In high school one of my classmates was named Benjamin Dover.

Also had a classmate named Ma Deek.

We call it the “Mens” category, but for all intents and purposes it is the same as an “open to all genders” category.

Female athletes don’t compete in it because they’re physically not strong enough to even qualify to compete in it at the world level. The gender they identify as or were assigned at birth is irrelevant. There’s no genetic testing requirement to compete at the men’s level.

In almost every sport, the world record performance from a women isn’t even good enough to meet the minimum bar for quality to compete in the men’s competitions at the world level.

Even sports like diving where you’re judged more than measured, the male athletes strength makes it possible for them to do things the female athletes simply can’t.

There was a time when they only was open to all competition, adding a protected women’s only category was to make it fair for women. And then we started calling the open category the men’s category.

We could call it the open category and the low-T category instead, and it would have the exact same participants in each.

Found the Canadian.

I got a 2400 baud modem and thought it was so cool that I didn’t need to use an acoustic coupler

The fastest a woman has ever run the 100m dash is 10.49 seconds.

The Olympic qualifying time, that all runners needed to beat to even complete in men’s 100m dash this year was 10.00 seconds.

If we didn’t have a women’s division, there couldn’t be women in sports.

It depends on the jurisdiction, but in most cases if you have a salaried position with say 3 weeks of PTO but you only take 2 weeks of it. The employer is usually required to pay you over and above your salary for working during your “vacation time”.

If there’s an unlimited PTO policy, they don’t have an obligation to pay you extra for working during vacation time.

It’s a lie.

By making it “unlimited” they don’t need to pay you out of you don’t use all of PTO days.

If you use it more than they think you’ve earned you get terminated.

Employees end up afraid of taking their PTO days and typically end up taking even less time off than if they knew there was a expectation of 3 weeks or whatever.

My favourite thing ever seen in source code was a comment that read “this code is temporary” with developer initials and a date that was at the time about 5 years ago.

Followed by another dated comment from about 3 years later that read “Temporary my ass”

😂

I bought a dashcam for my vehicle, and choose to use it to protect myself from false accusations.

Body cams should be like dash cams, something used by employees to exonerate the person wearing them.

I’m not a LEO, and I can respect that maybe it’s not this simple… but I would expect “honest” cops to voluntarily wear one to protect themselves from false accusations of abuse of power.

But when it crosses over from protecting the employee to big brother watching over you that’s the line.

Body cams used to protect the wearer - Good Body cams used to punish the wearer - Bad

I’m an expert in consequential greenhouse gas accounting. Which is the sub discipline of GHG accounting that specializes in understanding how policies and decisions impact global GHG emissions.

I feel genuinely bad for any democrat supporter with an ear injury right now.

Lots of great answers here.

I think one under mentioned cause is the effect of social media algorithms.

All major social media platforms use machine learning algorithms decide what to show in your feed. The algorithms are programmed to show you the things that have historically kept you on the site longer.

It’s human nature to upvote/read/support/engage with the things that agree with our world views, and downvote/dismiss/disengage/discredit the things that disagree with our worldview.

These two facts combined result in you seeing more of the content that aligns with your worldview, and more of the content from people who share your worldview. We’re all funnelled into communities of like minded individuals that repeat what we already believe, reinforcing whatever that is regardless of how factually correct it might be.

Dissenting information that might cause you to reconsider your position or become more politically aware is automatically filtered out.

And it’s not just social media either, even the algorithms behind search engines display this behaviour.

Long before social media existed, Google was tailoring search results to match the things you tend to click on. If you searched for news and typically clicked on the headlines biased towards one side or the other Google would start ranking site with that bias higher.

This wasn’t intentional (at least not originally) it was just a side effect of the algorithm, trying to figure out what you were most likely looking for.

For someone who, for example, believes the Earth is flat. If they were to type “is the Earth flat?” Into a search engine. They are much more likely to get results that “prove” the Earth is flat, then a person who believes the Earth is round, because the algorithm knows that they tend to click on articles that “confirm” the earth is flat.

Algorithms used by social media and search engines today, make it genuinely difficult to maintain a balanced worldview and find unbiased answers to any question. They are all designed to keep you engaged, And it is human nature to engage more with the things we agree with, regardless of truth.

Total monthly posts exploded after Spez enshitified Reddit, and is still growing steadily month over month.

That suggests that the current decline in monthly active users is primarily because lurkers who only came to lemmy after initially hearing about it on Reddit, went back to lurking Reddit.

The number of users that are contributors is still growing, and that’s what’s important.