I feel like that’s probably a huge misrepresentation of something legitimate.

Like maybe the found an activities coordinator or recreational therapist or something and asked them what they were doing that day and they answered “well right now I’m unpacking these groceries for a cooking class we’re doing tomorrow, and then I’m gonna go get things ready for game night, and I’m gonna be teaching them how to play mahjong”

Or maybe they just found the kitchen staff playing mahjong on their lunch break after unpacking a bunch of groceries.

I visited Iceland over the summer. In the Perlan science museum in Reykjavik they have a replica of a plaque that was installed at the site of the former glacier Okjökull. It reads, in English

A letter to the future
Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.

Followed by the global atmospheric CO₂ reading for when it was installed in August 2019, which was 415ppm

This year we reached 432ppm.

I’m going to go ahead and assume hegseth can’t grow a decent beard.

Every veteran I know who can grow a full beard did so pretty much immediately after getting out of the service.

And most of the rest are at least rocking a mustache or goatee if they’re able to.

There’s some valid reasons to not allow certain styles of facial hair in the military, like they can effect the seal of a gal mask, if you were to find yourself fighting someone hand-to-hand, a longer beard is one more place they could grab ahold of you, maybe a fire hazard in some conditions, or harder to decontaminate if chemical or bio weapons are used, etc.

But this doesn’t feel like it’s about that, I think he just doesn’t like beards and I think it’s because he’s jealous.

My dad has a '93 Ford Ranger

4 cylinder, 7ft bed, single cab with a bench seat. Gets around 20mpg, which honestly isn’t too shabby even by new truck standards.

Over the years it’s moved a lot of furniture, picked up a lot of bulky lumber and such from the hardware store, picked up a few decent sized loads of firewood, and generally done everything most normal people would need or want a truck for.

The bed is pretty low compared to modern trucks so it’s easy to load and unload, back it up to a curb and you can pretty step right off the sidewalk into the bed with the tailgate down

I have complaints about it, but they’re nothing most people couldn’t live with. It’s 0-60 time is probably best stated as “eventually,” especially if you’re carrying anything significant in the bed. And with no weight over those rear wheels it’s kind of shitty to drive on anything besides dry paved roads so 4wd would be nice. And of course after 30+ years it’s got some quirks and little things that are broken.

But if I could buy basically that exact same truck today, maybe as a hybrid or EV, I’d jump on it. I don’t need more performance, I’m not going to use it to haul a bed full of gravel or anything, we’ve never had to tow with it, and when I’ve towed with my own car it’s never been anything more substantial than a teardrop trailer that a Prius could probably just about handle if they came with a tow hitch.

I really like the maverick, it checks a lot of boxes for me and is overall pretty similar in size to my dad’s ranger but that short bed annoys me, I can’t fit a couch in that.

I’m not exactly some kind of cheese expert, but I’ve eaten a lot different cheeses in my day

I’d agree that on average, unpasteurized cheeses taste better

But some of the best cheeses I’ve had have also been pasteurized.

I think it’s mostly the size of the difference kinds of operations and how much care they put into their products.

There’s a lot of mediocre manufactures making pasteurized cheese and they’re making industrial quantities of it.

Whereas the companies making raw milk cheeses tend to be smaller operations where they’re putting more care into their product. They can be choosier about where their milk comes from, and are more hands-on with the process.

But if you can find a brand that puts that kind of care into it but pasteurizes their products, I haven’t found there to be a dramatic difference.

I feel like you’re severely underestimating how much and how many ways dogs can be useful dogs can be useful in hunting.

Sure, they can give chase as persistence hunters, like you said

But they’re also useful for tracking, let’s say you shoot a deer, and unfortunately it’s not a clean kill, and it runs off into the woods. You might spend hours, even days trying to find that deer, following tracks and blood trails that may stop in places and be impossible for a human to pick back up, but a scent hound can follow that trail, saving a lot of time and energy .

Or of course just sniffing out an animal in the first place.

They can be retrievers, if you shoot a duck over the water, you now need to find a way to retrieve it from the pond. If you don’t have a boat, that basically leaves swimming out there, and if the weather is cold, that puts you at risk of hypothermia. Many retriever breeds are much better suited to cold water than we are and could swim out to retrieve them with no problem. Or if you shoot something in dense brush they may be better able to retrieve it than you would without having to bushwhack your way to where it went down.

