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

promptly drove to the chick fil a right next door

That’s… not better, you know that right? The owners of chick fil a have funded some pretty horrendous anti-LGBQT organizations

Please lead the way and get off of it thene be the change you want to see.

First of all, I’m talking about gun ownership in general. Not necessarily about these specific people and their community.

Secondly, unless you have the stats to show that not a single hunting license was sold to anyone with a Chula Vista address, you’re just making a pointless generalization. Sure, it might be very uncommon, but out of around 280,000 people there I think it’s pretty likely that someone there goes hunting.

Finally, that applies to target shooting and such as well, different guns for different types of shooting.

I can see it adding up a lot faster than you might think.

Hypothetically, let’s say you have 2 or 3 people in your family who are avid hunters, lots of people go hunting with their spouses and/or children. And each of you have, let’s say, a deer rifle, a shotgun for turkey and waterfowl, and a .22 for small game. So off the bat that’s about 6-9 guns.

And maybe you started your kid off with a .410 or a 20 gauge shotgun and a smaller .22 rifle for them to learn the fundamentals when they were younger, and when they got older you got a 12ga and a more appropriately-sized rifle for them to use, so there’s another couple guns.

And maybe some of you have different guns for different purposes, maybe you prefer a semi auto shotgun for waterfowl and a pump for upland hunting for whatever reason, or if you live in the suburbs you might be limited to shotgun slugs and straight walled rifle cartridges in the areas you can hunt closer to home so maybe you have a gun that meets those requirements and then another rifle for when you can go hunting in the mountains.

So you can pretty reasonably have a dozen or so guns in your household from just having a couple people who like to go hunting before you even start talking about carry or home defense guns, dedicated range/target shooting guns, or collecting them, etc.

I work for my county, I have coworkers who are proud that they don’t vote and don’t follow politics

WE. WORK. FOR. THE. GOVERNMENT! Go up the food chain from us a couple steps and our boss’, boss’, boss’ boss or something along those lines is an elected official! You’re basically passing up an opportunity to choose who your boss is, and those elections often end up happening on off years when there’s no presidential or other big election going on and even less people turn out to vote, so your vote really counts.

We’ll it would be harder to pick some Democrats from this neighborhood and a bunch of Republicans from that neighborhood if the district size is only one neighborhood

Also it would allow for more specific representation. Using myself as an example, my district is basically my county plus a couple small parts of some neighboring counties. One end of the county is pretty rural, the other half butts up against a major city and pretty much just bleeds right into it. We have some ridiculously wealthy old money areas, and we have some that look like they were plucked from a movie about gang violence. There’s a few towns here that I’ve legitimately never even had to drive through. It’s kind of insane that all of these different areas are being represented by the same person, we have very different and sometimes conflicting concerns. And if I needed to go to my representatives office for any reason, I’d have to drive about an hour to get there because of course she’s set up shop at the far end of the county from me.

Personally, I think the ideal way to draw districts is to kind of have voters do it when they vote. Give them a map, have them select the areas where they live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or have other connections to until they’ve selected an area with a big enough population to be a district. Then feed those maps into a computer and have it average them all together to generate the new district map.

Congress already basically has the power to overturn court rulings. They make laws.

Courts only rule on whether things are or are not in line with those laws.

This is of course simplified and a bit absurd for humorous effect, but in broad strokes this is how things work.

Let’s say there’s a law on the books that says people are not allowed to wear hats. Someone gets arrested for wearing a bandana on their head. They go to court challenging that arrest arguing that bandanas are not hats.

The court hears the arguments from both sides, the guy who was arrested arguing that the law doesn’t apply to bandanas, and the lawyers for the police arguing that the law applies more broadly to other forms of headwear.

The court listens to those arguments, and considers previous similar cases to look for precedent, (like maybe there was a guy who was arrested for having a baseball cap tied to his belt and whether that counted as “wearing” a hat, or someone was arrested for wearing a KFC bucket on his head and whether that met the legal definition of a hat, or someone who was arrested for wrapping a hat around their feet and whether that counted or only if you wore it on your head) Maybe they even consider whether wearing a hat should be considered a form of free speech and whether that law is legal.

And then that ruling establishes further precedent, which will affect how/if that law is applied going forward. If the court has already decided that wearing a bandana doesn’t count as a hat, then it doesn’t make sense to arrest people for it in the future because the court will just throw the case out based on that precedent.

Now whatever the outcome, let’s say Congress doesn’t like what the courts decided. They can pass newer and more specific laws concerning the legality of bandanas and other headgear, maybe even going so far as to add a constitutional amendment to specifically protect or exempt hats or bandanas as free speech.

And then going forward, the courts would need to rule on cases based on that new law or amendment.

So if the court rules that bandanas are ok, then Congress goes and makes a new law specifically banning bandanas and goes through the trouble (for some reason) to amend the constitution to say that bandanas are not free speech, then future arrests based on that would be based on that. You couldn’t retroactively arrest someone for wearing a bandana before it was made illegal, but you could sure arrest them if they do it again.