There’s probably a lot of different variables, cows vs bulls, the breed, how they’re being raised, if they have calves with them, how you’re behaving, etc.

In general though, safest bet is always going to be to give them space and not approach them. Not to say they’re necessarily going to be aggressive or anything, but that’s just kind of rule number 1 with any animals you’re not familiar with.

Annecdotally, when I was a teenager, I did Philmont, which is a big property the Boy Scouts of America (now changing their name to Scouting America) owns in New Mexico, where scouts can go backpacking. They also maintain a working cattle ranch there, and I believe so e of the neighboring ranches allow their cattle to (grave? Free range? Roam? I’m not sure of the correct terminology) the Philmont property, so it’s not uncommon to encounter cows in various places there.

They give pretty much the same lecture, don’t approach them, don’t do anything to spook them, and give them some space.

At one point my group was hiking along a trail coming to a junction, and a few dozen cows came down the trail we were about to head up and went into the woods. We weren’t super close to them, but it was probably about the closest I’ve been to a cow outside of a petting zoo in my life, and there was nothing but a few yards of open trail between us. We just stood back and watched them go about their business, the cows didn’t pay any attention to us, we hung out for a couple minutes after they passed in case there were any stragglers, and sure enough there was a lone cow that came running down the trail trying to catch up with its friends.

I’m no cow-ologist, but my general understanding is that they tend to be fairly laid back, and if anything curious. That said, they’re big, powerful animals and you don’t want to spook them.

Not exactly the same thing, but my wife and I saw Logan at a drive in theater when it came out

Towards the end when he’s all fucked up and near death, the audio started doing all kinds of weird shit, cutting in and out, getting fuzzy and distorted, etc.

We thought it was a pretty cool effect to show the sort of state he was in and we were all about it.

Then we heard some crystal clear audio coming from the cars next to us, turns out it was just my car’s battery dying from running the radio.

Still think it was a cool effect, would watch it again that way if it were an option.

I’ve since picked up a battery powered radio for future drive-ins (we try to go at least once a year)

FYI, there’s a little debate over this in the English language, but many would say that the proper demonyms are Afghan for the Pashtun ethnic group, and Afghanistani (or rarely Afghanese) for people from Afghanistan regardless of ethnicity.

Afghani is their currency.

I believe it comes from a discrepancy between the Persian and Pashto languages. Afghani being the correct term in Persian, and Afghan being the term in Pashto.

Afghani is pretty widely used in English, and even appears in some dictionaries, but many argue that it’s not correct.

So a person is an Afghan, they eat Afghan food, wear Afghan clothing, have Afghan customs, and their currency is the Afghan Afghani (in case some other country ever adopts a currency called the Afghani and you need to differentiate between them)

That’s kind of the point of this thread though isn’t it? Weird food pairings that sound crazy but actually work if you’re brave enough to try them

Elsewhere in this thread you’ll find a lot of sweet/salty/savory pairings, one that’s particularly relevant is adding chocolate to chili. Lots of chili will end up getting served with some shredded cheese, or some sour cream (sour cream is kind of next door to cheese when you think about it) so not too far off from a Mexican hot chocolate without the meat.

Cheese is dairy, and there’s no shortage of milk and chocolate creations, like hot chocolate itself

Cheese can go with sweet things just fine, plenty of great fruit and cheese pairings, cheese and honey, etc. (if you haven’t tried it, some warm apple pie with some sharp cheddar cheese on it is great, also sounds crazy to some people but if you ever do a cheese fondue odds are you’re going to be dipping apple slices into cheese)

You’re probably even familiar with a couple pairings of chocolate and other cheeses, things like chocolate chips in cannoli, chocolate cheesecake

A Puerto Rican coworker turned me onto hot chocolate with cheese in it. I believe the traditional method is basically just to put some cheese in the cup and you end up with a melted glob of cheese to eat with a spoon as/after you drink it. I’ve played around with that as well as actually incorporating the cheese into the drink itself, melting it all together on the stove.

Kind of gets you some of that well-tested sweet/salty/savory combo. I dig it in a Mexican hot chocolate with some cinnamon and chili powder.

I believe the traditional cheese is edam, I’ve tried that as well as cheddar and a few other cheeses, they all seemed to work pretty well, try it at your own risk if you go for anything too funky

Long before I was born, my town was a working class mill town, steel mill, tire factory, textile mills, etc. the steel mill is still there, but it’s not a big feature of the town like it once was.

Even up into my lifetime, it was still essentially a working class town, nothing wrong with it, perfectly safe town, walkable, convenient to pretty much every major highway, public transportation, major shopping areas, etc. but it just had a little bit of a reputation for being kind of a slightly lower class town compared to a lot of its neighbors.