Breeds like beagles are incredibly effective for small game, they can flush them out of hiding spots for their human to shoot, or to tree game

And dogs can be used to great effect driving deer, flushing them and chasing them towards the hunters. This was actually so effective that some places have laws on the books that you can’t use dogs to hunt deer because back in the days when commercial hunting was more of a thing, it drove some deer populations to near extinction.

For some dangerous game like boar and feral swine, their role might be more to catch and hold the animal for the hunter to dispatch safely.

And that’s not to mention the value they can have for herding and guarding livestock, especially if you’re otherwise trying to go it alone or with only a small group of people, because you’re likely going to have other tasks to see to besides just constantly watching over them. To some extent, donkeys can fill a livestock guardian role, but if you need to round up a flock of sheep, they’re not going to be much help with that.

In any of those cases, they’re not necessarily generating value on their own, but they can significantly improve how productive you can be with minimal effort on your part.

As for barking, that’s a mixed bag. Yes, if you’re trying to avoid detection, it can be a detriment. But in other cases it can be a deterrent, making intruders and predators wary of intruding into your territory knowing that there’s a dog around, and it can give you an alert when there is an intruder.

And in some cases and environments, they can be useful as small draft animals, dogs can pull small carts and of course sleds.

Not every dog can fill every role of course (although some can certainly fill multiple roles) and they may not make sense for every scenario, but I think they’re worth a lot more consideration than you’re giving them.

Pumpkin does have some flavor, and it’s a pretty nice one IMO, sort of sweet and earthy

But it’s pretty mild, it doesn’t bring a whole lot to the party compared to a lot of things you might add it to like coffee. It would probably come through a little more in something more mild like oatmeal.

In most grocery stores (at least in the US) carry cans of pumpkin puree (not to be confused with pumpkin pie filling which is usually right next to it on the shelf which has added sugar and spices) if you want to get a sense of what just straight pumpkin tastes like, or mix it into something else (it’s an ok source of fiber and some vitamins, and like I said, it’s tasty, just kind of mild)

FYI Pumpkin spice is pumpkin pie spice.

Most “pumpkin spice” flavored things contain 0 pumpkin. And pumpkin doesn’t exactly have a particularly strong flavor on its own. The flavor people tend to associate with pumpkin are the spices you typically add to pumpkin pie.

And it’s basically just a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, ginger, and sometimes allspice.

I mean, Erasmus is a pretty well-known historical figure (and where, I assume, that programme gets its name)

That’s where my mind went first.

Turns out we’re both wrong and it’s just OP’s name like he said in the other comment, but I’m curious how you made that connection? Not passing any judgement on it, just curious since your brain reached a different conclusion than mine and I’m curious how you got there.

Depending on how we’re defining “seen” I’m betting it’s some guy running a hot dog cart or sweeping up trash or something in a busy intersection like Times Square or Shibuya Crossing

Sure, if you’re a performer like Taylor Swift who’s filling giant stadiums or what-have you, you might see 100k people a night.

But you’ll probably see at least that many people passing by if your job is to stand around in Times Square all day too.

And Taylor probably doesn’t have a gig every night, while the dude with a hot dog cart might actually be out there 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

And on his days off, there’s a decent chance he’s probably gonna be out and about seeing faces too. He doesn’t have a private shopper to go do his grocery shopping and bring it to his mansion on a few acres of land in some rich neighborhood, he lives somewhere in or near NYC, probably commutes on the subway, seeing untold hundreds of more faces, and honestly probably sees about 100 faces anytime he walks out his front door and walks to the corner store to grab a snack.

Yeah I did get that from the article, I was more building on the comment I replied to.

But I do appreciate it, those little dialect differences can trip people up, like I’ve talked to a surprising amount of British/Australian/etc. people seem to think that when Americans talk about peanut butter and jelly, that we’re talking about putting a gelatine dessert (like Jell-O) on our sandwiches, because that’s what they call “jelly” (for anyone just now learning that’s not what we mean, what we call “jelly” is sort of like a pulp-less jam)

I work in 911 dispatch, I’m always a little amazed at how many calls I get for lift assists. Not for a patient that fell and hurt themselves, not for someone who weighs 300+lbs, it’s just that no one there can apparently help an uninjured, 100lb old lady up off the floor or to stand up from the chair she’s sitting in.

Now granted, sometimes it’s another 100lb old lady calling, or someone with other disabilities, and they genuinely can’t do it. But just as often it’s a reasonably young and apparently healthy, able-bodied person, and most shocking to me it’s sometimes a nursing home or other facility like that where you’d really think they’d be prepared to handle something like that in-house.

I know there’s proper technique and equipment involved, and in some cases theres a lot of liability issues at play, but man It’s pretty wild to me that so many people and facilities are either unable or unwilling to just pick someone up.

