Pretty simple. Resist the urge to see people based on their membership in this or that group, and instead focus on each individual. People are not responsible for the actions of other people that may seem outwardly similar to them, they are only responsible for their own. Life is harder when you remember this, but it’s the honest truth.

If you’re not used to winter driving conditions, keep your speed to about half of the posted speed limit, AND allow about double the normal distance for any braking you have to do. Give yourself a little over twice the normal amount of time it’d take you to drive somewhere.

This is generous, and will generally keep you safe on the road even if you’re unaccustomed to the conditions. Ice can still cause (sometimes unavoidable) problems even with these extra allowances, but if you’re going slowly and giving the extra distance, any accidents will be at low speed and very minor.

Agreed.

I would also be curious if she has any areas of interest where she is actually very quick and knowledgeable. If not, that might be cause for concern, but for all we know she just hates the humanities and is actually a wizard at higher mathematics. Especially since she’s young, there’s no real way to gauge whether it’s a lack of general intelligence or just a symptom of complete and total disinterest in a particular subject.

Also let’s not forget that pretty people can often get away with more than average looking people can, so they don’t have quite the same degree of pressure to perform in areas where they’re uninterested. If a quick, dazzling smile can unlock the ability to copy someone else’s homework or get the teacher to grant extra time on an assignment, well, school might be a little easier.

It’s a pros and cons thing. The pros in this case are our upright posture with narrower hips that let us cover long distances more efficiently than most of the rest of the animal kingdom. We can even do things like carry food to eat while walking, which something like an antelope would struggle with. Then a second pro is the whole big brain thing. These two factors did let us take over most of the planet over the course thousands of years, pretty quick work, really.

Then the cons are high mortality in birth, and taking something like 10 years after that risky birth to become even semi-functional at a practical level.

Okay, fair enough.

I fail to see the distinction. By OPs prompt, we’re getting attacked no matter what once his plot armor expires.

Sea levels rise the same everywhere. And not in 10 yrs it won’t.

Ooh, I get to choose the location?

Fairly close to the North Pole. Our people are adapted to it, assuming the island has always been there somehow. Nobody else is, making the logistics of trying to invade an absolute nightmare for anyone on Earth.

Now we just have to feed ourselves somehow in the event of a naval blockade, so a lot of investment into ballistic missiles and submarines to make a blockade as difficult as possible and hopefully keep our trade open during the summertime. I assume we’re fully reliant on imports that can only come in during that seasonal window. Fishing alone probably can’t sustain a population that large, and nothing is going to grow up there.

Assuming an invasion has to occur in 10 years and cannot be delayed, whoever tries is kinda fucked though.

If North Pole is cheating, then in the middle of the Pacific with the same plan. Probably can’t resist something like the US though in that case.

The answer was — and is — not to let that panic us or force a change in policy: to keep calm and carry on.

When you’re dealing with a bully, there are times when you have no good alternative than to just punch them back. We have intelligence services and cyberwarfare departments too, if I’m not mistaken.

Riding your bike is exercise, so I’ll give that one a pass as a healthier hobby. Reading just depends on what you’re reading I suppose. Going to restaurants is generally looked at as a bad habit in my experience. Waste of money basically.

Regarding what makes video games special, I will say that they can develop bad personal habits a little easier than a lot of other hobbies. I think they have greater addiction potential than say, reading or bike riding. More on par with sex or gambling. They also create a temptation to oversimplify/misunderstand things about real life in the same way tv/movies do.

But yeah, overall I don’t think its a particularly bad hobby if you don’t go overboard with them.

Very nice. I think if we want to grow the Fediverse, these types of communities are among the most important of all. Lots of people use social media to ask questions/find answers/show off about specific games/hobbies.

Hope you stick with posting content during the slow, early days of starting a new community.

At very close range, sure, the spread is negligible. You don’t have to get very far at all before it becomes pronounced though.

Only time I’ve ever encountered the idea done for ostensibly practical purposes is what I’ve seen described as a “stagecoach gun”, where it’s a double-barrel that’s been sawed off. Portability is probably part of it, but I do think the bigger spread is also a desired characteristic in that context. I can see a case where a stagecoach driver back in the day might want that intimidation factor of “this probably isn’t going to miss you if I discharge these two barrels in the general direction of your horse.” Ultimately I’m not sure though.

Just imagine if you ordered a jack and coke, and you had no way of knowing if they’re actually going to give you watered-down diet coke and the mildest single malt scotch they could find, or cherry coke and a really intense rye, or anything in between. And at every new place, it’s just a gamble what you’ll get.

That’s kinda what its like.

Usually done with shotguns, it makes the pellets spread out more. This reduces the need for accuracy when firing. Another, bigger, part of it is it makes the gun easier to conceal. Normally weapons small enough to conceal are less powerful, this lets you conceal a bigger one.

The only significant difference flavor-wise I’m aware of from burr size is that a larger burr has more mass, and is more resistant to heating up from friction during use, with that accompanying expansion changing the grind characteristics. Tbh though, I think you need to be going either high volume at a commercial scale, or be trying to perfectly nail some ultra-precise extraction recipe for an award-winning cup of coffee for the thermal expansion to become relevant.

IPA wackos, I can’t stand this places IPAs because they don’t put a whole roasted chicken in the cup with the beer.

… yea okay, that’s fair.

Still though, IPAs run a huge gamut for some reason. I feel like the degree of variety you find in the IPA category is really strangely big. Like, if I order a stout or a porter I know about what I’m going to get, flavor-wise. But with an IPA it can run from fairly mild to way-past-grapefruit-juice.

Depends on what type of bullshit.

On one end, if the bullshit is just “my partner wants me to give a fuck about them”, and you don’t want to have to do that, then decent sex might be enough to make you consider changing your mind, if you’re also compatible in other ways.

On the other end, if the bullshit is “my partner has psychotic breaks and chases me around the house with a chainsaw”, I don’t think any quality of sex would really merit consideration in the bigger picture, given how short your lifespan might become.

So, there’s something of a scale there, and it partly comes down to what you personally consider bullshit to be. People won’t agree on that, it’s a personal thing.

They’re headed in that direction, but not yet. Their pop is 143 mil roughly, and the Ukrainian estimates are a little over 1 mil Russian casualties last I heard.

They could roll in with tanks, if enough pro-Russian parties came into power in the EU. The Baltic countries are not very big. Creating a situation where an Article 5 is called by a small country, but not answered, would be the ideal result.

Let’s also not forget that Putin has only done a very limited amount of mobilization so far.

attributed the incident in part to a lack of proper Holocaust education and historical context on hate symbols, such as the swastika. “We have absolute faith that if the district takes actual measures to teach students the right lessons about being inclusive and anti-hate, that Jews are a minority that deserve compassion and understanding and deserve to be equal to everyone else in this education system, then that would be a huge step towards tomorrow’s society,” she said.

No, I’m afraid not. They’ve likely been preemptively inoculated against lessons by anti-intellectual sentiment, lessons will not cut it. They won’t trust anything that might be attributable to a “deep state”.

You need a more natural, more grounded style of communication if you want to have a chance.