One time I was working my way down the bread/dairy aisle at a grocery store. It’s one of the wider aisles there, if 2 people pulled their carts off to the side, a third person could squeeze down the middle as long as those first two took a little care to not stick out into the aisle too much

Of course they never do

So there I am coming down the middle of the aisle, trying to squeeze between some idiot agonizing over which container of sour cream they should buy, and some moron who can’t decide on a loaf of bread who are stopped directly across from each other, uttering plenty of “'scuze me/pardon me/lemme just squeeze through heres” and of course neither of them move an inch

I nearly make it, but do tap one of their carts a bit in the process

I give her a quick “sorry” and continue on my way.

Then she yells down after me with a very indignant “excuse you”

Lady, you were the one blocking the aisle without any situational awareness, and I already apologized, fucking die mad about it.

2 bedrooms (one is an office that doubles as a guest room with a pull-out couch) 2½ baths

The two full baths are attached to the bedrooms and are pretty cramped with pretty cheap fittings, but they do the trick. The powder room is downstairs, it’s kind of an odd shape due to where it is in the house, and weirdly big but not in a way that makes it particularly more useable and still manages to feel a little cramped. No real counter space to speak of, or other storage options besides the cabinet under the sink. The master bedroom is weirdly huge, and the office is an ok size, but in both cases the way they’re laid out with doors and windows, outlets, etc. often leaves us wishing we had a couple more inches any time we think about rearranging or getting new furniture.

We could only afford this house because it was my mother in laws, she sold it too us for cheap when she moved in with her mother to take care of her.

My parents have 3 bedrooms, 2 full bathrooms, a powder room, and then I guess it might be called a ¾ bathroom in the basement. The master bath is pretty sweet with a whirlpool tub (albeit a fairly small one all things considered) 2 sinks, and a shower (the shower is nothing particularly special) and a TV.

The bathroom between the two other bedrooms is nothing too special, but has a nice-sized linen closet and pretty decent counter space.

The powder room is small, nothing too special there.

The basement bathroom has a sink, a weirdly huge linen close, and a shower stall, no tub.

The guy who originally owned the home was a landscaper who did a lot of business with a local builder so they tricked the house out for him. He ran his business from the home and we’re pretty sure that was the point of the basement bathroom, he could go in through the basement door and shower without tracking dirt through the house.

The master bedroom is huge, 2 walk-in closets, high ceilings, plenty of space for a king sized bed, a plethora of dressers, a couple small bookshelves, a desk, and a chaise with room to spare. The other 2 bedrooms are decent sized, nothing too special, with pretty huge closets.

It’s a pretty sweet house, I wouldn’t be surprised if my parents could get a cool million for it if they sold it now, the stars kind of aligned, they’d just inherited a bit of money, the market was right, and the original owner killed himself there, so they paid less than half of that probably about 15 years ago now.

The house we lived in before that had 3 bedrooms, none of which were particularly big, and one bathroom.

The apartment I was living in when I first moved out (to live with my then-girlfriend-now-wife, and a roommate) had 3 bedrooms that were oddly spacious. The master bedroom was pretty big, but again weirdly laid-out, with an en suite bathroom that was nothing too special, it had a pretty decent sized shower that was nothing too special, and there was a second bathroom by the two bedrooms with your typical shower/bathtub. The two other bedrooms were decent-size, our roommates technically had a walk-in closet that doubled as the utility closet for the water heater (and if I miss one thing about that apartment it was the water heater, you could practically brew tea with water from the faucet and it never seemed to run out, and since the apartment wasn’t all that big it was almost instant) one of those bedrooms started off as mine, because my wife and I had just recently started dating and I wanted to have my space in case things didn’t work out between us (we’d been friends for a good while before that and our plans to move in together had been in the works well before we started dating) but eventually it became her office/storage and additional living space.

