I’m not really a jewelry-wearer, and certainly not an expensive jewelry wearer

That said, I think it’s kind of fun. If I were the kind of person to wear jewelry, I might consider this. I’m a pretty hands-on, DIYer type of guy, I find myself fucking around with hose clamps pretty often, and hell, I might even say I have a bit of affection for them, I’ve solved a lot of problems with them.

That price seems steep to me, but I feel that way about most jewelry. I don’t know what material it’s made out of or how big it is, maybe that’s a fair price for how much silver or whatever is in it, maybe it’s horribly inflated.

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.

For me, most importantly I lay in bed with my eyes closed those are the two big prerequisites to sleep. If you’re getting out of bed or keeping your eyes open to use your phone or whatever, of course you’re not gonna get to sleep.

From there, what I do doesn’t matter much. I think about stuff, make up a story, just imagine a bunch of swirly lights and patterns, doesn’t much matter. Keep your eyes closed and eventually sleep happens.

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.

Ever if “The Beast” itself isn’t used, I’m pretty sure a lot ,f the rest of the motorcade vehicles are all armored with various additional bells and whistles so they probably outweigh standard SUVs by a good bit. I’m pretty sure one of the motorcade vehicles usually has a mini gun turret that pops out of the roof.

Also, I haven’t seen anything specific about it, but I do believe the beast is at or near the end of its intended service life and i saw a few months back some article that pointed out that he was seen in an Escalade-looking vehicle instead of the beast at some event, so there might possibly be a new beast making it’s way into service, but they weirdly haven’t made any major announcements about it yet (I wouldn’t be too surprised by any other president being a bit tight-lipped about it, but trump absolutely would not be the type to shut up about “his” new custom Cadillac.)

I work in 911 dispatch, I like to think I have my head on more or less straight, but a lot of my coworkers are bootlickers

A few years ago when the BLM protests were in full swing and there was a lot of “defund the police” talk going around. I remember one of my coworkers was complaining about that

I pointed out how many fucking calls we get for things that aren’t police issues that we end up having to send cops out to because that’s basically the only tool in our box, and how if we funded some of those instead of the police it would free them (and us) up to handle actual emergencies

Of course basically none of them wanted to hear that.

And it’s not just mental health issues, it’s animal control, road and utilities maintenance, legal advice, code enforcement, homeless outreach, non-emergency healthcare, etc.

Hell, half of the “disturbances” (fights) I get are just verbal arguments between two emotionally-stunted adults who really need a middle school guidance counselor to go out and tell them to take a couple deep breaths and use their fucking inside voices.

And I would love to be able to hook people up with some of those services instead of sending a couple armed cops out to not really do anything useful about the problem.

And instead it seems like half the departments in my county have built a new police station since then.

Kind of similarly, my wife tends to come home from work and get changed right into her pajamas, and I think that kind of flips a mental switch for her saying that she’s done doing stuff for the day, and so she kind of struggles to get any chores done after work or on her days off. She also kind of has trouble sleeping sometimes.

I tend to get dressed and stay that way until it’s time for bed, and I feel that I tend to be a bit more productive at home than her.

And I feel like that kind of helps create more of a mental divide. If I’m up and wearing clothes it’s time to get stuff done, if I’m wearing pajamas it’s time to relax and get ready for bed.

My old dog was a puppy when the local baseball team won the world series. We took him outside after the game, and our neighbor behind us started lighting off some pretty big fireworks.

The first one or two startled him a little, but he saw that we weren’t reacting and quick settled down. Then he started to enjoy them. He’d watch the neighbors light one up, watch it shoot into the sky and explode, and then back to the neighbor, tail wagging waiting for another one.

After that, any time he heard them going off somewhere he’d run around to the windows trying to get a better look. If he could find a good angle he’d happily stand there and watch the entire show.

My current dog just doesn’t react to them at all. We got her at about a year old, so I don’t know what, if anything, her previous humans did to desensitize her, but at most she just kind of groans and rolls over if they’re close enough to disturb her nap. I actually use them as a good excuse to take her for a walk because she is kind of dog-reactive and I know no one else is going to be out walking their dogs during the fireworks.

As an admin, you should probably work on understanding the difference between someone asking the community for advice and someone reaching out to you directly as an admin.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve never owned a car personally with less than about 150,000 miles on it

My parents did get a brand new Kia sportage during cash for clunkers so pretty close to 0 miles on it

After that, the runner up is my dad’s truck. It’s a '93 forD ranger, and it just hit 100k within the last year (I’m proud to say I was driving when it happened)

He’s the third owner, my grandfather had it until he lost his license and he basically never went anywhere, and I have no idea who had it before him.

For a lot of the time after that my dad also worked less than a mile from home and other than that my mom does most of their driving. They also had 3 cars for much of that time so that further cut into how much use the truck got.

Edit: did a dumb, read this as lowest for some reason

I’m currently somewhere around 220,000 on my '07 4runner, and I believe that’s about the highest I’ve had.