krellor

No one said cheap alcohol except you. I brew beer, discuss brewing beer, and very much appreciate the culture and history of brewing. I also enjoy reading about classic cocktails, and occasionally having some. I’ve read entire books about the history of distilling, the origin of terms like the angels share, etc.

The opinion posed wasn’t that we should get rid of cheap alcohol, but that all alcohol should be banned everywhere.

There is not a single reason for any human to get access to alcohol.

But there is. Because people enjoy it. Because it is a carrier of culture, tradition, and history. There are many things that people do that have risks, negative health effects, etc. Should all of that be illegal? Rock climbers sometimes need rescue, whose cost is often born by the public. Cell phones cause distracted driving. Processed foods make it easier for people to overeat, become obese, die, and create costs for society along the way.

Your premise is that there isn’t some transactional, functional value of alcohol. But people aren’t robots and we get value from the emotion and experience of things.

Tax alcohol to cover negative externalities, enforce drunk driving laws, force disclaimers about the health impact, and let people make informed, but free, choices.

Good unpopular opinion though. Good discussion! Have a great day!

I gave my kid a BB gun, but it stays in a safe. I also gave my son a pocket knife for camping that stays in my night stand unless we are camping.

You can give something to a kid without letting them have unsupervised access. I gave my kids steam decks, but limit their screen time.

I agree the original comment lacked specificity. You could gift a gun in a responsible or irresponsible way, and I’ve seen both.

Edit: and the comment about gifting a rifle also mentioned that in their personal situation they had to have a parent to use it.

There’s a huge difference between giving a child unrestricted access to a firearm, and taking them sport shooting in a controlled environment. I’ve helped with beginner shooting courses for kids in scouts. There is an adult with each kid, one round loaded at a time, etc. You can similarly control the environment hunting by using blinds, etc, where you oversee the use of the firearm, loading of round etc.

I’m not big into shooting, but from a safety perspective there are ways to hunt and sport shoot with kids in a very controlled way.

Some suggestions, either online or local;

Bookclubs
Walking groups
Chess, board games, table top
Theater groups (meetup groups to go to the theater as a group)
Escape room group meetups.

Depending on if you are in a city or a smaller town the locals options will vary. I’d look at meetups site and browse local activities. For most any activity you will find a range of ages, but some will skew more one way than another.

Best of luck!

I’ll give you some general advice and am happy to answer any follow up questions you might have.

Upfront, I recommend getting a laptop from a well known vendor running Windows. If you aren’t looking to go on a technology learning expedition, just need something that will work, and will have a warranty and a support line if things go wrong, you can’t beat a vendor. Dell is probably where I would look, but Microsoft surface, and Thinkpad’s are also good.

Going with Windows from a vendor supplied laptop will maximize the amount of support you have and the number of things that just work.

If you are looking for more of a technology project, I’d need to know more about what your tolerance is for fiddling with technology or your computer not working.

As for CAD, as others said, check the recommended software specs and match your computer to them. Make sure you give yourself plenty of fast storage like m.2.

For browsers, I use Firefox. I’d recommend Firefox as being a good balance between privacy and just working with plugin support. But chrome and other chromium based browsers like edge also just work.

Consider getting a Microsoft 365 personal or family account. For $100/year you get cloud storage, computer backups, and the local and online office suite, and it all integrates well into Windows.

If any of the above assumptions are wrong, I’m happy to update recommendations.

Finally, how do you learn to fish? It takes time to come up to speed on things, so slowly learning, finding neutral review sites like maybe Tom’s hardware, and doing your own testing.

Lots of people will give you opinionated advice, so don’t be afraid to be skeptical. Think about what’s important to you, whether that be just working, or privacy, or availability of support materials.

I don’t disagree that comment OP could have phrased it better and come across as less judgey. And I think that of someone like you left a well worded reply to the effect that it would be very fair feedback.

At the same time I feel like some of the comments she has gotten are living down to the less generous version of her statements. If that makes sense. It also sort of feels like people wallpapering over the underlying reason that many women look for social media participation, which is as a way to vet for safety reasons.

