? Because every letter needs to be represented on a scale. Ab-minor, for instance has Ab, Bb, Cb, Db, Eb, Fb, and Gb. So even though Cb is the same frequency as B-natural, it serves the same role in the scale as E does in the key of C, and if you didn’t represent it as a flat note, your scale would have 2 "B"s and no “C.”

    This gets even more important when you get into different instruments with different natural keys. A Piano, flute, bassoon, and other instruments are what we call “Concert C” instruments, which means they have the same natural key of C. However, other instruments are different.

    A standard clarinet is a Bb instrument, meaning its Bb scale matches the C scale of a piano. You also have Eb-clarinets that are a little smaller, meaning that if they play a “C” they’ll be playing a concert Eb, which uses the same fingerings as a Concert Bb from a standard clarinet.

    So when an Orchestra is playing something in the key of A-major (A, B, C#, D, E, F#, G#), an Eb-clarinet is playing in F#-major (F#, G#, A#, B, C#, D#, E#).





  • And it’s gotten much worse since then. The $185 billion number listed as the highest wealth would be around number 5 now, with Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and Arnault all having more than that now I think.

    My favorite statistic household net worth (includes cars, houses, retirement, everything).

    Median from 2022 was 192,000 Mean from 2022 was 1,063,000

    The ultra-rich are such incredible outliers that the mean is more than 5x the median.

    The 10 wealthiest people in 2024 control almost 1.7 trillion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of the pooreat 100 countries combined.


  • Those who hate homosexuals and see them as the “other side” often believe that homosexuals view heterosexuals with the same malice.

    Gay people know they’re not the norm, and don’t feel threatened by straight folk unless. They feel threatened by bigots.




  • Robert E Lee was the Supreme commanding General of the Confederacy, which seceeded from the United States out of fear that Lincoln and his new, progressive Republican party (times have obviously changed) would outlaw slavery.

    The resulting Civil War was by far the deadliest conflict the US has ever been in in terms of US casualties. But the bonus is that since the war over slavery had started anyway, we went ahead and outlawed most slavery while we were at it.

    Anyway, a lot of states, especially in the South kept discriminatory laws on the books following the war. As the Civil Rights movements of the 50s and 60s approached, a lot of Southern cities and states started building monuments and dedicating government buildings and parks to Confederate “heroes” and leaders.

    They romanticized the Confederacy as a major part of Southern heritage (even though it lasted less than 5 years), and rewrote the history taught in schools to teach that the war wasn’t about slavery, but about the federal government trampling on states rights.

    And it worked. Millions of people are brainwashed into thinking that the rebel flag is a racist symbol, but a symbol of individualism and freedom. They tricked generations of Southerners into thinking they aren’t racist.




  • The ndo Uber Eats a few times a week at work. It’s 100% about the time required to do anything else.

    The average new house in the city I work for is about 6 million dollars, so I live about 90-minutes away in normal traffic where I can pay $750/month in rent. I work lots of hours (start at 8, usually leave between 6 and 8 with no real break between), so I’m looking at 14-16 hours between when I leave the house in the morning and when I return home. I also think ach night classes at the University on Mondays during the fall and Spring semesters, and have 3 night meetings a month between Council and Planning and Zoning. On the weekends I drive a couple hundred miles out of town to help with my parents.

    If paying triple for a meal occasionally saves me 15-20 minutes it’s often absolutely worth it for the stress relief.