Honestly, no.

I learned a lot in school and I retained a hell of a lot of it, but from middle school onward I wasn’t a good student because I had absolutely no interest in doing homework, reports, reading the books I was assigned, projects, etc. so I scraped by skipping as much of that as I could.

I ended up in a profession where I don’t need a degree, and I’m not rolling in it, but the job security and benefits are amazing (county government job,) I’m making an OK living, I enjoy the work I do as much as I’m capable of enjoying any job, and I’m happy to stick this out until I can retire.

The things I wish I learned better in school are things like trig, which would be nice because I’ve developed a little interest in things like machining, but would only ever want to pursue that as a hobby, not professionally, so no great loss there. Frankly though, my school’s math program sucked and I’ve probably taught myself more math from casually watching a couple YouTube videos than I would have learned in a decade of high school math classes there.

The things people love to complain about not learning in school- finance, politics, etc. I think I have a pretty solid handle on. Maybe I’m better wired to put those pieces together than they are, maybe my parents did a good job of teaching me that themselves, maybe those people are idiots, maybe some combination of all of those things or none at all.

A lot of my best friends today and even my wife I can trace directly back to sitting next to and goofing off with one guy in a history class at community college before I dropped out. If I’d been a better student I may have gone to a 4-year college, or maybe would have taken different classes, or just fucked around less and never hit it off with him, and my life would be drastically different. It’s probably even likely I wouldn’t have found the current job that I really like, I stumbled onto it by chance while I was living in an apartment with my wife (then girlfriend) and a roommate.

And without a lot of those life experiences I had in the decade or so after school, I don’t know that I’d be able to do the job I do now, I don’t think I would have been able to cut it fresh out of high school, I definitely needed those shitty jobs, misadventures, etc. to mold me into the person I am, and I’m overall pretty happy with that person.

Not that there aren’t things I’d do differently given the chance, but not enough that I’d want a total do-over. Just give me a chance to go back and slap younger me upside the head once in a while to get him to exercise more or brush our teeth a little more diligently and I’ll take it, but there’s a lot of mistakes I had to make along the way, and I don’t want to interfere with any of those cannon events.

Without more context to this story I can’t say much about this

But my first thought on seeing this goes to Two Face (the Batman villain) who makes his decisions with an incorrectly minted coin with 2 heads with one side defaced like this. Often that coin is depicted as a silver dollar, so I think it’s very possible that the thought process didn’t go much deeper than “lol, like in Batman”

It could be a coincidence that they did it for the Batman lulz and the the fact they’re a maga dumbass is unrelated (plenty of edgelord nerds are also right-wing nuts, but I could also have seen myself doing this when I was like 16 and going through my edgy phase and I was never a right wing chud,) or it could be totally unconnected to Batman and it is some weird qult symbol, I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised either way

Look, I really want a reason to support assange/WikiLeaks, I think that we need someone doing the kinds of leaking that they like to pretend they do

But the man is just as crooked, corrupt, and politically partisan, and only looking out for his own self interest as anything he’s exposed. He’s not a good guy who deserves support

I don’t disagree, I think it’s pretty nuts that things like alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, etc. are exempt from the drug scheduling system, and that’s part of the reason I’d like to burn the whole system down and start again.

It would be a pretty monumental undertaking, and I’m certainly not holding my breath for it, but I’d like to see a more comprehensive and unified approach that would include basically every substance that a person could conceivably want to put into their body or might be exposed to in everyday life, drugs, medications, foods, additives, household chemicals, etc. with probably dozens of categories with various restrictions.

If it were up to me (and I’m no doctor/scientist so take my opinion for what it’s worth,) I’d probably put cannabis in the same or a similar category as things like alcohol, tobacco/nicotine, caffeine, psychedelics, certain OTC medications, household chemicals and excessively sugary foods. Things with potential for abuse/dependency, that when used in moderation/in a manner consistent with the intended use are unlikely to cause significant short-term health effects, but could be dangerous at higher doses/exposure levels, or may cause/contribute to longer-term health issues. It would probably need to be further broken down into a few different categories with more specific regulations/guidelines/restrictions/exemptions, but that’s generally my train of thought.

Straight codeine is schedule II, schedule III only includes things like Tylenol mixed with codeine if there’s less than 90mg of codeine in the dosage unit. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but that’s the way it is.

Schedule III is for drugs with “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.”

Frankly our research on cannabis still has a lot of catching up to do because it’s been hard to properly and legally study it for so long, but the current understanding shows that around 10% (give or take a couple percentage points depending on your source) of regular cannabis users do tend to develop some kind of dependence. That’s fairly significant.

