“locker room talk”

Most of my friends and I are pretty traditionally “manly” men. The kinds of guys you turn to if you need to build something, fix something, need to cut down a tree, want to drink beer and smoke cigars, shoot guns (not after drinking the beer,) go fishing (beer is ok for that,) etc.

I have basically no clue what’s going on in any of their sex lives. We never really comment on women’s appearances, and when we do it’s kept to just a very quick observation, “man, she’s hot” kind of thing.

Damn near any time some sort of sex talk comes up it’s our female friends stoking the fires.

I’m pretty sure my wife and her friends talk more about sex in an afternoon than I have in my whole lifetime.

Maybe it’s because we very rarely find ourselves in a locker room, most of aren’t exactly the gym or team sports type.

And what came of any of that?

The (wrong) lesson that much of the US took away from the cold war is that we’re basically untouchable. For all the fear of nuclear war, it never happened, and we came out on top. We never had war on our country, or even on our borders, and probably the tensest moment of the whole cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, we were able to diffuse peacefully and in a way that from many angles made Khrushchev look weak and like we came out on top.

Oh yeah, it’s absolutely primarily an infrastructure issue. Some proper bike lanes would go a very long way.

There’s a good smattering of the usual things- some people are dumb, some parents suck at parenting, etc. also at play, but that’s not particularly unique to bikes.

It sounds like you need to think about your word choice better then, because that’s exactly the kind of thing many gun owners have in mind when they talk about modding their guns.

And a lot of our gun laws are already incredibly stupid without people trying to drum up stupid ideas like “you shouldn’t be allowed to modify your guns”

Our roads are designed around cars, it’s very often extremely frustrating and unsafe to have to share the road with bikes.

As an example, most of my commute is along a 2 lane road (1 lane each direction) that’s winding, poorly lit, and has almost no shoulder. The speed limit is 35mph, which isn’t a speed most cyclists can keep up for very long if they can reach it at all.

If there’s traffic coming the opposite direction, it’s often difficult or impossible to pass that cyclist safely so very often I’ve been stuck driving 10 under the speed limit around a cyclist I can’t get around.

And again, it’s a windy, poorly lit road, coming around a corner it would be very easy to hit a cyclist if I wasn’t being careful (which I am, but many are not)

To add insult to injury in my particular case, there’s actually a very nice bike path that runs directly parallel to the road, you can actually see it from the road for much of its length, and there’s lots of places to get on and off of it, it’s paved, it’s actually almost as wide as the road itself.

There’s also the issue that a lot of them don’t always follow the rules of the road, you see a lot of the lane-splitting, running red lights, etc.

And there’s good reasons for some of that behavior, I’ve heard them, I don’t disagree with them, but the fact of the matter is that it makes them unpredictable, which is the last thing you want to be on the road.

Some also ride at night without proper lights and reflectors, which is really a problem with some idiots and shouldn’t be generalized to bikes in general, but some people are going to do that

There’s also Americans’ love of big SUVs with big blindspots that makes bikes harder to see when they’re around you in traffic.

As for ebikes, I have a love-hate relationship with them.

They can keep up with traffic a lot better, which helps my first point a lot.

They’ve also gotten a lot of people out on bikes who wouldn’t have otherwise, which is great, but it also means that a lot of those people are going from not having ridden a bike since they were like 10 years old to feeling bold enough to be out in traffic because their bike can keep up but never really learned how to coexist with traffic on a bike, so we’re doubling down on the unpredictability.

There’s also the issue that out of traffic, in spaces where e bikes coexist with pedestrians and regular bikes on trails and such they’re often zooming around at unsafe speeds.

And there’s the usual patchwork of laws and regulations from one state to another, and a lot of shady imported brands selling bikes that don’t meet those regulations. A lot of the e bikes on the road around me are overpowered and too fast for what the laws allow. And people also let their kids ride them which also isn’t allowed.

I’m all for more people riding bikes in general , but the current situation with infrastructure, regulations, enforcement, and education here make it a really unsafe and frustrating to share the road with bikes.

Alright, I’ll bite, why shouldn’t you be able to mod guns?

I’m not talking about something like converting a semi auto to a machine gun

I’m talking about stuff like choosing a different stock or grip that feels more comfortable.

Or maybe you’d prefer a lighter or heavier trigger pull, or maybe you find that your gun’s not cycling properly with a certain kind of ammo and you’d like to swap out some springs or other internal components to address that?

Or maybe there’s a part that wasn’t deburred properly from the factory that is making your gun jam and it needs a little filing or polishing to make it move properly?

Or maybe you have a shotgun for hunting, maybe you’d like to have just one gun and swap between a rifled barrel to fire slugs for deer and a smoothbore barrel for bird shot?