But I agree, it’s not good to typecast and overgeneralize, and a better suggestion to the post OP might be that some women look for social media accounts for safety reasons, if that is part of your social issues mentioned.

But I digress. Have a great day!

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I love that your post gave a probabilistic binning of someone who doesn’t have a traditional social media account, which was unironically confirmed by people replying with rustled jimmies.

Come on folks, it should be clear from context that she is saying that a single woman setting up dates is going to use what limited info they have to avoid stalkers, cheaters, red pillers, and anti social people. That this might filter out perfectly normal people along with the creeps is the cost of maintaining safety and not wasting time, which is pretty much par for the course in dating. There’s also a difference between exchanging info after a brief meeting, and actually knowing a person for an extended time and then dating. I doubt OP is saying that someone they studied with for three semesters would be excluded for lack of social media, because they have real life context and don’t need the proxy filters.

Also, getting real close in these replies to “but I’m a nice guy” and “I’m not like other girls.”

I thought I was taking crazy pills watching people tell the guy not to join social media, on a social media site!

I think the real question being asked is, should the OP make a social media account that is not anonymous or on one of the mainstream sites. Which I would say go for it if it helps with your IRL social life, just don’t post anything you wouldn’t say in person in public.

I read a NYT article on this and the videos included them having sex with the pornstars and they also published their own porn videos.

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Gow and Ms. Wilson said that they believe they were fired over the videos, which included sex scenes together and with others under the username Sexy Happy Couple. Both said they felt it was wrong for the university to punish them over the videos, arguing that doing so infringes on their free speech rights.

Mr. Gow, 63, said he and his wife, 56, have made videos together for years but had decided recently to make them publicly available on porn websites and had been pleased by the response. They said they never mentioned the university or their jobs in the videos, several of which have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. The couple also has made a series of videos in which they cook meals with porn actors and then have sex.

The article also includes some basic legal history that doesn’t make it seem like they will have much recourse.

NYT gift article

I look at the long arc of history and see that progress is not monotonic (always increasing or decreasing). We are experiencing setbacks to overcoming our challenges, as have those who came before us. But while we can read about years passing in a paragraph in a history book, we have to live and experience those years. And with all the challenges comes new technology and drive and awareness to solve problems. As unfortunate as it is trouble breeds innovation and commitment to change far better than comfort and easy times.

I was unfamiliar with misophonia so I went looking into it. I know it is a poorly studied issue, but I wasn’t able to find any peer reviewed research where children’s noises in general were used or reported as a trigger. I found lots of discussion forums, but that is anecdotal.

The reason I went digging is because the op describes all children’s noises, happy, sad, whatever, whereas what I read in the literature was very specific noises were reported as triggers. E.g, lip smacking, chewing, pen clicking, etc. In one study, they even used videos of children and dogs playing to help participants calm down and establish a baseline. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0227118

While I’m admittedly ignorant, it seems OP may have a more general aversion to children than I would expect of misophonia given what I’ve read from medical sources.

I only mention this as a counter suggestion to help op avoid self diagnosing and maybe going down the wrong track.

I think counseling is warranted to help sort it out.

I would echo the recommendation for counseling. However, is this a larger issue or unique to children? Do you find yourself getting disproportionately angry at other sources of annoyances? Answering that question might help you know whether there is a larger need to address.

I’ve lived on East and West Coast in the US, visited most states and the places you mention in Canada, and I just moved from Washington to Maryland.

Realize that everything you listed as a preference is the same for millions of people. Lots of people like paddle boarding, nature, and the cities you are looking at, so those places are going to be expensive. Without knowing more about your acute needs to move I can only give general advice.

First, don’t move without a job lined up or at least a plan in place. Look at college towns including in more states than you listed. They are more liberal on average, and have a baked in supply of people looking for roommates. Even older grad students are looking for roommates and are often quiet.

After that, look for things to minimize costs like public transit. You say south of Maryland, but that covers a whole lot including places with pretty bad public transit.

When you do move make sure you have any vehicle titles or purchase documents as you will need them to get new titles and registration. Update your insurance policy with your new address. Make sure you have your birth certificate, social security cards, and photo id so you can get a place to live and get your new state id. Make sure you know what it costs to do all of that (likely hundreds on the title, registration, new id). Even more if you don’t have one of the necessary documents and you have to pay a notary to send a form to get a new title mailed to you.