In the grand scheme of addiction, marijuana addiction isn’t the biggest deal, there’s plenty of harder habits to kick with far worse withdrawal symptoms, but there is some addictive potential there that is still worth considering.

But I I think that “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence” is probably not a bad way to describe the risks of marijuana dependence.

Really I’d like to burn the entire scheduling system to the ground, a lot of is doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but if we have to fit cannabis into the existing system, III isn’t the worst place for it.

Exactly, we left it mostly up to the manufacturers and they’ve kind of abused that freedom and made them kind of shit for their intended purpose.

Now in the modern era, with backup cameras being standard equipment on new cars, you can maybe make an argument for them being a little redundant since most if not all backup cameras have some night vision capabilities, but a little redundancy isn’t a bad thing, if your camera gets fucked up you still probably want to see where you’re going when you’re backing out of your driveway to get it fixed.

The most proper thing for them to do is probably to say “this is a state election issue, not our place to get involved in”

Which is probably fairly likely, I don’t think they’ll really want to deal with this, it’s an easy way for them to wash their hands of it, leaves the door open for red states to try to find an excuse to remove Biden from the ballot, let’s them act like they’re respecting the intent of the founders, etc.

If they do decide to take it up, who know? The court is definitely packed with conservative assholes, but even among them, I don’t think most of them particularly like trump, and they certainly haven’t been as “loyal” to him as he would like, some of them would probably love to see him removed from the ballot in hopes that an actually competent Republican asshole might win.

I think it’s probably about a 50/50 shot of SCOTUS actually taking it up, and if they do it’s probably about 50/50 again for what the outcome would be.

On that note, can we talk about how shit a lot of reverse lights are? In addition to indicating that you’re backing up, they’re also supposed to function as a sort of rear-facing headlight so you can see what your backing up towards, but their size, placement, and brightness on a lot of cars makes them pretty much useless for that in a lot of cases.

I’m not saying they need to be as bright as your regular headlights, that would be serious overkill, but they should probably be noticeably brighter than a turquoise self-driving indicator light would ever need to be.

Because their committed to the bit that the only thing they learned in school is that “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.”

I think there’s a few things that can be going on

First and probably the most straightforward, there’s people who are trying to deflect criticism of themselves. In your example, let’s say the Jewish person did actually say something disrespectful and misogynistic. They don’t want to get called out and catch heat for it, so they deflect by accusing the other person of being an anti-semite.

There’s also cases where cases where the person actually is anti-semitic, their motivations don’t really have anything to do with calling out misogyny (again using your example,) they’re just playing the part to attack the Jewish person. Now sometimes they might end up actually calling out actual misogynistic language, even a broken clock is right twice a day, which is a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason, or other times they might make a mountain out of a molehill or even just totally making up reasons to be offended.

And there’s some things that can complicate it even further.

There are cases where the Jewish person may be genuinely interpreting the accusations as being an antisemitic attack. Using your example of misogyny, some (but by no means all) Jewish communities/sects do hold some misogynistic views, under their interpretations of judaism, they have strong views about what a woman’s place in society is/should be, and to them speaking out against that genuinely is an antisemitic act.

There are also cases where they have been conditioned to watch out for antisemitism (or other forms of prejudice,) which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in actuality is probably a wise thing for people to have at the back of their minds, but that’s a hell of a thing to have weighing on your mind and some people can get a little overzealous or paranoid and start seeing it in places where it doesn’t exist.

Also, as a non-jewish person, if this is something you’re experiencing regularly, it’s probably a good idea to think about what your own biases are, and try to think about what you’re saying from the Jewish perspective and why what you’re saying or doing might be coming across as antisemitic. You very well might be in the right, or you might discover some biases you didn’t know you had.

And lastly, a final thing to keep in mind, we’re living in the disinformation age, there no shortage of trolls, bots, provocateurs, and other bad-faith actors out there trying to stir the pot and sow discord either for some political agenda or even simply for their own amusement. This especially applies online when you often have no real idea who it is you’re talking too and what their motivations might be, but it also applies in-person as well.

One final thought is that these sort of negative interactions will stick with you, you probably won’t remember conversations where things went smoothly and civilly nearly as well. For every time you’ve seen someone play the antisemitism card, or the race card, or transphobia card or what have you in this manner, you’ve probably had other conversations where it never comes up at all, but that’s not going to stick out in your mind as clearly.