Within the last decade or so it’s kind of exploded, property values have gone through the roof, lots of cool bars and restaurants, a whole bunch of new high rise apartment buildings, etc. It’s attracted a lot of yuppies and priced a lot of the old families out of the area. It’s also created some significant traffic and parking issues, with new apartments and such bringing in more people, and people wanting to come into town for the bars and restaurants and such the infrastructure just isn’t there for that many cars.

I can’t afford to live there anymore, but with my parents and relatives who still live there not getting any younger, sooner or later I should be able to snag up one of their houses, my sister already managed to snag my grandmother’s house for herself.

Like all cases of gentrification it has its plusses and minuses. The bars and restaurants and other new businesses are pretty great. Getting priced out of the town my family has lived in for over a century kind of blows, even if I have a roadmap laid out in front of me to get back. Some of my favorite cheap dive bars are no longer very cheap or divey, which is a bummer. The traffic can be a nightmare when you have to deal with it. The character of the town has definitely changed, there’s a definite difference in attitude between people who have deep roots there, own homes, and intend to spend the rest of their lives here and the newcomers, landlords, house flippers, renters, etc. who don’t have any real attachment to the town.

English

A very tiny bit of French, I can understand more than I can speak if they talk slowly, my French education was kind of shitty and it’s been well over a decade since high school since I’ve really used it so

I’ve been learning Esperanto on Duolingo, it’s been going pretty well, I’m just about at the point where I can confidently read a book without having too look up too many words. I’m far from fluent, but I getting there.

Not quite what you’re looking for, but I recently did NYC to Montreal on Amtrak, about a 12 hour ride (officially it’s somewhat shorter, but delays can happen at the border crossing, and as others have noted Amtrak doesn’t have right of way over freight trains so you may get delayed over that, I’d plan on about 12 hours on this particular route)

Overall I enjoyed my experience. It would have been faster to drive or fly, but that comes with its own hassles, and since it was snowing for a good part of our ride, I definitely appreciated not having to drive through that.

The seats (all coach class on this train) were pretty roomy, plenty of leg room, and comfortable enough for my tastes. There’s power outlets at every seat, the wifi is basically useless so plan on having any movies or ebooks or whatever you want to watch downloaded before you go.

The cafe car onboard doesn’t have an amazing selection, hot food is pretty much all microwave stuff, but I found it adequate to hold me over, I wasn’t looking for a gourmet meal, just some snacks and drinks, and it was pretty nice being able to enjoy a beer or two on the train ride.

On the ride back, it seemed like the train’s air conditioning wasn’t working well and it got a little warm, not ridiculously hot, but enough that you might want to take off an extra layer or roll up your sleeves. They also mentioned that since their train fleet is aging a bit, some of them can start to leak a little in the rain, we didn’t experience any of that even though it was raining a bit, but that’s something to keep in mind.

We didn’t have any issues with the bathrooms, but at least on that route they won’t get cleaned during the trip, so if they get too gross they do sometimes apparently have to put some of them out of service.

You’re being really critical here for no good reason, it almost feels like you’re the one with a troll account.

You could clear up your confusion about the username by a quick Google search. The library of babel is a story Jorge Louis Borges, about a vast library that contains every possible combination of letters and words, and if you Google “dhcmrlchtdj,” you can see that it’s one combination of letters that he specifically calls out to illustrate that point.

And like you said, an involuntary commitment is a serious issue to contemplate and a sensitive topic for a lot of people, I think it’s pretty understandable that someone may not want to share a lot of details about what their friend is going through.

Again, things are going to vary from one place or a person to another and I’m afraid there probably isn’t a simple, satisfying, one-size-fits-all answer to that question. There’s a lot of room for improvement at basically every level with mental healthcare, though it’s pretty hard to pick one or even a couple things and say “do this one thing differently and things will be better” because each of those one little things tends to lead straight down a rabbit hole of 10,000 other things that would also need to change for it to work.

Some very broad categories of things I’d like to see improved

More funding, resources, training, etc. there’s only so many psych hospitals, so many beds, doctors, nurses, etc. so even if we could somehow funnel everyone who really needs treatment down a path towards getting it, there’s really no way for them all to get it. We need to make sure that everyone who needs it is able to access high quality mental healthcare.

A whole lot of education, public awareness, societal changes, etc. need to happen. There’s still a whole lot of stigma and taboos about mental health issues and treatment. People don’t know what’s involved, are afraid of getting branded as crazy, don’t know what resources are available to them, how to access them, what their strengths and limitations are, they can’t afford it, a long stay in a psych hospital may mean losing their jobs or their home. Damn near every night I get a call for a domestic where I hear one of the parties yelling at the other that they’re going to get them committed, and often there’s no real sign that anyone involved actually has any kind of mental health issue, they’re mostly just idiots or assholes, so it’s usually an empty threat and paints the picture of treatment being some sort of punishment or a weapon to use against someone, and that sort of thinking really damages the reputation and efficacy of mental healthcare.

