TNG has young fans and you can have enough old farts like me around to populate a TNG forum while the whole is still mostly younger.

It skews young, and young skews left.

Now if only young voted…

The larger the organization, the larger their resources, but also usually the greater their complexity and legacy burdens. Large organizations also move slowly. All of this can delay things long after we might think they ought to have happened.

I’m so glad you invented metalbending

Job sites make money when you get a job. Companies pay a lot to get staffing vacancies filled. Recruiters and agencies cost a lot, so an online job board can literally get thousands of dollars sometimes for helping g facilitate a hire. This is how it should be.

But with dating sites, it does not work this way. There is no deep-pocketed business customer willing to pay a lot for making a match. Just two people with subscriptions, and that’s the company’s entire revenue.

I highly doubt that dating sites consciously try to prevent you from finding a mate because this will earn them more money. But I have to admit that the incentive structure is unhealthy.

I’ve been buying face scrubs that have ground apricot pits in them. They are great. Just the right amount of abrasiveness and totally biodegradeable. These have been around for decades. The microbead shit was cheaper, I suppose. And maybe some squeamish people don’t like the brown grainy appearance of apricot pit scrub.

While we’re making soup, let’s base the entire temperature scale on water, too.

We are blessed with a small but gorgeous local library that looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright creation, full of natural light. The stacks are lovingly curated and the computer services are great. Wonderful garden out front, friendly staff inside, and modern equipment that makes checkout a breeze. We can reserve books online or check if they are in, etc.

Anyway, after school, our kid walks to the end of the block with her friends and goes into the library. From there, we pick her up. That place is jumping in the afternoons, let me tell you. All the local regulars and all the kids just out of school: littles and teenagers. It’s busy and alive but not noisy (nor are they oppressive assholes about keeping silence). It’s a moment of civic joy to walk in there and get my daughter.

I once plucked up my courage to ask a girl if she would like to go see a particular show with me the following night. She said “I would, but I am already doing something tomorrow.”

I was totally unprepared for this answer and just heard “no.” She was probably a little surprised to be asked out suddenly, and didn’t take the initiative to suggest another day.

We didn’t go out. That was that. Huge mistake by me. So my advice is: be open to complications in her answer. And listen closely. If she says “I have plans.” that’s a polite decline. If she literally says “I would like to go, but I have plans,” that’s quite different.

It’s hard to hear the differences and react smoothly if you’re nervous about asking, like I was. Best of luck!

I am highly expressive and have little filter. I think my upbringing allowed this or even encouraged it. The meta message in every movie I ever watched as a kid was “if you just look deep inside yourself and bring out the essence of what’s there, you can do / win / be anything!” I’m also male, and my family laughed a lot and yelled a lot and angered easily and forgave easily. As a result, I’m quite outspoken and some find me bombastic or overbearing.

It’s quite hard to put this genie back in the bottle once you’re an adult. If you’re like this and wondering how other people contain it, the likelihood is that they have been conditioned to contain it their entire lives. In some cases longer than that: In Chinese culture, for example, no one has is permitted to be emotionally demonstrative and this has been the norm for thousands of years. It might even have been selected for genetically over time: outspoken peasants executed, expressive daughters disowned…

I will say this though. As you grow older your vision and hearing get worse and your feelings become less sensitive. I can hold a hot object that my kids can’t even touch with one finger. Emotionally, it’s a bit the same. Reactions come slower, and are not as strong. And the muscles in the face don’t react as much, and the heart is less inclined to engage in a full flameout over something trivial. So it gets easier.

In what way does it matter what age you experience things? I mean, of course it makes a difference but you clearly have some argument to make in favor of young people’s experiences meaning more. Make it.

I think you’re talking to some people who, in bad faith, are demanding “proof” when they need to learn how to acknowledge “evidence.” Someone with a fixed attitude will keep moving goalposts and cherry picking outliers until the cows come home, and you need to be able to say: your bias is overwhelming in the gymnastics you perform to avoid the clear evidence. The process of science most often doesn’t produce black and white results. Anti-vaxxers are gonna anti-vax and you can’t “persuade” them.

That said, if you can’t provide 7-8 stories with female protagonists, which are very popular, you’re not even trying. His Dark Materials. Moana. The Fault in Our Stars. The Fablehaven series. Frozen. Labyrinth. Heathers. The Force Awakens. Silo. Mulan. Legend of Korra and the Kyoshi novels. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. 16 Candles. Star Trek Voyager. Anne of Green Gables. Watchmen (2019 series). Jane Eyre. Pippi Longstocking. Captain Marvel. Aliens. Amelie. Arrival. Gravity. Little House on the Prairie. Game of Thrones. Coraline. You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

If you’re really talking to someone who says “there are no stories with…” then here’s enough to easily force them to change their position to “there are far less stories with…” and at that point they would in fact be correct.

It sounds like you’re talking about people still living. Haven’t they gone through all of these things with you? Or does one stop “experiencing life” at a certain age?

Did you even read the OP? A VPN that has real customers but is set up by a scammer can be doing anything on your computer. You install their client. It could be a key logger for all you know.

And not all services use end to end encryption so yes there is still the potential to listen to http traffic and extract data from it, especially as the VPN client.

Why is “governments” the boogeyman that comes to mind? Scammers and thieves would have much more interest in your everyday consumer internet usage.

When half of the country will

Y’all deserve

Wow that was a quick progression from “half” to “all.” I deserve this because Republicants are insane fucks? Gee thanks. Not that I care whether you care, particularly.

It’s actually pretty American not to believe in society. I’m not saying it’s good. But the right of an individual to march off into the wilderness and be left the fuck alone forever is a long-cherished American ideal (whether or not this ever existed).

I think it was just offered as an illustration of the concept, not as tax advice.

Yes there’s a long list of country flags and currency symbols and other shit in there too but lets not pretend like adding all that crap changed the fact that these are commonly used for expression. Does a cup of coffee have an emotion? Actually it kinda can, yeah, in the right situation. Let’s not even get into what people make of eggplants and popcorn tubs.

Of course this isn’t comparable - hieroglyphs form complete languages and are not just a set of emotion symbols. Probably there’s one or two that are emotions but I somehow doubt that the stone writings that endure contain any personal expressions of emotion.

But the post is funny and it hints at something important. Expressions to co vey emotion are incredibly important to human beings. It’s a language that our bodies are physically built for: our faces are far more changeable and expressive than other animals, and this supported the social bonds and cooperation that put us on top of the world. I’m not saying that across all cultures, one given facial expression means the same thing, but certainly all cultures have a vivid, silent language of facial expressions that is so deeply rooted, we barely think about it.