And the bill includes a carve-out for that, if you’re close enough to readily retrieve it, it doesn’t need to be locked.

I believe that’s left up to the manufacturers and state law.

I believe that PA Law already requires handguns but not long guns to be sold with a lock, and I believe that only applies to dealers, not private sales (in most circumstances you would still need to go through a dealer to do the transfer of a handgun for a private sale, but I don’t think they need to provide a lock in those circumstances)

In PA, where this bill is from, the state police already give out free gun locks, many other local police departments and community organizations do the same

A simple cable lock can be had for about $5 from Walmart and fills the requirement, and you can find them for even less if you hunt around a little, and this bill is also making gun locks and safes exempt from sales tax.

There’s also at least a handful of gun brands that include a lock as part of the standard equipment their guns come with, and at least a few gun stores that will happily give you a free lock with your purchase.

And while you may not have children, can you truly say that there will never be a child in your home? Do you have friends or relatives with kids or who may have them someday? Is it possible that they may stop by someday and your attention may be distracted from the kid for 5 minutes while they wander off and find your unsecured gun? Do you maybe have a neighbor with a special needs child that might wander into your house when you left the back door open to air out the kitchen after burning your dinner? If you don’t, can you say that will always be the case?

Could you live with yourself if that happens and the kid kills himself knowing that you could have prevented it with a $5 (or free) lock?

At least as far as ice harvesting goes, that’s a pretty well-documented historical fact that can be verified.

As far as my friends dad being able to ice skate on the creek, it’s a bit harder to verify what he was doing 60 or so years ago, especially since he’s dead, but he was also the kind of guy who did plenty of crazy things in his day, and that story would be downright tame compared to just about every other story involving him so it’s kind of hard to imagine that that was the one he misremembered or embellished, but I suppose it was possible.

And there are plenty of other little leftovers, like several parks and such in the area where the ice thickness is monitored by the park staff because once upon a time you used to be able to reliably skate and fish on the ice.

I live in an area where ice used to be an industry. Not even a minute drive from my house is a lake where they’d cut big blocks of ice and ship them downstream to stack and pack in sawdust and such to last the rest of the year. This area supplied a lot of the ice for the city of Philadelphia because closer to the city the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers were too dirty and no one wanted ice from them.

This went on until around 100 years ago, maybe even a bit longer, my dad in his 70s remembers his grandmother still getting ice delivered for her icebox for part of his childhood until she finally got a refrigerator.

My friends dad, who was a bit younger than my dad, used to tell stories about how the local creek would freeze over in the winter and he and his friends would ice skate down the frozen creek to get to another town about 5 miles away.

I actively keep an eye on ice conditions around me because I would like to try ice fishing some day. It’s only been a handful of times over the last decade or so where any body of water around here has frozen over enough for it to be possible, and even then it’s only been just the absolute bare minimum 4 inches and I’d ideally want another inch or two before I felt comfortable enough to actually try it.

I’ve never even seen that creek freeze over enough that even some foolhardy kids would be able to try skating on it, I’ve seen it get maybe 1 inch of ice, and even that was a rare occurrence, they’d break right through if they tried.

These are things that people around me should remember or at least should remember their parents and grandparents talking about, not something that’s totally out of living memory, and yet they still refuse to see it.

This will vary a lot of course, but in a lot of cases your local library may not be just your local library.

The library in my town isn’t anything too special, it’s a little small and doesn’t really have a lot of the cool things people talk about libraries having these days (though I am occasionally surprised, they have mobile hotspots you can borrow for example)

But it’s part of a network of libraries from around my county, so I can go check things out of around 30 different libraries and some of those other branches have a lot more cool stuff than mine does

It might just be my regional (Philadelphia) accent, or even just how I personally speak

But I do feel like there is a very subtle difference in how I pronounce scent, cent, and sent.

Like so subtle I absolutely wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t specifically listening for it, and wasn’t even aware of it until just now because I never had a reason to even think about it.

