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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Aww she’s a cutie.

    Regarding the crate, usual practice is that they wouldn’t have food/water in there. They’re supposed to go in there and sleep. Granted, you shouldn’t leave her in there all day while you’re at work without food and water and a litter box, but a few hours in the evenings is fine.

    If you do want a larger crate, there are some dog crates that double as furniture. I’ve seen a few that are coffee tables / dog crates. For our kitten, we just had her in her carrier in a corner when she (or we) needed a few hours of timeout. We’d put a lightweight breathable blanket over the top to make it dark and cozy in there.

    In any case, I applaud your commitment to making sure she ends up in a good home, whether it’s yours or another.




  • I feel your pain, friend. My wife got a kitten back when we were dating and shared a 1 bedroom apartment, and this creature was an absolute menace. Unrelenting energy, didn’t have a chill bone in her body, very destructive, no boundaries. We were both a little afraid of her for a while there. My wife thought about rehoming her many times. By the time she was 2 years old, she was a totally different cat. Sweet, cuddly, lazy, all around a joy to have in the house. We used to worry about what we’d do with this cat if we had kids - we didn’t trust her. Now, we just had our second baby, and I 1000% trust this cat to be a model citizen. She lets the toddler chase her around and pull her tail (she doesn’t like it, but she puts up with it and never bites back).

    Here’s the thing: Kittens are insane. It doesn’t matter how much space or attention or toys you give them, they’re insane. Cats, on the other hand, are generally pretty chill. Ours is trained to come when we call her, stay off of the furniture, and beyond that she just kinda hangs out.

    If you love this cat and can tough it out for a few years, you very well may end up with a totally different kitty. If not, kittens are a LOT easier to re-home compared to adult cats. Maybe reach out to your local humane society, ASPCA, or other no-kill shelter or rescue. They may even be able to get her listed for adoption while you continue to foster her, and she can go straight from your home to her forever home.

    Also, it is 100% okay to crate-train a cat just like you would a dog. I wouldn’t leave her in the crate any more than you need to, but may be worth a try if you need a break when you’re home.

    Good luck, and please, don’t forget to pay the cat tax!





  • This sounds like a security nightmare though. A central repository of all code and keys is a gold mine for exploitation. Don’t get me wrong, I would really want this to work, but if it was compromised it could he catastrophic.

    I do think there should be regulations in place that are clearly and easily enforceable by the FTC though. I’d love to see companies be hit with fines and/or compulsory refunds if they stop supporting devices and don’t provide some path forward for customers to keep using the device. That doesn’t solve for startups that go out of business, but it would at least cover the tech giants who are doing this garbage.





  • Thanks for the detailed reply. I totally see your point about people not calling 911 when there’s an actual emergency, or calling the wrong number, and that resulting in a delay to first responders being notified in a critical situation. Obviously not a dispatcher myself, but have spent some time working with them, and I would say that most of them would echo your sentiments. I’ve heard some funny stories though of people calling 911 for the most inappropriate reasons - lost dogs, car won’t start (was in caller’s garage, not like they were stranded in a blizzard or something). My favorite was an elderly man who apparently called 911 because his computer was being “hacked”, sounded like he got one of those scam calls. That one made me pretty proud of the security awareness training we did for county employees.


  • I think it definitely varies by county. I worked for an IT company that served a lot of county governments across a few states in the US, and a majority of them would try to discourage 911 calls for things that weren’t active emergencies.

    Lots of counties had central 911 operations that coordinated for other local municipalities (ie the county 911 would dispatch a local city’s fire department), but non-emergency numbers usually went to the local municipality. Sometimes municipalities would have non-emergency calls roll over to the 911 center, but those calls were always tagged differently, and essentially moved to the back of the queue behind 911 calls. The goal was generally that if you call 911 you talk to someone immediately, whereas if you call non-emergency you can wait on hold for a bit if there were a lot of 911 calls.