As far as her being trustworthy, personally I’d trust her as much or more than about 90% of politicians out there, which is admittedly a pretty low bar, and probably says more about how shit our politicians are overall as opposed to being a particularly positive comment about her.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t exactly like her, she’s far from my first choice, but overall I’d generally trust her to do what she says she’s going to do. I may not always like what she says she’s going to do, but sadly the bar is low enough that just being upfront about the ways she’d fuck us over is almost refreshing compared to the flat out lies and bait-and-switch schemes and such most politicians pull.

I also generally trust her to not be outright malicious, maybe greedy, misguided, short-sighted, stubborn, and/or wrong, sure, I could definitely see those, but I don’t think she’s generally out to hurt people she doesn’t like just for the sake of hurting people, which again is sadly how low our bar is set.

No other real disagreements with your comment, I’d agree that shes not charismatic, not likeable, but fairly trustworthy as far as politicians go, which is a huge asterisk to throw on there.

If I woke up from a coma into a world with president Hillary, I’d be far from thrilled, but I could also kind of shrug it off as “well we could have done a lot worse.”

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Honestly, I have a whole lot of issues with how the data is presented and categorize with mass shootings all around.

Now pretty much however you look at the data, we have a major problem and probably multiple different but related major problems with gun violence in America that we are handling poorly and pretty much nowhere else in the world is experiencing the kinds of problems we have. So don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to minimize the importance of any of the categories of gun violence, I just want more clear statistics on what actually is happening so I don’t have to go sorting through a thousand different news articles, Wikipedia pages, press releases, etc. to get a full and clear picture of what’s actually happening.

Personally, I’d like to see specific stats on

The “classic” mass shooting, someone walks into a place like a school, mall, outdoor public area, concert venue, etc. and attempts to kill as many people as possible more-or-less indiscriminately.

I’d also like to see stats on planned/attempted mass shootings that get stopped before they properly get off the ground, whether police actually manage to act on a tip about a suspicious person, the shooter is unsuccessful and either doesn’t manage to shoot anyone or only shoots one person before being stopped which may keep it from being counted as a mass shooting

There’s also more target situations, domestics where someone shoots multiple family members, or situations like a gang-related drive-by, where the victims are chosen because of a specific relationship to the shooter.

There’s definitely some grey areas in-between, for example someone shooting up their own school, church, or workplace, because they would have some relationship or affiliation with the victims, but it’s somewhat more indiscriminate and they might behave more like the first category than second, or situations in which bystanders get shot, or where the shooter’s specific goal is one or several specific people but they are ok with other collateral damage, maybe they intend to kill their boss but end up shooting 7 other coworkers as well that get in their way, they didn’t set out to kill those other employees, if they happened to not be there or didn’t interfere that would have been fine by them, but they were also willing to do it if it came to that.

I’d also like to see the stats for total shots fired, how much ammo they were carrying, percent of ammo used, how many wounded, how many killed, how many times each victim was shot, types of firearms used, how those firearms were obtained, length of the incident, police response times, previous criminal/psych histories, etc.

Similarly stats on school shootings could use a bit more granularity, a columbine or sandy hook type situation is very different from a situation where a kid brings a gun to school to shoot a specific student or staff member, or from a situation where a shooting happens on school property even if it’s well outside of school hours and no students or faculty are present, etc. but often these sorts of situations will get lumped together into one school shooting category.

And that’s probably just scraping the tip of the iceberg. I could keep going with a whole lot of categories and stats I’d like to see but this comment is already getting too long.

And honestly it’s wild to me that some government agency or at least some non-profit or even a dedicated random person doesn’t seem to have really put together any decent spreadsheet with these incidents categorized and all of the stats. I’m almost certain it probably exists somewhere as the pet project of some CDC employee or something who’s unable to release it due to regulations, bureaucracy, political bullshittery, etc.

I’m an essential worker, so I kept commuting pretty much like normal throughout the pandemic.

During the initial lockdowns I was averaging a whole MPG better just from not having any traffic.

And the real kicker is that my schedule is kind of weird, so I already commute at times when traffic isn’t too bad, I normally start at 2:30 in the afternoon and work 12 hours until the 2:30 in the morning (before anyone asks, my job isn’t very physically demanding, and I have more and more frequent days off, so 12 hour shifts aren’t too bad) so I’m going in after people have been running out to do stuff on their lunch breaks and before schools let out so traffic is minimal then, and I usually don’t even see a half dozen other cars on the road when I’m heading home, and some of my shifts are weekends so traffic is usually even lighter during the day. And my commute is only about 10 miles/20 minutes, no highways or anything, just normal semi-rural to suburban main roads.