In scent, I sort of stretch out the “s” a little longer, and the “e” feels a little more nasal

With “cent” the “c” becomes almost like a “ts” sound, and the “e” feels a little higher-pitched than in “sent” and I also kind of hit the “t” a little harder which kind of makes the word feel a little shorter and punchier.

Again, this is all “very” subtle, not something most people could probably pick up on at all in actual conversation, but sitting around talking to myself at midnight and really thinking about it I can pick up a little bit of a difference.

First big issue is that this facility has rats in the first place. That should probably be the primary focus of this article, that’s totally unacceptable.

But moving beyond that.

It’s insane that they’re using therapy animals for this purpose. If these were two separate programs and they were using dedicated rat catching ferrets, I could get that. That’s what ferrets do, and it sure beats scattering poison around. But those ferrets are also potentially being exposed to diseases and parasites and such from the rats and so they shouldn’t be used as therapy animals to make sure that they’re not spread to the children.

I have no experience with ferrets personally, but it also seems to me like you probably don’t want the animals you’re training to chase/bite/kill rodents to be the same ones you’re using to soothe kids with trauma and such.

As far as children being involved in and witnessing ferrets being used for pest control, I think that’s a bit of a mixed bag depending on the kids.

At the end of the day, some animals eat and kill other animals. Pretty much everyone knows that from a pretty young age, how many children’s cartoon and nursery rhymes and such are about cats chasing/eating mice after all?

Now actually witnessing that can absolutely be distressing for a lot of people who aren’t used to it.

But on the flip side, I do think that introducing children to that, if done properly, can often be beneficial to them, give them a better understanding of life/death, the food chain, responsibility etc.

Not that it sounds like they were doing this in an appropriate fashion. And of course if we’re dealing with children with various kinds of trauma, that topic needs to be broached even more delicately.

There’s of course a ton of variables at play here, and I’m gonna preface this by saying I’m by no means a graphics/performance snob and I’m mostly playing older games.

But anecdotally, there have been some cases where Linux has been a night and day difference for me.

My computer is basically 12+ years old, it’s basically the same computer my wife built before we started dating crammed into a new box with a couple upgrades along the way. It has a pre-ryzen AMD processor, and a 2060, so it’s definitely not technically meeting required specs for a lot of games but it’s holding it’s own and chugging along managing to run most of what I try to throw at it on (what I think are) acceptable settings.

I got Helldivers 2 to run on it exactly once on windows, every time after that it crashed on the loading screen when I tried to join a game no matter how I tried to get it running.

Since switching to Linux it’s been playable. Not necessarily the smoothest experience, but certainly good enough for my needs.

That’s probably the newest game I’ve tried to run, I’m cheap and tend to wait a couple years to get games on sale. All the older games I’ve tried to run so far have pretty much run the same as on windows as far as I can tell.

The way you described the lady. No nothing wrong with it.

If that’s the actual phrasing he used, I think it was pretty weird. Not necessarily offensive, just weirdly specific in a strangely technical way. Something like “the small Asian lady” would get the point across while sounding less like you’re some kind of robot or alien trying to classify her as a research specimen.

And the bit about either being from an Asian country or having Asian parents is kind of weird, for all OP knows her family might have been in the country for generations. People have a tendency to view people of Asian descent as a sort of perpetual foreigner, and that phrasing kind of feels like it’s playing into that.

“East Asian” also feels needlessly specific. How likely is it that there’s other women who otherwise fit the exact same description but are of, say, southeast Asian descent that OP needs to differentiate her from? I also think it’s probably the kind of distinction a lot of people just won’t understand. At least in the US I know I’ve had to explain what I’m talking about when I’ve talked about southeast Asia for example, a lot of people just don’t think that much about geography, let alone know about the cultures and physical characteristics of people from different regions.

It just all feels like a weird way to describe someone. Personally, I wouldn’t take it as rude, but it would definitely make me think that the person saying it is pretty odd and socially awkward.

I am not, on general principle, opposed to it. I do believe that there are some people who pose significant danger to others with no hope of rehabilitation, which basically leaves 2 options - locking them up forever, possibly in solitary if they’re dangerous enough, or killing them, and in many cases I think the later may be more humane.

