Yes and no, if you scambait hard enough your number can eventually be added to a blacklist for larger scam organisations that bought your data for use in multiple scam attempts.

In my experience that has really cut down on the calls.

In 2020 the department of human services accidentally posted my personal phone number on a list of support services for people experiencing housing or food insecurity. This number was then circulated by every major news source in my state. I couldn’t change my number at the time because I had no legal ID (still don’t… Can’t figure out how to get ID without ID, but I have a new number now at least) at first I didn’t really notice the ratio of spam calls to genuine calls for the wrong number (ie, people calling my number because they needed housing/food) . I just remember getting 40+ calls a day at many stages.

But as the actual number for the food relief service was circulated, I eventually stopped getting genuine calls and I was getting 3-5 scam calls every single day.

After a year of scam baiting, I was getting 2 a week.

Now, I’ll do something online that requires sharing my current number, within a few hours I get a scam call because my data has been sold, but I bait the heck out of that first call and I usually don’t receive any further calls which suggest my number was blacklisted by a larger scam organisation, and I won’t be hassled until my data is sold again as a new item.

It’s hard to avoid getting your number on scam lists when the largest health insurance company, and the second largest telecommunications company in my country both had major data breaches where millions of customers identifying information was accessed and sold to scammers…

Okay, you do you.

Buy physical media from independent production companies. Pirate whatever Disney, Netflix and Amazon are cranking out.

“body type” has always been a general term to express the entire shape, size and proportions of a person, including excess weight and obesity.

When I was obese I couldn’t pull off crop tops because of my body size, it was incredibly unflattering, and now that I’m a healthy weight I still can’t pull off crop tops because of my body proportions, I have a short torso.

Body type encompasses both scenarios, so it’s often thought of as a polite way to tell someone something is unflattering without singling out specific “flaws” in their body.

Oh definitely, he knows, but I also know and understand his perspective. For him, masking and unmasking when texting his boss then texting his family is exhausting and incredibly emotionally taxing. While I don’t meet the clinical criteria for an autism diagnosis, I do struggle with a few of the same things my brother and dad struggle with, particularly around processing, emotional regulation, and burn out, so I’ve been in his shoes where I know I’m doing something the hard way, or I know we’d all be happier with another method, but changing the task or changing the routine or process is even harder, even though the process I’d be changing to would be easier and better, initiating that change feels like an insurmountable climb.

Besides, my dad had to try and put up with my hyperlexia when I was growing up - before I had the emotional maturity to understand my dad’s needs, I can’t even imagine how much he suffered from my frustrating communication style being imposed on him. Now he’s older, it’s my turn to suffer 😂 (that is, it’s my turn to let him explore the ways he wants to communicate, even if it’s not what I want.)

My dad now uses AI to write all his texts to me.

He’s autistic and dyslexic and texting was always a massive struggle for him, so he’d leave voice messages, or just call me, and they’d be rambling and non linear, but it was my dad and his voice, his personality.

A few years ago he’d use dictation to send texts, and it was pretty funny because he hadn’t no way of proof reading them and dictation is never great for people with accents or speech problems… but now he will just use the microphone to ask whatever AI assistant is built into his phone the same rambling question he would have previously just voice messaged me.

And Copilot re-writes his rambling question and spits out a message that sounds like some formal business email. So now there’s an extra level of misinterpretation, an extra level of being removed from communicating with the human being.

I’ve asked my dad if he finds AI easier than just leaving a voice message (because I personally think sending a voice memo is easier) and he says he likes it because it makes him feel like he’s “normal” and can do the things everyone else has always been able to do with ease, even though he knows its not perfect.

I can definitely see the value in AI as an accommodation tool, and it has helped my dad a lot in his professional life where previous accommodation tools haven’t been adequate to “keep up”.

But I do miss hearing my dad, or reading his personality come through in the poorly dictated texts. My brother has gotten really annoyed at dad for this because my brother it’s also autistic and it’s actually harder for him to communicate with dad with an AI middle man, they’ve lived together for almost 30 years and they basically have their own language, so the AI texts my brother gets from my dad drive him nuts, when he and my dad have never had issues communicating.

I’m also worried that it’s effecting the limited literacy skills he does have, he’s getting rusty because he no longer has to try at all most days.

Better than the system being used by the department of human services in Australia. If the servers and service centres are overloaded, you basically just get told “tough shit, try again later, hope you’re not desperately trying to get out of a DV situation or protect an elder from abuse, cause we’re not paying for more servers”

At least with a digital queue system there’s a sliver of hope that you might get through.

