So everyone else is talking about how yes, it is generally better (at least in the US). But what I think is missing is that once the hot water is there, there’s no reason to not use cooler water at the sink. The dishwasher isn’t pulling its water from the sink, but if the hot water makes it to the sink then it’ll make it to the dishwasher more effectively.

I have a bedroom set my grandfather made. They’re beautiful, solid, and honestly just my taste. The drawers are made from crates they used to ship their belongings back to the US after living abroad for his work for a few years, so there’s deeper personal history there.

I kept a fair bit of art and a number of trinkets when my other grandparents passed, plus their dining room set. I’ve since gotten a nicer dining room set and the old one is in storage… I couldn’t quite stand to get rid of it, and it would make a good gaming table someday. Plus a rocking chair that was gifted to my grandpa by an organization at the university he taught at.

I had the opportunity to take dishes and things, but skipped most of it because I didn’t feel a connection to them, except for two glasses in a set of bird glasses. I only liked the two and they match; I didn’t need the full set to have the reminder of meals with my grandparents.

These things give me a sense of connection to my family and my past.

I appreciate your openness to thinking about this differently!

As an adult, my BMI has been as low as 16.1. Stress suppresses my already-weak appetite so it’s often a factor when I’m severely underweight. People saw me meeting society’s beauty standards, but not that I was extremely unhealthy physically and mentally.

It’s been over a decade since my low and I still float around the edge of underweight BMI, but I’m much healthier now (lots of credit to my partner for keeping me eating regularly!).

I think my struggles on this side have given me a ton of empathy for people who overeat or struggle with their weight. A lot of people dismiss weight as a simple matter of willpower and can be so unkind and judgmental.

Yes, it was! I can totally understand your confusion in that case, lol.

I’ve had summons twice now. First time (TX), I had to go to court. I sat there for half an hour while the judge figured out whether they’d have cases that required a jury. Someone came and gave the judge a memo and we were told no jury was needed and got released.

The second time (NC), I just called some time before to find out if they’d need me to attend, and they did not.

So just because you get a summons doesn’t mean you’ll have to show up in a courtroom, and even if you do you may not need to go through jury selection. However, you should show up unless you’re told not to. I’d suggest looking for state laws to understand repercussions of not doing so, as I’m sure it’s different everywhere.

The “you” vs “them” column makes me think of the adage “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

The “them” side feels specific to be consumable by someone who knows nothing, while not having enough content to teach someone who does understand the basics.

If you can simplify those columns even more, I think they could still be useful. The point is that rich people pay for people and systems that are able to make their money untraceable, but “you” can’t do that. So you pay taxes, they don’t. I like the column-based visual for this concept, I just don’t think the content is ‘there’ yet.

Not sure what you mean by “system,” so I’m just going to answer a thing I wish someone explained to me much earlier.

Not everyone feels hunger cues, so “just eat when you’re hungry” can be bad advice.

I learned about anorexia nervosa as an eating disorder in middle and high school. People worried about me because I was thin and didn’t eat a lot, but I didn’t try to stay skinny and I ate when I was hungry, so I knew I didn’t have that. Ironically, learning about EDs made me sure I didn’t have a problem.

In college I took a class that defined anorexia as “a lack of appetite,” identifying it could be a drug side effect, from stress, or just how someone’s body is. It differentiated “anorexia” from “anorexia nervosa.” That opened my eyes that I did have disordered eating, but it was from physiology, not psychology.

I trained myself how to eat enough, but I still have to be careful not to fall back into old habits since I don’t have normal hunger cues. It’s constant work that might have been easier if I started building these habits from a younger age.

“My compass shattered.”

My hobby is collecting items for new hobbies, lol. Mostly board games and various arts and crafts (miniature painting, clay sculpting, felting, watercolor, knitting, etc.).

Knitting: I knew a lot of people who did it and I wanted to fit in, plus it was something to do blindly and with my hands.