Honestly I liked that apartment, I could probably still be living there pretty happily if they didn’t keep jacking the rent up. It was a first floor apartment with a washer and dryer and a decent little patio, my only major gripe was that the kitchen was tiny and there was no decent place to put any sort of dining table (at least not with how we used the space, we’d rather have a decent entertainment center setup and couches for entertaining) so we ate at the coffee table or on tray tables.

I think there’s at least 3 factors at play here.

First, you’re probably living in a largely eurocentric bubble. You’re not seeing other mythologies because they’re not being marketed to you, and in some cases you may not even realize some of the ways that those mythologies and folklore and such are being presented to you because you just don’t know what to look for (for example, Dragon Ball, in the beginning, borrowed very heavily from the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West, which is a hugely important book in Asian literature, and I swear every couple of years there’s some new adaptation coming out, but it’s not nearly as well known to Western audiences) and translations can get a little wonky, if you watch a movie or read a book from a non-western culture, instead of naming specific deities or other mythological figures, the translator may figure that no one reading the translation is going to know who that is so they’ll translate it as something generic like “god” or “a great hero” instead of naming names.

Second, Western media is huge, and kind of overshadows a lot of other cultures. White Americans making movies in Hollywood are going to tend to pull from their own cultural backgrounds, and that often includes Greek, Norse, and Roman mythology.

Finally, a lot of it comes down to which mythologies we have actual written records of. The Norse, Greeks, and Romans all wrote about their gods to some extent, Slavic people, on the other hand, did not write until after they’d been converted to Christianity (the Cyrillic alphabet used in Russian and some other Slavic languages takes it’s name from Saint Cyril, who helped to christianize the Slavic peoples, and was developed by his followers,) so there’s no real first-hand accounts of their beliefs and practices, only second-hand accounts from other cultures who interacted with them and wrote down what they observed, and people recalling stories they’d heard about earlier times, and that comes with them inserting their own biases and interpretations and just plain getting things wrong. So if you wanted to write something about, for example, the Slavic gods Perun and Veles, you probably wouldn’t have as much decent source material to work from as if you wanted to write about the roughly equivalent Norse gods- Thor and Loki.

I’ve always been lucky and my skin is pretty bulletproof, I could probably just about wash my face with acetone and shave with a broken beer bottle and be none the worse for it.

I shower, normally every day but occasionally skip a day or two due to weather, lack of motivation, and how much I’ve been sweating, with Dr Bronners Peppermint soap and a washcloth.

I like Dr Bronners because it’s the best I’ve found at stripping the wax out of my moustache. I also find the mint to be nice and refreshing, especially after a hot day. It’s also nice that its organic, fair trade, etc. and since it can be used for pretty much everything I like it for backpacking (I tend to go unscented for that purpose, but if I intend to brush my teeth with it mint in the way to go, still a bit gross and soapy tasting, don’t exactly recommend it but it does the trick in a pinch)

If we want to count it as skincare, though it’s more hair care I suppose, my moustache wax of choice is Firehouse Wacky Tacky

I shave my head with a double edge safety razor, I like Feather blades. I lather up with whatever bar of soap smells good to me when I bought it and looks like it will fit in my shaving bowl, right now I think I’m using Dr Squatch Bay Rum because they sold it in the checkout line of ace hardware and the line was moving slow one day leaving me with nothing much to do to entertain myself but stiff some soaps.

Sometimes, instead, I splash on some lectric shave and use a foil shaver on my head.

Then I splash on some aftershave. I used to rotate through the usual drug store brands- Brut, Pinaud Clubman, Aqua Velva, and Old Spice, but then I met my wife and it turns out she really likes me in Old Spice, so I don’t switch it up too often anymore. I do tend to get a bottle of cheap bay rum to use over the summer though.

I use whatever beard oil or balm smells good to me when I run out and find myself needing more. I honestly couldn’t even tell you what brand I have kicking around currently, I use it pretty infrequently, mostly when I’m dressing up and feel like my beard could use a little extra taming and shininess. I tend to like woodsy scents like cedar.