Maybe you want to add a different optic, a scope more suited to the distances you shoot at, or iron sights with colored dots on them so they’re easier for you to see?

Maybe you’d just like to add a sling?

I went to a local dive bar one time with a friend.

It was our first time at this particular bar, not that we were avoiding it, we just had another perfectly adequate dive a bit closer to our respective homes.

We sit down, ordered our drinks, and as we were getting settled in a little dog comes walking down the bar.

We just kind of gave each other a look like “are you seein’ this?”

And watched as the dog hopped off the bar and onto a stool at the end of the bar.

No one else seemed to acknowledge the existence of this dog.

And it sat there for the rest of the time we were there, waiting patiently like it expected to be served a beer.

One of my friends lived in a really old house that had been converted into apartments. Everything was of course laid out really weirdly because they crammed a bedroom, living room, and kitchen into what I’m pretty sure was originally 2 bedrooms and part of a stairway

One of the only built-in light fixtures in that house I’m pretty sure was an old gas light that someone screwed a lightbulb holder onto about 100 years ago and has been there ever since.

I’m from PA, lyme is pretty common here.

One of my friends moved to Seattle, and one when he came back to visit family he managed to catch it.

Apparently he got a call from the state health department in Washington after he got his test results back basically asking “where the hell did you get Lyme disease”

He told them he’d been in PA, and they were basically like “ok yeah that checks out”

Other comment hit the nail on the head with their link

But for those who won’t click the link, its basically just that once upon a time that’s what the price of a package of nails that size was, bigger nails cost more pennies than smaller nails.

While we’re on weird hardware measurement, I might as well talk about wire gauge

Basically it’s an arbitrary standard because it’s what someone somewhere set up their wire making equipment to do and other people just followed the same standard (though of course different parts of the world use different standards for different things, so there’s diff6 “gauge” measurements in use in various places for different things)

But the general idea is you would start with a thick wire/rod, and pull it through a die to stretch it out into progressively thinner wire

The original rod would be 1 gauge, one pass through the die and its 2 gauge, one more pass and it’s 3 gauge, etc. which is why the diameter gets smaller as the numbers get bigger

Then there’s shotgun gauge, and I have no idea why this is the standard they decided to measure this by, but it’s what it is. It’s the number of lead balls that size it would take to make a pound.

So a 12 gauge shotgun has a bore of .725 inches. It would take 12 .725 inch lead balls to make a pound.

For a 20 gauge shotgun, the bore is .615, and you’d need 20 balls that size to make a pound.

And then they throw that system out the window with .410 shotguns and just call it by the fucking bore diameter.

And I’m not gonna even touch on railroad gauges, American screw sizes, etc. not because it’s not interesting (to me at least) but because I’ve run out of fucks.

Personally, I’ve only ever heard “code-switching” used to refer to switching between different accents/vernacular, I suppose that switching between entirely different languages also checks the boxes to be code-switching, but I don’t know, it feels kind of weird to use that term in that case to me.

I feel like the sort of classic code-switching example is a non-white person who speaks very “white” at their job but not otherwise.

But almost everyone does it a bit, I’m a white dude whose accent falls well within the spectrum of standard American English, but I know that I talk differently on the phone at my job than I do with my coworkers sitting at the desk next to me or with my friends and family at home.

The abbreviations come from Roman times, popular currency in Rome were librae, solidi, and denarii.

There were 12 denarii in a solidus, and 20 solidi (or 240 denarii) in a Libra

In pre decimal British currency they kept the latin abbreviations, but denarii became pence, solidi became shillings and librae became pounds (and this is why the £ symbol for pounds looks kind of like an L)

And over the years at different times currency was issued in various fractions and combinations of those, such as quarter penny (farthings) and half pennies

Also, what a joke that the officer basically shrugged and said he couldn’t help if no crime had occurred.

So I definitely get where you get that impression but what the article says is (emphasis mine)

After the agent identified himself, the officer told him “he could not assist with someone following or recording him if no crime had occurred, and that local law enforcement was en route.”

Which to me kind of sounds like cop-ese for “She’s allowed to follow and record you if she wants, so how 'bout you fuck off before we cause an even bigger scene?”

Now would it have been nice if the cop had arrested the nazi for brandishing or something? Sure, but you’re living in a fantasy land if you think that would have gone anywhere. I’m pretty sure any half-decent lawyer in the country could have gotten those charges thrown out because a “law enforcement” officer drawing their gun when they feel threatened while on an “operation” isn’t exactly illegal. And the arresting cop probably would have just found himself in hot water for interfering with the “operation”

And it was a Fullerton officer but the incident occurred in Santa Ana, so there may have been jurisdiction issues where he legally couldn’t have done much beyond what he did since he was out of his jurisdiction. Honestly a lot of cops probably would have said “not by town, not my problem” and kept driving.