There probably need to be new categories of healthcare created, or if they do already actually exist, they need to be expanded. I can’t tell you how many calls I get a night from people who clearly have some kind of psych issues, but wouldn’t meet the bar of being a danger by any reasonable definition. I could probably rattle off a dozen names and addresses off the top of my head of people that I speak to almost every shift who probably really need to be in a psych hospital for a while to get themselves straightened out, but since they’re in no way dangerous, our hands are kind of tied, and the best we can do is offer them a mental health crisis line they can speak to, or send a cop out to check on them, make sure they’re ok, maybe talk to them for a while or leave them some pamphlets or business cards or something for resources they can try and hope they take the next step themselves, or at the very least tell them to stop calling 911 (which doesn’t really have any teeth, no one really wants to go through the paperwork and court hearings and such to get them in trouble for abusing the 911 system, I’ve only heard of it actually happening once in these kinds of cases in the 5 years I’ve been working here, and in their minds they’re calling about an actual emergency, and we don’t want to discourage them from calling if/when there actually is something going on, it’s happened before that they’ve actually called in a real incident) so there needs to be some sort of middle ground between hauling them off kicking and screaming to be committed and just making suggestions and hoping they follow through with them, and I don’t really know what that middle ground is.

Never been committed or had to go through the process myself, but I do have some second-hand knowledge from my work as a 911 dispatcher.

Most important to keep in mind is that the specific laws and processes are going to vary depending on what state or country you live in, who can initiate it, what’s involved in the process, how long they can be held, what the process is is to extend that hold if needed, etc. will all vary a bit.

Most commonly, the requirements include something like the person must be a danger danger to themselves or others, and the relevant law will likely spell out how that is determined.

In general, an involuntary commitment should be a last resort. Probably not surprisingly someone who doesn’t want to be there probably won’t try very hard to keep up with their treatment, and since they can usually only be held for a few days without taking extra steps to extend it, they may be able to keep themselves out of trouble for just long enough to get released and then go right back to whatever they were doing to get committed in the first place. If you can somehow convince them to go of their own free will, they’re probably going to be a lot more cooperative, and sometimes, depending on the exact circumstances, it can actually be harder for them to leave before they’re better when they go voluntarily than when it’s involuntary.

I’ve had pretty good luck getting cocktail recipes out of chatgpt. They sometimes need a little tweaking but it hasn’t steered me horribly wrong yet.

I’m also going to be officiating a wedding for a friend in a few months, so I’ve been using it to work out what I want to say for the ceremony.

I have a coworker who’s been taking some college classes. He struggles a bit with writing papers, he knows all the material just doesn’t quite know how to get started putting things down on paper. I told him to give it a try, with some strong warnings to rewrite and fact-check everything it spits out, and so far it’s been working out great for him and he’s been heeding my warnings, he pretty much punches in some prompts and bullet points and then goes through and rewords everything it spits out and fact-checks it as he goes.

Charcoal isn’t the same thing as regular coal

I assume when you say “American culture” you are referring to the “United States of America culture” not one of the other countries in the Americas.

This has to be one of my least favorite bits of pedantry out there.

Everyone is aware that there are other countries in the Americas, the US is the only one that is commonly called America and the people who live there “Americans,” and in fact none of the others have the word “America” in their name.

The only time I see people trying to refer to anything besides the US as America/American, is when someone feels compelled to bring up this point. In actual usage, people will refer to the things as being North and/or South American, or “From the Americas,” or in certain contexts, they may use “New World.” Otherwise, they’ll refer to specific countries or regions, like “The United States and Canada,” “Central America,” “Latin America,” “The Amazon Basin,” “The Pacific Northwest,” etc.

Because frankly, there aren’t too many contexts in everyday usage where it’s useful to lump both contintents together as a whole, the two continents have a pretty diverse cross section of different cultures, languages, economies, climates, geography, seasons. One of the only things you can really say about them as a whole is they’re not physically close to most of the “old world” (Europe, Asia, & Africa) and even that’s technically a little iffy because part of Russia is pretty damn close to Alaska.

Because really, what sort of useful comparisons are there to make between, say, Newfoundland, Kansas, and Peru besides to say “Yeah, those places sure are all different from each other?” What do you gain by trying to lump them together?

Customer is who purchase the product, consumer is the end-user, the actual person or entity that will use it.

If you buy, for example, a Samsung TV from Walmart. Walmart is Samsung’s customer, but they are not the consumer. Walmart, in some fashion, is paying Samsung for that TV and reselling it to you. You are the consumer of that TV and a customer of both Samsung and Walmart.

Hypothetically if you’re gifted a Samsung TV and spent no money on it yourself, you are technically a samsung consumer, but not a customer.

In common usage, the terms are often going to be used as synonyms, if you have a problem with your TV you’re going to call Samsung customer service, whether or not you actually are technically a customer.