When my hands feel a little dry and cracked, which isn’t a very common issue for me, I use Duke Cannon Bloody Knuckles balm. Again, I’m pretty sure that was an impulse buy from the checkout line of a hardware store or something, but I think it works pretty well. My wife probably uses it more than I do and she has an actual skincare routine so I guess she agrees.

And for deodorant, I again like old spice. It works for me, and I’ve used it pretty consistently since I was in about 4th or 5th grade when we had a basic sex-ed/some-of-you-stink-so-use-deodorant-please assembly where they handed out a small stick of it to all the guyse Again, apparently my wife likes old spice so that worked out well, and I can usually find a 2-pack of it at most grocery stores and such that is probably the best value in the deodorant aisle.

Centrifugal governors are possibly one of the origins of the phrase “balls out” or “balls to the wall” (although many say “balls to the wall” has to do with the ball-shaped handles on old aircraft throttle levers)

Also somewhat similar to governors are centrifugal switches, which are used in just about anything with an electric motor to disconnect the motor from a capacitor which gives the motor a little extra juice to get it going (I like this video for an explanation of how they work)

Is not potato man, is secret police. Such is life.

Anvil firing

You get 2 anvils, stack them on top of each other, the bottom one upside down, pack some gunpowder between them, light it, run, and the top one shoots off into the air and eventually comes back down.

I’m sure it’s a blast (literally) but I’m not trying to looney tunes myself.

I think “cave diving” is generally understood to refer to the underwater variety.

If you’re referring to general cave exploration, that would generally be called “spelunking”

So ignoring the technical problem of how it could actually be done, let’s assume we somehow did it, cut every cable, and somehow blocked every cell tower and satellite from somehow connecting to North Korea to the rest of the world.

For the average north korean citizen, probably nothing much changes, most of them don’t have much access to the internet to begin with.

For those who do, the elites, people in university, those government, military, etc. it will probably worry a bit.

For the elites who get to enjoy the internet as a luxury, probably not too much changes. I doubt that except for maybe the very top echelons of DPRK society, the Kim family for example (and maybe not even some of them,) anyone is getting totally unrestricted access to the global Internet. They’re probably limited to mostly a bunch of north korean-hosted websites, and unless they’re relying on data centers and such abroad (and they very well might be,) there’s not really much we can do to take them down unless we really want to go in and attack all of the internal Internet infrastructure.

It’s going to hamper their universities and such, sucks for them, probably no great loss for the world, the next big scientific break through probably wasn’t coming from the hermit kingdom anyway.

It will definitely hurt their ability to conduct espionage, cyber attacks and such, that goes both ways though and it also makes it harder for other countries to spy on them.

They will do their usual sabre-rattling in response, maybe even going a bit above and beyond their usual mostly empty gestures, but probably nothing that’s going to lead to any actual escalation p

I think you have some faulty assumptions here.

Israel is very reliant on US support to be sure, but not totally reliant on us. They have their own military industrial complex and could ramp that up if needed, they have their own nuclear program, they would certainly have to scale back in some aspects, but I don’t think there’s much that we can do that would stop the war in its tracks. They’d change tactics, and Israel can be very creative, look at the recent pager bomb thing.

That’s not saying that we should continue supporting them and sending them supplies. I just don’t think it would be the quick end you’re thinking it would be.

If they knew the US wasn’t going to step in, we might see other countries, Iran perhaps, step up their involvement. If Israel starts getting desperate they might do some incredibly stupid things, like using those nukes, their mindset seems to very much that if they think they’re going down they’re going to take as many people with them as possible.

There is basically no chance you’re going to be able to land that boat at any port in Israel/Gaza and let 10k people loose. You’ll be stopped at the port if not even sooner, I’d honestly be a little amazed if you even be allowed to set sail in the first place.

While hamas is overall arguably on the right side of this conflict, don’t mistake that for meaning that they are an overall good organization. 10k Americans would make for some damn good human shields and hostages and they’d snatch every one of you up that they can. It’s not going to be as simple as just chilling in Gaza clogging up streets so Israel can’t get through (assuming Israel doesn’t just decide that your enemy combatants too and wow you down) you’re probably just as likely to end up as a Hamas prisoner and spend months or years in some pretty terrible conditions hoping for rescue.