I have a step through frame that you sit upright on. 20-25km/h is my average commuting speed for getting to work and going to the shops. I regularly have to push to 30km/h+ because of motor traffic trying to ride up my ass even though I’m in the designated bike lane. (cars in Australia like driving fast in the bike lanes to avoid the chicanes on the road designed to slow motor traffic for cyclist safety)

If ebikes are disproportionately represented in cycling accidents, then I would argue it’s not the speed, it’s the barrier to entry. People who have never ridden before, people who aren’t physically able to ride a standard bike, these groups make up a significant portion of ebike riders because ebikes are accessible.

Yes, speed will contribute to this, people with limited riding experience being able to ride fast, possibly without the physical fitness required to control a bike at high speed.

The issue then isn’t the speed itself, but rider education and training.

I had two email addresses throughout all of highschool. The one I gave to adults if they asked, firstname-lastname@, and the one I used to sign into msn and give to all my friends… I forget the exact address but it was definitely along the lines of “hotpants-sexi.kitty.87@”

The former is still my primary email. The other one is sitting abandoned since I was 17 and smart enough to realise what a stupid idea it was, but I never deleted it and I can’t even remember it.

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

My education background is nursing and social work. I’ve only ever used Windows and very surface level. I’ve never programmed anything, the closest I’ve gotten to anything technical is troubleshooting a game that I’ve modded to within an inch of its life.

Though I’m picking up an old laptop from a school surplus next Monday to wipe and begin exploring Linux. My only other experience with Linux is the interface of my housemates NAS (which I use only to manage a plex and valheim server)

I’m an IT tutor in a community centre - basically just teaching grandma how to close all her iPhone apps. No experience or formal qualifications needed. If you can be patient while showing seniors the basics of the devices they’ve got at home, you’re hired.

Our organisation currently pays too much for an IT managed service provider, who doesn’t provide a comprehensively managed service, so my boss wants to end their contact and hire me as a dedicated IT management officer. My boss is 75 and is confident in my abilities because she thinks power cycling the router when the internet goes out is an amazing and high level skill, but I know enough to know how much I don’t know. But I also know I can learn.

So maybe in a year or so I’ll understand more of the jokes on lemmy.

That makes sense, we don’t have a proper bottle collection service in my area, everything goes in the mixed recycling bin, bagged up, it sits in a recycling landfill for a few months then if no one takes up the processing contract it gets scoop-diggered into the general landfill. (and the processing contracts rarely get picked up, we used to ship everything to China) During this process bags are ripped open and plastic debris gets everywhere, and heavy rains will wash it into the environment.

But isn’t the tether still too thin and fragile to remain connected forever?

If you drop a tethered cap on the beach, a few weeks in the sun, getting polished by sand, and that cap is seperating from the ring, and how does that fix the problem?

Meanwhile in our house, every pot needs to be precariously balanced in a stack in order to fit in the cupboard.

How precarious? This will blow your mind!

We have 3 pots/pans, A big one, a medium one, and a little one.

Now, and bear with me because I know this is an unorthodox way to stack things, but I think the little pan should go inside the medium pan, and those two should go inside the big pan. It’s crazy, but it just might work.

My partner has other ideas when he stacks them though.

When I was 23 I moved into a sharehouse that had a dishwasher, I lived there over a year before I saw it, it had a false cabinet so it blended in. I’d always just washed my dishes in the sink and I keep all my dishes, cutlery and pans separate in a tub in the pantry because I have allergies. I’d never used a dishwasher before.

I googled how to use a dishwasher because I didn’t want to be the 20 year old that can’t do basic chores. I read the user manual and looked for the filters and catchment drains. They were filthy so I cleaned them, then followed the stacking guide in the user manual and ran it with a full load of my housemates dishes.

I was very impressed with how clean they came out.

I mentioned it to a housemate who found it very amusing I’d only just discovered the dishwasher, he warned me that it was old and broken and not a very good dishwasher so the few housemates that use it were actually talking about splitting the cost of a replacement if I wanted to get in on it.

Why? When the dishwasher was working perfectly.

All 7 of my housemates flooded into the kitchen to assess the cleanliness of the dishes because no one believed me that the dishwasher worked.

Turns out in the 7 years the house had been used for student housing since the landlords son took over as head tenant, not a single one of the rotating cast of 8 housemates had ever cleaned the secondary catchment filter, and only rarely did someone remember to clean the main filter.