Mini painting: started from unpainted minis in a board game I bought. I fell out of the habit due to constant blurry vision for a couple years, but now my partner and I have friends who love mini painting so they came over once a month or so and we paint together.

Watercolors: I loved the fun and messy chaos I saw some artists make and wanted to do that. Instead I learned I’m way too much of a “color in the lines” person. But before learning that, I painted a pet portrait for my niece for Christmas and she loved it so much she asked for a new one every year. So a hobby I probably would have totally stopped has continued with at least one painting a year for five years now, and I have to admit I’m pretty good at pet portraits.

Felting: washing my cat’s favorite blanket once produced little felt balls of her fur and one looked like a little creature. I just had to put eyeballs and a tongue on it so I learned the basics of felting.

Clay sculpting: I wanted to make a figure of my then-boyfriend’s favorite LoL character for him. I’ve picked it up again whenever I’ve had a vision but it’s rare.

That’s almost certainly where the idea came from, though when I learned it wasn’t cited. Thank you for letting me know!

That sounds exactly like where that came from, though I didn’t know the source. Thanks for sharing!! I’ll try to credit it in the future when it comes up.

I read once that Trump isn’t just a liar; he’s a bullshitter. The nuance was that lying requires some consistency, some standard of a coherent story; lying requires knowing and caring about the truth and choosing a different story. Bullshitting doesn’t; bullshitting is just saying whatever you want whenever you want, regardless.

It helped me better understand their actions. And also somehow makes it worse that they believe the bullshit, since it doesn’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny or logical thought at all.

I’m citing the CDC with the years I gave, so if you got it in the US before 1995, it would have either been a trial or unlicensed version. It was approved for use in the EU in 1991 though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

“Hepatitis A (HepA) vaccines were first licensed for use in the United States in 1995.”

Interestingly, 1995 was the same year the chickenpox vaccine was licensed. I grew up in the “everyone gets chickenpox” days too; in fact, I caught it at only 3 weeks old from my older sister, who caught it at daycare.

Hepatitis A vaccine was licensed in 1995, available in the US in 1996, and recommended for all US children in 2006. Hep A is the one you’re most likely to catch from sharing food.

So if children all got recommended vaccines (which sadly we know is getting less common), then ~21% of the US population should be vaccinated, plus anyone who got it before it was recommended for all.

Hepatitis B became standard for all newborns in 1991.

I’m showing my age, but I realize—even though I received all standard vaccines—it might be time to find out if I’m vaccinated against either of those.

This is also a way hepatitis spreads.

Wow, sounds like the people who hold that office have historically been class acts! Jeeeez. (Also on first reading, I didn’t catch the last line was about his predecessor and was trying to figure out why that lede was so buried.)

I recommend watching this TED Talk by Adam Grant. It’s 14 min and groups people as “givers, takers, or matchers.”

Crows will eat cat or dog food (my local crows love the cat food we feed them!). If there aren’t laws against feeding stray cats, you could put a bowl on your porch with cat food and if you’re questioned, play innocent.

As an aside, if you want to identify the fledglings, look at their mouth. Baby crows have red/pink mouths while the adults have black mouths!

Yeah, fair. Difference in politicians making the policy vs people supporting those politicians. I was thinking about the supporters, but your comment was more about the politicians.

I’m so sorry you’re facing this and I hope you’re able to get through all of this and back to health.

I think it’s less Darwinism and more Just World Fallacy. If you believe in a just world, then it means anyone who’s sick did something to deserve to be sick, so culling them is getting rid of bad people. And sadly, that fits perfectly within religious dogma because if you believe God is almighty and omnipotent, then it’s easy to believe that God would keep good people healthy and only let bad people get sick; or at least if good people are sick it’s “God’s plan.”

The reason naming it is worse than Darwinism because is because the Just World view is logically consistent with their world view, making it even harder to convince them of anything else.