And the idea that you’re going to get 10k to sign on is pretty laughable, I’d be amazed if you could get 100.

I’m just scraping the surface with a few thoughts off the top of my heads.

I’d probably push it back to a little over 100 years to include WWI, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the British Mandate for Palestine, since that all set the stage for Israel being founded pretty directly, and there had already been a pretty substantial movement for Jews to immigrate to the region by about the '30s (known as the “Fifth Aliyah”) so a bit outside of your 80 year range.

But of course, none of these events happen in a vacuum, if you want to get really nitpicky, you can start talking about the events that led to world war 1, trace them way back, through the crusades, the birth of Muhammad, Christianity, the Roman empire, all the way back to the bronze age, and maybe even further if you were able to somehow find decent historical records going that far back.

Trying to point to one single event as the one that kicked off a certain conflict is tough, because there was always something that led up to that event too, and when you try to unravel it, before too long you might come to a very Douglass Adams-y conclusion that it all started when our first ape ancestors decided to come down from the trees, only for someone else to say that the trees had been a mistake in the first place and that we never should have left the oceans.

I think you’re misreading the comment of the person you’re replying to here, it’s worded a little wonky and I don’t know if you picked up on a bit of a sarcastic tone there, I think you also may not be reading far enough into the history to really have a handle on the situation but frankly neither of you are doing a great job of explaining your positions so it’s a little hard to say what point either of you are trying to make

Tl;dr of modern Afghan history:

Around the 80s, Russia invaded Afghanistan and installed a socialist government

The US backs Islamic militants, essentially the Taliban or the groups that eventually morph into them, to oust the Russian backed government,

The Taliban also likes to style themselves as the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan

Some power struggles ensue, by the 90s sometime the Taliban is in charge of the country

9/11 happens, US invades, tries to set up their own government, pulls out, Taliban quickly takes back over

The impression I’ve always gotten (and I’m sure no political guru or social scientist or anything of the sort) isn’t so much that the country overall prefers the Taliban as much as most of them just don’t really give a rat’s ass about the country as a whole or who’s claiming to be in charge of it at any given time, they don’t have a strong sense of national identity, they care for more about their tribe or village than anything going on outside of it. American, Russian, Taliban, doesn’t really matter too much to them, when the guys with better guns roll into town, you pay them lip service until they go away then continue right on doing things more or less the same way you have for the last 2000 years.

It does happen that the Taliban probably aligns with their traditional values more closely than the other people who have tried ruling it as a unified country over the years, but day-to-day, they’re still probably mostly only going to the Taliban when they need something from them and deferring to village elders or local warlords or whoever for everything else.

There’s variation I’m sure, those in cities probably have a stronger sense of what a country is and what it has to offer in the modern world than those in rural areas, but it’s a largely rural country, almost 75% of them are living in rural areas and some of them are super rural where some of them have probably never even seen a city.

I flip flop back and forth, I’m not totally sure if there’s a specific rhyme or reason to my choices, it may just come down to a subjective feeling about which I think sounds better in the sentence.

My wife is a dayta analyst, and she analyzes dahta.

I understand your meaning but saying that those east coast cities were built to European standards is maybe not the best way to phrase it.

Philly in particular, is a standout for being one of the first planned cities. Not that there weren’t attempts at city planning before then, but they tended to be more of an attempt to straighten out the wacky stuff that had grown organically. With Philly most of the city was pretty much laid out from the beginning, which was fairly unique at the time. You’d be pretty hard-pressed to find something totally comparable to that in Europe at the time.

What they do share with European cities though, is that they (relatively) old, and from the era before cars were a thing, so the city planning happened with the assumption that people would be walking pretty much everywhere.