I think this is the right take. At the end of the day you just can’t change some people’s minds.

Arguably, you can’t change anyone’s minds, they have to change them themselves. You can try to lay the groundwork for them to make that change, but we all know what they say about leading a horse to water.

Like OP’s example of the uncle with lung cancer. The dude already has lung cancer, and is continuing to smoke, what more could you really say or do to convince him to stop? They’re already facing probably one of the biggest possible consequences of their actions and they’re still not stopping.

Sure, you could focus all of your energy into trying to browbeat them into stopping, but do you really think that’s going to get anywhere? Your time and energy are probably better spent convincing someone else to quit or not to start instead.

Also on the methanol concern, while the headline is calling it moonshine, which for most people probably calls to mind a distilled spirit with probably 40+% abv

But really we’re talking about pruno here, prison wine, so probably more like a quarter of that if they’re lucky.

I doubt they fucked it up badly enough and had enough of it to really make methanol poisoning a real concern.

When I was a kid the chicken pox vaccine was still pretty new. I remember hearing parents talking about it, and remember a few of them saying that it was only X% effective (don’t remember what that percentage was off the top of my head)

At the time, it seemed like every other children’s show had a chicken pox episode with one or more of the characters getting chicken pox, their parents talking about having a chicken pox party to get their kids infected, etc. it kind of seemed like it was almost inevitable that either I’d get chicken pox at some point or a lot of kids I knew would.

But I, and most of the kids I went to school with, did end up getting the vaccine, and very few kids in my school ever ended up with chickenpox. I can probably just about count the number of cases on my fingers in a school with hundreds of kids.

So vaccines work.

Funny story though, at one point in my childhood I got sick and ended up getting a prescription for amoxicillin. I started breaking out in sort of a rash/hives, and for a while they thought it might be chicken pox.

Turns out I’m actually just allergic to amoxicillin.

And then to make things even weirder, my sister gets a similar reaction from the azithromycin I usually got instead.

I don’t know every chain off the top of my head to double check, but I assume that those two and the 3 I mentioned are probably more-or-less the top 5

And using the locators on their websites, I can find 1 VCA-affiliated vet, and a handful of Banfield (mostly out of PetSmart) and blue Pearl locations operating under their own names. Nothing else came up around me

I suppose it’s possible some of them may be part of some smaller chains, and I’m not going to comb through every last vet in my area, but a cursory glance at a handful of them that I’ve used doesn’t look like any of them are affiliated with any kind of chain.

I very well may live in a bubble, but this is actually the first time I’ve heard of them, are they really that widespread?

I can think of about a half-dozen independent veterinarians off the top of my head within maybe about 20 minutes of me

We do have a handful of Banfield and Blue Pearl locations around, which now that I’m looking into it also seem to be owned by Mars, which is wild

But even still, they’re still dwarfed by the number of independent vets.

The AI-first certainly isn’t helping

They also recently changed their life meter, which just feels like a weird move. Now instead of having 5 hearts that only deplete when you get a wrong answer they have an energy meter that slowly goes down whether you’re getting questions right or wrong

Which feels like a really weird choice for a business model that I assume gets a lot of money from showing ads.

With the hearts I could keep doing lessons forever as long as I wasn’t getting them wrong and they could keep showing me ads the whole time

Now after a while I’d just bottom out the energy meter and then I just can’t keep going

Obviously it’s an attempt to get people to pay for a subscription, maybe it works to get people to do that, but I know there was no circumstance where I’d ever pay for it.

I’ve been thinking about ditching Duolingo for a while over the AI thing, but I’m really damn close to the end of my course and I kind of planned to just finish it out then delete my account. I may just ditch it early now.

In the US at least it’s sort of a legal grey area

We of course have our usual patchwork of different local and state laws, and I believe it is outright banned in some parts of the country

But overall, federally, I believe it’s more of an issue that there’s so little demand for it that no slaughterhouse for horses has bothered to open and go through the necessary USDA inspections and such to process horses for human consumption.

I believe, if you really wanted to, you could go slaughter a horse yourself and feed it to your friends and family and be totally in the clear, but if you try to sell that horse meat anywhere you’d have the USDA beating down your door (not a lawyer, don’t go feeding your friends horse based on my understanding of the issue)

As for the cultural reasons that Americans don’t want to eat horses and why it is outright banned in some parts of the country, I can’t really comment on that. I’d eat a horse and wouldn’t feel the least bit bad about it.