But, and I’m not going to go into all of the details because there’s a lot, but I have basically no confidence in any of the systems we have in place to use that power in a fair way that can’t be abused, and I’m skeptical that such a system could ever be implemented

So in actual practice I oppose it.

My wife generally says that she’s bi, but if she were coming out today she’s said that she’d probably call herself pan, that just wasn’t really a common term when back when she did come out so she’s spent most of her life calling herself bi, and she just kind of identifies with that label more at this point.

To her, the term bi does kind of imply that someone is attracted only to males or females and would tend to exclude non-binary gender identities (though not necessarily trans people, being MtF or FtM does still kind of line up with a traditional gender binary, a trans man is a man and a trans woman is a woman)

Which doesn’t really describe her, she’d be cool with any identity, which to her is more pan, but again she’s just been calling herself bi for so long it just feels weird to change that, and since she’s off the market at this point it’s a little bit of a moot point anyway since she’s not trying to get in anyone’s pants but mine.

Yeah, that’s basically the gist of it, jacket a hard, dense penetrator in a softer metal so it doesn’t damage the barrel

But there’s some edge cases like with m855 “green tip” 5.56 ammo which has a steel core inside a lead bullet and copper jacket, but generally isn’t considered “armor piercing” even though it does penetrate armor slightly better than most other standard 5.56 rounds

So I’m gonna hedge me bets and say there may be a case where a tungsten bullet may not be considered armor piercing but I don’t know the specifics of where that line would be drawn.

I don’t know about tungsten bullets, but I have heard of tungsten shot.

You could probably jacket a tungsten bullet in a softer metal like copper to mitigate the damage to the barrel, but I feel like that’s also gonna run up against armor piercing regulations

The bullets are lead-free, but usually the primers still contain lead which is a big, maybe the biggest, part of lead exposure with firearms, and it can be pretty hard to find ammo with lead-free primers, it also can get pricey, and by a lot of accounts they’re less reliable than lead-based primers, so that’s something to be taken into account.

Lead exposure from the ammo itself is usually pretty minimal, a lot of bullets are jacketed in copper so under normal handling you’re not really going to come in contact with much if any lead. There will probably be some fouling in the barrel, but that’s mostly contained in the barrel and unless you’re cleaning your gun on the same towel you use to wash your face thats pretty easily contained with some basic precautions like wearing gloves and such (not that all, honestly probably not most gun owners take those precautions seriously)

But when the primer detonates it’s putting out a lot of aerosolized lead compounds that kind of get all over the place because it’s basically getting sprayed around you- on your hands, on your clothes, the outside of your gun, your range bag, you’re inhaling it, etc.

So keeping your gun and shooting gear in a safe or something helps to keep that contained so it’s not getting transferred from your gun and range bag to wherever you set it down.

I used to drive an Isuzu Trooper. I got rear-ended which totaled my car. Theoretically it was repairable, but when your car is old enough to vote it doesn’t take much damage for it to get totaled.

There was other damage, but one thing that still pisses me off is that a few hundred bucks of that calculation was my spare tire cover, which had some cracks after the accident, and the insurance company would not let that drop.

It was a plastic shell that is mostly just decorative that covered the spare bolted to the back of my vehicle. I didn’t care that it was cracked, it in no way affected the safety of my vehicle, I would have happily driven that car for another decade with it being cracked, if they slapped 5¢ worth of epoxy on it I would have been more than satisfied, or hurry they could have just thrown the damn thing away and I guess my spare would get a little dirtier that it would if it was covered.

But they had to include that in the repair cost estimate, and since it was kind of an uncommon older car, replacement spare tire covers were scarce and pricey and added a few hundred bucks onto the estimate.

I don’t know if that was the thing that pushed me over the edge to a total loss but it certainly didn’t help

I had a perfectly mechanically sound vehicle that was paid off, and could possibly still be on the road today, and instead I got stuck with a couple years of car payments on a car I liked less than that one.