Also, from all of the calls for falls and lift assists I’ve taken, I’ve started telling my wife that if I ever fall and can’t get up to just leave me on the floor. Gravity has spoken, I’m to be a floor-person from then on. Just slide a skateboard under me and let me scoot around on it. I have some people who call almost every day, and sometimes multiple times a day because they’ve fallen and can’t get up, and I really don’t want that for myself.

I’m a little unclear on how this whole vote by mail process works, I’ve always voted in-person because I haven’t trusted Republicans to not pull shit like this to fuck with my vote.

But how exactly does the postal service have the ability to do this? They’re not the ones tallying the votes, they’re just delivering mail. You put something in the box with correct postage and they take it to the address on the envelope. I don’t really get where they have the discretion to say “no” to doing that.

And hypothetically, let’s say they do refuse to deliver what looks like election mail. What’s to stop you from taking your mail-in ballot envelope, stuffing it into another plain, nondescript envelope addressed to wherever your ballot is supposed to go and mailing it that way? I’m pretty sure they’re not supposed to be opening up mail to see what’s inside.

Genuinely asking and trying to understand.

NileRed on YouTube has done a few interesting things like turning plastic gloves into hot sauce through different chemical processes.

It’s more of a fun science demonstration than anything meant to be even remotely practical to create food from waste, and there are some pretty nasty chemicals involved in some of them that really have no business being anywhere near food

But it does I think drive home the point that everything is basically made out of the same stuff and it’s a matter of figuring out how to break it down and put it back together in the right way to be useful.

I wasn’t part of the trials, but I was probably one of the first hundred or so people in my county vaccinated. I work in our 911 dispatch center and they were able to secure the vaccine for us and other essential first responder type roles, and I remember a lot of my doctor friends were still trying to figure out where they could get the vaccine at the time.

I worked nights at the time, went to the vaccine clinic after my shift. I remember they made us sit around for like 20 minutes to make sure we didn’t have any kind of immediate adverse reaction, no one did and I went home and went to bed. I woke up feeling fine, then a couple hours later I had some fatigue and chills and I ended up crashing early. Woke up feeling fine, and the only side effect from subsequent doses was that my arm was sore for a few days.

I figure if I worked a normal day shift schedule, and still got the vaccine in the morning the side effects probably would have hit me about when I was going to sleep anyway and I would have slept through them.

I always hear about the importance of shopping around for insurance, and I don’t necessarily do it every single year, but probably about every other year

And everywhere I look my quotes are always about the same, within a few bucks of what I’m already paying.

And I guess if you add it all up over the years a couple of bucks a month difference does eventually add up to something kind of significant.

But having been with my current company/agent for a while and having had to use my insurance a couple times over the years, I don’t mind that so much because I’ve found them pretty easy to work with. They’ve paid out when I needed them to without any drama, and they’ve been willing to cut me when, like when I had some billing snafu that was kind of my fault they were saw that I’d been a customer for a while with otherwise perfect payment history and we’re willing to waive some fees that were otherwise tacked on. And jumping ship to save very little money and not knowing if the new company is going to be as decent to work with just doesn’t seem like a smart move to me.

Still pisses me off to no end that my insurance goes up every year though. My car’s not appreciating in value any, and I’m not getting any younger or more reckless on the road, nor have I reached the age yet where my mental faculties have started to nosedive, and I have a very clean driving history.

I guess I like the plaid tops more than the hooters tank tops, but otherwise it’s just standard chain restaurant food. Nothing too special.

I’m not disabled, at least not visibly, there might be a bit of neurospiciness going on in the background, but I do have kind of a unique look- shaved head, big beard, curly moustache, and kind of an interesting sense of style, so I get a lot of looks (and, not for nothing, compliments.)

The other day I was dressed up a bit and on my way to meet up with my wife to have a nice dinner. I was wearing a linen suit and panama hat, so definitely dressed a good bit spiffier than most people on the street.

As I was walking down the sidewalk on my way to this restaurant, this little girls’ eyes just kind of lock onto me like I was the most interesting thing she’d ever seen, and she just kind of starts wandering towards me, and walks directly into my path. If I’d been distracted on my phone or something I might have tripped over her.

She wasn’t quite a toddler, but not much older.

I didn’t mind it at all, I don’t really like kids, it was kind of funny, maybe even a bit flattering, but i could definitely see it getting old for people getting that kind of attention for things they’re not in control or proud of.

You and I make s’mores very differently.