And so a slight reduction in traffic during my commute into work (and no real difference to my commute home) got me a small but noticeable difference in my average fuel economy. Now all told that means I probably only saved a few gallons, maybe a tank of gas myself, but think of all of the millions of people who commute in much heavier traffic both ways, possibly even further, and how much extra gas they’re burning releasing CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere.

Imagine what more people being able to work from home, better public transit and carpooling to reduce number of cars on the road, companies staggering the start/end times of their business days so that everyone isn’t commuting at the same time, etc. could do.

So first of all, which American accent? There’s no single accent.

Secondly, if you try to transition slowly, odds are you’re going to get made fun of a whole lot along the way for nearly every single American pronunciation you make, because each individual change will stick out more in context. so we’re talking about months or years of people thinking you’re weird, stupid, or have some kind of speech impediment instead of getting it all out of the way in one go. I have a fairly strong Philadelphian accent, and even here in my home turf I’ve had the odd person try to make fun of my pronunciation of things like “water” (wooder,) generally it’s pretty good-natured fun, but once in a while you get some asshole with a stick up their ass about proper pronunciation. You’re setting yourself up for a long time of that, and it will only get worse up until you’re actually able to pass as an American.

Third, don’t try to be cool, it never works. The coolest thing out there really is just having the right amount of confidence. Trying to change your accent because it sounds cooler kind reeks of trying too hard, like weebs sprinkling way too much Japanese into their conversations for no good reason, or people using big words to sound smarter, or whatever the fuck Elizabeth Holmes does with her voice. It’s basically the verbal of equivalent of a neckbeard wearing a fedora (is that still a thing or am I dating myself?)

If you’re actually dead-set on changing your accent, the best way is to just live in America and immerse yourself in it and come into it naturally, and you’ll pick it up, and then it gives you a solid reason to say how/why you picked it up. You’re going to need to spend some significant time here though, months at a minimum, probably years, otherwise at best people will just think you’re an obnoxious, maybe naive weirdo who’s huffing their own farts about how well-traveled they are, or at worse think you’re some sort of weeaboo type obsessive nutjob about America (Google “Rawhide Kobayashi” and you’d get a pretty good sense of how people might think of you)

Last thoughts on the matter, if there’s American slang you like, go ahead and use it, but do it naturally, don’t force it. I sprinkle all kinds of weird shit into my speech that I’ve picked up from all over the place, things I’ve read, heard others say, movies, tv, the internet, but it’s never been a conscious choice, it just happens naturally, trying to force it never makes it feel natural. “Stop trying to make fetch happen.”

Not that breeding hasn’t created a lot of issues in many dog breeds, but something I always notice with wolf stats is that their lifespan in captivity is always listed as “up to” and I don’t tend to see anywhere saying what an average lifespan in captivity is. Maybe that stat is out there but in my casual googling around I don’t think I’ve seen it.

Which makes me think that some of those life span claims may be based on outliers. You get the odd dog that lives past the average life expectancy for it’s breed too, but it would be a bit misleading to say that French Mastiffs can live to be up to 12 years old because a couple have lived that long even though the average lifespan is half of that.

And let’s not forget that the grey wolf’s native range was almost the entire northern hemisphere in just about every climate imaginable. That leaves a lot of room for different populations with genetic variations. Different populations of wolves can vary pretty greatly in size, Indian and Arabian wolves only average around 25kg, north American wolves about 36, European wolves around 38.5, and while places like Alaska and Russia have turned out a few giants in the 70kg+ range, wolves over 54kg are overall pretty uncommon. That puts a lot of wolves in the same weight class as a medium or large sized dog, not giant breeds, and 15 years, while not exactly common, isn’t quite so unheard of either for a lot of breeds in that weight range.

And trying to find specific stats on the lifespan of those different wolf populations is definitely outside of what I was able to find with a little casual googling and skimming Wikipedia.

Of course 15 years might very well be a perfectly ordinary lifespan for a wolf. I don’t know, I don’t feel comfortable saying one way or the other from the stats I was able to find with the amount of effort I was willing to put into it, and I’m certainly no biologist studying wolves or anything of the sort.