Side note- I remember reading an article about one of the older assassins creed games set in the American revolution, and one of the reasons they decided to not set it in philly was because Philly, even back then, was too orderly of a grid with lots of long straight streets that you can look a long way down and the graphics engine had a hard time rendering that far.

So first of all, the US is big and diverse, if you hop in a car and drive from New York to LA without stopping, taking the fastest route, mostly on major highways, averaging out to something like 60+mph (about 100 km/h) you’re still going to be spending just about 2 days in the car.

And in between, you’re going to see a little bit of everything, mountain, plains, forest, farms, huge dense urban cities, towns small enough you can barely even call them a town, suburban sprawl, massive industrial facilities, you name it you’re going to see it.

Overall, if you live in an urban area, the situation may not be too bad, cities are somewhat walkable, there’s public transportation that will usually get you fairly close to where you need to go, there may even be protected bike lanes, etc. although the situation will vary wildly from one city to another.

It will even vary from one part of the city to another. You can have large sections of the city where there’s no real grocery stores or other places to get your basic necessities, and you’re pretty much limited to whatever you can get from corner stores, bodegas, convenience stores, etc. (mostly pre-packaged and processed foods, and if you’re lucky maybe a couple pieces of fresh fruit) and if you want anything more than that you’re probably looking at taking a few hours out of your day to walk a significant distance to a store or take public transit that may not go exactly where you need it, may be slow, expensive, or just a pain in the ass to deal with, etc.

Getting out into the suburbs, it’s again kind of a crapshoot. There are some walkable suburbs, with wonderful shopping options, there’s some that are a maze of residential developments and gated communities that come off of major roads with no sidewalks or even shoulders worth speaking of and you’re taking a significant gamble trying to walk anywhere from there. There may be little or no public transportation and if there is it may not be going anywhere you need to go, or be convenient to get onto

Personally, I live towards the rural end of the suburbs, about an hour or less from a major city depending on traffic.

Damn near everything I could ever want or need is within about a half hour drive, and most of I commonly need is covered within about 15 minutes.

If I don’t have a car though, my options drop off significantly. I’m looking at an hour walk one way to get to a grocery store, mostly along a long winding road with little or no shoulder and few streetlights. The only things I would really feel safe to walk to are 2 pizza shops, a small hardware store, a bar, a CVS, and gas station/convenience store, those last 2 are going to be about a half hour or longer walk, and along that winding road, but it’s a stretch that at least has a half decent shoulder and some lawns to walk on for most of the way.

If you have a bike, there’s a decent bike trail that will get you to some more shopping options, but it’s about an hour’s ride one way.

If you need to catch public transit, you’d have to walk about 2 hours to catch a bus, that line basically runs straight up and down a main road between the city and a larger, urban-ish town further out in the suburbs. There’s not many options to transfer to anywhere else along the way but there’s a lot along that route so if you can get to that bus most of your needs will be covered, but it doesn’t run super frequently and it’s not going to get you anywhere in a hurry.

Getting out into rural America, you have some small towns that are functionally self-contained, with their own grocery stores and other shopping options in-town within walking distance. Your options are limited but for the most part everything you really need is right there in town.

If you don’t work in town though, and often people in these areas don’t, they may be involved in farming, logging, oil/natural gas, construction, etc. and may work many miles from town, you’re pretty much screwed if you don’t have a car, or at least can count on carpooling with a coworker.

There’s other small towns where there just isn’t much of anything at all, maybe they have a gas station and a liquor store, and if you need anything else you’re SOL, in some cases you may be looking at an hour or more drive to get to anything else so you can forget about walking.

Regardless of where/what kind of area you find yourself in, transportation between cities is often going to be an issue. You can probably catch a Greyhound bus or maybe Amtrak or similar between most major cities, though you may have to get a little creative with figuring out your route, but if you’re trying to get to the smaller towns in between you may not have much luck.

There are, of course, nearly as many exceptions and special cases to everything I said as there are individual towns and cities.

I sometimes like to entertain sort of a radically modified 2 state solution.

Both sides get their own state, the catch is neither state is in Israel/Palestine.