Look at room mate apps or sites to potentially vet a low cost place you can move into more quickly than getting your own place and going through the credit checks and down payments for a lease.

And look at your credit to make sure you don’t move just to find that you won’t clear the checks they will perform.

Open a bank account at a bank or credit union with branches where you are moving to, or at least part of a no-fee ATM network. E.g., I can get cash from my credit union account without any fees from 7-11 and they are everywhere.

Make sure you have a few blank checks on your wallet for oddball expenses or deposits that don’t take cards or have fees to do so. Have a little cash as well.

Once you have a job planned, costs figured out, make a spreadsheet. MAKE A SPREADSHEET! You do not want to move across the country to find that you didn’t factor state income tax or vehicle registration costs and suddenly can’t make rent. Include all likely costs and see if your budget has some wiggle for miscalculations and other issues.

Make a spreadsheet of all the tasks you need to do. Keep track of them because the details of moving will screw you hard if you don’t mind them.

The more money you have while moving, the better you can solve problems. Hard truth for life in general.

If the above sounds overwhelming, then you need to plan all the more carefully.

Make sure you don’t make unrealistic assumptions about the culture of where you are moving and get taken advantage of our targeted for violence. Even in the most liberal places there are places and people unfriendly to LGBTQ people. Don’t be a victim.

Best of luck and happy to answer questions about specific cities, I’ve been to many.

Yup.

We do lots of things as a society because we’ve always done them that way, or it’s good enough, and not enough reason to go through the effort of changing everything including legal language, etc.

Happily, in this case I think ABV is about the best way we could have inherited, maybe only second to alcohol by weight in terms of consistency across temperature.

In the US, and I suspect other countries, the agency that regulates alcohol is different than the one that regulates food. In the US alcohol is regulated by the ATF and food by the FDA. Since it is the FDA rules that require nutritional labels and ingredients and not the ATF, most brands don’t list much.

Additionally, alcohol recipes are often considered trade secrets and closely held which might be why rules haven’t been introduced in many places.

Here is an article that talks a little more about different breweries and if they keep their ingredients secret or not.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/life-style/food-wine/89281511/why-doesnt-alcohol-doesnt-feature-nutritional-information-on-labels

Like I said, because the percent doesn’t change with the volume served. If you are an 1800s brewer you can calculate the ABV from samples, and subsequently sell kegs of various sizes, bottles, which in turn can be served in various amounts and the percent doesn’t change. And the industry never changed, nor the laws written. So it’s the way it is because that is how they used to do it and how laws were written and there hadn’t been a motivation for people to change that.

I would guess about 4% heavier with sugar, which is just enough so that a can of Dr. Pepper sinks while a diet can of Dr. Pepper floats. I think I recall the specific gravity of most sugar flavored soda was around 1.04 but I would need to check sources.

I haven’t seen anyone really answer the why of it, which is that the industry developed using a floating glass tool called a hydrometer which measures the specific gravity, or density, of liquids.

When you boil the wort to prepare for fermentation, you end up with a sugary liquid that is denser than water or alcohol. Water has a specific gravity of one, and the specific gravity of the wort is increased by everything you dissolved into it. You would float a glass hydrometer in it and lets say you get a reading of 1.055.

After fermentation the yeast has converted much of the sugar to alcohol and decreased the specific gravity. You measure a second time, and multiply the difference by a constant factor to get ABV. let’s say after fermentation you got a reading of 1.015.

1.055 - 1.015 = 0.04
0.04 * 131.25 = 5.25% ABV

We label with ABV because that was how it was calculated, and remained the same regardless of the quantity served.

There is a similar process for distilling as well. Before these methods people didn’t know the exact amounts, which led to fun things like navy and admiral strength.

Edit: also the 131 figure really should vary based on temperature since it is derived from the ratios of the density of ethanol and water. The higher the ABV the more important it is to factor temperature, and distilling requires more sensitive measurements and tools. But for beer, using 131.25 is fine and has about 0.2% error up to around 10% ABV.