I started googling this earlier today to comment on a different post about this where someone asked about what the lifespan of dogs would be without human meddling, and I thought to myself “well that’s basically wolves.” And I started off intending to skim a few pages for the relevant numbers and say something like “wolves live about X much longer than similarly sized dogs” with “X” being kind of an average from a few different sources because I expected some variation in the numbers, but I saw a lot more variation in the numbers than I expected, and some of the way things were phrased felt like they were answering different questions than what I was asking, which kind of sent up some red flags for me, and I ended up not commenting on that time because I didn’t feel like I had a solid answer.

I still don’t, but in this context I think it’s important to stop and think about the data and ask questions like

Are the wolves that get up to 70kg the same ones that can live up to 15 (or I even saw claims of up to 20) years? Or is it maybe smaller wolves that can live that long? Are we making fair comparisons between dogs breeds and similarly-sized wolves, or are we comparing giant breeds to the smallest wolves out there?

Are these ages averages, or are they the top end outliers that are more of a theoretically maximum than something that’s likely to happen?

Is the genetic diversity of different wolf populations being taken into account properly?

How fair is it to compare the lifespan of wolves and dogs? They’re closely related to be sure, to the point they’re generally considered to be part of the same species, but there’s also very significant differences in their biology as well.

I hope someone is more dedicated than I am and can dig up the data I’m looking for, and my gut says that wolves probably do have longer potential lifespans than dogs, but I’m not very confident in just how big the difference is.

I feel like the founders felt that the voting base would not possibly be dumb enough to support an individual like Trump.

That’s actually one of the reasons we have an electoral college (though not the only reason, and I’m not claiming that any of those reasons are necessarily good, just that it was part of the justification for why our system is the way it is,) some of the founders were afraid the average voter might be too stupid to choose a decent president.

Of course a couple centuries of fucking with the system has made it backfire on us. If it worked the way it was supposed to, we would have had a bunch of faithless electors take a look at who the people of their state voted for and say “hell no.”

The question posed was whether farming dogs is worse than farming other animals, and that is the question I attempted to answer.

The question was not whether farming any animal for food is ethical or justifiable, and so I didn’t attempt to answer that.

In general, predators like dogs are a very inefficient way to get calories. Cattle, for example, have the benefit of turning stuff like grass that we can’t eat into something that we can (meat,) dogs on the other hand, largely tend to eat the same sorts of foods we would, so often we could just eat those foods and cut out the middleman

Now dogs are not totally obligate carnivores, theoretically they can be fed on a vegetarian diet, though it requires some careful planning to ensure they’re getting the right nutrients, you can’t just turn them loose in a field to eat grass and expect to get much out of it, by and large they’re going to need to eat the same sorts of food we’d eat- a variety of fruits and vegetables. They can also possibly fed byproducts, scraps, offal, overripe or damaged produce, etc. that is unfit or less desirable for human consumption, but that still adds a lot of complexity to managing their diet, and if animal products are part of the feed it potentially means you need to worry about spreading disease between animal populations, don’t want to be feeding your meat dogs on mad cow brains or avian flu chicken bits.

And as you move up the food chain you can have issues with bioaccumulation of toxins like heavy metals. Say from birth to slaughter a cow absorbs 1oz (pulling that number out of my ass) of lead and mercury and such that ends up in its various tissues. Cows are big, you have to eat a lot of cow to absorb that much lead and mercury from eating them. Now let’s say a dog during it’s lifetime eats the equivalent of one whole cow (again, pulled out of my ass) during it’s lifetime. That dog now has that same 1oz of lead and mercury, and dogs are much smaller so it’s at a higher concentration in their meat, you don’t have to eat nearly as much dog as you do cow to get the same amount of heavy metals.

I used to go to strip clubs occasionally, I never had the delusion that any of the girls were into me, but for me that was kind of part of the fun.

It removes all of the pressure, you don’t have to worry about fucking up your chances with any of them because you never had any chances to begin with, and as long as you’re not a total creep and can keep the singles coming, you’re going to have a steady stream of pretty girls coming around and acting flirty with you, laughing at your jokes, generally paying attention to you, etc. and that can feel pretty nice.

Some people can get weird about it and have an unhealthy mental idea about what their relationship with the strippers actually is, but that’s not limited to strippers either, pretty sure that just about anyone who’s worked in a bar or restaurant for any length of time has probably had that one regular customer who was a little too buddy-buddy with you and seemed to think that you were their best friend even though you kind of hate their guts and are just nice to them because that’s your fucking job.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have the occasional genuine interactions with them, it’s kind of hard not to, at the end of the day we’re social creatures who want to connect with one another, but that doesn’t necessarily change the fundamental nature of your customer/service-provider relationship.