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  • 19 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
Cake day: June 4th, 2025
  • Scirocco@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•If the 2028 United States presidential election was held today, who would you vote for?
    3·
    11 days ago

    I’d do more than that

    Disband DHS. This agency was never required and was created merely as a knee-jerk to the information sharing problems that contributed to how 9/11 turned out.

    Ironically, the majority of those problems were actually between the FBI and CIA and DHS has no authority over either — that role was handled to the also-newly-created Director of National Intelligence (DNI)

    Sooooo we never needed the orwellian DHS in the first place

    Abolish ICE, HSI and CBP*. The the other constituent agencies carry on as they did before 9/11 and leave the LE/intelligence coordination to the DNI

    *Some folks would love to see ATF go, others want the end of TSA

  • Scirocco@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•If the 2028 United States presidential election was held today, who would you vote for?
    11·
    11 days ago

    How so?

    I fly enough to hit “gold” status on major airlines, and have seen the transition from the shit-show that was TSA initially into a universally smooth and fast process.

    I think a lot of people don’t truly know the chaos that was pre-TSA screening. Do you recall being stuck in an aircraft at the gate, because the airline had to unload luggage for a passenger that hadn’t boarded?

    For a long time after 9/11 the only airport operating smoothly was DCA (Congress uses DCA)

    But for the last dozen or more years, things have only gotten smoother, everywhere.

    I passed through JFK screening in less than 22 minutes a few weeks ago.

  • Scirocco@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world•We used to have TV repairmen who would come if dad couldn't fix it with the tube from the grocery store kiosk. Weird.
    11·
    1 month ago

    Old televisions used vacuum tubes in their circuitry in a similar role to transistors in (more) modern electronics.

    These were literally little glass bulbs with bits inside that heated up, glowed and did magical things with electrons. They had some number of pins on the bottom and plugged into the television board similar to CPU sockets (but with only 5ish pins in a circle)

    These tubes were not particularly long-lived and were fragile physical devices. When they were “on the fritz” it was literally often possible to smack them back into place/alignment/operation. Hence the trope of a TV with a bad picture, slapping it around and voila it works again. This was a literal thing that really happened and works, at least until the internals of whatever tube were too far out of alignment.

    At this point, rather than call an expensive repairman (always a man in those days), you could take your suspected bad tube to the grocery store, where there might be a machine that resembles a 1980s arcade cabinet, which has a bunch of various common vacuum-tube sockets on it. Dad will plug the ‘bad’ tube into the (in)correct socket and the machine will pronounce that tube to be GOOD or BAD with some version of accuracy.

    With that information, dad can select a new identical or similar tube from the rack that’s under the testing board, inside the cabinet.

    Maybe it will work, maybe not.

    Lots of specific tubes were replaceable with more generic versions that “will work” and there was a lot of effort to consolidate the vast number of tube variants, so another important tool was the equivalency chart-- look up your old tube in a book of tiny print/tables and see what generic part number might work to ‘fix’ the TV

    Without having to call the repairman to your house, which was also very much a real thing.