Until you’re that rural person dropped into a convention center with people wearing name tags with their preferred pronoun and almost no understanding of how to actually use those pronouns appropriately.

For the most part, it’s amazing how seldom pronouns actually get used in referring to any specific person. Even if Bob uses he/she/they relatively often, the he/she/they being referred to is a specific person and the number of times Bob uses the word ‘she’ when referring to Sally is related entirely to how often Bob talks about Sally, specifically with other people. That might literally be never/once a year/once in his lifetime/etc.

If the vast majority of the time Bob talks about other people, they’ve not mentioned any preference, it’s understandable if he struggles when the need comes up, mid conversation, to substitute a ‘they/zhe/xer’ where he has only every used he/she (they still sounds plural to most people), and to remember off the top of your head a pronoun you’ve only seen on a name tag one time, roughly amounts to remembering everyone’s name and their hometown. Of course the impact is lessened by the fact that you will rarely have to refer to some specific person in third person when you don’t even remember their name, and in that case ‘they’ is kind of a fallback anyway.

Perhaps an undesirable outcome is that if the pronoun is a hurdle to overcome, it’s easier for Bob just not to bring Sally up at all, a possibly unfortunate result because it might have been an interesting conversation that is now simply avoided.

We’re still in the growing pains version of it, though, where there are far too many people taking advantage of a legitimate position just for the attention. This isn’t unique to the gender conversation, but it definitely suffers from it.

Another issue is that there is a component of needing to be vocal and firm or no one will take you seriously, but it’s a fine line between that and being obnoxious and over-asking…reminding someone who wants to be considerate is good, being offended at someone intentionally mis-labeling may be necessary, but being offended by honest mistakes or berating someone for not realizing zhe or zher or some newly defined label was a thing definitely hurts the cause.

Guessing that is Assad in the second panel, and he’s mocking them, as though their statement means nothing because they are powerless, like ‘sorry, did you say something? because I can’t hear you’. And then the 4th panel is his reaction when they actually speak up.

Yes

From one perspective, per capita is fair, but from another perspective it isn’t. The Constitution actually did a reasonable job of trying to address both cases, it just didn’t adequately account for such a huge swing in population and technology. One could argue that that is a failing of the people that came afterwards, since the Constitution also provided mechanisms for modification.

For an example of where it is not fair, consider an agreement between three groups and we all agree to vote on decisions that affect all three of us, say ‘how things are taxed’ or how often elections are held. Each group gets a vote, and 2 out of 3 wins. If that’s the agreement we entered into, my group would expect to get a vote now or a hundred years in the future even if your group grows it shrinks, it’s an agreement at the group level. Especially if we made considerations for a different type of vote that does take group membership size into account. It would be pretty shitty for your group to get big and insist that it should make all the decisions for me.

Land doesn’t vote, but groups do. The Constitution was written to accommodate both points, the Senate so each state has an equal vote, which is fair in respect to the fact that the Constitution is and agreement between states, and Congress where states with more people get more votes, because that is a legitimate perspective as well. It’s not perfect to start with, and it’s been modified poorly over time (representation hasn’t been kept proportional in Congress), but it is fair to say that each state having an equal vote is one valid point of view, and the founders realized that it wasn’t the only valid point of view.

Don’t attribute the ‘states rights’ phrase to me as though I’m on the wrong side of the civil war or something. The country can’t be entirely directed by states regardless of population, but the states can’t be directed by other states based solely on population either.

To be fair, it is the united ´states´, not the united ´people living on the continent´. It wouldn’t be any more fair if California was making the decisions for 20 other states, just because they happen to have a crap load of people. The federal government is kind of supposed to be making decisions and maintaining things between states, not all these decisions affecting the people so directly.

I know it’s going to last a long time because the old lady said they used it everyday and it still looks practically new

I agree, but I’m the spirit of the question, do you work in a corporate environment?

For sure, anyone who has seen some of the videos of drink carts and luggage bouncing off the cabin ceilings during crazy turbulence shouldn’t have any questions about the utility of seatbelts in less than catastrophic events… Which of course is the goal even in ‘crash’ landings. There are crashes where seatbelts would obviously be worthless, but in anything short of that, you’ll be happy that you weren’t in a box with 300 human shaped dice being shaken up.

Basically ‘duty cycle’…same reason electric heaters all put out 1500W but ones for larger rooms are ‘larger’. Big or small, they both put out 1500W, but the small ones can only do it for a few minutes at a time before having to cool off, while the larger ones can run for longer and heat up a big room more quickly.

Imagine that actually goes through and one of the Republicans actually gets a conscience and falls on his sword and throws in for Kamala.

Also a separation so the smell can’t be directly attributed to him.

If it makes it any easier, those hundreds of millions of people are going to die anyway, the only tragedy about it is that it’s from something we could technically prevent or mitigate, but most things are like that… Traffic, smoking, guns, unhealthy diet… The climate changing isnt really going to affect the earth, our short sightedness and ignorance will just make lots of areas we can comfortable live in now much less comfortable or unlivable entirely. It’s going to suck, but do what you can with what you have and just the fact that you know enough to care means you have something to offer.

Not that there isn’t a lot of creepiness going on with this in general, but it wouldn’t be crazy to remodel without emptying a freezer. Assuming they weren’t on top of the rest of the food, stuff in the bottom of a freezer can easily be overlooked for years

Are you that roommate? Or are you saying he tried to set it for 30 seconds?

Maybe it helps to understand it when you think of it from the perspective that those $1000 expenses do happen, they’re not just hypothetical. But being able to cope with an event like that leaves you less able to handle a second one, and a third one

Couple that with the fact that I’m the US there is very little financial education so what might be an expected event for one person surprises another. Imagine living with a roommate and not realizing that to move into your own place involves coming up with first and last month rent, deposit, hook up fees, renters insurance, furniture, kitchen supplies, toiletries, etc… None of those should be unexpected, but also why would you expect them if you didn’t happen to run into them before?

Basically no amount of saving accounts for an expense that takes it all, and it’s then followed up by another one right after. And for some people those events are small and happen so quickly you never catch up and now you have late fees and interest and stress.

Hey, where’s all the water going all of the sudden?

This picture of the apparent tornado, with alleged clouds and, i guess, some type of ‘land’ was captured with what has been reported to be a camera of some sort.

There’s no copyright involved in taking a picture of someone, or having a picture of someone… Your tourist pictures are fine. If you publicize then or try selling them, that might be an issue, but making it inconvenient for people to make money off of non-permission photos isn’t really concerning to most people.