I am no teetotaler by any stretch of the imagination, I have a home bar that is better-stocked than most actual bars.

I’ve definitely been drinking less this year that I have in previous years.

Drinking is, for me, a social activity. I don’t drink by myself, I need friends to be drinking with for it to be a good time.

Everyone’s schedule sucks these days, we’re all too busy and broke to go out to bars and such, and I barely have time to just straighten my house up for company to have people over to enjoy the booze I already have if their schedules manage wo line up with mine.

And even if by some miracle, all that lines up, its harder to get myself into a drinking mood. I have what I think is a pretty healthy relationship with alcohol, I’m not drinking to drown my sorrows, I do it to enhance an already good time. If I’m stressed or anxious or pissed off or whatever, I’m don’t and don’t won’t to drink, and with the world the way it is I’ve pretty much been at least a little pizzed off for most of the last decade or so.

And booze is expensive and so is everything else now, I’m having to choose between things I used to enjoy and things I just need to survive more than I used to.

And even if I find the wiggle room in the budget, I’m feeling like I need to be extra critical about where my money is going. If I buy, let’s say a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, that means that somewhere along the line the state of Kentucky is probably getting a cut of my booze money from taxes and frankly I don’t particulaly think KY deserves my money. If I gut a bottle of Canadian rye, what even is the current state of tarrifs? Is it worth forking over a bit of my money to the feds in exchange for some Alberta Premium? (or for that matter, giving money to Alberta, they have some idiots there too)

And I have a good handful of friends who don’t drink, some never started, some have stopped for various reasons (like all of the above,) so with them I’m usually not going to be drinking either.

Its just a bad time to be drinking.

I’m admittedly in a bit of a bubble, but right now my PC gamer friends are a pretty even split between windows and Linux. Know anyone with a steam deck? They’re gaming on Linux.

No, it’s not quite as user-friendly as windows, and it takes a couple extra steps to get things running, especially if you’re playing non-steam games, but that’s one-time setup stuff then you’re golden. Most games are able to run fine on Linux these days, by some measures more PC games may actually work on Linux than in Windows because sometimes new versions of Windows have broken compatibility issues with older games.

There’s edge-cases to be sure, like some stuff with kernel-level anticheat have issues, but the state of that constantly improving, even the game devs are improving Linux support from their end in a lot of cases.

Anecdotally, I’ve had some cases where games are even running better for me on Linux than they did on Windows. Part of that is that most of the main components of my computer are pushing 15 years old, but I think that alone is a pretty big endorsement for Linux gaming that in some cases it can keep your rig relevant for longer.

When I was about 17 I started training for my first backpacking trip. First shakedown hike I loaded my pack up with about 40 or 50lbs, and I think I lasted about 5 minutes before I went back to my car to lighten my load because I was dying carrying it.

Worked my way up to doing it no problem over the next few months, and for the next few years I hiked and backpacked pretty regularly. I never exactly got in good shape, I had a gut the whole time but I could carry a heavy backpack 10 or occasionally 20 miles a day up and down mountains no problem.

I’ve been a lot more sedentary the last few years just due to being a busy adult with a wonky schedule. I still squeeze in some hikes here or there, but nothing with a heavy pack, and rarely doing more than 10 miles, and usually not going up and down any significant mountains, and I’m definitely not hitting the gym or anything, and I’ve probably packed on about 50lbs of mostly fat since I was 17.

But still, a couple months ago I went backpacking with a friend. Didn’t really do anything in particular to prepare for it, and I still carried about 40-50lbs in my pack

And I did just fine. Definitely huffed and puffed a bit more than when I was in my prime backpacking shape, and I was definitely a bit sore and had some blisters after it, but I was able to hit the trail with a heavy pack and almost no prep and I definitely couldn’t have done that when I was just starting out at 17 years old despite being generally younger, healthier, and more active back then.

So to a pretty great extent, my body definitely “remembers” how to backpack.

Unless… it is like for a space suit

Fun fact, the space suits used in the Apollo program were made by Playtex