We carve out 2 Israel-sized chunks of land that are nowhere near each other from the emptiest space we can find in large developed nations, maybe the American southwest, siberia, australian outback, Canadian wilderness, etc. The world throws money at the problem for them to set up any schools, government , infrastructure, etc. they need to run a country in that space, then we draw straws or flip a coin to determine which gets to be the Israeli state and which gets to be the Palestinian state.

Then all of the residents get 2 options. They can go set up shop in their new country, or they get a one-time free pass to pick any other country in the world and be granted instant citizenship.

No one gets to stay in Palestine/Israel. It gets overseen directly by the UN or something as a giant world heritage site, people are free to visit, play tourist, make pilgrimages, etc. but no one gets to live there full-time, anyone who works there to facilitate tourism, conduct research, maintain facilities and infrastructure, etc. must be kept on a strict schedule where they’re cycling in and out of the area so that they don’t spend more than half the year there without special permission. Anyone caught attempting to live there gets departed to their home country immediately.

The new countries’ borders are strictly enforced, no trying to expand the borders, settlements, etc. and it’s up to them to negotiate what the border situation with their surrounding country.

If they can’t play nice, we’re taking their toys away from them and sending them to stand in opposite corners of the room to think about what they did.

If any verifiable God/Messiah/prophet, etc. should happen to show up, we’ll defer to their judgement on the matter.

There are, of course, a million different reasons why this can’t/won’t happen, and hopefully they’re obvious enough that I won’t have to explain why it’s a crazy fantasy.

Little context on that, we obviously camp and hike and such a lot, so trees are pretty much what we have available in the woods. And one of my friends has a pretty messed up septic system at his house that he’s reluctant to put too much money into servicing because he’s allegedly on the list to be hooked up to the city sewer at some point, so we go outside when we can to avoid stressing the septic system too hard.

We don’t normally expect women to use the trees at his house (they of course don’t have many other options when we’re in the woods) but a couple have risen to the challenge over the years and more power to them. I don’t think anyone has come prepared with a go girl, sheewee or other such device, they just pull down their pants and pop a squat behind a tree, but we’re a bunch of old boy scouts so we’d certainly applaud anyone who did for being prepared.

Just pointing out a straw man doesn’t do much good if you don’t also point out why it’s a straw man. Please add to the discussion, debate me’ try to light my straw on fire.

I personally go a step further.

Everything in the universe is following the laws of physics. We don’t know all of the laws, and we’re limited in what we’re actually able to perceive and measure, so some of it seems like random chance. But at the end of the day, everything is playing out according to those laws.

Your thoughts, feelings, etc. are all just physical and chemical reactions happening in your brain, no different than iron rusting, water evaporating, unstable atoms decaying, etc. you don’t get any more say in what you think, feel, say, or do than you do over whether vinegar and baking soda are going to react with each other.

The only thing special about us is that we’re aware that things are happening, even if we can’t fully perceive the causes. We don’t really get any say in what the meat we inhabit does, even if it something feels like we do, we’re just along for the ride, but the fact that we’re aware it’s happening is pretty cool. There’s a quote, I forget by who and the exact wording, that we are “the universe experiencing itself” and I think that’s all we’re doing, experiencing. We don’t genuinely have any agency, not even about what we think about the experience, because thinking is a part of what we’re experiencing.

If somehow you knew the exact state of every elementary particle that existed the moment the big bang happened, and had a complete rulebook of all of the unknown laws of physics we have yet to discover, you could theoretically trace out the paths those particles would take from there, what other particles they would eventually collide and interact with, how those interactions would play out as they come together to form nebulas, stars, planets, and eventually yourself and everything else around you, and you could keep going tracing out the paths of those particles into the future and see what becomes of everything in the universe and how it all ends (if in fact it does eventually come to an end)

I could be wrong, and if it ever turns out we do have an actual say in what we think, feel, and do, that would be even more amazing. If not though, I’m satisfied to just be along for the ride to see where I end up and what I can experience along the way.