Turns out the dishwasher works great when you remove the months worth of old rotten corn building up in the filter, and drain off the 7 years of muck that’s blocking the greywater outlet flow.

My housemates will still say I stack the dishwasher like a sociopath, but I learned from the user manual so I don’t care, the dishes are clean.

I’m an IT teacher at a community centre, I genuinely never thought I would see the day when a student younger than me enrolled. I wrongly assumed my role as a public educator would just fade out as younger generations required generally less training around computers.

Obviously courses in disability service centres would remain, and accredited training for people to kick off or retarget their careers would still exist.

But the person at the local library who meets twice a week and teaches grandma how to close the tabs on her phone felt like a job that was destined to die.

I’m in my 30s and this year I have a few teenagers in my class. The conversations are hilarious, they don’t know how to read a file location adreess or open a program that isn’t pinned to the taskbar, but at the same time, I don’t know how to access the notifications bar on an iPhone or quickly find the wifi settings without going through general settings…because I went from windows to 98, to a blackberry, to an Android, just like they went from an ipad toddler to an iPhone teen, and only now are they having Windows 11 thrown at them, and of all the computers to try and learn to use, this wouldn’t be my first recommendation (but it’s what our government funds us to teach 🤷‍♀️)

The skill divide is so hard to explain too. My elderly students just stare blankly at one screen, overwhelmed and confused, unsure how to recognise anything. Nothing stands out as a link, or a click able button, because the entire visual landscape is new to them. There is often a lot of hand holding which can be frustrating especially when you made a huge breakthrough in their confidence and independence only to have come in the next week feeling insecure about their skills because they’ve forgotten a little bit, or had a bad spam caller over the weekend who made them want to never touch a computer again.

Then the teens, who know what links look like and generally what they do will rush ahead, they may not know what it is exactly they’re trying to do, but they think they know what end result is expected and they generally know how to avoid catastrophic issues so they just barrel ahead, I’ll see them make 40 clicks a second for something that usually takes 2, because they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.

I had a project last week. Dead simple. Save a linked file to a target location, import the file into another program through either drag and drop or browsing for the file, then change 1 thing, and export the final file into another target location, as specified on the activity sheet.

Barely 5 minutes in, I’m still helping Brenda get her mouse dongle plugged in, and one of the teens is finished. And yes, they have every file I asked for, and every edit I asked for, but both are just sitting in the downloads folder. And now we’re at the end looking back, the teen is confused because they have the edited file that is required to "finish*, how is it wrong, and I’m trying to explain why skipping the steps about target locations means they’ll have to start again because this activity is all about target locations and I don’t actually give two shits about this file I just need them to put things in and out of a folder until they can explain to me “a folder is a container” and not just stare into space because a folder is a black hole on their phone things they save go to until they need them again and just download them again.

I mean, I’d be confused and concerned too if a time travelling European from the 18th century stepped off a boat in 1492

It’s also left open because that’s where the drop curb is for people getting out of a car parked in the accessible spot can physically get onto to sidewalk.

if you have ADHD and/or anxiety like me

Bingo!

In Australia I’m not even sure if there is a service that could help me - other than applying for an actual disability support worker to help, which my ADHD could probably benefit from, but that’s a whole other paperwork process and it’s frustrating that paperwork is a barrier to getting accommodations and support with completing paperwork!

Actual Proof of Age Cards are still around, and that’s what I need to get (but I don’t have anything with my current address on it, other than the lease agreement, so it’s going to take a few steps over red tape to get proper ID, and I am not mentally healthy enough to push that process along right now)

I had a keypass, which they stopped in 2022. I only found out about proof of age cards last year, when I tried to get into an RSL and the bouncer asked if I had anything else because they’re phasing out keypass.

I know it’s stupid and ignorance isn’t an excuse, but as a teenager I was told to get a keypass because “that’s the ID you get when you don’t have a licence” so I got a keypass, and for the next 15 years I didn’t run into a single issue with not having the right ID. No one I worked with ever questioned why that’s the only ID I had, so I never really stopped to research the specifics. I didn’t know that keypass and “proof of age card” were different, I thought keypass was a proof of age card, just different names for it.

This is why I currently have no proper ID.

I have my birth certificate and my public healthcare card, and a not expired but no longer fully accepted proof of age card that previously counted as full ID but no longer does, but without it I dont have enough ID to get the new form of ID the government introduced in place of the old one I have.

It’s enough to prove who I am at a liquor store or chemist, day to day, but I can’t get a passport until I sort it out.